Aloha Rodeo

by David Wolman

  But they soon wanted more. A system of well-defined property ownership with clear boundaries was key for successful ranch operations. Without it, reasoned the enlightened outsiders, legitimate businesses would be at the mercy of the monarchy or local chiefs. Indeed, they argued, disputes over land ownership were already breaking out.

  Two of these episodes grew into international incidents, and both starred the same obstinate Englishman. Richard Charlton, British consul to the Hawaiian kingdom, leased land on Oahu to raise longhorn cattle. Charlton had no qualms about shooting any local cows or goats that wandered onto his property. Yet his own animals had a tendency to venture out after dark and stray onto nearby farms. In 1829, a Hawaiian farmer had had enough of these late-night depredations and shot one of Charlton’s trespassing cows.

  Charlton was livid. When his appeal to the Hawaiian government to punish the cow-killer was rejected, he took matters into his own hands. With the help of an American named John Coffin Jones, Charlton seized the Hawaiian, tied a halter around his neck, and rode off. The man ran until he collapsed, strangled by the rope, and Charlton dragged him behind his horse until a fellow islander ran up and cut the cord.

  In a letter to the king, an unrepentant Charlton argued that the current land-tenure system put people’s property, and even their safety, in jeopardy—especially if those people were foreigners. But the king’s response showed he was more concerned with Charlton’s brutality: “[I]f you judged the man guilty, you are not forthwith to punish him; wait till we have a consultation first; then, had we judged him guilty, we would have given you damages; but no, you rashly and suddenly injured the man.”

  Charlton’s next clash nearly led to an attack on Honolulu, and briefly resulted in the cession of the Hawaiian Kingdom to Britain. In the winter of 1842, the Englishman was on the warpath again, this time over Kamehameha III’s refusal to accept a claim he had made on a piece of land in Honolulu. Charlton traveled to Mexico, where he convinced British Navy officials that the monarchy was denying the queen’s citizens their rights under the law. A British captain, Lord George Paulet, set sail for the islands to demand recourse. When the king denied him an audience, Paulet made it known that he was ready to fire his ship’s twenty-six guns on the town.

  Kamehameha III, in a now-famous letter addressed to the Hawaiian people, agreed to relinquish power—temporarily, he hoped—until the international community stepped in to right this all-too-obvious wrong. Paulet made himself and three other Britons heads of a new Hawaiian government. Within six months, British authorities realized that Paulet had acted unlawfully, egged on by Charlton. The takeover was nullified, and Hawaii was returned to the Hawaiians. Charlton lost his government post but kept up his property fights before finally retreating back to England in the winter of 1846.

  Dubbed the Paulet Affair, the brief occupation was a stark illustration of how vulnerable Hawaii was to the whims of imperial powers. It also showed how central cows had become to the story of the islands.

  HALF-MAD ENGLISHMEN WEREN’T THE only ones pressing for land ownership reform. Parker and others worked to convince the monarchy that it was in everybody’s best interest to end the communal approach and start nailing down private property titles. Together with other businessmen, he made the case that helping ranchers would also earn the kingdom money. (The monarchy and its circle of chiefs earned hefty commissions on every hide or cask of tallow sold.) Some missionaries even said private land ownership would help encourage a work ethic among a people they considered naturally lazy.

  In 1840, Kamehameha III signed a new constitution, followed by a series of laws that ultimately made it possible for anyone to own land, including foreigners. Almost overnight, a land grab swept across the archipelago. It was one of the most important events in Hawaiian history: a complete redefinition of the concept of property.

  Within decades, foreigners like Parker owned huge grazing parcels and sugar plantations spread across the islands. The fragmented remainders consisted of native farms, many of which were too small to sustain a family. In places like Waimea, native Hawaiians who had farmed communal land for generations were forced to take up a trade or leave to find work. Most Hawaiians—everyone outside the royal family or not well connected to a chief—ended up with less than 1 percent of Hawaii’s land area, while the list of names for title claims read like a New England phone book: Harris, Sinclair, Bush, French, Baldwin, Chamberlin, and Parker.

