Beyond Hawai'i Native Labor in the Pacific World

by Gregory Rosenthal

  Not yet a metropolis, San Francisco in 1850 was more of a “dunescape” and tent city: deforested down to its last tree in just a few years, there was seemingly not enough wood, labor, or perhaps even time to build a sturdy city on the bay. Merchandise was stacked out in the open. Ships in the harbor were creatively converted into shops and residences. In the early 1850s, a new downtown was built entirely upon landfill in Yerba Buena Cove, and wharfs, including the 700-yard-long Central Wharf, were extended into the bay to accommodate hundreds of ships coming and going. English-language newspapers reported Hawaiian migrants on the streets, on the wharfs, among the tents. The newspapers more often than not depicted Hawaiian urban pioneers as homeless vagabonds with penchants for drink and violence. They were also frequently presented as victims. Their bodies were seen as weak and their deaths duly noted. For example, there was “Bill,” a Hawaiian migrant who died in the fall of 1850 after having slept in a tent with diarrhea for the last few nights of his life. The Sacramento Transcript reported his death as part of a larger cholera outbreak among Hawaiian migrants in both Sacramento and San Francisco. Attempting to locate the source of the disease, the Transcript reported that in San Francisco a camp of “Kanakas”—at least seven of them—were living “in the midst of filth and dirt” and that the men were “of irregular and intemperate habits.” Thus readers were told that urban Hawaiians were at least in part cultivating cholera through “irregular” behaviors, perhaps endangering the rest of the city in the process. In this discourse, cholera marked Hawaiians, and not the urban environment, as diseased.46

  Health, indeed, was a real concern for newly arrived migrants. U.S. Navy midshipman Edward Brinley, Jr. wrote from Honolulu en route to San Francisco in 1849 that “I may be in San Francisco the next time I write—but I am sure I would rather stay here till I can leave for home, for it is very sickly over there & no fresh provisions.” Upon arrival in San Francisco Bay, Brinley described the coast as a “miserable climate.” “I dont wonder there is so much sickness on shore [here],” he wrote; “it is estimated that at least one half of the population of San Francisco are constantly sick.” He blamed the sickness partly on the quality of housing in the city. “Half the town is nothing but tents: & the other half shanties that are roofed with [illegible] canvass or such like—very few of the houses except the old ones have shingle roofs.” The Kingdom of Hawaiʻi’s own consul in San Francisco in September 1850 wrote to Honolulu with concern for the health of this city’s Hawaiian workers: “Last winter I had a great deal of trouble with the poor ‘Kanakas,’” he wrote. They “were in a deplorable & starving condition, many of them died. I could not see them suffer and with the assistance of some of the old residents of the Islands succeeded in rendering them comparatively comfortable and no doubt saved many of the poor creatures lives.”47

  More sensational than stories of kanakas dying, however, were stories of kanakas already dead. In 1849, Brinley wrote that “it is not at all rare to pick up one & two dead bodies in the streets in the mornings half buried in the mud & water.” In the spring of 1851 the body of a “Mexican or Kanaka” was discovered, headless, floating in San Francisco Bay near Central Wharf, reported the Daily Alta California. The newspaper did not make clear why this body was “Mexican or Kanaka,” in fact stating that “there were no marks upon the body by which it could be identified.” Yet skin color marked the body as nonwhite, and an ambiguous designation was sufficient enough for most readers. A second body was found in the sand on Dupont Street in San Francisco two years later that locals surmised might be the corpse of a “Kanaka woman” who years earlier “had a tent near the spot” but hadn’t been seen since. These decapitated and decomposing bodies—headless, nameless, hard to identify—marked Hawaiians as shadowy figures in the urban collective. Kanakas only seemed to appear when corpses washed up on shore.48

