Weaknesses of Empire: Rethinking Kaluaiko‘olau’s Confrontation with Hawai‘i’s Colonial State*

In July 1893 the Hawaiian-language daily Ka Leo o ka Lahui ran a serialized allegory involving a kupua—a hero with supernatural abilities—named Ko‘olau. The story culminated with a great battle in Kaua‘i’s Kalalau Valley, fought between the ali‘i, or chiefs, of O‘ahu and Kaua‘i.¹ As the first installments went to print, readers in Honolulu awaited word from the haole Provisional Government’s real-life expedition to the Kalalau Valley, where a Hawaiian ranch hand called Kaluaiko‘olau—Ko‘olau for short—squared off against the government’s seventy-man force. Like many Hawaiians afflicted with what is today known as Hansen’s disease, Ko‘olau had run afoul of the law when he refused to be relocated to a small, isolated settlement on the island of Moloka‘i.² To escape this fate, he left his home at Mānā and fled with his wife and child to Kalalau. It was there, on June 27, 1893, that he shot and killed the deputy sheriff of Waimea, Louis Stolz. The ensuing manhunt left three soldiers dead and made Ko‘olau an overnight folk-hero to Native Hawaiians. He was never captured, and is remembered today in both popular and scholarly accounts as a symbol of Kānaka Maoli resistance to haole rule.³

Subsequent retellings of Ko‘olau’s story include a memoir in Hawaiian by his widow, Pi‘ilani, an epic poem in English by W. S. Merwin, and most recently a one-man stage production entitled “Legend of Ko‘olau.”⁴ No author has done as much, however, to shape the memory of Ko‘olau as the U.S. novelist Jack London. In 1907, Jack and his wife Charmian sailed their brand-new yacht to Honolulu. The Londons first heard Ko‘olau’s story within hours of their arrival, after a reporter from the Hawaiian Star discovered a Hawai‘i-born university student named Bert Stolz among their crew. Bert’s father was the sheriff killed by Ko‘olau in 1893, but much to Charmian’s amusement the mixed-up reporter wrote instead that Bert was the “son of the famous leper.” The younger Stolz was not laughing, but Jack and Charmian lost little time consoling the slain sheriff’s son, seizing instead on Ko‘olau, who Charmian styled romantically as “a wild free spirit.”⁵ Two years later, Jack published a short story entitled “Koolau the Leper.” Postcolonial literary scholars protest that London sensationalized the symptoms of Hansen’s disease and twisted facts to reflect his fascination with a particular brand of rugged, solitary masculinity, producing what literary scholar John R. Eperjesi aptly if anachronistically dubs a “subaltern Rambo.” The real Ko‘olau died with his wife at his side; the fictional one dies like a Jack London character should—alone and hunted, comforted in his final moments only by the familiar feel of his favorite rifle.⁶

Most significantly from the perspective of Hawaiian history, London wrenched Ko‘olau’s story free from its immediate political context. Ko‘olau’s defiant stand against the Provisional Government came not quite six months after the haole leaders launched their own revolt against Queen Lili‘uokalani, toppling the Hawaiian monarchy for the moment but falling short of their larger aim of annexing Hawai‘i to the United States. By the time the Londons got there Hawai‘i had been under U.S. rule for nearly a decade. The only Hawaiian victims of Hansen’s disease that Jack would ever meet personally were those he encountered on a tour of the Moloka‘i settlement carefully choreographed by the Territorial Board of Health. Jack and Charmian arrived in time to witness a carnivalesque Fourth-of-July celebration, during which inmates of the settlement donned grotesque masks and paraded about on horseback, waving U.S. flags as if to underscore that the possibility of indigenous sovereignty had long since been laid to rest.⁷ For London, U.S. conquest was inevitable and Native resistance a noble, futile gesture.

Figure 1:

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Hawaiians celebrate the Fourth of July at the settlement for persons with Hansen’s disease at Kalaupapa. July 4, 1907. Call no. JLP 492 Alb. 54, Jack London Collection, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA. Image is in the public domain.

He expressed this in his short story through his protagonist’s perverse admiration for the haole soldiers’ “terrible will.” No matter how many die, “Koolau” marvels, the haole continue to “rise like the sands of the sea.”⁸ Given that the defining characteristic of his soldiers—their indomitable will to conquer—was racial, it would have mattered little to London which particular haole government these soldiers served. Accordingly, he omitted any mention of the 1893 coup or the Provisional Government from “Koolau the Leper.”

Native Hawaiians were well aware of who was responsible for the violence. One Hawaiian poem from 1894 entitled “Ke Aiwaiwa Koolau” pointedly identified the men terrorizing the people of Kalalua the previous summer as “Na koa Pi Gi”—the soldiers of the Provisional Government. In Pi‘ilani’s words the soldiers of the “thieving P. G.” were like kōlea, the migratory birds that “came as wanderers” to Hawai‘i every year “to fatten on our land.”⁹ Scholars such as Pennie Moblo, Kerri Inglis, and Anwei Skinsnes Law have worked to resituate Ko‘olau’s story in its original historical context. Moblo, for instance, contends that the timing of the violence on Kaua‘i was no coincidence, as Hansen’s disease provided the leaders of the new haole government with a pretext for disciplining the indigenous population. Nevertheless, like London these scholars overestimate the strength and resolve of Ko‘olau’s opponents, who appear to act according to an unstoppable, undifferentiated logic of colonial conquest.¹⁰

The present work builds on the insights of these scholars but challenges their implicit determinism and their presumptions of a strong and monolithic colonial state. As Christen T. Sasaki points out, for anyone living in Hawai‘i in 1893 “the world was in flux.” The annexationist dream was momentarily ascendant, but it faced existential threats in the form of Japanese imperial ambitions, organized political resistance from Native Hawaiians, and the likely withdrawal of U.S. diplomatic support.¹¹ This last possibility hinged on the deliberations of James Blount, the envoy tapped by President Grover Cleveland to investigate U.S. involvement in the coup against Lili‘uokalani and—it was rumored—possibly even effect the queen’s restoration.¹² The Provisional Government could not afford open conflict with Native Hawaiians, since it would only confirm what Blount already suspected: Indigenous people deeply opposed the new regime. For this reason, Louis Stolz’s superiors in the Provisional Government pleaded in vain that he tread lightly in Kalalau.