  The eventual takeover of the Kingdom of Hawaii resulted from a familiar array of forces: the ravages of disease, missionaries suppressing native culture, political subterfuge, and a weak military. Yet the shift to private land ownership was also a crucial event in the saga of Hawaii’s stolen sovereignty.

  At the same time that Hawaiians were losing control of their ancestral territories, the U.S. government was waking up to the islands’ strategic and commercial value. By mid-century, the American whaling industry was the fifth largest sector of the U.S. economy. Whale oil lubricated machinery and lit lamps, and whale baleen made stiff but flexible corsets. A single ship’s cargo could turn a profit of close to $1.5 million in today’s dollars.

  Hawaii was the ideal place to resupply during the harsh Pacific winters, and whaling ships—most from Parker’s home state of Massachusetts—were stopping by the hundreds every year. Ship captains needed to refit their vessels and stock up on fresh water and salt beef. Mainland businesses required tallow and leather for products like shoes and book jackets. As a result, Hawaii’s coastal villages were replaced by commercial harbor towns whose tidy storefronts evoked their builders’ New England roots.

  Honolulu, the kingdom’s commercial center, was inundated with sailors ready to blow off steam. In the winter of 1845–1846, Rear Admiral Samuel Francis Du Pont of the U.S. Navy received an appeal from whaling ship captains and the American consul to have a U.S. Navy warship on hand during the height of refitting season. This would improve morale and help ease tensions between sailors and locals. Du Pont agreed wholeheartedly. The request and Du Pont’s response reflected an attitude that was steadily crystallizing within America’s military, business community, and, increasingly, government: the more the United States ran things in Hawaii, the better it was for everyone. The monarchy wouldn’t be able to maintain its grip on power in this rapidly globalizing world, so the assumption went, and the United States couldn’t afford to let another power take over. Yield Hawaii and what would come next—the West Coast?

  King Kamehameha III was well aware that his rule was under threat from foreign powers, and may have considered the United States to be the devil he knew. In 1854, he ordered his minister of foreign relations to look into the idea of annexation by the United States because “plans are on foot inimical [unfavorable] to the peace of Our Kingdom and the welfare of our people, and such as if carried out would be wholly subversive of Our Sovereignty, and would reduce Us to the most deplorable of all states, a state of anarchy.”

  On the Fourth of July that year, a parade through Honolulu showed what the islands’ foreign community thought of the idea. A chariot carried “Young America,” a boy described by a witness as “the very personification of health, strength, and beauty.” Pulled behind that chariot was “Young Hawaii,” a colorfully decorated boat holding eight native boys eating sugarcane. The procession ended at Kawaiaha‘o Church, where the American commissioner delivered a speech “in which it was more than hinted that a new star was about to be added to the glorious constellation.” The prospect of cozying up with, or even absorbing, Hawaii was greeted enthusiastically in Washington, where President Franklin Pierce and other proponents of expansion were carrying the torch of Manifest Destiny. Plans for an annexation treaty were being drafted in 1854, but then were abandoned after Kamehameha III died that December. His successor, Kamehameha IV, scuttled the negotiations.

  BY THE 1860S, THE whaling boom was all but over. Whale populations had been decimated, and petroleum products and vegetable oils had proved better and
cheaper than whale oil. Meanwhile, Hawaii’s burgeoning cattle industry was primed to expand, fueled by cheap cattle, ample labor, and an insatiable overseas market for salted beef, hide, and tallow. In 1860, the island of Hawaii, population under 22,000, had about 25,000 wild cattle and another 10,000 domesticated animals. Hide and tallow became the kingdom’s top export commodities.

  Through all of this, John Palmer Parker was steadily amassing real estate. About eight miles east of Waimea, at a site called Mānā, Parker had built a small home out of ‘ōhi‘a bark and Hawaiian grasses. In the following decades, Parker Ranch endured aggressive competition, disease outbreaks, floods, droughts, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions. But Parker and his descendants persevered, snapping up more and more land along the way. By the end of the century, Parker Ranch was one of the largest ranches anywhere, with more than 20,000 branded cattle grazing on 300,000 acres.

