Aloha Rodeo

by David Wolman

  VANCOUVER WAS UNSURE HOW he would be received. He had not forgotten how his captain was killed and dismembered fourteen years earlier, and there had been other accounts of hostility toward outsiders since then. On his first visit as expedition leader, two years before, Vancouver had found the Hawaiians uninterested in trading for any British goods except guns and ammunition, which he politely declined. This time, however, the islanders were open to trading goods such as nails and red cloth.

  On the day of those first doomed cows, a fleet of canoes paddled out to the ship, led by King Kamehameha’s half brother. As the king’s emissary, he wanted nothing to do with the cattle at first. But after much pleading from Vancouver, he agreed to take the bizarre beasts to shore.

  As Vancouver watched his bellowing gifts being lowered into the canoes, he knew the stakes were high. If things went well, the animals might help revive relations between Hawaii and Britain, the first step in drawing Hawaii into the fold of the empire. If they didn’t, he could have a situation on his hands like the one that had left his predecessor dead.

  After the death of the first two cattle, Vancouver’s next chance came a few days later, this time at Kealakekua Bay, when he welcomed Kamehameha aboard the ship. The tall, powerful chief, described as a man who “moved in an aura of violence,” wore a resplendent royal cloak covered with bright yellow feathers. Kamehameha had met Cook before he was king, and participated in the battle in which the famous explorer was killed. Now the warrior was well on his way to uniting all the Hawaiian Islands, by diplomacy and force, for the first time in history.

  Upon meeting Kamehameha, the British captain was “agreeably surprised in finding that his riper years had softened that stern ferocity.” As a gesture of friendship between them, Vancouver wrote, “we saluted by touching noses.” Then the two men exchanged gifts, including a scarlet cloak the Hawaiian chief clearly treasured. When Kamehameha offered Vancouver hogs, vegetables, and four ceremonial helmets, the captain felt the time was right to give livestock diplomacy another try. He presented the king with two ewes, a ram, and five black cows.

  Kamehameha was delighted with the animals, although, as one sailor wrote, “it took some time to quiet his fears lest they should bite him.” Vancouver noted with satisfaction that the king took a rope in hand and helped secure the animals in the canoes himself. Finally free of their cramped quarters, the cattle dashed around the beach like they were calves again. A large crowd gathered to see the strange creatures. Many found them terrifying. “Thousands ran for the Sea and plunged in; every Cocoa Nut Tree was full in a moment; some jumped down precipices, others scrambled up rocks and houses.”

  The locals’ reaction was not surprising, wrote Archibald Menzies, the Discovery’s botanist and surgeon, “as they were the first animals of the kind they had ever seen prancing about their country in a state so lively and vigorous.” Hawaiians dubbed the cows pua‘a pipi, or “beef pigs,” since hogs were the only animals they knew that even came close.

  Foreigners’ accounts of these events need to be read with a critical eye. Their chronicles inevitably blend an attempt to tell what happened with considerable racial stereotyping and often total ignorance of the culture they were observing. Still, the accounts provide at least a sense of how shocked the Hawaiians were to see longhorns storming up and down the beach.

  The moment those four cows hobbled onto the sand at Kealakekua was a turning point in Hawaiian history. After the exchange, Kamehameha opened the islands to the British Navy, no longer demanding payment for safe passage. In the decades to come, cattle and cattle products would tie Hawaii into the global economy as much as other major commodities like sandalwood and sugar. And Spanish longhorns from the West Coast became one of the first links in a chain of commercial, cultural, and political influence drawing Hawaii steadily toward the United States.

  Vancouver returned to Hawaii again in 1794 with three more bulls and two cows. He learned that soon after he had left the previous year, one of the animals had given birth. The Hawaiians were so elated that they immediately bundled the calf onto a man’s back to carry it across the island to show the native governor in Hilo. The journey took several days, during which the Hawaiians fed the calf fish and water. “With this unnatural food the animal has been reared without the least aid from its mother,” Menzies wrote, “and they assured us that it was at this time very fat and doing well.”