Rather than a case of imperial muscle flexing, the ensuing violence exemplified what Frederick Cooper calls “the long arms and weak fingers of empire-states.”¹³ The annexationists dreamed of an American Empire reaching across the Pacific. Yet locally they could neither restrain subordinates like Stolz nor mount successfully a military operation to assert their own sovereignty in the wake of the sheriff’s untimely death. From a bureaucratic perspective, the Provisional Government was internally divided and dependent at the lowest rungs of law enforcement on potentially subversive Hawaiian subaltern officers.¹⁴ Stolz’s showdown with Ko‘olau resulted from the combination of these weaknesses, as the sheriff defied his more cautious superiors only to be betrayed in turn by one of his own Native subordinates. The subsequent expedition to capture Ko‘olau was then thoroughly undermined by rivalries among the different agencies involved in that effort.

The personal antagonism that developed between Ko‘olau and Louis Stolz was that of men who had lived and worked in the same tightly interconnected community for at least thirteen years before finding themselves on opposite sides of the law. Ko‘olau was born in 1862, in Kekaha near Waimea. Stolz arrived on Kaua‘i some time before December 1879 and worked as a carpenter for a time after marrying the Reverend George Berkeley Rowell’s youngest daughter, Mary.¹⁵ It was in Rowell’s church in Waimea as well that Ko‘olau was educated as a boy and it was here that he married a seventeen-year-old Pi‘ilani in 1881. Their son Kaleimanu was born the following year. Pi‘ilani recalled that Ko‘olau first began to develop symptoms of Hansen’s disease some time in 1889. Nevertheless, he continued to work as a foreman for two local haole ranchers. Pi‘ilani’s memoir is silent on the nature of her husband’s relationship with Louis Stolz prior to her family’s flight to the Kalalau Valley, but she alludes to the fact that Ko‘olau was seen by Stolz at least once after starting to show symptoms.¹⁶ She further hints that she and her husband were on familiar terms with the man who was by this time the deputy sheriff for Waimea, referring to Stolz throughout her memoir by the Hawaiianized nickname “Lui.”¹⁷ Christopher Hofgaard, a Norwegian shopkeeper who lived in Waimea at the time, later claimed to have been friendly with Ko‘olau—he was certainly friendly with Stolz—and to have accompanied him on numerous hunting trips to Pu‘u Ka Pele. Hofgaard recalled in 1916 that it was Stolz who directed Ko‘olau to see a doctor about the redness developing on his cheeks.¹⁸ In November 1892 Ko‘olau visited the government physician in Waimea, who confirmed that he was suffering from Hansen’s disease.¹⁹

Ko‘olau and Pi‘ilani now faced a choice of whether to submit to the laws of the Hawaiian Kingdom or flee to the Kalalau Valley. Since 1865, the official policy of the Hawaiian Board of Health had been to relocate all persons with Hansen’s disease to the government settlement on Moloka‘i. Later the settlement came to be known as Kalaupapa, but at this time it was still called Kalawao.²⁰ Pi‘ilani’s account states that her husband considered exile to Kalawao a fate worse than death, for it meant separation from his wife and son, as well as from his birthplace and that of his ancestors. Pi‘ilani further recalled that despite his Christian upbringing Ko‘olau was troubled by the knowledge that on Moloka‘i his body would be laid to rest by strangers, not by his wife as Hawaiian custom demanded.²¹ Ko‘olau and Pi‘ilani had friends in the Kalalau Valley.²² They knew that victims of Hansen’s disease formed part of a thriving community there, living freely alongside the valley’s long-time residents, or kama‘āina, without government interference. The Board of Health tolerated this community because the alternative—removing persons with Hansen’s disease by force—was impractical. For much of the year Kalalau was inaccessible by sea due to the enormous winter swells that battered Kaua‘i’s western coast. By land, it was cut off from the rest of the island by two-thousand-foot-high cliffs that most haole officials considered impassable.

One alternative to removal was legalization. Even before the fall of the monarchy, however, the power to reform the rules of the Board of Health rested largely with members of Hawai’i’s elite white missionary families. In 1884, Louis Stolz’s brother-in-law, William Rowell, sponsored unsuccessfully a bill in the Hawaiian legislature to designate Kalalau as a “leper hospital.”²³ In 1887, Rowell joined with leading members of other missionary families in a conspiracy to curb the power of the Hawaiian monarchy.²⁴ After forcing King Kalākaua to accept the infamous “bayonet constitution,” the plotters installed a new cabinet comprised of their own loyalists. Rowell took a seat on the newly reshuffled Board of Health, where he joined forces with another of the conspirators, Lorrin Thurston, in pushing to formally designate the Kalalau Valley as a place for persons with Hansen’s disease.²⁵

The object of Thurston and Rowell’s efforts was not to concede the autonomy of Native Hawaiians but rather to further the haole aim of separating those who had Hansen’s disease from those who did not. The leaders of the new administration believed that Kalākaua’s previous cabinet had been too tolerant of persons with Hansen’s disease skirting the law, and they enacted a number of measures in the fall of 1887 aimed at stepping up enforcement.²⁶ It was in this context that Francis Gay—whose extensive landholdings on Kaua‘i included the ranch in Makaweli where Ko‘olau was working as a foreman—came to Honolulu to ask the Board of Health to consider establishing at Kalalau “a new leper settlement” organized along the lines of the one that already existed at Kalawao. Gay reported that the Hawaiians he knew in western Kaua‘i “were exceedingly desirous of being allowed to remain on their own island.” His proposal therefore assumed that victims of Hansen’s disease on Kaua‘i and nearby Ni’ihau would go willingly to Kalalau rather than risk involuntary exile on Moloka‘i. Rowell, who also claimed to know “the wishes of the people,” strongly favored the plan, and Thurston argued that it would cost the government very little to give it a try.²⁷

Still, it was not certain that the total isolation of afflicted persons could be achieved at Kalalau. For one thing it was unclear whether kama’āina who were free of disease would agree to leave the valley, and so Thurston, Rowell, and the new president of the Board of Health, Dr. Nathaniel Emerson, sailed to Kalalau in late September to judge the sentiments of the locals for themselves. When the board reconvened, Thurston confessed that he had found opinion among the kama‘āina to be divided and was now having second thoughts about the plan. Emerson reported that the people with whom he had spoken were quite willing to give up their homes, but doubted whether a largely self-sufficient community of Hawaiians could be counted on to remain in a permanent state of strict isolation.²⁸ Emerson had served previously as the Moloka‘i settlement’s resident physician and he considered himself an expert on Hansen’s disease. Despite a scholarly interest in Hawaiian religion, his views on public health were rooted in the paternalist belief that the survival of the Hawaiian race depended on white doctors intervening to control the spread of infectious disease.²⁹ For Emerson, white supervision was a crucial ingredient in any quarantine scheme, since in his view Hawaiians lacked “the instinct of self-preservation” that should have caused them to avoid close contact with the sick.³⁰

