The fourth of the line of Keoua’s wives was Kamakaehikuli. She bore him a son named Kaleimamahu, who married Kaheiheimalie and had a daughter named Kekauluohi, mother of King Lunalilo. No sooner than news of the death of Kamehameha V. had reached all parts of the islands William Lunalilo was acclaimed as the choice of the people, from Hawaii to Niihau.
Prince William Lunalilo, being a member of the royal house of Keoua by his mother Kekauluohi, was the most favored choice of the whole nation, to await the final approval of the Legislature, and he ascended the throne with the brightest prospects for a happy and prosperous reign.
But the people were doomed to encounter a bitter disappointment soon afterward, for his death took place a little more than a year after he ascended the throne of Hawaii. He left the whole of his property for the care and maintenance of indigent Hawaiians. The interregnum which occurred was of a most excitable nature. Two claimants to the throne Queen Dowager Emma, widow of Kamehameha IV, and the high chief, David Kalakaua, were backed by two different factions. Kalakaua was descended on his father’s side from the royal line of Kalaninuiamamao, the firstborn son of Keaweikekahialiiokamoku and elder brother of Keeaumokunui, father of Keoua Kalanikupuapaikalaninui.
Kalakaua won the day, bringing the rule of the Kalaninuiamamao family, and was enthroned as king of the Hawaiian Islands.
The case was very promising for the future safety of the throne as to a line of succession, for Kalakaua already had two married sisters and a young brother of twenty years, besides a little niece of five or six years, as heirs apparent or presumptive. Kalakaua, empowered by law to nominate his successor, proclaimed his brother Leleiohoku as heir-apparent. The All-wise Creator willed it otherwise. In the full glory of his expanding manhood the young man lost his life through an epidemic then raging in town. Two or three years later the younger of the two sis-ters died and the elder sister, who had already been proclaimed as the heir apparent, and the young niece were left as the only members of the Kalakaua dynasty in the line of succession. Upon the death of Kalakaua, or when the event first became known in Honolulu by the arrival of his body from San Francisco in the U. S. S. “Charleston” in 1891, Princess Liliuokalani, the heir apparent and regent during his ill-fated visit to California, succeeded him but was dethroned by revolution on January 17, 1893.
Princess Kaiulani, who had been heir presumptive up to that event, was put forward by some friends as a candidate for the throne if restoration of the monarchy should be accepted as the solution of unsettled conditions of the government, but an unsuccessful, uprising on behalf of Liliuokalani in January, 1895, ended all the hopes of Hawaiian royalty, and about four years later the beloved young princess, after her country had been annexed to the United States, died in Honolulu from the effects of a cold that she had contracted while on a visit to Hilo, Queen Liliuokalani lived in dignified retirement for nearly a quarter of a century after the overthrow of the monarchy by revolution.