  Keen to protect his investment and boost the animals’ chances of survival, Vancouver had requested that Kamehameha forbid anyone from killing the cattle until their numbers had grown. The British captain had seen sophisticated ranching operations in Spanish California, and he knew that the cattle needed royal protection until there were enough of them for a self-sustaining population.

  Kamehameha agreed and imposed a kapu, or royal edict, forbidding anyone from killing or even hurting any cattle. Defying a kapu was punishable by death. For the sea-weary bovines, this meant they were free to wander, eat, mate, and enjoy their island home. The king also ordered a paddock built on a lush slope with easy access to spring water near modern-day Kailua-Kona. The stone enclosure was roughly five hundred acres and had walls nearly eight feet tall. (Parts of it are still there today.) Penning the longhorns was as much to protect locals from the cattle as the reverse: bulls could grow to weigh 1,500 pounds, and their deadly horns could gut a man as effectively as any spear.

  The immediate goal of keeping the animals alive was to give them time to reproduce, which they did, in huge numbers, and soon there was no need to keep them penned. But the kapu also served to elevate the cattle’s status. They became “the king’s cattle,” and centuries later, even when it became clear that the animals were agents of ecological destruction, few people ever thought of them as noxious invaders, much less tools of colonialism.

  Fierce and fearless, wild cattle soon overran every island where they were introduced. In 1806, an American ship captain noted longhorns on Maui digging up gardens and destroying patches of sugarcane with their horns. One bull that charged people regularly “appeared to have a disposition to do all the mischief he could, so much so that he was a pretty unwelcome guest among them.”

  As Hawaiians struggled with marauding cattle, trade with the outside world was expanding quickly. Seven species of sandalwood grew in the islands, and Hawaiians used the fragrant wood to scent their homes and kill lice. Soon after the turn of the nineteenth century, American traders found that sandalwood fetched high prices in China, where it was used for incense, carving, and traditional medicine. For almost two decades, sandalwood dominated the islands’ economy. Chiefs forced common people to collect sandalwood instead of fishing and tending to their farms, leading to two major famines.

  But the sandalwood industry collapsed by 1830, due to foreign competition and, more so, to the fact that the trees had all been cut down. Trade in other commodities quickly filled the void: sugar, salt, tropical fruits. Hawaii was on its way to becoming the fabled crossroads of the Pacific.

  Cattle and cattle products were not yet part of that mercantile boom. In February 1811, the American ship Tonquin sailed to the islands. The Tonquin was part of John Jacob Astor’s ambitious, if not quixotic, plan to establish a fur-trading empire connecting the mouth of the Columbia River with New York City, London, and Canton. The crew met the governor of the island of Hawaii and paid their respects at the beach where Cook was killed. Then they sailed to Oahu and loaded up on pigs, goats, sheep, chickens, and vegetables.

  When a member of the Pacific Fur Company offered to buy two beef cows from Kamehameha, the king assigned nearly a hundred men to retrieve the animals. They surrounded the herd and drove it into an enclosure. One man roped a young cow around the neck and fastened the other end to a coconut tree.

  Crew members from the Tonquin, worried that the animal might break free, decided to shoot the cow instead. The noise triggered a stampede, and the Hawaiians—according to the ship’s crew—scrambled up trees to safety. The Americans found
it impossible to catch a second cow, and eventually gave up and shot another. A few more shots with blank cartridges drove the herd back to its pasture, and the Hawaiians climbed down to the ground.

  It had been less than twenty years since Vancouver first delivered cattle to the islands. Thus far their influence was anything but civilizing.

  2

  Ferae Naturae

  ONE OF THE MOST powerful ranching dynasties in American history began with a teenager’s dreams of adventure on the high seas. John Palmer Parker was born in Newton, Massachusetts, in 1790, the redheaded son of devout Puritans. He grew up a few miles from the harbor where, just two decades earlier, American colonists had revolted against their faraway overlords.

  The Parker family’s roots dated back a century before independence, when his great-great-grandfather emigrated from England, and generations of Parkers were well respected in their New England community. John’s father, Samuel, along with a number of cousins and siblings, served in the Revolutionary War. One of his cousins was president of the United States Branch Bank, and was described as “one of the solid men of Boston” in a listing of local bluebloods. His mother, Ann, came from an Irish family and had six children.

