Crosbie Wells—Lydia Wells

Crosbie Wells and Lydia Wells’s marriage began with a short courtship and ended in estrangement, leaving their relationship to be judged after Crosbie’s death through incomplete documents and competing claims. His letters present a man who once announced himself as a proud husband, then admitted that he had concealed the truth about the marriage; Lydia, arriving after his burial, claimed the inheritance as his widow, but could not establish that the dead hermit was the man who had married her.

Marriage and early expectations

In a letter dated June 1862, Crosbie reported that he had married after a very brief courtship, which he described as following conventional themes. His tone was openly pleased with his new status. He portrayed Lydia as someone he was proud to accompany and said that he would return to Dunstan to provide for his wife. The letter gives little account of Lydia’s own perspective or of the courtship’s circumstances; the marriage appears through Crosbie’s description of it and his expectation that he would assume the role of provider.

That announcement sits beside the instability of Crosbie’s life on the goldfields. He had been digging in the gullies near Lawrence and had acquired what he called a competence, though he had not yet made the decisive strike he sought. He intended to return to Dunstan to provide for Lydia, making his work and pursuit of wealth part of the marriage’s immediate context. The later correspondence reveals that the confident announcement did not disclose the condition of their relationship: Crosbie eventually acknowledged that he had withheld much about the marriage from his correspondent because he feared the truth would lower that person’s opinion of him.

Estrangement and separate lives

By June 1865, Crosbie was living in West Canterbury and described himself as estranged from Lydia. He said that he had put his former life behind him and referred to his departure from it as a sorrowful episode that saddened him to recall. He declined to give details, so the letters establish the rupture without explaining its precise cause. The gap between his earlier pride in being married and his later guarded account is central to the relationship: the marriage had been publicly named, but its private history remained concealed even from someone whose judgment mattered to him.

Crosbie’s account also distinguishes the formal bond from the life they actually shared. In August 1865, he wrote that he had been with Lydia in name, if not in deed, for nearly three years. During that period, he had been on the goldfields without a fixed address while she remained in town. His description places distance and separate circumstances at the heart of their estrangement, without establishing whether they had formally ended the marriage. By then he had resolved to stop prospecting, fearing that another fortune would be stolen, and to try the timber trade instead. His new life in the Arahura Valley was not a return to married domesticity: he described his solitude as suitable to him, though unfamiliar.

A new home and a contested landscape

Crosbie’s move west gave his separated life a particular setting. He bought one hundred acres at the eastern end of the Arahura Valley from the Crown, built a one-room cottage overlooking the river, cleared a garden space, and began a timber mill. In his August letter he took pride in owning land for the first time and noted that ownership entitled him to vote. The property represented a settled foothold after years of moving between goldfields, but the correspondence offers no evidence that Lydia joined him there. He wrote of living apart from her, not of establishing a shared home.

The land also had a history that complicated any simple account of ownership. The Poutini Ngāi Tahu had been confined, after the Crown’s purchase of their extensive western lands for three hundred pounds, to the Arahura River and limited adjoining areas, among other retained holdings. Crosbie paid the Crown fifty pounds for his acreage. Te Rau Tauwhare, who regarded the valley as his people’s land, later resented its purchase for profit and the transfer of Crosbie’s former cottage to another owner. This history does not explain the Wellses’ marital separation, but it shapes the property that became part of their posthumous dispute: the home Crosbie made while estranged from Lydia was itself situated within a contested history of land sale and dispossession.

Widowhood and the estate claim

Lydia arrived in Hokitika several days after Crosbie had been buried and did not identify his body. She appealed against the sale of his estate and claimed the inheritance as his widow, but the legal question was not simply whether a marriage certificate existed. The court lacked surviving documentation that could establish the dead man’s identity and connect the hermit who had died in the Arahura Valley with the Crosbie Wells named on Lydia’s marriage certificate. Without that link, the marriage could not by itself prove that the estate belonged to her husband.

The Magistrate’s Court delayed Lydia’s appeal until a firmer conclusion could be reached, judging the value of the inheritance too great for the identity question to be treated casually. Lydia thanked the Magistrate and said she would wait as long as necessary for what she regarded as a debt owed to her. Her response makes the claim both personal and financial: she asserted the position of a widow while the legal process withheld confirmation that the dead man was her husband. The evidence does not resolve the marriage’s private history or show a reconciliation. Instead, the relationship’s final public form is an unresolved separation carried into court, where missing proof turns an intimate bond into a dispute over identity, widowhood, and inheritance.