by Huang, Yunte
The primary market for beef was not the Hawaiian natives, whose traditional diet had been confined to fish, pig, and poi (taro paste). The best customers were the whaling fleets that made island calls to winter the crew and replenish their supplies. As the hunt for the ocean’s leviathans intensified at a maddening pace, the demand for Parker’s beef increased, soon surpassing what his small team could procure from the great wilderness or from his growing ranch. More help was needed.
Still strapped for cash because of his expensive purchases of luxury items on credit, Kamehameha agreed to Parker’s request and sent for help from California. Help came in the form of a team of colorful Spanish vaqueros, who one day arrived on the pier clad in woolen ponchos, slashed leggings, brightly colored sashes and bandannas, and floppy sombreros. These artisans from the mainland taught the Hawaiian natives everything they needed to know about horses and cattle, and every skill of ranching: how to capture wild horses and break them to saddle, how to lasso raging bulls, how to tan leather with tree bark, how to braid rawhide quirts and lariats, and how to build saddles. Not only were the natives eager to learn the arts of the cowboy, they also were quick to emulate the exotic costumes and the lifestyle that came with the profession. After calling the vaqueros “the Españols,” they referred to themselves as “paniolos,” a variation of the former word.13
In short order, the Parker Ranch grew rapidly, and so did the number of paniolos, who would soon include Hawaiians, Caucasians, Asians, and other mixed-race men. After John Parker died in 1868, the vicissitudes of the ranch rose and fell, as do all dynasties in history, throughout the remaining decades of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. But the ranch has always remained under the control of the Parker family, making it even today the second-largest family-run ranch in the United States.
IT WAS AT the Parker Ranch in Waimea that young Chang Apana learned and honed his cowboy skills. Although no verifying record has been found, at least two reliable sources place Apana at the ranch. Chester A. Doyle, a court interpreter who had worked closely with the Honolulu Police Department, described in a 1935 letter a dinner meeting he had once hosted for Earl Derr Biggers. According to this letter, addressed to the editor of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, Biggers had arrived on the island to scout for materials for his next book, and Doyle threw a dinner party at his home in honor of the famous Charlie Chan novelist. Among the twenty or so guests was Apana, who, according to Doyle, spoke about his days at the Parker Ranch.14
Doyle’s letter was full of factual errors, many of which were disputed by Helen K. Wilder in a letter subsequently published in the same newspaper a month later. Wilder differed with Doyle on many points except for one, that Apana did work at the ranch in Waimea.15
The Parker Ranch, when Apana spent time there in the late 1880s and early 1890s, was plagued by poor management. After John Parker’s death, ownership of the ranch passed down to his descendants. Troubles loomed when the cattle dynasty reached Samuel Parker of the third generation, who preferred the leisurely life of a playboy to the hard work of a rancher. A close friend of King Kalakaua, who was dubbed “the Merry Monarch” for his love of life’s pleasures, Samuel Parker spent more time hobnobbing in the royal court than running the ranch. Not surprisingly, the business suffered.
Nonetheless, work went on for the hundred or so hired paniolos. Joining this most colorful group, young Apana certainly acquired a great knowledge of ranching. The 227,000-acre ranch, lying in the northwest of the Big Island, high up on Mauna Kea’s bare volcanic slopes, had breathtaking vistas of natural beauty as well as rough terrain unsuitable for the faint of heart. From sunrise to sunset, Apana joined other paniolos in herding, cutting, holding, roping, throwing, branding, castrating, inoculating, ear-clipping, medicating, sorting, loading, and shipping.16 Even after sundown, there would still be plenty of odd jobs to do: tending to the horses, caring for the saddle and tack, repairing the lassos, chopping wood, and more.17
A cowboy’s life demanded courage and built character. The experience would have a lasting effect on Apana, and for the rest of his life he was known as a top-rider and hunter—fearless, dashing, devil-may-care. From dress to talk, from weapon to walk, the future “supercop” would maintain a paniolo’s way of life. He would always wear a cowboy hat and carry a bullwhip that he had fashioned himself, just as a paniolo handcrafts his own lasso and saddle. Dark and sinewy like a bull, he walked straight and fast, with an energetic gait. According to his daughters, Apana could “tell time down to the minute by observing the shadows that the sun cast.” And he kept the same schedule of getting up and going to bed every day, like a clock. In his “high shrill voice,” he spoke fluent Hawaiian, the crisp syllables popping like firecrackers.18
By the time Helen Wilder hired him, in 1897, as the first officer for the newly founded Hawaiian chapter of the Humane Society, Apana the paniolo was ready for the proverbial wide, wild world.