The most forceful opposition to establishing a settlement on Kalalau came from Dr. Georges Trousseau, the only remaining “royalist” on the Board of Health. Trousseau had left France after the breakdown of his marriage, spending time in Australia and New Zealand before settling in Hawai‘i in 1872. Since then he had served the Board of Health in a variety of roles, most notably as personal physician to Hawai‘i’s last three kings. He had also preceded Emerson for a short while as president of the board.³¹ Trousseau would later provoke a brief controversy. After the coup of 1893, he refused to affirm his loyalty to the Provisional Government by joining the Annexation Club. In August of that year, he was finally forced to resign his government appointment after recanting his support for segregating persons with Hansen’s disease.³² Had Trousseau’s change of heart come six years sooner, there would have been no reason for Louis Stolz to be in the Kalalau Valley that summer, but in 1887 Trousseau was still a dogged defender of haole medical orthodoxy. He insisted that “Kalawao was the only place where complete isolation could be enforced.” Moreover, he warned that a second settlement would double the expenditures of the Board of Health and “cripple the resources of the kingdom.”³³ Thurston and Rowell could not win over even one of their colleagues on the board and following Trousseau’s motion the plan for a settlement at Kalalau was scrapped on a three-to-two vote.³⁴

Having ruled out a compromise, force and persuasion were the board’s remaining options for effecting the removal of persons with Hansen’s disease from the Kalalau Valley. In August 1890, the board asked William Rowell to go back to Kalalau and try to convince the people living there illicitly to give themselves up. The following spring J. Kauai—a retired judge, former legislator, and ardent supporter of the Hawaiian royal family—asked the board’s permission for himself and sixteen others to remain at Kalalau. The board countered that Judge Kauai should “use his undoubted influence in persuading his afflicted companions to obey the law.” On both these occasions officials considered mounting an armed raid on the valley, but they knew from past experience how impractical this would be.³⁵ In June 1888 the board had sent ten men to Kaua‘i to scour the Waimea Valley for a group of Native Hawaiians who were suspected of having contracted Hansen’s disease. The party searched houses as far west as Pōki‘i and took seven people into custody. Many more escaped, some of them by way of the mountain passes that led to Kalalau. At one point a determined resistor fired on the government force, prompting health officials throughout the islands to rethink their tactics. The government physician for Hilo, Frances Wetmore, mused that she had better not press Hawaiians with Hansen’s disease too hard lest they “resist with firearms as on Kauai.” Not everyone, however, was as cautious as Wetmore. Later that summer, Louis Stolz led two Hawaiian officers up the Waimea Valley, where a group of men with Hansen’s disease were known to be in hiding. In a turn of events that foreshadowed his later encounter with Ko‘olau, the men Stolz was hoping to arrest ambushed his party, forcing the sheriff to retreat under heavy fire.³⁶

Four year later, Stolz remained intent on apprehending persons with Hansen’s disease, even if it meant getting into another violent clash. By this time Kalākaua was dead and his sister Lili‘uokalani had acceded to the throne. Lorrin Thurston and his cronies had been ousted from power after their party suffered losses in the 1890 general election.³⁷ Under a new cabinet, David Dayton was serving as president of the Board of Health. In November 1892 Stolz wrote to Dayton about a man named Ko‘olau, who the sheriff was “anxious” to arrest. This man had fled from Waimea, and Stolz understood that he was now taking refuge in Kalalau. Stolz claimed that this was the first time someone with Hansen’s disease had escaped his jurisdiction, omitting to mention his earlier experience in the Waimea Valley. He told Dayton that he had already made plans to arrest Ko‘olau, but did not say how he was going to get to Kalalau. In late November it was probably already unsafe to go by sea. The sheriff knew that “almost every man in Kalalau” had a gun and that armed resistance was likely. He was nevertheless unfazed even by his own prediction that he or one of his constables might be killed attempting to capture Ko‘olau.³⁸

The sheriff’s determination to pursue Ko‘olau at all costs may have had something to do with the circumstances of Ko‘olau’s escape. Stolz claimed that Ko‘olau had asked for a small consideration that he and his constables routinely extended to persons diagnosed with Hansen’s disease. Rather than taking such persons into custody immediately, Stolz would give them a few days to settle their affairs. Ko‘olau, the sheriff wrote to Dayton, had agreed to surrender himself after one week, at which time the steamer Pele would be arriving to pick up passengers bound for Honolulu. Pi‘ilani’s memoir makes it clear that Ko‘olau never had any intention of giving himself up, but does not mention whether he made any agreement with Stolz. Instead Pi‘ilani recalled that a Hawaiian officer, Pokipala, took her husband to see the doctor and that it was Pokipala who relayed the message to his superiors that Ko‘olau “would not be taken alive to Kalawao.” If Ko‘olau really did break his word, Stolz’s anger over this subterfuge could explain his determination to capture Ko‘olau. Indeed, there is some evidence that Stolz had a history of settling scores with violence. In 1886 he had been found liable for assaulting one J. Kauai—likely the same Judge Kauai alongside whom Ko‘oalu was now residing in the Kalalau Valley.³⁹

An alternative possibility is that Stolz accused Ko‘olau simply to avoid the blame for having allowed his disappearance. In fact Stolz’s entire missive to Dayton can be read as an attempt to evade responsibility, both for what had already happened and for whatever was about to happen next. Stolz insinuated that his current predicament was the fault of the Board of Health. Ko‘olau was “justified” in fleeing, Stolz wrote, as the board had conveyed through inaction that it would tolerate people with Hansen’s disease living in the Kalalau Valley. Furthermore, Stolz told Dayton that he would be leaving for Kalalau “shortly” unless he received “positive orders to the contrary.” Rhetorically, the blood would now be on Dayton’s hands if he failed to rein Stolz in and someone met a violent end.⁴⁰

Dayton himself in turn deflected responsibility for making a decision, with the result that Stolz’s plans were put on hold for the time being. In a terse reply to the sheriff, Dayton wrote that while he was aware of the people in the Kalalau Valley, the Board of Health did “not recognize their right to remain there.” As for Stolz’s orders, Dayton told the sheriff that he was referring the whole matter to Cecil Brown, the attorney general.⁴¹ Brown was at the top of the law-enforcement chain of command—though technically Stolz’s immediate superior was the sheriff of Kaua‘i, Samuel Wilcox.⁴² Having served himself as a sheriff and later deputy marshal in Honolulu, Dayton could have advised Stolz had he wanted to, but he was adamant that this was a matter for “the police authorities.” His attempt to get the attorney general to intervene only started an argument, however, as Brown rebuked the Board of Health for having “done nothing” to remove persons with Hansen’s disease from Kalalau. Dayton fired back that the board had already done what it could by issuing a warrant for Ko‘olau’s arrest. If the police had deemed it expedient in the past to ignore such warrants, Dayton wrote, that was Brown’s business. With officials in Honolulu jockeying to avoid responsibility for the situation on Kaua‘i, Louis Stolz would remain in Waimea and Ko‘olau, Pi‘ilani, and Kaleimanu would be safe in the Kalalau Valley at least until the spring.⁴³