  As for the living, California newspapers provided frequent updates on the bad behavior of urban kanakas, portraying them not only as victims of crime but also as its perpetrators. There was the Hawaiian who got upset with the French card dealer during a game of “Monte Bank” on San Francisco’s Long Wharf, and “fell to and gave [the Frenchman] a severe thrashing.” Or there was the Hawaiian man on horseback on Third Street in the city of Sacramento who almost ran over a pedestrian, pulled his pistol on the man, and then using “very undignified and insolent language” sped away upon the approach of a police officer. Tit for tat, Hawaiians in the city were frequent targets of violent crime. There was a kanaka “with an unpronouncable name,” reported the Daily Alta California, who was robbed of his pistol on the Long Wharf by a youth. There were also a group of Hawaiian men drinking at the Abbey, a tavern on Pacific Street in San Francisco, in May 1852, who were assaulted when a man at the bar called one of them a “d—n bloody Kanaka” and drew a revolver. Sometimes the police made arrests; sometimes they did not.49

  The unusual behaviors of exotic immigrants in a cosmopolitan city sometimes also caught the eye of city journalists. Readers of the Sacramento Daily Union probably found amusing the tale of a drunken “Kanaka” who the night before had “walk[ed] the plank” across the slough near the Sacramento courthouse. Drunk, he lost his balance and fell into the “commingled mass of mud, water and offal of that interesting locality.” He pulled himself out, only then to immediately flip over and back into the muck. Readers were likely less amused by the reported use of Sacramento’s Sutter Lake as the “City Bath House” by an “unwashed” and unwanted mix of Chinese, Hawaiians, and African-Americans. The writer of this April 1852 article was embarrassed to see the men “disrobe” and “make their toilet” at I Street beside the lake. Such savagery in the city was just what Hawaiʻi’s Christian missionaries had feared would become of Hawaiians in this land of golden sin.50

  Besides diseased, dead, and disorderly bodies, the most popular imagining of Hawaiian migrants in the city was the “destitute” kanaka, the homeless and shivering migrant worker sleeping on the streets. The destitute kanaka represented what Euro-Americans most feared about Hawaiian bodies, that they were strong at work but simultaneously weak and fragile when exposed to unfamiliar environments, such as the climate and society of California. In 1857 the Daily Alta California reported on “an old Kanaka” who was found “last night, wrapped in his blankets, with a handkerchief of crackers by his side, lying on the sidewalk of Davis street, shivering and chattering with cold.” The article went on to identify the man as David Anton, a thirty-year veteran of the American whaling industry, now seventy-five years old and living on the streets of San Francisco. “He speaks good English, and has forgotten his native tongue,” the writer continued. “He says that he visited the Islands a few months ago, for the first time in thirty years, and found himself a stranger in his native land, and could scarcely recognize the town of Lahaina where he was born,” which would have been in the 1780s, only a few years after the death of Captain Cook. The grizzled Hawaiian man told the reporter that he “despises” the way Hawaiians act today like they are Americans, but “how [can they] be good Americans, when they have never lived in New Bedford, and never been a whaleman for thirty years, as he has?” And yet Anton’s claims to Americanness, won over thirty years of service in the U.S. whaling industry, could not protect him from his near-death, huddled on a San Francisco sidewalk with only a blanket on his body and crackers by his side. Although he felt “a stranger in his native land,” he was just as much a stranger in California.51

