Beyond Hawai'i Native Labor in the Pacific World

by Gregory Rosenthal

  The 1850 U.S. census shows the level of Hawaiian emigration to California at the height of this transoceanic movement. The census records at least 230 Hawaiians living in California in 1850, with nearly 50 percent (N = 113) crowded into just one county: Sutter. Of those Hawaiians in Sutter County, 60 were recorded as living in one of two encampments at Lacy Bar and Manhattan Bar on the North Fork of the American River. These camps were just some of the places where Hawaiian miners resided throughout California. Anecdotal data suggests that there were other major Hawaiian mining camps at the time: Sutter’s mining camp “ten miles above Mormon Island with 100 Indians and 50 kanakas” in summer 1848, and the so-called Kanaka Diggins, an “encampment of Sandwich Islanders,” numbered at “about 75” Hawaiians in summer 1849. The majority of Hawaiians were listed in the federal census without personal names, simply labeled “Kanakas.” There are several caveats to the census data. Due to the rapid mobility and invisibility of Hawaiian workers moving between San Francisco and mountain camps, it is likely that many gold miners were not counted by census enumerators. Furthermore, the San Francisco data was later destroyed by fire, and therefore hundreds of Hawaiians living and working in the Bay Area are likely not enumerated in the data. There were at least 230 Hawaiians living in California in 1850, but most probably there were many more.31

  The invisibility of Hawaiian workers in the Gold Rush is evidenced by the fact that only one image is known to exist of Hawaiian miners in California, and that comes from the memoir of a white gold miner published four decades after the fact. Charles Warren Haskins described the scene in which “a number of Kanakas from the Sandwich Islands came up into the mines” in the spring of 1850. “Being of an amphibious nature,” he noted, “they concluded to prospect the bed of the South Fork of the American River.” The Hawaiian miners prospected by diving. Indeed, their “habits of diving for the precious metals in California streams entertained observers” in California, according to one historian. Haskins explained how the men did it. “They procured a number of empty kegs to which rocks and ropes were attached. These were sunk at the most favorable points, and the Kanakas, by diving down, would shovel the sand into them. They were hauled up and the sand was washed in cradles in the usual manner.”32

  When Henry Nahoa arrived in California as a young man in 1850 it was an inopportune time to be a Hawaiian migrant worker in these parts. That year, California’s state legislature (California became a state in 1850) passed the Foreign Miners Tax, placing Hawaiian miners and all other immigrants at a severe disadvantage to Euro-American miners. Meanwhile, the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi passed its own legislation in 1850 banning Hawaiian emigration without the express permission of the government. A companion law passed two weeks earlier, the Masters and Servants Act, had codified a system of contract labor in the islands—perhaps an incentive for Hawaiian workers to stay and find work closer to home. When these two acts became law in 1850, both government officials and foreign capitalists held hopes that Hawaiʻi could provide for its own domestic economic growth with indigenous labor, if only workers could be forcibly restrained from leaving the Islands. This law “to Prohibit Natives from Leaving the Islands” was couched in the language of protecting the health of Hawaiian bodies, its preamble matter-of-factly stating that Hawaiians in California were dying “in great misery,” and that it was in the interest of the government to “prevent such loss to the nation, and such wretchedness to individuals.” When the law was signed by Kamehameha III in July 1850, the haole Minister of Foreign Affairs, Robert C. Wyllie, wrote to a friend: “Here we are going to enact a law to prohibit the natives from leaving the Islands, for a country where they ought to be restrained from rushing to their own death and destruction, personal rights notwithstanding.” As Wyllie reasoned, “Nobody can plead a right to suicide.”33

  FIGURE 16. Eugene Bauer, Kanakas Mining on the River, 1890. Reproduced from C. W. Haskins, The Argonauts of California (New York: Fords, Howard & Hulbert, 1890).