As it turned out, it was Dayton and Brown who were dislodged from their positions before the winter was out, as a result of the plot against Lili‘uokalani hatched by haole businessmen and aided by the U.S. minister to Hawai‘i, John L. Stevens. The queen had clashed numerous times already with Stevens, who was a friend and ally of the expansionist former U.S. secretary of state, James Blaine. Stevens made no secret of his belief that the United States should take control of Hawai‘i, and he had even arranged for Lorrin Thurston to meet Blaine in Washington in the hope of laying the preliminary groundwork for annexation. In January 1893, Queen Lili‘uokalani announced that she was about to promulgate a new constitution to restore the indigenous political rights that had been stripped away under the constitution imposed on her brother in 1887. Stevens had already warned Lili‘uokalani not to tamper with the constitution, and after Thurston and the other conspirators decided the time was right to move against the Queen they approached Stevens for help.⁴⁴ Stevens agreed to land U.S. marines from the USS Boston under the pretense of protecting U.S. “lives and property” during a time of political unrest.⁴⁵ This gave the appearance that the coup set in motion by Thurston and his “committee of safety” had the backing of the U.S. government. Lili‘uokalani surrendered, stating in a message to the new Provisional Government that she had capitulated “to the superior force of the United States of America.”⁴⁶

Under the new government, the offices previously held by Dayton and Brown were consolidated in the person of Thurston’s law partner and fellow conspirator, William Owen Smith. Upon the formation of the Provisional Government, an “Executive Council” consisting of four officers immediately took the place of the queen’s cabinet, with Smith assuming the position of attorney general.⁴⁷ At the end of February, the annexationists constituted an entirely new Board of Health, over which Smith reluctantly agreed to preside.⁴⁸ With a brother already serving as a government physician in Kōloa, Smith knew it would be a thankless task to tackle thorny issues like Hansen’s disease. He later confided to Rudolph Meyer, the superintendent of the Moloka‘i settlement, that he only accepted the job because half of the other members of the Board of Health had turned it down and the other half were “malihinis”—that is, newcomers to Hawai‘i. During the chaotic early months of the Provisional Government’s rule, Smith sought above all else to see that the board operated as efficiently and as economically as possible.⁴⁹

When the board began to make plans to remove the persons with Hansen’s disease from Kalalau early in the summer of 1893, the impetus came neither from Smith nor from the other leaders of the Provisional Government, but from Louis Stolz. It was Stolz who warned Smith at the end of April that healthy people at Kalalau were still at risk of infection. If Smith wanted to do anything about it, wrote the sheriff, “the months during which a steamer” might land there were fast approaching.⁵⁰ Stolz’s letter coincided with the arrival of a pair of petitions, one favoring and one opposing a revived proposal to designate Kalalau as a settlement for persons with Hansen’s disease. The members of the board were unsure how best to proceed. Smith warned them that the situation in the Kalalau Valley had already been a source of “friction” between law enforcement officials and the Board of Health. As attorney general, he believed he could effect the removal of the people at Kalalau, but not without putting his officers in danger.⁵¹ After much discussion, the board instructed its secretary, Charles Wilcox, to tell Stolz to gather as much information as possible. The board, Wilcox wrote, needed to learn not only the age, sex, and number of afflicted persons living in the valley, but also the number of firearms available to them.⁵² Stolz assured the board—quite wrongly as it turned out—that much could be accomplished short of violence. Sensing perhaps that the board had found his earlier tone overzealous, Stolz offered the assurance that he was “not hankering” to go after the people at Kalalau but merely willing to go if the board so desired. Smith and his colleagues responded to this optimistic overture by commissioning Stolz as an agent of the Board of Health for Waimea, for the island of Ni‘ihau, and for Kalalau.⁵³

Even before he had assessed the situation in Kalalau personally, Stolz began pestering Smith with ideas—all of them involving violence or coercion—for removing the victims of Hansen’s disease from the valley. On May 19 he suggested placing armed guards at each of the passes leading out of Kalalau and on the wide beach at the valley’s mouth. With their supplies and lines of communication cut off, Stolz predicted the healthy residents of the valley would turn on their afflicted neighbors and drive them out.⁵⁴ Smith reacted coolly to what he called this “plan of laying siege,” having no desire to antagonize those at Kalalau who were free of Hansen’s disease. The lawyer in Smith fretted that doing so would only invite a legal challenge to the actions of the government. Considering Stolz’s proposal a last resort at best, Smith instructed the sheriff to go to Kalalau and assure the people there that they would “be well cared for” if they agreed to leave.⁵⁵ By the time Smith addressed these instructions to Stolz, however, the sheriff already had taken a canoe to Kalalau, reporting upon his return that there were twenty-eight persons with Hansen’s disease living there out of a total population of 102. Most of the twenty-eight were willing to leave peacefully, according to Stolz, while a few vowed to remain. Stolz supposed he could lead a small raiding party consisting of himself and “two or three” Native policemen to capture those few he deemed most likely to resist. Once the troublemakers were apprehended, he told Smith, the rest surely would give themselves up.⁵⁶

This latter plan or something similar might have been what Stolz had in mind on June 5 when he rushed into the Honolulu office of Edward Hitchcock, the newly appointed marshal of the Hawaiian Islands. Hitchcock had served for the past five years as sheriff of the island of Hawai‘i. Like many of his colleagues in government he was the son of missionaries, and owing to his reputation for ruthlessness he was known as “The Holy Terror.” On this occasion, however, Hitchcock urged patience. Arthur Mouritz, government physician for the island of Moloka‘i, was present in Hitchcock’s office during the marshal’s conversation with Stolz.⁵⁷ The accuracy of Mouritz’s memory cannot be assumed, since he wrote his account more than twenty years after the fact. That said, it is clear enough that Mouritz and Stolz were both in Honolulu on June 5, just as Mouritz later recalled. The doctor was there to appear before the Hawaiian Supreme Court, and Stolz’s wife was listed as a passenger on the steamer that arrived from Makaweli on June 3.⁵⁸ Moreover, the doctor quite plausibly contended that Stolz’s “tragic ending impressed deeply” upon his memory the details of the conversation he had witnessed just weeks before the sheriff’s death.⁵⁹