  Parker turned Mānā into a full-fledged manor. From the outside, the building was pure New England colonial; on the inside, the walls, floors, and even the wooden nails had the reddish glow of native koa timbers. Intermixed with the saltbox buildings were traditional Hawaiian grass houses. An orchard of peach and orange trees grew alongside manicured gardens, giving the property the air of a European country estate dropped in the tropics.

  Parker provided ranch employees with denim work clothes but wore Hawaiian-style clothing himself, usually a malo, or loincloth. Native Hawaiian was the language of choice, the only exceptions being the children’s English lessons or when foreigners visited. Guests dined and enjoyed music and dance while seated on the floor, as Hawaiian chiefs had done for ages. Even the beds were fitted with cloth made of flat-pounded bark instead of cotton sheets. Christian prayers were still held every day, and a loud note blown on a conch shell announced the weekly Sabbath service.*

  Riders approaching Mānā would sometimes report seeing the wahine koa, the ghostly shape of a woman that paniolo claimed to see in the mists and rains as they crossed the undulating pastures. A visitor in 1857 experienced a royal welcome, with dozens of native Hawaiians hurrying about to greet guests, unsaddle horses, and prepare a feast of roast beef, bananas, and strawberries. The guest described Parker as a “cosmopolitan” who “by energetic work . . . has made a considerable fortune.”

  Parker had realized his vision. The young dreamer from Massachusetts had built, hide by hide and acre by acre, an immense ranching empire, where he exercised “a baronial sway and a noble hospitality.”

  John Palmer Parker died in Honolulu in August 1868. He was seventy-eight years old. His ranch had become the beating heart of the paniolo world, and would soon give rise to some of Hawaii’s—and America’s—greatest cowboys.

  4

  Holy City of the Cow

  ON THE MORNING OF September 5, 1898, the streets of Cheyenne, Wyoming, were lined with so many people it was almost impossible to move. Ranchers, merchants, schoolmarms, hucksters, farmhands, and children of all ages had gathered to mark the start of a celebration of life and sport in the West: Cheyenne Frontier Days.

  Festivities kicked off with an extravagant parade that included enough international combatants to launch a war: twenty mounted Sioux; a company of German cavalry in white uniforms; bands of Arabs, Turks, and Mexicans on horseback; a company of Cubans; and a squadron of British lancers. They were followed by fire trucks decorated with flowers, and a train of thirty weathered prairie schooners.

  Two men sat in an open carriage at the head of the convoy. One was a prominent rancher and surveyor named William Richards, who would become Wyoming’s fourth governor.*

  But the audience had come to see the other man, a distinguished gentleman whose long white hair fell over the collar of his fringed buckskin jacket. To the Daily Sun-Leader, the fifty-two-year-old cowboy was “handsome as a picture, bold as a lion, chivalrous to a fault, he is the beau ideal of the public, a human poem, a breathing statue, an animated painting.”

  His name was William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody, and he may well have been the most famous person on the planet.

  That day, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was the opening act to Cheyenne Frontier Days, adding the prestige of Cody’s stardom to the upstart rodeo. First, spectators watched Cossacks, cavalrymen, and cowboys gallop around the prairie north of the Capitol Building. They witnessed a mock Pony Express ride, a pretend buffalo hunt, and formation riding by the 6th U.S. Cavalry. The soldiers also reenacted Cody’s personal, albeit embroidered, exploits as a scout and soldier. A band filled in gaps in the action and an orator on a raised platform narrated everything at top volume. The audience, stirred by the action and military prowess on display, was primed for the rodeo competition that followed.

  Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Frontier Days delivered grand entertainment the likes of which few, if any, had ever seen. For the residents of a town that had been little more than a way station for travelers headed to California and Oregon, Cheyenne suddenly felt like the center of the West.

  SOME THIRTY YEARS EARLIER, on November 13, 1867, the first passenger train arrived in Cheyenne with a screech of brakes and hiss of steam. The din heralded the start of a new era, a future of connectedness and commerce. “No use of talking,” said one onlooker. “It beats the world,” said another.

