by David Wolman
Just before his death in 1819, Kamehameha suspended the kapu on killing cattle for himself and his inner circle. He needed the money after a number of Hawaiian chiefs had racked up debts to European and American merchants and governments. Imported alcohol only made the problem worse. As one Hawaiian historian wrote: “It is plain that rum is a poison god, and debt is a viper.”
Selling off the islands’ sandalwood had helped with the debts temporarily. But with that resource exhausted, the kingdom needed another revenue source. To make matters worse, more powerful countries were taking notice of the monarchy’s weakened financial situation. In 1826, a group of American creditors, with the support of a U.S. naval commander, negotiated a most-favored-nation trade status between Hawaii and the United States. It was an early step in a sequence being repeated around the globe: trade and investment were used to entwine colonial powers in the political affairs of less powerful nations. Then those same powers picked from a grab bag of rationales—religion, national security, “liberating” the local population, protecting the rights of citizens abroad—to justify takeover.
In Hawaii in the 1820s, this narrative of outside influence was well under way, but most foreigners were still forbidden from cutting timber or hunting cattle. Chiefs did, however, grant permission to a handful of individuals to hunt wild cattle, or bullocks,* to supply beef for the monarchy and its fleet, and for trading with visiting ships. John Palmer Parker was first on that list.
PURSUING BULLOCKS IN THE mountains of Hawaii was about as difficult and dangerous as hunting could be. Hunters armed with black-powder muskets hiked into the forested mountains around Waimea. They crossed over onto the island’s eastern flank in search of huge animals with surprising speed and horns like spears. The bullocks also had an instinct for revenge. As one contemporary writer put it, if a hunter missed his first shot, the longhorns “invariably pursued their destroyers with a kind of furious madness.”
Bullock hunters were generally reclusive, unpolished, and proudly independent, content to live and work far from other people. Theirs was an unforgiving profession that required a temperament as tough as koa wood. Starting with strong coffee before sunup at a backcountry campsite, a hunter began each day knowing it could bring capricious weather, riding accidents, and face-to-face encounters with half-ton creatures in treacherous terrain. A musket was the bullock hunter’s essential tool, but he also caught the animals in carefully camouflaged pits, sometimes using natural holes created by collapsed lava tubes. A trapped bullock was much easier to shoot, but God help the man who slipped and fell in on top of it.
On Hawaii, hunters butchered animals where they fell, sometimes leaving all but the hide. Other hunters packed slabs of beef into casks of salt that native Hawaiians had hauled uphill from the coast. Laborers then carried the casks and stiff, sun-dried hides back down to the port at Kawaihae.
Parker, the starchy New Englander turned mariner, reinvented himself as a bullock hunter in the Hawaiian wilderness. He roamed the mountains with a pack of trained dogs and carried gunpowder in hollowed-out bull horns. He grew to know all the shortcuts, hideouts, and secret springs of Hawaii’s mountainous interior. A crack shot, he would later claim to have killed some 1,200 animals.
For all of Parker’s prowess, Hawaii’s most famous bullock hunter, and the man who epitomized the type of personality drawn to the work, was an Irishman named Jack Purdy. In the early nineteenth century, Purdy fled his childhood home and found work on a whaler sailing for the Pacific. He arrived in Hawaii in 1834 and took up hunting. He built a stone house outside Waimea that looked more suited to rural Ireland than the tropics. Compared to Parker, Purdy led a hard-charging, hard-drinking life; he once gave away an acre of land in exchange for a glass of wine. Still, he was an ace rider and shooter, and in the eyes of his contemporaries a bullock hunter without peer.
One other well-known hunter was Ned Gurney, an Englishman who had escaped from the prison settlement at Botany Bay, Australia. Gurney is remembered, unfairly, for his involvement in a mysterious death in the backcountry of Hawaii. In 1834, the famed Scottish naturalist David Douglas was on a plant-collecting expedition on Mauna Kea, when he stumbled upon Gurney’s grass-thatched hut and mountainside homestead. The two men shared breakfast, and then Douglas headed back out onto the trail connecting Waimea to Hilo.