Mouritz recalled that Hitchcock was preoccupied with the “Cleveland and Blount business.” By this time, the annexationists all but assumed that James Blount was hostile to their cause. When Blount arrived in Honolulu at the end of March, one of his first actions had been to order that the U.S. flags in front of the government buildings be replaced with the flags of the Hawaiian Kingdom. Backers of the coup suspected that Blount was cozy with the Hui Hawai‘i Aloha ‘Āina, a group of Native Hawaiians that had organized in protest of the Provisional Government. They interpreted his order to restore the kingdom’s flags as an incitement for Natives to attempt an actual restoration of the monarchy.⁶⁰ Amid the paranoid atmosphere that suffused annexationist circles in the summer of 1893, there even circulated a rumor that Blount had snubbed a group of U.S. “patriots” by skipping a meeting of their Fourth-of-July planning committee and attending a Native lū‘au instead.⁶¹ With Blount still lurking in the islands, Hitchcock felt that Stolz’s plan would only further compromise the diplomatic position of the Provisional Government with respect to the United States. “Let this leper business go over for the present,” Hitchcock ordered the sheriff. “We are not yet out of the woods in Honolulu.”⁶²

Mouritz further remembered that Hitchcock found it “foolish” of Stolz to contemplate making arrests in the Kalalau Valley with only Native policemen to assist him. “You cannot trust your Hawaiian officers,” Hitchcock warned. The marshal urged Stolz to hold off until he could spare some of his own white officers. If Stolz would “wait a month or two longer” Hitchcock promised even to come to Kaua‘i himself “and see how the land lays.” Stolz protested that such a visit would be impossible. “Kalalau is surf-bound at the end of September,” Mouritz recalled him telling Hitchcock, “and after that the pali is the only way to get into the valley.” As Mouritz recounted, the marshal was particularly unimpressed with Stolz’s suggestion that white officers could not handle the cliffs surrounding the valley. “No pali phases me,” Mouritz remembered him telling Stolz. “I was born on Molokai, and we have some palis up there. Dr. Mouritz is a great climber, ask him.”⁶³

A few days after speaking with Hitchcock, Stolz returned to Kalalau to hold further discussions with the people there. Six who he had previously identified as having Hansen’s disease now had such mild symptoms that as “a non-medico” he was unsure of his earlier finding. Most of those with more serious symptoms, including Judge Kauai, agreed to leave willingly, but the sheriff reported there were four or five who refused.⁶⁴ On this point Stolz’s account conflicts with Pi‘ilani’s, the latter contending that it was Ko‘olau alone who refused. Pi‘ilani later remembered that Stolz lost his temper and spoke to her husband in a “boasting and scornful” manner when Ko‘olau stated that he would never agree to leave his wife—a detail that did not appear in Stolz’s report to the Board of Health. Pi‘ilani also recalled a timetable for the planned removal different from the one reported by Stolz and entered into the records of the Board of Health. According to Pi‘ilani, the sheriff told the people at Kalalau they could expect to be taken to Moloka‘i the very next week, but Stolz wrote to the Board of Health that he had arranged for them to be ready in the last week of July. It was with this later date in mind that the board instructed its executive officer, Charles Reynolds, to prepare to take a steamer to Kaua‘i.⁶⁵

The planned expedition would never come to pass, for in mid-June Stolz was back before the Board of Health in Honolulu with an “urgent request” for permission to visit the valley a third time. The board’s minutes indicate that Stolz’s purpose in returning to Kalalau a full month before anyone there would have expected him was “to carry out, in a quiet way, the plan of persuading the unwilling lepers to come away from that place.” In other words, the board understood this not as a mission to remove anyone from Kalalau, but rather a last-ditch attempt to convince the holdouts—numbering four or five in Stolz’s estimation and certainly including Ko‘olau—to leave the valley when Reynolds arrived. The minutes of the Board of Health state that Stolz “was allowed to have his own way in this matter,” implying understandable misgivings on the part of the board. According to the Hawaiian Star, which was closely aligned with the Provisional Government, the board assented only with the assurance that whatever Stolz was about to do, it would be done “without bloodshed.”⁶⁶

Stolz’s correspondence with the Board of Health never explained why the sheriff insisted on going back to Kalalau even when most of the people there had acceded to the government’s demands and after arrangements were in place to convey them away from the valley. In the sheriff’s final letter to William O. Smith, Stolz stated that he had returned to Kalalau on June 24 and found that all but a few of the those who had promised to go to Moloka‘i had instead fled further up the valley.⁶⁷ In light of what Stolz had already told the board, these people should have had no reason to flee, since Reynolds was not due for several weeks and Stolz was not supposed to be there to arrest anyone. Stolz’s account, however, is contradicted once again by Pi‘ilani’s, as the latter makes it clear that Stolz had come specifically to arrest Ko‘olau. Pi‘ilani recalled that shortly after Stolz and his men landed on the beach a friend brought word that the sheriff had given orders to take Ko‘olau “alive, if possible, but if it could not be done without shedding blood, to shoot him dead.”⁶⁸

Convinced that Stolz was planning an ambush, Ko‘olau did everything possible to ensure that he would encounter the sheriff on his own terms. Though Pi‘ilani’s memoir presents Ko‘olau’s actions in the days before Stolz’s death as strictly defensive, undertaken to counter the aggressive moves of Stolz, two other Native Hawaiian witnesses, Paoa and Nihoa, recalled that it was Ko‘olau who took the initiative, seizing firearms from the police and at one point evicting some Native officers from their tent at gunpoint. Nevertheless, Paoa and Nihoa felt the sheriff’s death and the carnage that ensued were due to Stolz’s rashness and arrogance. “If this agent of the government had gone about his work carefully,” they later wrote, “he would not have suffered death, and the public money would not have been squandered.”⁶⁹

Edward Hitchcock’s warning regarding Native policemen was borne out when Stolz was betrayed by one of the three Hawaiian officers in his party. Pi‘ilani, Paoa, and Nihua all agreed that it was Peter Nowlein, a policeman from Hanalei, who gave away Stolz’s position, helping to foil any ambush the sheriff might have been plotting and giving Ko‘olau the upper hand.⁷⁰ The Nowlein family had been prominent under the monarchy. Peter’s brother Sam had commanded Lili‘uokalani’s Royal Guards and his niece Maile Nowlein had attended university in Italy, part of a state initiative undertaken by Kalākaua to prepare promising young Natives for a future in government that was now unlikely to come.⁷¹ On June 26, Ko‘olau proceeded to the house of a friend near the beach, where he and several companions planned to confront the sheriff. Pi‘ilani rejoined Ko‘olau later that night, but Stolz did not arrive until the following evening. Under a full moon, Ko‘olau lay in wait behind a boulder a short distance away. Paoa, who was in Stolz’s custody, led the sheriff toward the house. According to Pi‘ilani and the testimony of others who were present, Ko‘olau saw Stolz take aim at one of his companions. He fired his own rifle, hitting the sheriff in the stomach. As Stolz cried out and dropped to his knees, Paoa began beating him. Ko‘olau attempted to restrain Paoa, fearing that Stolz would be killed. It was then that the sheriff raised his gun again and Ko‘olau fired a second shot.⁷²