  It was a tumultuous time in America. In 1798, citing national security, Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which increased barriers to citizenship, expanded the president’s authority to detain and deport immigrants, and grossly undermined freedom of the press. A screwball presidential race in 1800 ended in an electoral college tie between sitting president John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who eventually prevailed.

  Three years later, the Louisiana Purchase extended the country’s western boundary from the Mississippi River to the Continental Divide. With a few signatures and $15 million, the United States added more than 800,000 square miles, from bayous to high plains to mountains—native inhabitants be damned. To those who had advocated for it, doubling the size of the fledgling country wasn’t opportunistic; it was divine providence. Almost a century later, this spiritual, economic, and civilizing obligation known as Manifest Destiny would push the United States beyond the western edge of the continent and across the Pacific.

  As a student at Framingham Academy, where the curriculum was steeped in Enlightenment principles, young John Palmer demonstrated a curiosity about the world and a particular skill in mathematics. Yet despite the excitement of life in post-revolutionary Massachusetts, Parker saw the oceans as his ticket to fortune. New England merchants were buzzing about the discoveries made by explorers like James Cook and the potential business opportunities abroad as trade with “the Orient”—spices, silk, and teas for North American furs—surged. In 1809, at age nineteen, Parker signed on with a whaling vessel, leaving behind the deciduous forests and harsh winters of New England to set sail for Asia. He thought he would return to Newton in a year or two. He never did.

  Parker reached Hawaii before the end of his first year at sea. In the early nineteenth century, explorers, traders, and whaling ships were stopping in ports like Lahaina, Honolulu, and Kawaihae with increasing frequency. Like so many before and after him, Parker was transfixed by Hawaii’s beauty, climate, and hospitality. But once his ship was resupplied and loaded with sandalwood, Parker departed for Canton, where he became ensnared in the turmoil of the Napoleonic Wars. Canton was one of a number of Chinese ports the British Navy blockaded to limit trade with France, leaving American mariners like Parker no choice but to wait out the conflict. Parker was still young, and this extended stay in an alien culture helped shape a famously adaptable personality.

  When the blockade ended, he sailed aboard a merchant ship on a sixteen-month voyage to California and up the Pacific Coast to the Columbia River. From there, the ship traveled to Hawaii, and this time Parker stepped ashore for good. The year was 1815. He was only twenty-five, yet within a decade he would befriend a king, marry a princess, and help transform the islands’ economy, landscape, and culture.

  WHEN PARKER SETTLED IN Hawaii, the wild cattle situation was completely out of control. Thousands of animals roamed wherever they pleased, with virtually no fences or stone walls to stop them. They raided agricultural plots that Hawaiians had painstakingly cleared of heavy volcanic rocks and fertilized with seaweed and manure. For foraging cattle, farm plots were a veritable buffet.

  To a distant observer, the west coast of the island looked unchanged from three decades earlier, when European explorers made their first contact: a coastline dotted with thatched roofs, fishermen working the reefs, and taro plots spread out below leafy slopes. But elsewhere, especially in the upland plateau north of Mauna Kea, cattle were creating chaos and endangering lives. Visiting foreigners noted that the animals had “resorted to the mountains, and become so wild and ferocious, that the natives are afraid to go near them.”

  For centuries, this part of Hawaii, known as Waimea, had been a carefully gardened landscape of green hills, fertile farms, and grasslands bordered by thick forest to the north.* Cows would change all that.

  The thriving newcomers acted as if they owned the place. These were not the docile, doe-eyed animals of eastern dairy farms. Longhorns were the same breed of cattle that wranglers in Alta California would sometimes pit against grizzly bears for sport. Hawaii’s cattle had quickly become shrewd survivors who hid and foraged in steep pockets of forest and remote ravines. Like mountain lions, they tended to avoid people as much as possible, except when it was time to storm a garden. If startled or threatened, they would charge and chase anyone in sight.

