Mauna Kea Oral History Appendix - Office of Mauna Kea Management

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He had been over there for ten years and married that wahine over there, and was just
doing cattle, bullock hunting here, and going back there to live. By and by he came over
here.
He got the Mänä Grant.
Through his wife.
It was quite early how it came through.
In 1850 something. Spencer was way before that. Where Lïhu‘e is in Waimea, went in
there once before they opened it up for the Farmers and they were two great big cisterns
in there lined with this same stuff, that’s the first time I saw cisterns. They were big, they
were probably fifteen feet across in diameter at least. Then the old-timers told me that
that might have been, they told me that Laukï was in there, the Chinaman who was
growing cane. And then Ernest Martinson told me there was a flume going down there.
Before the Lälämilo Farmers went in there, there was quite a bit going on in Lïhu‘e and
Spencer was in there too, wasn’t he
Yes.
I remember seeing those big cisterns.
What’s the name of the place down there.
Yes, where they all live now. Rally where Hisa Kimura lived, the little subdivision where
William French said, that is the nicest place to live in Waimea because the stream is
always running with water.
You mean where Willie Kaniho used to live
Yes. Across the street there
‘Ähuli.
Yes, ‘Ähuli Park.
‘Ähuli, yes.
That’s what William French said in his writing, “it was the nicest place to live, because the
stream always ran.” Going into Lïhu‘e, which is just below that, south of that. And you’d
have water for that flume, whatever it was.
Yes, ‘auwai.
Ernest Martinson said, “Forty years ago he found remnants of the flume out there.” Dry
land.
Yes.
That in the ‘60s, I used to walk out there because it was so interesting. I’d go down below
the Rubbish Dump, and there was a kahawai, a little channel of water that went down,
and it went out and fed those different flocks of land there. There was Päpua‘a,
Spencer’s old house.
Yes.
South from Päpua‘a, that’s where a lot of this is. Interesting, the plots of land and the
places you’d see. A place up on the slope at one corner of the field where it was built up
to a paepae like and you knew that the luna was sitting up there watching the workers. I
learned so much out there, and the channeled water. That’s a fascinating place. But we
used to see the mortar shells and step around them.
It is amazing how extensively used that place was. All of the planting fields, the water
was drawn off of that ‘Ähuli and out even Wai‘aka side, Keanu‘i‘omanö, they would just
draw the water out across there.
Mauna Kea– “Ka Piko Kaulana o ka ‘Äina”
Kumu Pono Associates LLC
A Collection of Oral History Interviews (HiMK67-050606) A:652