We will begin by recounting the times during which the oral histories of the Kohala district of the island of Hawaii were being collected and written down. It was a time unique in the history of the nation.
It was a time relatively soon after contact was again established between Hawaii and the rest of the world. To many students of Hawaiian history, the term “pre-contact” means before Captain James Cook first sighted the islands on January 18, 1778. That is why the Hawaii State Constitution uses the year 1778 in reaffirming native Hawaiian rights:
“The State reaffirms and shall protect all rights, customarily and traditionally exercised for subsistence, cultural and religious purposes and possessed by ahupua’a tenants who are descendants of native Hawaiians who inhabited the Hawaiian Islands prior to 1778, subject to the right of the State to regulate such rights.”
It is also the reason that the 1978 Constitutional Convention proposed the following definitions for the terms “Hawaiian” and “native Hawaiian” (but the Hawaii Supreme Court later decided that the section containing the definitions had not been validly ratified by the people):
“The term ‘Hawaiian’ means any descendent of the races inhabiting the Hawaiian Islands, previous to 1778. The term ‘native Hawaiian’ means any descendant of not less than one-half part of the blood of races inhabiting the Hawaiian Islands previous to 1778 as defined by the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act, 1920, as amended or may be amended.”
So, the year 1778 is a significant milestone in Hawaiian history, as is the date November 25, 1892, which is the date fixed in Hawaii law as the date a protected “Hawaiian usage” of land must have been established in practice.
The years between 1778 and 1892 were tumultuous and devastating to the Hawaiian people and the people of Kohala were at the eye of the storm. A culture that was theretofore effective at preventing change was overwhelmed and almost driven to extinction by a series of cataclysmic events.
In 1794, Captain George Vancouver introduced cattle to the island of Hawaii for a second time, this time successfully. Following Vancouver’s advice, King Kamehameha placed a kapu on the cattle (that lasted until 1830), and very quickly feral cattle were overrunning the land, destroying the forests and native agricultural plots. By 1846, “vast herds destroyed natives’ crops, ate the thatching on houses, and hurt, attacked and sometimes killed people.” Recognizing that something had to be done, King Kamehameha hired bullock hunters from other countries. Unfortunately for the people of Kohala, many of these were former convicts from Botany Bay in Australia.
If being overrun by cattle and convicts were not enough, shortly after his father’s death in 1819, Kamehameha’s son, King Liholiho, eliminated the kapu system that was the backbone of Hawaiian society for over a thousand years. Encouraged by his mother and by his regent, Liholiho allowed men and women to eat together at a feast attended by high chiefs and several foreigners. Called the ‘Ai Noa, this act shook the foundation of the Hawaiian’s entire belief system. When the first Christian (Protestant) missionaries reached the Kohala coast on March 20, 1820, they stepped into a cultural vacuum–the kapu system was no more.
The boom and then bust of sandalwood trade was another extremely traumatic event to the people of Kohala — a commercial activity that began shortly after 1800 as a strict monopoly of the aliiI, and reached its peak in the 1820s. Before deforestation began, the Kohala forests were abundant, reportedly reaching almost to the Kawaihae shore in 1815. One of Kamehameha’s lieutenants, John Young, oversaw the measuring and loading of logs, while, according to the Reverend William Ellis, thousands of natives were forced to cut and haul timber, penetrating ever deeper into the interior as supplies dwindled. On his second visit to Kawaihae, Ellis, while staying with John Young, reported that one morning:
“Before daylight . . . we were roused by vast multitudes of people passing through the district from Waimea with sandal wood, which had been cut in the adjacent mountains for Karaimoku [the high chief Kalanimoku]. . . and which the people of Kohala, as far as the north point, had been ordered to bring down to his storehouse on the beach, for the purpose of its being shipped to Oahu.
There were between two and three thousand men, carrying each from one to six pieces of sandal wood, according to their size and weight. It was generally tied on their backs by bands made of ti leaves, passed over the shoulders and under the arms, and fastened across their breast. When they had deposited the wood at the storehouse, they departed to their respective homes.”
This intensive business venture denuded the forests of Kohala and precipitated the retreat of the forests inland. The burgeoning herds of wild cattle and goats in the Waimea area prevented new growth from surviving, as did the diversion of streams to support development there.
In 1832, realizing that cattle would be managed more effectively by other than shooting them, King Kamehameha III sent a high chief to California to hire cowboys who could round up wild cattle and teach Hawaiians cattle and horse handling skills. Three Mexican-Spanish vaquero (reportedly named Kossuth, Louzeida and Ramon) began working on Hawaii island, first breaking in horses and then rounding up cattle. The paniolo culture was born, gradually replacing the primarily agrarian native Hawaiian culture in the area.
Beginning in the 1840s, the chiefs and the konohiki (king’s land managers) joined Kamehameha III supporting a land reform effort called the Mahele (division). The Mahele was an agreement on the “separation and identification of the relative rights of the king, the chiefs, and the konohikis” and established a Land Commission that could settle land claims. The Kuleana Act of 1850 enabled the Land Commission to award small parcels of land to commoners for subsistence purposes.
While the process may have had altruistic origins, in practice it was a failure. Only a few parcels were actually sold to commoners and many of the kuleana lands that commoners received in the 1850s were later lost. The list of reasons the process failed include: natives received lands that lacked firewood or were too rocky or poor to farm, a number of kuleana were sold by unscrupulous land agents before the farmers could get a survey, the land commissioners delayed getting notices to landholders, prices were out of reach for commoners and foreigners evicted legitimate kuleana owners without due process. For many Hawaiian ohana, the result was that they lost their relationships with the lands their families had lived on for millennia.