  Poverty and homelessness were rampant among Hawaiians in San Francisco, such that the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi’s consul to the city, Charles Hitchcock, wrote to Honolulu many times requesting instructions as to what he might do, if anything, to help the destitute Hawaiians knocking at his door. “There are two Hawaiian subjects here now sick and destitute—at least they say they are,” he explained in July 1862. “I have become responsible for their Board & Medical attendance and wish you would inform me whether such expenses will be reimbursed by the Govt & if so how?�
� Furthermore, he requested “instructions as to what I am to do in cases like this for now that the Hawaiians have commenced applying for relief I must expect more. In the two cases alluded to they are miners and not Seamen & what I have done I ask no recompense for; but would like to know what to do in future.” Two months later, he wrote to the Hawaiian government in Honolulu again, stating that “several cases of Hawaiian subjects—mostly seamen—applying for relief at this Consulate have occurred of late . . . Please inform me what I am to do in such cases, for in this as in cases like Heleike [a Hawaiian arrested and jailed in San Francisco], I incur expenses not provided for by your circlur to diplomates Agents & consuls. I have paid out for legal advice, services of police, photographs &c. in Heleikes case $30. for which I have taken no vouchers, the sums paid being only in small amounts.” Finally, three years later, Hitchcock received vague instructions noting only that Hawaiian migrant workers’ “ignorance of the language and ways of your town makes them fall an easy prey to a certain class of men.” “Our natives,” the instructions continued, “more than any others, require an almost parental protection and I hope you will extend it over them whenever practicable.”52

  Sacramento, too, had homeless Hawaiians. One wonders what Henry Nahoa thought of these men who lived on the streets of his city. In October 1860 under the straightforward headline, “The Destitute Kanaka,” the Sacramento Daily Union described a Hawaiian, “[a] poverty-striken and destitute subject,” who was “found near the furnace of the Pioneer Mills, on First street,” sleeping close to the furnace’s flames to keep warm through the night. When he was discovered in the morning, his pants were reportedly on fire, and one leg was “burned to a blister.” He was no prince, no veteran whaler. He was just one poor man, with no great story to tell. The Union reported some people in the neighborhood had fed him through the night, but that he was on the path of no return toward death. Expressing thoughtfulness and great aloha, the Union editorialized that if the man “dies where he lays, his death will leave a stigma upon the people of Sacramento not soon to be forgotten.” The man was taken to the city hospital by a police officer, but before night, “he ran away again . . . and sought his warm lodgings, near the furnace of the Pioneer Mill, on First street.” Because of this, the Union lost all sympathy and the next day changed their headline from “Destitute Kanaka” to “The Imbecile Kanaka.” “He is such a miserable object,” the paper declared. A “poor creature, lower, if possible, than the brute,” was the newspaper’s assessment of the dying man. For rebuffing the city’s philanthropy—for denying the white community their role as uplifters of the world’s less fortunate races, their “white man’s burden”—the “imbecile” Hawaiian was ridiculed, insulted, and left to die on First Street.53

  If Nahoa had not witnessed these occurrences in person, he may have read about them in the papers, for by 1860 he was reading and writing in English, or so he told Ka Hae Hawaii. Writing from Sacramento, he wrote “half of his letter [to Ka Hae] in the Hawaiian language, and half in the haole [English] language.” Nahoa told the paper that “a majority of the kanaka in that foreign land [California] are searching for the dala [kālā; money] inside of the dirt of the earth.” But there were also at least six Hawaiians living in the city of Sacramento, he reported. They were “R.H. Nahoa, Davida, L.A. Maikai, Elia Waikane, Kapua, Kae.” This was more than the two Hawaiians living in Sacramento according to the 1860 U.S. census, but it was also perhaps less than the actual number, for the question remained: did Nahoa know of and include the name of the Hawaiian man who slept on First Street beside the furnace of the Pioneer Mill? And if not, how many other Hawaiians were living in the interstices of California’s cities in the decades following the Gold Rush?54