For officials of the Provisional Government who had opposed forceful intervention in the Kalalau Valley up to this point, Stolz’s death changed the stakes, personally and politically. When word of the sheriff’s fate reached Honolulu on June 29, the leaders of the Provisional Government resolved immediately to send a large force to capture Ko‘olau and round up the other persons illicitly residing in Kalalau. Marshal Hitchcock attempted to rush the expeditionary force off the very same evening but could not make arrangements in time for a steamer, and so had to wait until the afternoon of June 30. By then Sanford Dole, the president of the Provisional Government, had declared martial law in the districts of Hanalei and Waimea.⁷³ The fact that Dole’s brother was married to Stolz’s wife’s sister no doubt helped to ensure that the government’s response would be overwhelming. That it took the form of a military operation, accompanied by a declaration of martial law, surely indicated that officials in Honolulu interpreted Stolz’s death not just as a crime or an attack on the white missionary elite, but also as a challenge to the sovereignty of their fledgling state.

Native Hawaiians were keenly aware of the political stakes implied by Stolz’s death. Indeed, coverage in “royalist” newspapers such as the English-language Daily Bulletin and its bilingual sister-publication Hawaii Holomua suggests that Natives saw the violence unfolding on Kaua‘i as a direct result of the attack on indigenous political sovereignty that had taken place earlier that spring. Hawaii Holomua was co-edited by G. Carson Kenyon—also associated with the Bulletin—and Kahikina Kelekona, who would later help Pi‘ilani to record her memoir. Of course, opinion in the Hawaiian-language press was not monolithic; Ka Nupepa Kuokoa functioned essentially as a propaganda outlet for the Provisional Government despite being published by a Native, Joseph Kawainui.⁷⁴ On July 14 Hawaii Holomua informed its readers that the debacle on Kaua‘i was a direct result of the coup, which had left the Board of Heath in the hands of the reckless, inexperienced, and lazy William O. Smith. For years, successive governments had tolerated the presence of persons with Hansen’s disease in the Kalalau Valley, as Smith would have known had he only taken “the trouble to investigate the letter-book of the Board.”⁷⁵ In addition to highlighting Smith’s incompetence, Kenyon and Kelekona gave voice to the idea that the violence on Kalalau and, by extension, the Provisional Government were vehicles for the personal enrichment of the haole ruling class. Specifically, there were rumors that Smith—whose family hailed from Kaua‘i—was plotting to establish in the Kalalau Valley a sugar plantation over which Louis Stolz was to have been appointed luna.⁷⁶

While the sympathies of the royalist papers were clearly with Ko‘olau, the Bulletin and Hawaii Holomua nevertheless joined their annexationist rivals in calling for “justice at any cost” for the slain Sheriff Stolz.⁷⁷ In fact the editors of Hawaii Holomua would later fault Smith not only for precipitating the conflict but also for bringing it to a premature end without having captured Ko‘olau.⁷⁸ The difference was that whereas the government’s backers viewed Ko‘olau’s killing of Stolz as an “atrocious and cowardly act,” royalists and Native Hawaiian critics of the Provisional Government saw it as the tragic result of the government’s meddling. ⁷⁹ According to Hawaii Holomua, Ko‘olau had found himself on the wrong side of the law because Smith’s policies had left him with no choice but to defend himself and his companions.⁸⁰  Hawaii Holomua did not call for Ko‘olau’s “bold stand” to be emulated, instead noting that the government’s blundering reaction had “done more than anything else could have” to call into question the rules and tactics of the Board of Health and expressing hope that the government’s failure to enforce the law on Kaua‘i would lead to a serious debate over public health policy.⁸¹

Even within royalist circles there were some differences between English- and Hawaiian-language coverage of events on Kaua‘i. For one thing, the English-language Daily Bulletin tended to echo the sensationalizing tone of its pro-government counterparts when it came to chronicling the exploits of Ko‘olau and Pi‘ilani.⁸² As the expeditionary force left Honolulu, the Bulletin juxtaposed a colorful description of the “P. G. Army,” marching aboard the Waialeale “armed to the teeth” and “with knapsacks on their backs,” with a profile of Ko‘olau and his outlaw band, setting the scene for the coming showdown with some minor embellishments. Ko‘olau was known “as a dead shot with a rifle,” and for good measure so was his wife. Both were heavily “armed with rifles and pistols.” It was said that at all times Ko‘olau kept “four belts of cartridges around his waist.” Pi‘ilani carried two more. Pi‘ilani’s memoir later clarified that Ko‘olau did all the fighting. He had one gun and he was indeed a crack shot.⁸³

Save for a few companies of guardsmen, the Provisional Government possessed nothing in the way of a standing military. The force that sailed for Kaua‘i aboard the steamer Waialeale therefore comprised a mix of guards, policemen, and volunteer militia. These men were joined by Charles Reynolds from the Board of Health and a correspondent for the Pacific Commercial Advertiser, Frank Hoogs. Albert Kūnuiākea, the illegitimate son of Kamehameha III, joined the expedition, hoping that as an ali‘i he might convince the Natives at Kalalau to submit without bloodshed. Finally, Dr. C. B. Cooper, the Honolulu prison physician, went along to serve as a medic. All told, the men on the Waialeale numbered roughly forty-five. Once it reached its destination this force was to be supplemented by another two dozen or so policemen under the command of Samuel Wilcox, the sheriff of Kaua‘i. Wilcox’s men would take up positions guarding the passes leading out of the Kalalau Valley. In addition to small arms, the expeditionary force was equipped with a Krupp field gun in the charge of one Major Pratt.⁸⁴ Illustrating how ill-prepared the government was to undertake such an operation, the men were not outfitted with proper footwear. It might have been comical that William O. Smith departed ten days later for Kaua‘i with “thirty pairs of boots for the guards” had he not been obliged also to bring along three coffins.⁸⁵

