Kapalakiko: Hawaiian Migrant Workers in 19th-Century San Francisco

At least one thousand Hawaiians lived and worked in California in the mid-nineteenth century. As itinerant seamen and fur hunters they touched Alta and Baja California shores; as cowhide skinners, sea otter scalpers, agriculturalists and Catholic converts, they lived and worked in the Channel Islands and in Mexican ranching towns; as stevedores, boatmen, and day laborers they peopled the port city of Yerba Buena; and, during and after the Gold Rush, as miners, fishermen, boardinghouse keepers, opium farmers, factory workers, beggars, and vagabonds, they lived amongst others in Sacramento, San Francisco, and in the Central Valley. In the course of research at the Huntington Library, the California Historical Society, the Bancroft Library, and throughout Hawaiʻi, I have uncovered a multitude of stories of Native Hawaiian migrant workers in nineteenth-century California. In this talk, I will discuss Hawaiian migrants to California and their experiences of life and labor in early San Francisco, from the city's sleepy beginnings as Yerba Buena in the 1830s and 1840s to the aftermath of the Gold Rush in the 1860s and 1870s. During this era, Hawaiians were a crucial part of San Francisco's story of cosmopolitan growth and urban transformation.

Speaker: Gregory Rosenthal, Roanoke College