  Eight years later, Nahoa was still in California. In 1858 he lived in a settlement of about twenty to twenty-five Hawaiians camped out along Irish Creek in El Dorado County. In September of that year, Lowell Smith, a haole missionary to the Hawaiians, visited their encampment. Smith listed the names of fourteen Hawaiian men. Like Nahoa, half of them had arrived in California in either 1849 or 1850. The other seven had trickled in from Hawaiʻi, one in 1851, four in 1852, one in 1854, one in 1857. When this Hawaiian community took shape in El Dorado County remains unclear; Hawaiian-language newspapers do not mention the men at Irish Creek until 1858.34

  Nahoa had asked his family members on Maui to write to him via the post office at Coloma. But by September when Smith arrived in Coloma, Nahoa was no longer there. In fact, on his way to Coloma via Sacramento, Smith had serendipitously discovered Nahoa, although the young man did not make much of an impression on him. “I went in search of several natives of Hawaii who were living in Sacramento,” Smith wrote to Ka Hae Hawaii. “I found only three of them, Nahoa and Ainanui from Honolulu, and Haleole from Kailua. These were the only native Hawaiians I saw in Sacramento.”35

  Arriving at Coloma, Smith was met by a Hawaiian named, of all things, Hawaii. Hawaii informed Smith that “only nine” Hawaiians were at Irish Creek “at this time.” Hawaii stated that “17 [had] left elsewhere, these days, because, the [amount of] water at ‘Irish Creek’ is small now. 30 miles above the cliffs, some of them have left, they are going to look for work.” The next day three Hawaiians came down from Irish Creek to meet Smith; they had hired a horse-drawn wagon to pull Smith up from Coloma to the Hawaiian encampment in the hills above. At Irish Creek, Hawaiian miners were pleased that a white missionary had arrived from the islands to provide them with Christian instruction and, even more importantly, palapala (written materials), including “Bibles, new testament, praise hymns, children’s hymns, lyrics, sermons, geography, mental arithmetic, children’s arithmetic”—texts of both religious and secular natures, almost all in the Hawaiian language. Smith wrote, “They are very happy, for the arrival of some Hawaiian palapala.” Palapala may refer to any written documents, not just Bibles and schoolbooks, but also perhaps private letters from family members back home. We do not know if Smith brought letters from Hawaiian loved ones, but either way, Hawaiian palapala brought great happiness to the migrant workers that day.36

  During his one week in the mining country, Smith became despondent about the conditions that the Hawaiian men faced. “I saw their work, the gold digging,” he wrote, “and I also saw some haole people and Chinese, digging the gold. They don’t find much these days, for the lack of water. Some [make] two dollars, some three dollars a day; and some even [make] nothing.” The lack of water at Irish Creek and elsewhere around Coloma was a serious issue, not just for quenching the men’s thirst, but also for facilitating the extraction of gold. In the early years of the Gold Rush, miners panned for gold in clear mountain streams and picked nuggets right out of the water, but by the late 1850s most mining in California was dependent upon hoses and hydraulic pressure to blast away rock and reveal the gold hidden underneath.37 It is not clear if the Hawaiians in El Dorado County were dependent on hydraulic technology in their mining. If so, we can assume that they did not control the means of production. Smith’s letters to Ka Hae Hawaii reveal as much, for he states that the Hawaiian men were not working for gold, but for wages. “They don’t save [their] money,” he wrote, “or [their] gold like the haole, or the Chinese [do]. Because, if they are earning some money, [they] go to the haole village, and buy that thing and this thing for the kino [body].” “[They] spend everything,” he noted, “then return to work again.” Here is the same critique that was put to Mr. Mannini on the beach at San Diego over twenty years earlier: why do you spend all your money rather than saving it to bring home? Smith blamed the Hawaiians’ careless spending as the primary reason why these men would likely never see Hawaiʻi again. “In my opinion they will not come back to Hawaii. The death of some p
eople has occurred having come to California; and these people perhaps will live at that gold land, and die there,” he remarked. In their own defense, the Hawaiian miners replied to Smith, “[you] don’t understand.” “The love for [our] parents is great,” they stated, “and for [our] cousins at Hawaii, but, we are ashamed to return empty handed and worthless.” And so, fearing embarrassment, Hawaiians stayed in California, making new lives out of nearly nothing and doubling down in their commitment to make a go of it in Gold Country; in the process, they sacrificed their golden dreams on the altar of a new and less shiny reality.38