Having been rushed together in only a day’s time and possessing neither strong leadership nor a clear command structure, the “army” bound for Kaua‘i was in trouble even before it left the Honolulu wharf. A military man, Lieutenant King, led the guardsmen, but overall charge of the mission fell to William Larsen, a “wiry and muscular” Honolulu police captain who was promoted to the rank of deputy marshal for the occasion.⁸⁶ Neither King nor Charles Reynolds trusted Larsen’s leadership, and there was nothing to recommend him for the job aside from the fact that he had been part of the detail, led by Reynolds, that had sailed to Kaua‘i in 1888 to arrest a group of Hawaiians with Hansen’s disease.⁸⁷ For the past five years Larsen had done little to distinguish himself. His police colleagues disliked him. His wife had sued for divorce in 1891. Less than a year later he had been convicted of assault with a deadly weapon after unloading his shotgun into the leg of a man he falsely suspected of cattle rustling. Despite this conviction, Larsen had been reinstated as a policeman in April 1892. Larsen’s own colleagues greeted his selection for the mission to Kalalau with derision. One of them, a police detective named Wagner, paid for his remarks with a beating. The two men were found scuffling on the steps of the Honolulu police station only hours before the Waialeale was set to depart for Kaua‘i with Larsen in command.⁸⁸

The most successful phase of the operation took place in the first two days. On July 1, the government force landed on the beach at Kalalau and issued a proclamation giving anyone with Hansen’s disease twenty-four hours to surrender or risk being shot. Fifteen people were induced to give themselves up, and Larsen dispatched these captives back to Honolulu aboard the Waialeale. The twenty-four-hour ultimatum was subsequently doubled, and as it expired on the morning of July 3, it became increasingly clear that Reynolds, King, and Larsen were unable to agree on a concerted plan to capture Ko‘olau and the five others known still to be at large in the valley. Disjointed action ensued as Reynolds and three other men set out toward the head of the valley and King took his guardsmen and struck out eastward toward Hanalei. As if to underscore that he had no idea how to locate a handful of fugitives within this vast, mountainous, and densely vegetated wilderness, Larsen gave his men orders to set up the Krupp howitzer on high ground and begin lobbing shells into the gorge below them. He hoped the sound of artillery fire would convince Ko‘olau and his companions to come out of hiding.⁸⁹

As the first news of the expedition reached Honolulu on July 5, William O. Smith started having second thoughts about the whole endeavor. The next day he announced tentative plans to bring the army home, with or without Ko‘olau.⁹⁰ What Smith did not yet know was that on the afternoon of July 4 a group of guardsmen under the command of Major Pratt had located Ko‘olau atop a rock ledge deep inside Kaua‘i’s rugged interior, about five miles from the beach. From the soldiers’ position Ko‘olau could scarcely be sighted let alone struck with a bullet. To reach the ledge, however, the guardsmen would have to drag themselves single-file up the side of the bluff. The path ahead started at a forty-five degree slope, growing steeper with rising elevation. On one side was a precipice overlooking a two-hundred-foot drop, and on the other “a dense chaparral” that was nearly impenetrable.⁹¹ According to Pi‘ilani’s account, the soldiers opened fire first. As bullets began to strike all around Ko‘olau, Pi‘ilani, and Kaleimanu, the troops began their ascent.⁹² No sign of Ko’olau could be seen from below, save for the barrel of his rifle extruding from the rock.⁹³ Suddenly a bullet struck the man at the head of the column, John Anderson, and as the dying Anderson fell the soldiers behind him toppled over like dominoes, sending one careening into the gorge below. Sustaining serious injuries, this man nevertheless avoided death and was able to climb back up and rejoin his comrades.⁹⁴ A triumphant Ko‘olau now turned to Pi‘ilani and exclaimed “Aha! My death was coming here, yet here the soldiers are being taught to run! Perhaps Koolau is truly a big head!” Later that night, however, Ko‘olau issued a grim warning: If the troops returned the next day and he could not hold them off, he would shoot his wife and child and then himself so that none of them would suffer at the hands of the soldiers.⁹⁵

On the morning of July 5, as Smith deliberated in Honolulu, the men of the expeditionary force were again attempting to storm Ko‘olau’s rocky bastion. This time Charles Reynolds would lead the charge. First, however, Larsen ordered the men to soften up their adversary’s position with another furious salvo of gunfire. Raising their rifles, the company proceeded to fire roughly sixty rounds at the rock ledge. Pi‘ilani later recalled that this time “the striking bullets around us seemed as nothing.”⁹⁶ As the party of soldiers began to work its way up the narrow path ahead, Reynolds and two other men took the lead. These men knew enough of war to realize the folly of what they were doing. Reynolds, a British national, was said to bear a hatchet scar from the New Zealand Wars and the man in front of him—an Irishman named John McCabe—was a veteran of the U.S. Civil War.⁹⁷ So too, they knew what Larsen did not: that by volleying bullets ineffectually at the cliff-side the soldiers had just revealed their presence and position. A pair of shots rang out and Reynolds looked up to see McCabe’s skull blasted open. Cries from behind announced that another soldier—a man named Husberg—had been killed when his own gun accidentally went off. The men following Reynolds began to return fire, no longer hoping to intimidate Ko‘olau but now just desperately trying to cover their panicked retreat. Funerals for the three dead soldiers were held later that afternoon.⁹⁸

For several days following the second assault on the bluff the soldiers continued, sporadically, to fire at Ko‘olau and Pi‘ilani’s position. Ko‘olau was not sighted and no further attempts were made to advance on his stronghold. Morale on both sides was low as Ko‘olau and his family began to exhaust their provisions and tensions mounted between the leaders of government force. A frustrated Lieutenant King wrote to his superiors in Honolulu, expressing dismay that only “one man and one woman” could hold off an entire army. Ko‘olau possessed the advantage, however, of “a natural fortification” that had to “be seen to be appreciated.”⁹⁹ Although he did not say as much, King likely resented that his guards had been thrown twice into the line of fire while Larsen’s policemen waited in camp. Richard Mahart, one of the men assigned to guard the passes leading out of Kalalau, stated that while passing through the expeditionary force’s camp he observed discontent on the part of the soldiers and squabbling between Larsen, King, and Reynolds. The men, Mahart reported, “had lost all confidence in Larsen as a commander.”¹⁰⁰

Reynolds seems to have given up on capturing Ko‘olau altogether. He may have decided that one brush with death was enough, or perhaps he was simply fed up with Larsen. Whatever the reason, early on the morning of July 8, the veteran health officer led six soldiers aboard the steamer Iwalani and sailed off to see if he could find anyone with Hansen’s disease in Hanalei. In the mean time Larsen cast about with increasing desperation for a means to break the stalemate with Ko‘olau. He considered a far-fetched plan to drop an explosive charge on Ko‘olau’s position from above, but dropped this idea when his men were unable to obtain the necessary materials. Next he contemplated cutting a new trail up the mountain so as to outflank Ko‘olau. Finally, he headed down the coast to Mānā. Here he hoped to find relatives of Ko‘olau who could convince the man to give himself up without further bloodshed. Thus it was that on the morning of July 9 Lieutenant King and Deputy Marshal Larsen escorted Ko‘olau’s sister and brother-in-law toward his last known position. With Ko‘olau’s kin as hostages and human shields, King and Larsen dragged themselves up to the threshold of their adversary’s fortress, only to find it abandoned.¹⁰¹ Having run out of food and water, Ko‘olau and Pi‘ilani had decided the previous night to climb down from their “little fort” and slip away with their son, leaving the soldiers to continue their siege.¹⁰² Concluding that Ko‘olau had left Kalalau altogether, Larsen decided to break camp and take his entire force north to Hā‘ena, the sooner to make contact with the steamer that would carry his men back to Honolulu.¹⁰³