Not long after Douglas’s departure, however, natives found his body in a pit with a live bullock. The Scotsman had been gored and trampled almost beyond recognition. When the men told Gurney, he hurried to the spot and shot the animal so he could recover Douglas’s body. Then he paid local islanders to carry the corpse to Hilo, and followed soon after to tell the authorities what had happened.
Unfortunately for Gurney, rumors circulated that the men had gotten into an argument and that Gurney had killed his guest. He was a Botany Bay man, after all, even if the crime that had him sent there from England was stealing two shillings’ worth of lead. The murder accusation followed Gurney for the rest of his life. A missionary tending to him on his deathbed recalled later that Gurney raved about how he hadn’t killed Douglas. Even the man of God was disinclined to believe him, saying that “wildly protested” innocence could only mean guilt.
IF HAWAII HAD A Deadwood, it was Waimea. In 1830, the island governor moved to this misty valley town tucked between the Kohala Mountains and Mauna Kea to oversee bullock hunting and trade on behalf of Kamehameha III.* He ordered convicts to build a road up from the docks at Kawaihae. Soon the winding, sun-blasted route was full of flatbed carts carrying thousands of cowhides and barrels of salted beef, lumber, pa‘i‘ai (pounded taro), and New England rum. The Kawaihae–Waimea road was only about thirteen miles long, but in local terms it was a superhighway.
American and British mariners who had had it with the sea, pioneering Chinese merchants, escaped convicts, and Hawaiian entrepreneurs all began settling in and around Waimea, drawn by opportunity in the cattle business. A visitor in the mid-nineteenth century would have found a town of more than a thousand residents with a tannery, a rendering plant, a mission school, saloons, and livestock so abundant that one local called Waimea a “cattle pen.”
Residents rolling into town after days or weeks on the mountain had plenty of chances to spend their earnings on alcohol, opium, and women. In 1864, a British explorer said Waimea had been settled by the “riff-raff of the Pacific,” men who “lived infamous lives, and added their own to the indigenous vices of the islands, turning the district into a perfect sink of iniquity.”
When missionaries arrived, the pious newcomers from New England saw Waimea’s fortune-seekers as “moral degenerates, interlopers, and political schemers.” (One missionary witnessed a drunken brawl that ended with a man biting off another man’s ear.) No one fit these unflattering labels more than the freelance hunters who came into town stinking of blood and leather.
The men who were attracted to occupations like sawyer and bullock hunter were an upland version of the intemperate whalers stopping over in towns like Lahaina, wild in all the ways that missionaries weren’t. Lahaina, Honolulu, and other port towns had to contend frequently with rowdies, foreign sailors eager to meet women and drink themselves legless. When a Lahaina missionary lobbied the monarchy’s representatives on Maui to forbid Hawaiian women from visiting whaling vessels, armed sailors showed up at his house one night to express their disagreement. The crew of a ship anchored in the harbor even fired a cannon at his house before heading out to sea to resume their slaughter of whales.
Lahaina’s issues with vice finally drew the attention of the king himself. Kamehameha III ordered the construction of a building where sailors could buy goods and seek medical care. The Seamen’s Hospital was meant to serve another purpose as well: to keep all the drinking, drugs, and sex hidden from the missionaries, whose presence had been sanctioned and even encouraged by the monarchy. By all accounts, this attempt to confine the town’s degeneracy to one building was wholly unsuccessful. Grog and its related ex
tracurriculars could not be repressed.
Parker steered clear of these dens of depravity, focusing his efforts on earning money instead of spending it. He partnered with another Boston-born entrepreneur, William French, who had royal approval to operate a ranch and open a trading outpost in Waimea. French, Parker, and other newcomers were betting that cattle would be Hawaii’s next big thing.
Yet aside from livestock in a handful of small pens scattered around the islands, most cattle remained wild. Bullock hunters made money for the monarchy, but they could kill only so many animals. In the meantime, hunters were inadvertently teaching wild cattle to fear humans, which simply made them harder to hunt. To build an industry, Hawaii’s upstart ranchers needed to control the cattle.