  By 1860, the Hawaiian presence in gold mining had decreased. The great majority of Hawaiians in California yet continued to reside in rural mining districts. From a high of 230 Hawaiians in 1850, U.S. census data indicates that only 71 Hawaiian immigrants continued to reside in the state of California ten years later. Many had died. Joseph Opunui, in an 1858 letter to Ka Hae Hawaii, listed the names of 18 Hawaiians who had recently died in Coloma. Death was a common occurrence and may have outpaced new arrivals from Hawaiʻi. Some, too, went home, although few went home rich. Of the 71 Hawaiians in California in 1860, many were new arrivals. We know this because there were more Hawaiian women in California in 1860 than in 1850, especially when figured as a percentage of the total Hawaiian population in the state (2 percent of migrants in 1850 were women; 11 percent were women in 1860). Of those Hawaiians still in California in 1860, more were settling down with families, perhaps giving up dreams of returning home with pockets full of gold. Many Hawaiian men married Native California women and had families. Indeed, the 1860 census interestingly lists many men named “Kanaka” and even others with Hawaiian-sounding names living among bands of Indians in Fresno County. Some Hawaiians, as historian David Chang has shown, melded into Indian society in the Sierra foothills and, perhaps in the eyes of the U.S. census, may have become “Indian.” Some Indians also became “Hawaiian.” The average Hawaiian in California in 1860 was probably a single man living among other men, mostly Hawaiians, almost all in their twenties, some in their thirties, living and working in the mining regions of the state’s mountainous interior.39

  Working conditions for Hawaiian gold miners were debated at length in the Hawaiian-language press. In April 1861, Ka Hae Hawaii reprinted a letter from one Dr. Frick, a Honolulu haole, who had written to a French-language paper in San Francisco to share his views about Hawaiian labor migration to California. In his letter, Dr. Frick stated that “a certain person of California is searching, [yet I] do not know his name, to get some kanaka maoli [Hawaiians] to go to his land, to work as hired hands for him.” Frick thought this was an awful idea. “If the free children of the pleasant land of Hawaii desire,” he admonished his readers, “to transfer their bodies, having been born and living beneath the hot sun of their Islands, [to] the difficulties of the cold and the heat of the four seasons of the entire year within the first year; Then, they will be pono to go to California. If they desire to give up their good and abundant food, and comfort, for the type of food [here] is not right for their well-being, and buying [food] is a great cost; then, they will be pono to go to California.” Frick continued, “If they are prepared for the appropriate clothing, the shirts and the woolen shawls, the things not desired in their native land, just the things it is impossible to be without in this land; then, they will be pono to go to California. If they seek to sharpen the fatigue, to sharpen the oppression, to live with heaviness, no comfort, with the problem of the foreigner who treats [him] with contempt because of his dark skin, then, they will be pono to quickly go to California.” Frick concluded his premonition of Hawaiian suffering arguing that out-migration to California would lead to the “diminishment of their lahui [lāhui],” and that “the delicious kalo [taro] of the fine valleys of their land [will be] no more, the fish of the sea is no more for the sailing away [of] a small portion of the commoners who haul [the catch] for the haole.” In other words, Hawaiʻi faced ecological ruin and social disintegration should its indigenous workers leave the Islands in pursuit of wages abroad.40

  Dr. Frick’s letter prompted a quick response from a Hawaiian migrant who actually knew the conditions for migrant workers in the interior of the state. From a riverside farm in Vernon township, Sutter County, T.B. Kamipele admitted that he used to live in the gold fields but had since left. He proceeded to explain what conditions were really like for Hawaiian wage workers. “In these years having lived here,” he wrote, “all the people living in the mountains, digging the gold, [we] did not receive just wages for the work.” All we got in return for our work, he wrote, was “the trembling of the swollen chest for some food and some fish.” Lacking in wages and food, Kamipele admitted that he became distrustful of his Euro-American employers in California. He warned Ka Hae Hawaii’s readers that “hired work with haole employers [in California], was close to the nature of [that of] oppressed slaves.” Giving an example, Kamipele described “a certain haole [named] Coneki,” who brought over “some kanaka people from the land [from Hawaiʻi], the number of them was perhaps fifty.” These migrants worked in California for six months, but then as “their work did not earn at all even a little compensation. They quit, and everyone went [off] to his place as he wished.” “So that’s the importance of the hired work at this time,” he concluded. “A certain little minority has succeeded, [but] the majority, they have not succeeded.”41

