Meanwhile, the California Gold Rush opened up yet another front in the Hawaiian migrant experience. Eighteen-year-old Henry Nahoa wrote a letter home from California’s Sierra Nevada mountains in the 1850s to express his “aloha me ka waimaka [aloha with tears]” to family members in Hawaiʻi. Nahoa’s tears were not alone. At least one thousand Hawaiians migrated to California in the period before, during, and after the Gold Rush. Chapter five explores workers’ experiences in Alta California from the 1830s to the 1870s. During this time, men like Nahoa lived and labored under Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. rule. They worked in sea otter hunting, cattle hide skinning, gold mining, and urban and agricultural work, from the coasts, to the sierras, to cities and farms. Nineteenth-century California was an integral part of the “Hawaiian Pacific World.”