3
The Empire
THE NEW WORLD’S FIRST cowboys were called vaqueros, from the Spanish vaca, for cow, and querer, to love. Vaqueros wore clothes that combined practicality with ornamentation: hats with wide upturned brims, low-heeled boots with jingling metal spurs decorated with silver, and pants adorned with bright buttons up the seams. Their skills at riding, roping, and herding, combined with their distinctive look, gave them prestige among men and women; it was said a vaquero would dismount only to dance with a pretty girl.
By the early nineteenth century, it was clear that Hawaii’s bullock hunters couldn’t keep up with the islands’ soaring cattle populations. Through increasing trade with North America, the monarchy had learned that vaqueros managed herds of tens of thousands at sprawling ranchos in Alta California. Here, finally, was a possible solution to Hawaii’s bovine nightmare—and a potential moneymaker. In the early 1830s, Kamehameha III sent a royal decree to mission contacts in California. The king requested that vaqueros come to the islands to teach Hawaiians the basics of roping and herding. That same year, perhaps a dozen men, roughly three for each of the major islands, traveled from California to Hawaii.*
The vaqueros brought their own well-trained mustangs, which traveled in first class compared to livestock, with regular brushing, water, and fresh food. Storms aside, the most stressful part of the journey was the end. As one historian noted, “While embarkation in California meant dockside loading, the vaquero was apprehensive about casting his mount overboard in Kawaihae Bay for the swim to shore.” But there was no alternative.
Customized gear was also critical, starting with a leather-covered saddle often stamped with intricate geometric or floral patterns. A vaquero’s most important and treasured possession, though, was his reata, the root of the English word lariat. Braided painstakingly by hand out of four strips of carefully chosen rawhide, the lasso was usually about eighty feet long. A rider’s job, and sometimes his life, depended on his proficiency with the rope. When it rained, the lariat was the first thing the vaquero protected.
Cowboys in Spanish Mexico had put their lassos to uses beyond herding cattle. During the Mexican-American War, local ranchers pressed into fighting employed them as weapons against American troops; dragging a man to death didn’t cost any bullets. According to one story from the Mexican Revolution, a soldier once roped the muzzle of a small cannon and dragged it off. Lassos also came in handy during bear hunts in California. A colorful 1855 account in Harper’s Magazine described how Mexicans, who could “throw the lasso with the precision of the rifle ball,” would corner bears and rope them around the neck and hind foot. “[A]fter tormenting the poor brute and . . . defying death in a hundred ways, the lasso is wound around a tree, the bear brought close to the trunk and either killed or kept until somewhat reconciled to imprisonment.”
In 1840, a young Yale graduate named Francis Allyn Olmsted was traveling the South Pacific and, upon arriving in Waimea, noticed men dressed in ponchos, boots with “prodigiously long spurs,” and pants split along the outside seam below the knee. Olmsted watched as the men corralled cattle and branded each one prior to shipment to Honolulu: “In an instant, the lasso was firmly entangled around his horns or legs, and he was thrown down and pinioned. The burning brand was then applied, and after sundry bellowings and other indications of disapprobation, the poor animal was released.”
The vaqueros taught the bullock hunters that the lasso was a more effective tool than the rifle. Ranching meant careful management: organizing, moving, slaughtering, breeding. It was about fences and grass, brands and paddocks. This was how to bring the wild herds of Mauna Kea under control.
The men from California also taught the Hawaiians how to work with the horses that had first arrived in the islands in 1803, when an American merchant ship had brought four mounts from California as gifts for Kamehameha I. This time the king’s reaction was more subdued. Even if riding was faster than walking, he asked shrewdly, would the animals be worth the food, water, and care they would require?
But in the end he accepted the gifts, and within a matter of decades, horses had become an integral part of daily life and tradition throughout the islands. Hawaiians quickly took to riding, and there is mention of importing more horses to the archipelago as early as the mid-1820s. Hawaii’s first horses were mustangs from the wilds of New Spain, descendants of the tough animals the conquistadors had brought to the New World in the sixteenth century. They were Arabians, probably the oldest horse breed in the world. These compact, hardy survivors could thrive in harsh landscapes—their long-distance endurance is legendary—and they had experience working with cattle that made them perfect for their new job in the islands.