  ON THE FARM

  Sometime between 1868 and 1870, Henry Nahoa left Sacramento to reside in a boardinghouse in the rural town of Vernon, Sutter County, about twenty-five miles north of the city along the Sacramento River. The 1870 U.S. census recorded “Henry Mahoa,” thirty years old, living in Manneha Kapu’s boardinghouse along with eleven other Hawaiian men. The census listed each man’s occupation—including Nahoa’s—as “fisherman.” They ranged in age from Nahoa, thirty, to Bull Kaawa, sixty. Manneha Kapu, the female boardinghouse owner was also sixty years old, and living alongside her and the twelve male boarders were a few younger relations, three California-born Hawaiian children of undetermined parentage: Hamet Kapu, male, 16; Lipica Kapu, female, 8; and, John Davis, male, 5. The biological parents of these children are not recorded in the census, but it can be assumed that Kapu and her husband were raising the children as their own. Her husband, John, was recorded living next door with four other Hawaiian men on the agricultural estate of the Euro-American Roth family of Pennsylvania. The five Hawaiian men at Roth’s were also listed as “fishermen.” Remarkably, between the Kapus, the twelve Hawaiian men in the boardinghouse, the four other Hawaiian men on the Roth farm, and the three children living with Manneha Kapu, this Hawaiian community at Vernon—twenty-one people in all—comprised nearly 3 percent of the town’s population and was the largest nonurban congregation of Hawaiian migrants then living in the state of California.55

  Nahoa was not the only one to move to the farm. By 1870, Hawaiian migrants had scattered from mining camps into jobs and livelihoods, as well as unemployment and homelessness, all across California, from the mountains to the cities to farms. While most Hawaiians still engaged in some form of mining (or at least that was the occupation most frequently recorded in the federal census), the trend in the 1860s was diversification in work and work environments. In the 1860s, more Hawaiian women were living in California than ever before. Some worked as prostitutes, others as domestic servants, but most simply married working men and, according to the census, stayed at home and engaged in unpaid domestic work. Fully 36 percent of all Hawaiian migrants living in California in 1870 were women (up from 11 percent in 1860). One consequence of this change was more and more Hawaiian men in California started families, having given up dreams of returning home with riches to share with their kin. Geographically, this phase of Hawaiian migration to and within California not only saw the spreading out of Hawaiians across a greater assemblage of California counties, but also witnessed a marked exodus away from the traditional mining regions and toward cities and farms.56

  In some ways these migration patterns were a reflection of larger economic and ecological transformations in California’s post–Gold Rush trajectory. Historian Andrew Isenberg has argued that Frederick Jackson Turner was wrong when in the 1890s he claimed that the history of the American frontier (i.e., the U.S. West) followed a linear progression from wilderness to agriculture to industrialization. Rather, the history of California, at least after U.S. annexation, followed the exact opposite trajectory: first it was industrial, then agricultural, and only later, in the age of John Muir, was there ever any “wilderness.” Other scholars have shown how in post–Gold Rush California, Euro-American male experts sought to “reform” the postindustrial landscape by turning it (back, as they supposed) into a “garden.” They saw California’s mining landscape as not just ecologically ruined but also socially and morally deformed. By promoting small-scale agricultural production, they hoped for a latter-day manifestation of Thomas Jefferson’s ideal society built upon a foundation of free-laboring white male small-scale producers. But California’s postmining turn to agriculture was in fact just as “industrial” as mining. Rather than providing support for small-scale producers, agricultural development in California largely benefited huge corporations that came to own the great majority of land and water resources. In this environment, immigrants continued to work mostly for wages, and only few came to control the means of production.57

  Before Nahoa had even arrived in Vernon, other Hawaiians were already there building a rural Hawaiian community. T.B. Kamipele had settled in Vernon as early as 1861. By 1867, John Kapu was also living in Vernon, writing frequently to, and regularly reading, Ka Nupepa Kuokoa. A
ccording to the missionary newspaper The Friend, prior to 1868 “Kapuu” [John Kapu], the Hawaiian “chief” of the Vernon community, as the paper styled him, led his people eastward across the Sacramento River from Fremont to Vernon. In Vernon, the newspaper reported eight Hawaiian men, one Hawaiian woman, three Hawaiian children, and one Native American woman living in this new settlement. The newspaper reported that the Hawaiians were good fishermen; they had a skiff on which they plied the river, catching pike and sturgeon in prodigious quantity. The Hawaiians invited the newspaperman to share a supper of fresh Sacramento River fish and blackberries with their community. Living off the land, it appeared that these migrants had found a way to avoid wage labor by living a life centered around communal subsistence production.58