4
The Wilders of Waikiki
A CHINESE STORE IN CHINATOWN, HONOLULU, LATE 1890S (Courtesy of Hawaii State Archives)
In my youth, I am house-boy in the Phillimore Mansion.
—Charlie Chan
IN THE HIERARCHICAL world of late nineteenth-century Hawaii, where the racial pyramid put white plantation owners and missionaries on top, even above the indigenous chiefs and queens, an uneducated yellow man like Chang Apana would not have stood a “Chinaman’s chance” without luck or help.
Unlike earlier times, when hospitable Hawaiians would extend alohas and leis to people of all races arriving on their shores, racism became more visible as the haoles became more established in the islands. Steadily and persistently, an elite group of American businessmen and missionaries and their descendants had begun, since the midcentury, to consolidate power. The Provisional Government under their control, while severely corroding the role of the native monarchy, had passed laws and implemented policies that all too often became carbon copies of what existed on the racist mainland.
Apana’s luck was a result of his relationship with the Wilders, the affluent and influential family who, like the Parkers, dominated Hawaii’s economy and politics for generations. The first Wilder to come to the islands was Samuel Gardner Wilder, born in Leominster, Massachusetts, in 1831. He had grown up in Geneva, Illinois, and left school at the age of nine in order to work and contribute income to his family of five siblings and a widowed father, all eking out a living on a farm mortgaged to the hilt. At eighteen, he hopped on a “prairie schooner” (a covered wagon) and lit out for the West to try his luck in the California goldfields. Failing to strike it rich, he supported himself with odd jobs in San Francisco, where he met Elizabeth Kinau Judd, daughter of Dr. Gerrit P. Judd. A pioneer of American missions to Hawaii, Judd had arrived in the islands on the third missionary ship from Boston in 1828 and became a close friend and adviser of several Hawaiian monarchs. Elizabeth, his eldest daughter, was said to be the first white girl born in Honolulu, with her middle name chosen in honor of the sister of the then-reigning monarch, Kamehameha III.1
Samuel Wilder and Elizabeth Judd were married at her father’s Honolulu house in 1866. It became a historic occasion, with Edgar Allan Poe’s brother as one of the witnesses and distinguished guests who included Mark Twain, King Kamehameha V, and Queen Emma. Wilder’s conjugal tie to the prominent Judd family enabled him to get a foothold in Hawaii. He started off by trading in guano—droppings of seabirds mined from uninhabited Jarvis Island, near the equator, and sold to the U.S. mainland as fertilizer and as a gunpowder ingredient. Soon he bought his own steamships and built up an empire, the Wilder Steamship Company. He also owned sugarcane plantations in Hawaii.