  The settlement’s name came from the tribe that had once ruled the high broad plains east of the Laramie Mountains. Here, windswept steppes and grasslands inspired a U.S. Army surveyor to coin the term Great American Desert and dismiss the entire region as “almost wholly unfit for cultivation.” The area was fit for wildlife, though. Tens of millions of bison roamed and sculpted the landscape, and had so for millennia, trampling and eating their way across hundreds of miles of grassland every year.

  The western reaches of the Great Plains were in fact suitable for cultivation, once farmers figured out how to tap the enormous Ogallala Aquifer for irrigation. Before then, however, settlers passed through by the thousands: pioneers headed to Oregon, fur traders eyeing the Rockies, gold seekers dreaming of California. Those who stayed lived the hardscrabble life of homesteaders in an unforgiving land of sagebrush and sandstorms, brutal sun and ice-choked rivers, a place as uninviting as it was monotonous. An early traveler described a “gray, sage-covered plain” that “with its yellow, withered grass gave a cheerless picture, made still more so by the numerous human graves.”

  Resident Native American tribes—Shoshone, Crow, Sioux, Arapaho, and Cheyenne—fought a losing battle against white settlers, soldiers, and disease. By the mid-1800s, indigenous populations had plummeted by up to 90 percent since the arrival of Columbus at the end of the fifteenth century.

  When California governor Leland Stanford hammered home a ceremonial golden spike at Promontory Point, Utah, on May 10, 1869, the moment commemorated a staggering engineering achievement. Completing the Transcontinental Railroad reduced what had been a six-month cross-country journey to a six-day trip. At the same time, it symbolized the stitching together of a nation recently torn apart by civil war.

  In the years leading up to the golden spike, workers had raced to lay tracks from east and west at speeds of up to ten miles a day. Starting in Council Bluffs, Iowa, three months after Lincoln’s assassination and the end of the Civil War, the Union Pacific Railroad snaked west across the Nebraska plains and entered southern Wyoming in late 1867. At the head of the tracks was a transient community of railroad workers, support crews, prostitutes, and hangers-on. Hell on Wheels, as the traveling town came to be known, left a ribbon of steel and a trail of mayhem across the country.

  Thousands of people arrived in Cheyenne in advance of those who were laying the track, living in dugouts, tents, covered wagons, and shacks. Hell on Wheels spent six months there, longer than in most towns, before pushing farther west in January 1868. In its wake was a city whose “wickedness [was] unimaginable and appalling,” wrote one Episcopal reverend. It was full of “gamblers of all shades, and roughs, and troops of lewd women, and bull-whackers [and]
almost every other house is a drinking saloon, gambling house, restaurant, dance hall or bawdy.” Saloons in Cheyenne were said to outnumber other businesses three to one. “Every man slept with from one to a half-dozen revolvers under his pillow,” reported one visitor, “for depredations of every character could be expected at any hour, day or night.”

  Cheyenne grew into a buzzing, boisterous frontier town so quickly it became known as the “Magic City of the Plains.” Residents organized a city government, opened hundreds of stores and saloons, and set up a newspaper and a post office. Frontier opportunities drew engineers, lawyers, and businessmen along with Native Americans, Chinese laborers, and soldiers fresh from the Civil War.

  The city’s police officers were overwhelmed. Cheyenne’s first mayor levied a $10 fine on anyone who fired a gun within city limits, whether they hit someone or not. He tacked on an additional 25 cents to each fine “to cover the expense of stimulants necessary to efficient administration of justice.” With law enforcement shorthanded (or drunk), citizens felt the need to form a vigilance committee to keep the peace. They hung or shot the occasional desperado, and turned a log cabin into a jail for vagrants and petty criminals. When the building filled up, each occupant was taken out one at a time and told to leave town. Anyone who didn’t move fast enough was urged along by six-guns fired at his feet.

  The frenzy diminished when the railroad moved on, and Cheyenne’s population dropped from about 10,000 to 1,500. But those who remained were determined to turn Cheyenne into a real city. On July 25, 1868, the Wyoming Territory was formed out of a geographical gumbo: portions of the Utah, Dakota, and Idaho Territories, the land had been previously claimed by Great Britain, France, Spain, Mexico, and Texas, and was home to Native Americans for thousands of years before that.