William Kaulehelehe and Mary Kaai: Hawaiian Missionaries at Fort Vancouver

William Kaulehelehe and Mary Kaai stand where two forces that drew Native Hawaiians to the Pacific Northwest met: the fur trade and missionary work. Hawaiians worked in many jobs at fur trade posts such as the Hudson's Bay Company's Fort Vancouver, and some traveled with American missionaries seeking to set up missions in the Northwest, either straight from the Hawaiian Kingdom or recruited at the fort.

Hawaiians at Fort Vancouver

By 1845, the year the couple arrived, Native Hawaiians made up almost a third of Fort Vancouver's workforce. When the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) took over from the North West Company in 1821, it inherited its employees, among them 36 Native Hawaiians, who helped build the fort. Hawaiians worked in the sawmill and on the farm, as boat pilots, cooks and carpenters — they were integral to the company's operations.

Relations were often strained. Hawaiian workers lived far from home in small cabins in the fort's employee Village, worked long, hard hours and had little way to complain or appeal. Company records show worry that some shared trade knowledge with competitors or deserted to rival traders, such as the American Nathaniel Wyeth, who recruited Hawaiians from the fort in the 1830s.

Visiting missionaries were often critical of Hawaiian workers for not meeting their expectations of religious observance — impressions shaped by their own ideas of "acceptable" behavior and, in some cases, by racial and cultural prejudice or a wish to paint the HBC's workforce as immoral. The American missionary Alvin F. Waller called the Hawaiians' "condition" "deplorable" in 1842 because many spent Sundays, their one day off, tending their homes and families rather than attending church. The fort's British minister, Herbert Beaver, recommended hiring a Hawaiian pastor, citing the language barrier — though Beaver, notoriously prejudiced, had refused to hold any services for Hawaiians even when asked.

In summer 1844, Chief Factor Dr. John McLoughlin wrote to the HBC's office on Oʻahu asking for a Hawaiian chaplain to "read the Scriptures and assemble his people for public worship" and to teach, in the workers' own language. He hoped to curb what he called "corruptions": drinking, fighting and gambling. No Hawaiian accounts of those accusations survive, but McLoughlin seems to have wanted both a preacher and a teacher who would answer the concerns of administrators and clergy and make the workforce more compliant and less likely to desert.

The request reached G. P. Judd, an American missionary in the Hawaiian Kingdom. He recommended the 36-year-old Kaulehelehe as a "faithful, industrious Skillful Teacher," and his wife, Mary Kaai, 23, was also "highly recommended." They left the islands on May 15, 1845, and reached Fort Vancouver five weeks later.

Chaplain or advocate?

Little is known of Kaulehelehe's life in Hawaiʻi, but he was respected enough to earn Judd's recommendation though he was not an ordained minister. The Hawaiian newspaper Ka Elele Hawaiʻi described the pair as missionaries who would serve as teachers. At the fort he founded the Owyhee Church, a house of worship and schoolhouse, and reported 20 to 40 attendees within a few months.

The Owyhee Church at Fort Vancouver, which served as both church and schoolhouse (NPS).

His role soon collided with his congregation's hopes. The HBC saw a Hawaiian chaplain as a way to make workers comply; many Hawaiians hoped he would stand up for them. In a letter to Judd, Kaulehelehe described workers "repeatedly abused by the white people without any cause," who hoped he had "come as an officer" of the Hawaiian government to "settle their difficulties." An HBC employee himself, he believed he had no authority to mediate. His congregation stayed small, and teaching was hard when Sunday, reserved for worship, was the only day off.

Tensions grew so sharp that the couple had to leave their Village house for quarters inside the stockade, where the only other non-administrators were Anglican clergy and Catholic priests. There is no record that he became the go-between many had hoped for, but he adapted: a contemporary noted that he "preached to the Kanakas [a term for Hawaiians] in their camp among their houses" as well as holding Sunday services in the fort. Perhaps those changes — and a shrinking Village, as the California gold rushes drew many workers south — helped the couple move back to the Village by 1850.

Eviction

The Oregon Treaty of 1846 ended British claims to the area, the U.S. Army arrived in 1849, and in 1860 the HBC ended its operations there and moved north to Fort Victoria, in today's British Columbia. Kaulehelehe and Kaai chose to stay in their Village home. But in 1860, over Kaulehelehe's protests, the Army slated their house for demolition, forcibly removed them and set it on fire. They moved to Fort Victoria, to a Hawaiian neighborhood called Kanaka Row, home mostly to HBC employees and their families.

Later years

In 1863 Kaulehelehe compiled a directory of Hawaiian communities from Oregon to British Columbia and published it in the Hawaiian newspaper Ka Nupepa Kuokoa (The Independent), to which he subscribed. He hoped it would stop letters going astray and let Hawaiians scattered by the end of HBC operations and the lure of California's goldfields read the "loving sentiments of their friends" across the Pacific.

In Victoria he worked for the HBC as a clerk and interpreter, and in 1869 served as court translator for Peter Kakua, a former HBC worker on trial for murder. He died on June 22, 1874, at 65, and was buried in Ross Bay Cemetery.

Mary Kaai

The lives of Hawaiian women of the HBC era are hard to recover. Mary Kaai is one of only two Hawaiian women named in Fort Vancouver's records — the other is a woman known only as Betty, who lived with a Hawaiian worker named John Kie — and both are identified mainly through the men they lived with. Most Hawaiians at HBC posts were men, who often married local Indigenous women.

Still, some of her life can be pieced together. To be "highly recommended" at 23, she must already have held standing in the Hawaiian missionary community. She shared the challenges of moving nearly 3,000 miles to a foreign and sometimes unwelcoming place, and after 1860 she was active in Kanaka Row's Hawaiian community. The couple adopted a Native Hawaiian daughter, Mary Opio, who died in 1864 at 15.

Mary Kaai died on December 31, 1865, at 43. Over the following year Kaulehelehe composed a kanikau, a funeral chant, for her — 355 lines, published on the front page of Ka Nupepa Kuokoa on November 3. It is a deeply emotional song that invites her spirit to revisit places in the Northwest she loved, as former neighbors — Hawaiian and Northwest Indigenous women of Kanaka Row — express their love for her.

Archaeologists at Fort Vancouver National Historic Site have found objects from Hawaiʻi, such as fragments of coral brought to the fort from the islands (NPS photo).

Legacy

The couple's lives show the complexity, conflict and community of Native Hawaiian life in the Northwest. Though they never again lived in the islands, they stayed connected to Hawaiian communities at home and abroad.

At Fort Vancouver National Historic Site, the visitor center's exhibits and film tell the story of the fort's Native Hawaiian community and its influence on contemporary artists. The reconstructed fort shows it as it looked in 1845, the year the couple arrived, and two reconstructed cabins in the Village resemble the kind they lived in. Their own house has not been rebuilt, but archaeologists digging at its site have found objects traded from around the world — fragments of a small metal container stamped with the British royal coat of arms and a ceramic jar that once held preserved ginger from China — evidence of the global connections that shaped their lives.

Sources

• National Park Service, Fort Vancouver National Historic Site: "William Kaulehelehe and Mary Kaai," by Marie Hashimoto, citing Ka Elele Hawaiʻi (1845), Barman and Watson, Leaving Paradise (2006), Chang (2021), Deur (2012), Klan (1979) and Morris and Benedetto, Nā Kahu (2019). The source spells the Hawaiian newspaper's name several ways; this page uses Ka Nupepa Kuokoa.