Crosbie Wells—Emery Staines

Crosbie Wells and Emery Staines are connected not by a publicly established partnership but by a document and a fortune entrusted to secrecy. Wells witnessed Staines’s proposed gift to Anna Wetherell; later, gold Staines had taken from his claim was found hidden in Wells’s cottage. Together, these links make Wells both witness to Staines’s intention and the apparent custodian of wealth whose ownership remains contested.

The deed and its intended recipient

A deed found among Wells’s effects recorded that Emery Staines was to give Anna Wetherell £2,000, with Crosbie Wells as witness. The document identifies a concrete connection between the two men: Wells was present in a formal role when Staines’s intended gift was set down. But Staines had not signed it, leaving the proposed transfer incomplete and its legal force in doubt.

The missing signature became significant after a fortune was discovered in Wells’s cottage. George Shepard argued that, if Staines had signed, Anna could claim half of that fortune. He treated the deed as evidence that the gold had originated with Staines and that Wells had held it for him. Cowell Devlin knew the gold’s actual route, but could not disclose it; he maintained only that there was no reason to think the fortune belonged to Staines. The deed therefore suggested a relationship of trust while also giving rise to an inference about ownership that the concealed history complicated.

Gold moving between them

The fortune’s story began with gold sewn into five dresses by Lydia Wells and later worn by Anna. Ah Quee discovered the hidden gold and, believing it connected to Dick Mannering’s fraud, removed it from the dresses over several months. He retorted the dust into squares and stamped them with the name Aurora, so that the earnings would be credited to the claim then owned by Staines.

At his trial, Staines explained that Ah Quee had excavated the ore on the Aurora claim and submitted the retorted squares to him as earnings. Staines acknowledged that he did not bank the gold against the claim as required. Instead, he took it to the Arahura Valley and buried it. Cowell Devlin’s concealed knowledge connected the next steps: the gold found in Wells’s cottage was the gold from the dresses, retorted by Ah Quee, taken by Staines, and hidden in the cottage. The evidence establishes the chain of possession, although it does not explain why Staines chose Wells’s cottage as the hiding place.

Wells as witness and custodian

Wells’s documented role as witness to the gift and his cottage’s later role as a hiding place give the relationship its unusual shape. Shepard’s suggestion that Wells was keeping the fortune for Staines was a plausible interpretation of the deed and Staines’s disappearance, but it was not the same as proof that the gold had originated with Staines. Devlin knew that its earlier history ran through the dresses and Ah Quee’s work; Staines’s own account later confirmed that he had taken and buried the gold.

The amount sharpened the consequences of their connection. The bank valued the ore found in Wells’s estate at £4,096, while the deed named a proposed gift of £2,000 to Anna. Since the deed was unsigned, it did not settle her claim; and since Wells was dead, his part in the concealment could not be clarified by his testimony. The two men’s connection thus became entangled with questions of custody, intention, and legal entitlement rather than resolved by a completed agreement.

Significance of the connection

Wells and Staines are joined by acts of confidence whose meaning is only partly recoverable: Wells witnessed Staines’s intended gift, and his cottage held gold that Staines admitted taking and hiding. The relationship gives the gold’s movement a personal and documentary dimension. It is not merely a question of where the ore was found, but of whose labor produced it, who held it, what Staines meant to give Anna, and whether an unsigned deed could make that intention enforceable.