Among his various business adventures, Wilder’s one-shot involvement in the coolie trade was generally regarded as his worst and most embarrassing failure. In 1870, as the agent for the Hawaii Planters’ Society, Wilder sailed for China with plans to recruit 541 coolie laborers. In Hong Kong he ran into snags with local laws bannin
g contract-labor emigration. After some secret maneuvering and loophole jumping, Wilder gathered about four hundred Chinese men to go to Hawaii. He gave each of them clothing and $10 cash advances. Just as the ship was about to set sail, someone spread the rumor that they were sailing to South America rather than Hawaii. The whole ship burst into an uproar, and most of the recruits went overboard, without returning the advances. “The result of Mr. S. G. Wilder’s mission to China,” an article in the Pacific Commercial Advertiser reported after Wilder’s return, “is before us in the 168 Chinese coolies which were brought in the ship Solo from Hong Kong. The enterprise is looked upon as a failure, and Mr. Wilder has been soundly berated upon the street by some of those who were most anxious that he should be sent.”2
In contrast to this disaster, Wilder’s finest business deal was his purchase, again against opinions on the street, of the wrecked Eskbank. One day, a merchant ship ran aground off Diamond Head. Aroused from his morning nap by his children, Wilder looked through the spyglass and saw it was Eskbank, a vessel with a valuable cargo. He told his wife, “I am going to buy the Eskbank and what I make out of it I will build you a house with.” As the weather worsened, the raging waves completely destroyed the bark, and the vessel was sold at auction for $1,100. Wilder, who made the winning bid, once again became the butt of jokes on the street, for people thought he was throwing money away. But Wilder hired divers, sent out steamers, and salvaged a staggering $175,000 worth of goods from the ship. All the skeptics—or, rather, the whole island—got drunk and made merry for days with the bottles of gin and port that washed ashore.3
True to his word, Wilder built his wife a big house by using part of the profits from the wrecked Eskbank. He named the house after the ship. It was a saga so fascinating that it inspired Robert Louis Stevenson, the adopted son of the South Seas, to write The Wrecker, a Pacific mystery about the rogue cargo of the wrecked Flying Scud:
“There is something in wrecks, too,” said Havens. “Look at that man in Honolulu, and the ship that went ashore on Waikiki Reef; it was blowing a kona, hard; and she began to break up as soon as she touched. Lloyd’s agent had her sold inside an hour; and before dark, when she went to pieces in earnest, the man that bought her had feathered his nest. Three more hours of daylight, and he might have retired from business. As it was, he built a house on Beretania Street, and called it for the ship.”4
“That man in Honolulu” is unmistakably Samuel Wilder. And in the spirit of fiction, Stevenson also changed the name of the street where the house was built, from the original Judd to Beretania Street.
Later in her memoir, Elizabeth remembered fondly the redwood house built on the street named after her father. “Eskbank,” she said, “was a beautiful house, well adapted for entertaining, having large, airy rooms and wide verandas.” It boasted a banquet hall, salon, library, billiards room, cupola, and a large stable.5 An extant photo of the house shows a two-story wood building with a lanai going all around, capped by a prominent widow’s walk on the roof—reminiscent of the couple’s New England roots—and surrounded by royal palms, banana trees, ribbon-leafed lauhala, and flaming hibiscus.
AS A SEASONED paniolo skilled with horse and rope, Apana was hired by the Wilders in 1891 to take care of their stable at Eskbank. He lived in the servants’ quarters in the barn behind the big mansion.6 It is conceivable that he shared other chores at the house as well. Later in life, Apana was remembered as an excellent cook. According to Gilbert Martines, when the Prince of Wales visited the islands in 1920, Apana was the chef in charge of the big celebratory luau. When interviewed in the 1980s, Apana’s daughters spoke fondly of their father’s daily cooking and freshly baked cookies.7 There was a regular cook at Eskbank as well as a Chinese housemaid, a former slave girl named Sibilo, whom Wilder had bought for $50 at a Canton marketplace during his infamous 1870 trip.8 But the Wilders were raising a family of five children; a good hostler at such an establishment had to have been a jack-of-all-trades, ready to step up wherever and whenever his service was needed.
