The Forgotten Story of 500,000 Acres in Hawaii: Parker Ranch

On the fourteenth of January, 1893, the man who owned half of Parker Ranch stood in a room of Iolani Palace and would not pick up a pen. His Queen had asked for a signature that would take back her kingdom. He was her Minister of Foreign Affairs, three-quarters Hawaiian, a cattleman by inheritance and a courtier by ambition. Three days later his name sat beneath hers on the document protesting the end of the Hawaiian Kingdom. This is the story of how his family got there. It begins in 1809, when a runaway sailor from Massachusetts came ashore on the Big Island, married a granddaughter of Kamehameha the Great, and was paid to break a sacred law that bound every other Hawaiian on the island for another fifteen years. It ends in a Waimea parlour rebuilt as a bank vault, a Degas on the wall and twenty-six million dollars of debt against it, and a last heir who sang thirty years on Broadway and left the whole ranch to a hospital while his two sons went to court. Copyright & Fair Use Notice This video is a non-commercial, educational history documentary produced for research and for purposes of commentary, critique, and analysis. Certain archival photographs and video clips appear here under the Fair Use doctrine (Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act), including use for commentary and criticism, news reporting, instruction, scholarship, and research.