The discovery of Crosbie Wells’s fortune came one day after his burial, when a search of his cottage revealed gold hidden throughout its single room. Valued at a little over four thousand pounds after purification, the hoard turned a supposedly negligible estate into a contested fortune. Its discovery also opened a larger puzzle: who had placed the gold there, why it had been concealed, and how its ownership connected to other gold moving through Hokitika.

An estate without a will

Before the gold was found, Wells’s death had left an estate with no clear heir. He had made no will, and officials knew neither of any family nor of an address or birth certificate that could help locate one. The land and cottage therefore reverted to the Crown and were sold the day after they entered the market. Only after the sale did a woman named Lydia Wells appear with marriage papers, claiming to be his wife. Her sudden arrival challenged the assumption that the estate could be treated as property without a known family claim.

The dispute had a colonial setting as well as a legal one. Wells had bought one hundred acres at the eastern end of the Arahura Valley from the Crown for fifty pounds. The Crown had acquired the extensive western-coast territory of Poutini Ngāi Tahu six years earlier for three hundred pounds, reserving only the Arahura River and certain other parcels. By the time of Wells’s purchase, gold seekers were paying for prospecting licences and land, while the value of gold taken from the region remained beyond calculation. The cottage’s ownership followed Crown title, even though that title rested on a land purchase Poutini Ngāi Tahu regarded as unjust and later understood as theft.

The cottage and its hidden wealth

After the burial, Edgar Clinch commissioned Harald Nilssen to clear the cottage and dispose of Wells’s effects. Nilssen found gold tucked into hiding places around the one-room dwelling. Once purified by the bank, the ore was valued at a little over four thousand pounds. Nilssen received a ten-percent commission; death taxes, fees, and incidentals reduced the balance, which was held in escrow at the Reserve Bank. Clinch, who had bought the property, was unlikely to receive the proceeds: Lydia Wells appealed to have the sale revoked, arguing that the property and its contents legally belonged to her.

The scale of the find altered the meaning of Wells’s life in Hokitika. He had been regarded as a solitary, little-known man, not as someone of wealth or consequence. In fact, he had made a substantial strike at Dunstan years earlier and evidently kept the resulting fortune secret. His cottage was not merely a home to be cleared after death; it had become a carefully concealed store of wealth whose presence could not be reconciled with the town’s earlier picture of its owner.

A second fortune in circulation

The cottage hoard was not the only fortune linked to Wells’s story. Roughly nine months before Moody reconstructed the events, Francis Carver had taken the Godspeed from Alistair Lauderback and subsequently lost the shipping crate that had helped him force the transfer. The crate contained a trunk with about four thousand pounds in gold, painstakingly sewn into the linings of five dresses. Lydia Wells had made the dresses while posing as Carver’s wife. Carver later searched for the lost shipment in Hokitika under the name Crosbie Francis Wells, using a birth certificate to support that identity.

Some of the gold sewn into the dresses travelled through another chain of possession. Ah Quee, who had previously been cheated by Dick Mannering, mistook the hidden metal for ore Mannering was using Anna Wetherell to smuggle. He removed gold from four dresses while Anna, heavily affected by opium, slept in his hut in Kaniere Chinatown. He retorted the dust into squares and stamped them with the name of the Aurora claim, intending that the proceeds be credited to that claim. The orange dress remained an exception: Anna did not wear it on those visits, and its gold was left in place.

Anna eventually found the remaining gold in that orange dress after waking in gaol with no memory of the twelve hours before her arrest. Confused about how it had come to be on her person, she sought Aubert Gascoigne’s help. Together they removed the metal and hid it in a flour sack beneath his bed. This portion of the dress-hoard was distinct from the gold found in Wells’s cottage, although both fortunes became entangled in the same disputes over concealment, ownership, and the identities attached to property.

What the later evidence established

The origin of the cottage gold became clearer when Emery Staines testified in court. He said the ore had come from the Aurora claim, where Ah Quee had excavated and retorted it into squares before submitting it to him as earnings. Staines admitted that he had not banked the gold against the claim as required. Instead, he had bagged it, taken it to the Arahura Valley, and buried it. His account connected the hidden fortune directly to the mining relationship between Staines and Ah Quee, and explained how the gold had come to be concealed at Wells’s property.

Yet the discovery did not resolve every question of entitlement. The estate gold, the gold sewn into the dresses, and the sums hidden or held in different places had distinct histories, even as their paths crossed. The cottage hoard brought Lydia Wells’s claimed marriage and Clinch’s purchase into conflict; the dress-hoard drew Anna Wetherell and Ah Quee into disputes arising from mistaken assumptions about its source. The fortune’s discovery therefore did more than assign a value to Wells’s effects: it exposed how gold could move from a claim to a worker, from a worker to an employer, and from the ground into a hidden domestic space, with each transfer changing the arguments made for who owned it.