The Little People Who Build in a Single Night
The Menehune are Hawaii's legendary little people, short, stocky, taciturn and immensely strong, hidden by day in the mountain forests and working only at night in great crews. Their rules are strict: any project must be finished in a single night, and whatever stands incomplete at cockcrow is abandoned forever; they take no wages but food, the standard rate being one shrimp per worker. No one may watch them at work — once seen, the crew scatters.
Kauai keeps the two stoneworks most often credited to them. The Alekoko fishpond near Lihue, known as the Menehune Fishpond, closes a bend of the Huleia River with a wall nearly three hundred meters long, said to have been built in one night by a chain of Menehune passing stones hand to hand from the mountains to the river. The Kikiaola ditch at Waimea, the "Menehune Ditch," is faced with cut and fitted basalt blocks, dressed stonework otherwise rare in Hawaiian building — proof, the story goes, that only Menehune hands could have made it.
The ethnologist Katharine Luomala's 1951 monograph sorted through the whole corpus. She noted that "Menehune" is cognate with Tahitian "manahune," the commoner class, and argued the figure likely condensed after European contact from memories of earlier settlement layers and imported little-people motifs; nineteenth-century accounts from Kauai even speak of Menehune as a countable population. The line between legend and history stays blurred here, while the fishpond and the ditch still stand.