Hawaiians also adopted the vaqueros’ spirit of competition. During annual roundups, or rodeos, ranches in New Spain hosted matches in which vaqueros faced off in friendly contests. These games were sometimes brutal, such as grizzly roping, or races in which riders tried to grab a live rooster buried up to its neck in the ground. Others were controlled versions of tasks the vaqueros performed every day: sprinting on horseback, lassoing and tying up steers, and breaking wild horses to the saddle.
As Hawaiians became more adept with the vaqueros’ methods and tools, they absorbed many of their mentors’ sensibilities about work, animal husbandry, and even style. Some of the men Olmsted observed, in fact, were likely native Hawaiians dressed in what was fast becoming standard garb for island cowboys.
Yet they also created a uniquely Hawaiian tool kit. They slimmed down the heavy, bulky Mexican saddle into the Hawaiian tree saddle, so called because it was carved from the wood of local trees, just as their ancestors had carved canoes out of koa. Local saddlemakers added a high saddle horn for dallying, or tying, the free end of a lasso. Hawaiian riders used smaller spurs than the long Mexican ones, so as not to trip on jagged lava rock.
Hawaiians took to cattle ranching with such enthusiasm and skill that soon the vaqueros had nearly put themselves and the bullock hunters out of a job. “Already the old race of Bullock catchers (a most useless set in other respects) is becoming extinct,” wrote a local rancher in 1848. Eleven years later, the Honolulu papers reported that the vaqueros who had come to teach the Hawaiians “how to lasso, jerk beef and cure hides” were all but gone, either back to North America—perhaps to California to chase gold rush fortunes—or else absorbed into Hawaiian society.
In their place were Hawaiian cowboys called paniolo, a local twist on the word español. The legendary cattle drives of the West were still a generation away, but here on the plains of Waimea and elsewhere in the islands, paniolo were working cattle—before there was ever such a thing as an American cowboy.
BY 1835, JOHN PALMER PARKER had left the coast of Hawaii and moved to Waimea, where he worked as a bookkeeper for William French while hunting wild bullock on the side. The general store where Parker worked quickly became a nexus for local business dealings, as well as a hangout for cowboys to “talk story.” A fire would have helped counter the chill of the rain and the stink of skinned carcasses and hides, as dogs and rats foraged outside among piles of discarded entrails.
While the fastidious Parker maintained an unblinking focus on his business aspirations and spiritual
virtue, Jack Purdy burnished his reputation as a hunter and mountain man nonpareil, with little apparent concern for everyday comforts and money. Despite their contrasting personalities, Parker and Purdy were neighbors and friends with much in common: they both had Irish ancestry, married Hawaiian women, and lived lives that revolved around cattle.
In 1835, both men were working for French as bullock hunters. Parker’s additional job as French’s bookkeeper gave him a wide lens on the emerging livestock industry. He soon shared a joint lease with French to run cattle on Mauna Kea, making the two men the first private ranchers on the island. By 1851, Parker had secured more than 1,640 acres. He knew exactly what it took to create and run a successful ranch similar to those on the mainland: horses, corrals, accessible water, and ace paniolo.
Above all, though, it took land. But the Western concept of property was alien to Hawaiians. Land wasn’t something human beings could own; people cared for the land, and in turn the land took care of the people. Once Kamehameha I consolidated control of the islands, he doled out parcels of varying sizes to chiefs and relatives. Everyday Hawaiians lived on and worked the land at the behest of regional chiefs, but it wasn’t theirs, or even the chiefs’, to buy or sell.
Parker used his royal family connections and the two-acre plot the king had given him for a wedding present as a toehold to gain further claims and leases. As the islands’ cattle industry began to flourish, other entrepreneurs—almost all of them foreigners—started leasing property as well, first to secure the right to hunt wild cattle and later for grazing.