To Larsen’s surprise, when the Iwalani was sighted off Hā‘ena Point on the morning of July 11, it was William O. Smith who presently came ashore. Smith was incensed that Larsen had abandoned the operation without waiting for instructions, and he was also furious with Reynolds for having left Kalalau to search for victims of Hansen’s disease elsewhere. To Larsen’s further dismay, Smith informed the deputy marshal that he was ordering the troops back to Kalalau to have another go at Ko‘olau. Even to the brute Larsen, this suggestion was madness. He told the attorney general to either give up or accept his resignation. Later that morning, with the expeditionary force safely on board the Iwalani, Smith, King, Reynolds, Major Pratt, and Larsen hunkered in the ship’s saloon and once again debated their next move. Larsen repeated his threat to resign, but Smith talked him out of it. By noon, the men were disembarking once again at Kalalau. Had Ko‘olau and Pi‘ilani been there to bear witness, they might have wondered, much like the Jack London characters, whether the haole soldiers would ever cease to come after them. Yet in a move that symbolized the enduring tensions between guardsmen and police, the two groups established separate camps.¹⁰⁴

Then, just when it seemed that the white will to conquer would not break, it did. On the morning of July 12, the army began preparations to return to the Iwalani, ending permanently the effort to capture Ko‘olau and any other victims of Hansen’s disease who remained in the valley. The surf was rough that morning, and several small boats were swamped. For a time it appeared perhaps that the sea would not take back that which it had churned up upon Kaua‘i’s sandy shores. Thus it was with great exertion but no further sacrifice of life that the soldiers of the “P.G. Army” won their way back aboard their great hulking scow. The previous evening, William O. Smith had called another meeting, this time without Larsen. On the advice of King, Pratt, Reynolds, and C. B. Cooper, Smith decided he would survey Ko‘olau’s stronghold for himself in the morning. Accompanied by Reynolds and King, who again prodded Ko‘olau’s unfortunate relatives into the lead, the attorney general climbed up to the deserted ledge from which death had rained down only days before. From atop this strongpoint, Smith looked out and surveyed the damage wrought by the war he had tried not to start. Disgusted with his subordinates and resigned to the fact that Ko‘olau would not be found, he announced that the expedition was over. It was “useless,” Smith wrote to the policemen guarding the pass leading over the mountains from Kalalau to Waimea, “to keep this force here any longer.”¹⁰⁵ Indeed, Ko‘olau was never caught. He eventually succumbed to Hansen’s disease, sadly outliving his son, Kaleimanu, who had also contracted the disease.¹⁰⁶

The conflict on Kaua‘i showcased the profound weakness and disorganization of the Provisional Government, as its leaders failed repeatedly to exercise control over their subordinates in the field. Still, the debacle on Kaua‘i was not the threat to the annexationist cause that haole officials feared. James Blount was already preparing to leave Hawai‘i when Louis Stolz was killed.¹⁰⁷ His report made no mention of the conflict on Kaua‘i. Even so the report was damning. It revealed that the regime lacked a popular mandate and owed its existence instead to the U.S. military. As Blount wrote, “the undoubted sentiment of the people is for the Queen, against the provisional government, and against annexation.”¹⁰⁸ All this was more than enough to convince Grover Cleveland that the Provisional Government had to go. Yet in retrospect the revelation of Blount’s findings constituted—to paraphrase G. M. Trevelyan’s famous formulation—a turning point that failed to turn.¹⁰⁹ The annexationists hung on even after Cleveland ordered his new minster to the Hawaiian Islands, Albert Willis, to put Lili‘uokalani back on the throne in November 1893. At first the queen resisted Cleveland’s demand that she grant amnesty to the leaders of the Provisional Government, but it was Sanford Dole’s refusal to step down that decided the matter. The annexationists threatened to take up arms if Cleveland’s government tried to force the issue, and Cleveland punted the issue to Congress.¹¹⁰

Few in the United States would learn of the conflict in the Kalalau Valley until Jack London published his fictionalized retelling in 1909, and his framing still haunts the memory of this event despite countless attempts before and since to correct the record. London’s identification with Native Hawaiians was superficial; his affirmation of their basic worth predicated on projected Western notions of masculine individualism.¹¹¹ Furthermore, by setting it against the backdrop of overwhelming haole strength and inevitable haole triumph, London consigned Hawaiian resistance to a romanticized past. His text is therefore an early example of a style of representation that became increasingly common over the course of the following century, one that “forecloses alternative futures” and continues today to naturalize the idea of a “multicultural” Hawai‘i where liberal ideals of pluralism and racial equality have obviated Native claims to land, sovereignty, and self-determination.¹¹² The antidote to London’s determinism is to de-naturalize empire, to take Hawai‘i’s anxious annexationists seriously but not to overestimate them, and to imagine as they did the survival of their cause dangling by a thread. A different sort of picture emerges of the events of the summer of 1893. Rather than a moment overdetermined by the relentless logic of empire, there comes into focus a series of inflection points at which other possible futures existed, for Ko‘olau and Pi‘ilani; for Louis Stolz; for Privates Anderson, McCabe, and Husberg; for Lili‘uokalani; and for Hawai‘i.

*The author wishes to thank John Abbott, Elif Akçetin, Leon Fink, Kirk Hoppe, Lynn Hudson, David Igler, Daniel Immerwahr, Robert Johnston, Jenny Lopez, Marina Mogilner, Steve O’Bryan of MSU Denver, Stephanie Philpott-Jones, Kevin Schultz, Joy Schulz, Peter Strickland, SHAFR, the editors and staff of Diplomatic History, and the anonymous referees.

Footnotes

Caleb Giles Hardner is a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His near-finished dissertation explores the relationship between public health and race-making in colonial Hawai‘i, with a particular emphasis on the periods immediately preceding and following U.S. annexation. It argues that that as Hawai‘i was transformed by demographic and political change, public health practices helped to position white colonizers as the natural benefactors of Native Hawaiians, while casting persons of Chinese and Japanese heritage as foreign, subversive, and dangerous to public health.