  Kamipele, however, did not wholly agree with Frick’s negative assessment of the Hawaiians’ experience in California. Frick, like many other foreigners, believed that Hawaiian men’s bodies were only fit for tropical climates and would suffer if exposed to extreme cold, such as in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Dr. Frick warned Hawaiians of “transfer[ing] their bodies” to “the difficulties of the cold and the heat of the four seasons of the entire year.” But Kamipele rejoined that “there is no problem with the clothing things, the wool/flannel shirts are numerous for keeping warm for the cold season.” These items, he stated, can be found “in the store[s] in every location of California, with blanket[s] for sleeping in the night,” as well.42 Similarly, where Dr. Frick warned of famine, “for the type of food [here] is not right for [a Hawaiian’s] well-being, and buying [food] is a great cost,” Kamipele shot back that “there is absolutely no famine concerning food, the food is numerous in every location.” Frick’s final warning to the Hawaiians concerned “the diminishment of their lahui,” the Hawaiian nation. Decades of population loss due to epidemic diseases, decreased fertility, and, of course, emigration, had put the future of the Hawaiian lāhui in jeopardy. Leaving for California would not help preserve your people, he warned. But Kamipele came to a very different conclusion. “[As for] sickness,” he wrote, “there is no great sickness in California here, it is like the [native] land, the amount of illness. The living here is good for the lack of disease.” Despite haole fears for his body, Kamipele ultimately considered California to be a healthy environment, at least as healthy as Hawaiʻi, and certainly no worse. Not only was California a healthy environment, he wrote, but the health of the Hawaiian people was maintained by the care of the community. Here, “all the lala [lālā; branches/limbs; i.e., members of society] are strong in aiding the kino [body].” “Therefore,” he proudly proclaimed, “the work is going well everyday with the lack of pain for the body.”43

  IN THE CITY

  Henry Nahoa was determined to avoid embarrassment. After eight years in the gold mines, and still without any aloha from family members back home, he wiped away his tears and left the mines for the bustling city of Sacramento in the summer of 1858. By spring 1859 he had settled in. Friends or family had clearly gotten wind of the move, for by February he now had mail waiting for him at the Sacramento post office. He was renting a tiny space in a “small building,” in the alleyway between Front and Second Streets and I and J Streets, one block from the Sacramento River, near the docks. He shared the building with another person, a “mulatto” woman named Lucretia Grossbeck. On M
arch 3, 1859, they had a dispute in which the police became involved and Nahoa and Grossbeck were arrested. Apparently Nahoa was Grossbeck’s tenant, and she desired to evict him from the building. On March 3 while Nahoa was away she threw all his furniture into the alley. When Nahoa returned to see his belongings in the street, he beat the woman, thus prompting police to intervene. She was charged with “malicious mischief” for destroying his furniture, while Nahoa was charged with assault and battery. Two weeks later, Nahoa, along with another man named John Alexander, “both colored,” were charged by Lucretia Borgia (Grossbeck?) with “disturbing the peace” and tried in the city’s police court, then promptly “discharged.” Nahoa was free, but he was most likely not moving back in with that woman. Yet all indications suggest that Nahoa remained in the city of Sacramento throughout the 1860s. Remarkably, the Sacramento Daily Union reported that Nahoa was evicted once again from another city residence in 1868, although this time the eviction took place in court, not in the alleyway with all his furniture splayed out on the ground.44

  The move to the city was a common experience for many Hawaiian workers in California. With their golden dreams dashed, these globetrotting proletarians now had to find new sources of revenue. Many moved into the maritime and domestic trades that their ancestors had pioneered a generation earlier in Mexican California. Some disembarked from ships in San Francisco and in fact never went to the mountains. The allure of the city was just too great, although not every Hawaiian felt that way. The future mōʻī, Alexander Liholiho, for example, dismissed San Francisco when he wrote home to a friend circa 1850 that “I did not write you from San Francisco as I promised. . . . I knew you would not like to hear about sufferings and murderers and gamblers, and what else could I write from there?” Despite his royal misgivings, these two regions—Hawaiʻi and San Francisco—became intricately linked almost immediately after the Gold Rush began. “The city that shared the name of the gentle St. Francis of Assisi,” wrote historian Gray Brechin, “began to act like Poe’s Maelstrom, drawing everything from the Rockies to China, and from Alaska to Chile, into its growing maw.” Hawaiian migrants, too, were sucked into San Francisco’s maelstrom, and so was Hawaiian agriculture. The production of salt beef, fresh fruits and vegetables, and even sugar, expanded rapidly in the early 1850s to feed hungry gold miners thousands of miles away. In some ways, Hawaiʻi was San Francisco’s “cantado,” a term Brechin uses to define San Francisco’s tributary regions, those places transformed by the power of the all-consuming yet distant metropolis.45