Island History for Friday, November 5, 2010

On Sept. 9, 1924, Hawaiian cowboy, storyteller and sheriff’s deputy Moke Kua was shot and killed at Hanapepe during a bloody confrontation between Deputy Sheriff William Olin Crowell, his deputies and striking sugar plantation workers, which also took the lives of 16 strikers and two other deputies, and wounded nine strikers and three deputies, one of whom who later died of his injuries.

Few people possessed the intimate knowledge of Koke‘e as did Kua, and he shared his knowledge of the names and uses of that woodland’s native plants and trees.

He also knew the secret trails and the hidden caves whose entrances it was believed could be opened and closed only by those who possessed the charm. 

Kua was renowned also for his grace of movement when he would dance the hula by the light of smoking lanterns in the evenings on the verandah of the cowboy’s cabin in Koke‘e, while other cowboys played their guitars and ukuleles.

But best-loved were his stories of akua and Menehunes. He said that in the old days, the Menehune were ever ready to help those who knew how to ask them, and they could still be seen in modern times, but only rarely in secluded places.

He claimed he’d once seen one between Kukui, near the present-day radio tower by the Koke‘e Road, and Pu‘uopae above the Mana plain.  The little fellow was sitting on a stone with his knees hunched under his chin, and when Kua spoke, he tore the stone from the earth, jumped under it and pulled it over his head.

Then there was the story of the akua with burning eyes watching him in the darkness from across his campfire in a lonely part of Koke‘e after a day of pig hunting.