While The Chinese Parrot (1926), the second Charlie Chan novel but the first featuring Chan as the central character, is fictional, there is a striking resemblance between the early life of Chang Apana and the fictional Charlie Chan. In the novel, the honorable detective recalls his early days of serving the wealthy Phillimore family: “In my youth, I am house-boy in the Phillimore Mansion. Still in my heart like old-time garden bloom memories of kindness never to be repaid…. Life would be dreary waste, if there was no thing called loyalty.”9 In the book, Chan is taking what he calls “a postman’s happy walk on holiday,” a leave of absence from the Honolulu Police Department, and performing a personal service: to protect and deliver a precious piece of pearl jewelry for Sally Phillimore, his former employer. Chan’s résumé, as described in this novel, closely resembles Apana’s career. “Detective-Sergeant Chan, of the Honolulu police,” is the way Sally Phillimore introduces him to her friends in San Francisco. “Long ago, in the big house on the beach, he was our number-one boy…. Charlie left us to join the police force, and he’s made a fine record there.”10 Later in the story, Chan disguises himself as Ah Kim, a cook and houseboy at financial tycoon P. J. Madden’s desert ranch, in order to solve the mysterious case of the Chinese parrot. The skills he acquires earlier in life as a hostler certainly come in handy to assist his sleuthing.
Race and class differences notwithstanding, the master and the servant often build a bond longer lasting and more reciprocal than what exists between the employer and the employee in a capitalist enterprise. More than a nexus defined solely by naked self-interest and callous cash payment, the feudal relation, both patriarchal and idyllic, often presumes a lifetime obligation. The same was true with Apana and the Wilders. When he lay dying at the Queen’s Hospital in Honolulu in 1933, Apana requested that a member of the Wilder family be present at his deathbed. Not only had he, in the words of Helen Wilder, “looked upon our family as his own,” but, more important, he obviously had not forgotten that it was the Wilders, especially daughter Helen, who had set the stage for his debut in white-dominated Honolulu society. The feisty and compassionate Helen gave Apana, a humble coolie’s son and an illiterate Chinaman who spoke broken English, a chance to show what he was truly made of.10
Helen Kinau Wilder, born in 1869, was the youngest child of Samuel and Elizabeth Wilder. Like her maternal grandfather, Helen was a champion of social reform throughout her life. Her most significant historical legacy is the founding of the Hawaiian chapter of the Humane Society in 1894. Originally called the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the Humane Society had been formed by Henry Bergh in New York in 1866. After the New York State legislature passed the first law in the United States against animal cruelty, Bergh successfully lobbied many other states to follow suit, and new chapters of the society sprouted like bamboo shoots after a spring rain.
In the early 1890s, Helen Wilder used her family influence and wealth to launch a personal campaign in Honolulu to save what many considered to be dumb animals from ill-treatment. Her initial efforts proved unsuccessful, and the society she founded soon disintegrated. But her luck changed one day in 1896. It was a Sunday morning, and folks were on their way to church on their horses, in buggies, or on foot, all traversing Honolulu’s dusty, unpaved streets. Helen was late, and when she got to her church, the sermon had already started. Tethering her mount to the hitching post and hurrying inside, she noticed that something was wrong with the minister’s horse: the tongue of the horse was tied to the post! Obviously the animal had a bad habit of jerking its head up, and the minister was trying to teach it a lesson. But now its tongue was nearly cut off by the rope.
Storming inside, the apparently indomitable twenty-six-year-old denounced the minister to the entire congregation before he could finish his prayer. The poor minister slipped out of the church in a hurry and was gone for good. The people at the scene were so impressed that they began to chip in for He
len’s cause. Their support ignited a new movement, and the Humane Society was relaunched, this time successfully.12
On February 27, 1897, Helen was deputized by the Marshal of the Republic of Hawaii to enforce animal cruelty laws. She now had the legal authority to stop horse owners from beating their animals. Her organization came to the aid of neglected cattle, and it rescued cats and dogs abused by their owners. Helen served without pay, but she and her friends pooled their resources to hire an animal case investigator.13 That new job went to Chang Apana, the charismatic stableman of Helen’s parental home, a former paniolo versatile in roping and riding. Thus, the future “Charlie Chan” debuted before the public as the first humane officer in Honolulu.
5
“Book ’em, Danno!”
HAWAIIAN HUMANE SOCIETY SEAL (Courtesy of Hawaiian Humane Society)
The undersigned, sensible of the cruelties inflicted upon dumb animals by thoughtless and inhuman persons, and desirous of suppressing same—alike from considerations affecting the well-being of society as well as mercy to the brute creation—consent to become patrons of a Society having in view the realization of these objects.