By the year 1859, the whaling industry reached its peak and prices for whale oil collapsed five years later. In the mid-1800s, Kohala was reportedly a wild place. Momi Naughton in her May 2007 article in The Waimea Gazette entitled “Kimofe Prospers” noted “According to a mission report written by Reverend Lorenzo Lyons for the years 1839 and 1840, there were at that time between sixty and seventy foreigners from seven or eight different countries living in his ‘field’ that covered the areas of Kawaihae, Puakō, Hamakua, and Waimea. At least from Lyon’s perspective most them acted like ‘mad men’ noting that one man in a fit of intoxication bit the ear off another and in a subsequent case a man nearly bled to death from wounds inflicted by a fellow foreigner.”
In her book, Makua Laiana, Emma Lyons Doyle, granddaughter of Lorenzo Lyons, notes “In 1848 Kenway describes Waimea foreigners as ‘pretty generally a set of graceless ragamuffins whose most exquisite pastime was to get together in herds and get fou [Scottish for drunk] for weeks together. Lately…liquor has been scarcer, experience severe, work more necessary. At present in Waimea may be found some of the most skillful artisans and excellent citizens of the Sandwich Islands.’”
In 1875, Isabella Byrd in her Six Months in the Hawaiian Islands described Waimea in 1873 as follows:
“The moral atmosphere in Waimea has never been a wholesome one. The region was very early settled by a class of what may be termed ‘mean whites,’ the ‘beachcombers’ and riff-raff of the Pacific. They lived infamous lives, and added their own to the indigenous vices of the islands, turning the district into a perfect sink of iniquity, in which they were known by such befitting aliases as ‘Jake the Devil,’ etc. The coming of the missionaries, and the settlement of moral, orderly whites on Hawaii, have slowly created a public opinion that is adverse to flagrant immorality, and the outrageous license of former years would now be meet with legal penalties. Many of the old settlers are dead, and others have drifted to regions beyond restraining influences, but still ‘the Waimea crowd’ is not considered up to the mark.” (pp. 149-150)
During this period, Hawaiians welcomed the crews of foreign vessels, not knowing they brought disease and death to those whose immune systems were unprepared. In 1866, Mark Twain (Samuel Clement) was writing from Honolulu that “day by day the Kanaka race is passing away” and concluded:
“They are a strange race, anyhow, these natives. They are amazingly unselfish and hospitable. To the wayfarer who visits them they freely offer their houses, food, beds, and often their wives and daughters… The example of white selfishness does not affect their native unselfishness any more than the example of white virtue does their native licentiousness. Both traits are born in them—are in their blood and bones, and cannot be educated out.”
While most historians estimate that the population of Hawaiians was about 300,000 at the time of Captain Cook’s arrival, the population is estimated to have dropped to only 56,900 by 1872. The decline was apocalyptic. In Kohala, for example, a smallpox epidemic in Kawaihae in 1853 took half the population.
In his novel about Hawaii in the 1850’s, O.A. Bushnell, who was also a microbiologist, imagined a meeting between disease-bearing sailor and a Hawaiian woman as follows: “The mucous membranes lining his mouth and throat were shedding myriads of spirochetes … during fits of coughing, his rotten lungs were raising bloody sputum and tubercle bacilli into his mouth. Or if the virus that cause influenza, smallpox, mumps, measles, chicken pox, or even the common cold lurked there … It was the kiss of death.”
Eleanor Harmon Davis, the biographer of then Judge Abraham Fornander, noted that “One is left with the impression that, if the results of drinking, gambling and sex are excepted, the people of the kingdom were remarkably mild and law-abiding group.” She summarized his case load as follows:
“… sexual crimes outnumbered those of violence two to one; two-thirds of those accused of adultery, fornication, and illicit cohabitation were acquitted. Gambling charges followed in number those involving violence, with liquor law offenses a close fourth. Opium cases appeared not infrequently, both during the term and between, as a result of attempts to smuggle the drug and also for illegal possession and selling without a license. During the 1870s and 1880s it was usually Chinese who were involved with opium, though later its use spread to other segments of the population, and it was not unknown for a young man of respectable non-Oriental parentage to become a hopeless addict. (p. 208)”
She also noted that King Kalakaua was accused of having accepted $71,000 from one Akai for the privilege of importing and selling the drug under a law passed by the Assembly in 1886. Reportedly, when the license was granted to a Chun Lung, the king refused to return Aki’s money on the ground that he had already spent it. (p. 270). The New York Times in an article published on September 26, 1879, reported that the Hawaiian kingdom’s duty on opium was 35 percent and that the price in the islands was $60 per pound, compared to $14 per pound in New York City.
Kohala did not escape this scourge either. Opium bottles (some of which are multi-colored) can be found in holes (puka) in the rock walls common in the area (most of which were built to keep marauding cattle out of gardens, but the way). One story recounts the practice of one of the town’s founding fathers (who shall remain nameless) who would sit in a chair on the top of Pu’u Iki (a now bulldozed cinder cone that used to be located near the “Honking Tree” in Kohala View Estates subdivision) to signal the “all clear” to opium smugglers coming up to Waimea from Kawaihae.