The death of Crosbie Wells is first presented as an unremarkable end: a solitary prospector, found in his cottage by a passing party and believed to have died from drink. Its apparent simplicity does not last. The death draws officials to the Arahura Valley, exposes a concealed deed intended for Anna Wetherell, and initiates the transfer and contest of Wells’s property. It also becomes a point where private grief, legal ownership, and the dispossession of Poutini Ngāi Tahu meet.

Discovery and reported cause

The account that reaches Hokitika comes from Alistair Lauderback, who was crossing the Alps with aides on his way to the township. About two hours from their destination, at nightfall, the party stopped at a hermit’s dwelling to ask for water and, if possible, a meal. They received no answer at the door, but a lamp and smoke from the chimney suggested that someone was inside. Lauderback entered and found Wells dead at the kitchen table. In the account he later gave to the law, the kettle was still boiling; the bottle beside Wells was nearly empty, and the room smelled strongly of liquor. Lauderback said that he and his companions made tea and ate damper before continuing their journey, remaining no more than half an hour.

The published report cast the death as natural, and the official assessment initially supported that account. George Shepard informed Cowell Devlin that Wells had died peacefully, attributing his death to age, infirmity, and drink; there was then no reason to suspect homicide. At the wake, Dr. Gillies examined Wells’s organs and found traces of laudanum in his stomach and intestines, but not in an amount considered sufficient to warrant undue suspicion. Shepard likewise concluded that Wells had been poisoned by drink, not by another person. The evidence preserves a qualification rather than a reversal: laudanum was present, but the examination did not establish that it caused his death.

Lauderback’s arrival did not become the political entrance he had expected. On the outskirts of Hokitika, his party also encountered Anna Wetherell unconscious in the road, and Lauderback arranged for help. In the following fortnight the death of the hermit and Anna’s fate commanded more attention than his electoral campaign. The West Coast Times devoted two columns to Wells, while Lauderback’s crossing received only brief notice. The coincidence of the two encounters later troubled Thomas Balfour, who wondered whether the newspaper’s account of Lauderback’s journey had told the whole truth. The text leaves that question alive without establishing that Lauderback caused either death or Anna’s collapse.

The cottage, the hidden deed, and the estate

The morning after Wells’s death, Devlin accompanied Dr. Gillies to the cottage to collect the body. The house stood several miles up the Arahura River, raised above the bank and plainly visible from Christchurch Road. Its sparse, neglected interior and the empty liquor containers supported the impression of a lonely life shaped by drinking. As Devlin prepared to light the stove, he found a paper caught in the ash drawer. It had been scorched along one edge but remained legible.

The document, dated 11 October 1865, set out a proposed gift of £2,000 to Anna Wetherell from Emery Staines, with Wells named as witness. Wells’s signature was present, but Staines had not signed; Devlin therefore recognized that the deed was invalid. He nevertheless folded it and concealed it against his chest rather than show it to Dr. Gillies. Devlin later entertained several possible explanations for his decision, including respect for the quiet of the house and a wish to protect Anna, but settled on no definite motive. He did not disclose the document for a fortnight. The death thus leaves behind not only a body to be examined, but evidence that might have changed Anna’s prospects, withheld by a man who continued to regard himself as virtuous.

Wells’s property changed hands quickly. The bank reclaimed his land and mill, and Edgar Clinch purchased the land; Nilssen was then employed to clear the cottage and sell its effects. He said that he believed the estate would be small and did not know of the hidden fortune when he took the work. In the cottage, however, a hoard of gold worth £4,000 was discovered, a substantial windfall described locally as a homeward bounder. Wells’s death had initially seemed to leave no family to claim anything. Lydia Wells arrived after his burial and asserted that she was his widow, contesting the sale and the transactions made in its wake. The discovery of gold transformed the estate from a routine disposal into a legal and personal struggle.

Burial, friendship, and competing obligations

Te Rau Tauwhare came to Wells’s cottage the morning after the death, bringing food as he and Wells customarily did: Tauwhare supplied meat, and Wells supplied spirits. He met the cart carrying his friend’s body back toward Hokitika and recognized Wells beneath its blanket. In shock, he dropped the food he had brought and asked to accompany the body. With no place beside the driver, he rode on the cart’s rear tongue, holding Wells’s ankle as the cart entered town.

The body was temporarily laid out in the governor’s study at the Police Camp while a coffin and grave were prepared. A cooper made a pine coffin and a rounded wooden headstone. Because Wells’s exact birth year was unknown, the year 1809, written on the flyleaf of his Bible, was used as a plausible date; the inscription would mark the span of his life with that year and the year of his death. Tauwhare insisted that Wells should not be left alone before burial. He understood the interval before interment as requiring a vigil of presence, prayer, and song, and described Wells as his friend and brother. The gaoler rejected that kinship in racial terms, while Tauwhare maintained his obligation to remain with the dead man. The episode makes the funeral more than an administrative conclusion: it places Tauwhare’s rites and friendship against the authorities’ control of the body and the terms by which they recognized belonging.

Land, inheritance, and the meaning of ownership

Wells had bought one hundred acres in the eastern Arahura Valley for £50 and built a one-room cottage, cleared a garden space, and begun a timber mill. The purchase took place within a larger colonial transfer: Poutini Ngāi Tahu had once held the western coast, but the Crown bought extensive territory for £300, leaving the iwi restricted to the Arahura River, parts of its banks, and a small area at Mawhera. By the time of Wells’s death, prospectors and settlers were making money from licenses, land, and gold on the Coast, while Poutini Ngāi Tahu understood the earlier purchase as dispossession.

Tauwhare’s objection to Clinch’s later acquisition of Wells’s land grows from that history. He resented the purchase of land for profit rather than use, particularly because Clinch had not meaningfully visited or worked the property and had its contents cleared through others. For Tauwhare, the valley was not simply an asset that could pass from the Crown to a buyer and then yield a dividend. The cottage’s ownership therefore remains contested in two distinct senses: Lydia disputes the legal handling of Wells’s estate, while Tauwhare sees the underlying land transaction as part of a wider injustice that the law has already ratified.

Wells’s death is a hinge between these claims. The official finding of natural causes gives the town a settled account of how he died, but the surviving deed, hidden gold, disputed widowhood, and contested land prevent that account from closing the consequences of his life. His lonely end sets in motion a crowded struggle over who may speak for him, inherit from him, keep his memory, or claim the ground on which he lived.