  In the early nineteenth century, a Russian merchant sloop arrived at Kealakekua and found the area overrun with wild cattle. One of the Russian explorers wrote of a herd that came down from the mountains and “committed great ravages in the plantations in the valleys.” A large group of Hawaiians was dispatched to catch the animals, or at least scare them away. The cattle killed four men before disappearing back into the hills.

  The situation was similar on Oahu, Maui, and soon Kauai and Molokai, too. Fences did little to prevent what one historian dubbed “the great Cattle Menace.” By 1830, there were an estimated 20,000 wild cattle on Hawaii alone. The animals made it difficult to clear and farm the land, and made it hazardous to venture into the high country. “The bullocks of the mountains were . . . very numerous and savage,” wrote an American traveler in 1841, “so that traveling among the mountains was attended with great danger.” Another visitor, keen to explore Mauna Kea and its surroundings, found Hawaiians were “so terrified at the idea of encountering the wild cattle, which roam in prodigious numbers through the woods, that no threats or entreaties would be likely to induce them to penetrate far [into the forest] with you.” In less than a quarter of a century, Vancouver’s gift had become, in the words of a British explorer, completely “ferae naturae.”

  There were a few scattered attempts at fencing and domestication. The native governor of Hawaii ordered the construction of a stone wall nearly five miles long to prevent cattle from trampling farms. On Oahu, an enterprising Spaniard named Don Francisco de Paula Marín may have been one of the first people in the kingdom to slaughter cattle and sell the beef. (By 1828, Marín’s herd was up to 1,000 animals.) A former slave from the United States was reported to have a flock of goats and a handful of dairy cows inside a round fence on a six-acre homestead near Waikiki. For the most part, though, the animals remained wild and dangerous.

  When Parker settled in Hawaii, he scarcely could have known that these four-legged marauders would become his ticket to riches. But his timing was perfect. The 1820s saw a dramatic increase in the number of ships arriving in the islands, including sandalwood traders, missionaries, and whaling vessels in need of provisions. More traffic meant more connections with the outside world. With expanded personal networks, it was now possible to reach foreign markets for hide and tallow (rendered animal fat used for cooking and making soap and candles). For the monarchy, the high chiefs, and those who served them, there was value in the maddening ani
mals—but who would go after them?

  Parker was socially and politically poised to capitalize on the birth of a new industry. He was among a small group of foreigners whom Kamehameha had begun grooming as advisors to help him understand and negotiate with the outside world. These relationships would prove instrumental for the king and his successors as they navigated a growing tangle of Western ideas, languages, politics, and financial opportunities.

  Unlike the Protestant missionaries who had started showing up in the islands, Parker was intent on fitting in, not changing others.* He learned to speak Hawaiian, and barely a year after he arrived, he married Kamehameha’s granddaughter Rachel Kipikane. The traditional ceremony concluded with a close friend throwing a bark cloth over the couple and exclaiming Hoaoe! or “You are married!” Parker’s ability to assimilate, while simultaneously achieving a position of status and respect in a foreign culture, wasn’t something he learned at the academy in Framingham or on the high seas. It was more like a social sixth sense that a person either possessed or didn’t. Parker had it.

  His work ethic and bilingualism made him a valuable asset to the king, a reliable grandson with respect for Hawaiian ways and a firsthand knowledge of foreign cultures. Perhaps even more beneficial was his expertise with a musket, or Brown Bess. By 1810, Kamehameha had succeeded in taking control of all the islands of Hawaii. His success hinged in part on a technological edge: two British-built warships, one of which was a forty-ton vessel armed with cannons, and muskets in the hands of his best soldiers. Since then, the king had retained a special appreciation for firearms and, by extension, the people who could use them skillfully.

  Within a decade, Parker was living with his wife and infant girl on a small coastal plot given to them by the king. He fished, grew vegetables, and ventured up into the plains of Waimea to hunt cattle. But Parker was not one to settle for bucolic serenity, and the new commercial opportunities taking shape around him were hard to miss. On the rutted track connecting the nearby port at Kawaihae to Waimea, fifteen miles away and 2,600 feet higher, Parker would have seen an almost daily procession of natives transporting sandalwood and heavy timbers of koa wood, first on their backs and later in Spanish-style oxcarts. Cattle products would soon follow.