Aloha Rodeo

by David Wolman

  While visiting Cheyenne that summer in 1898, Cody gave an interview in which he waxed on about how much Wyoming had changed since his first visit in 1858. “Little did I think forty years ago that in less than a half century I would be riding at the head of a procession with the governor of a state,” he said. “Who knows or who can estimate the progress the forty future years will show?”

  Yet he knew this story of “progress” was also one of loss:

  [T]here is something pathetic about the thought of these plains once so lively with the animals of frontier days and the yells of redskins being redeemed, as they call it, by civilization. It impresses one that civilization in its sweep takes not always only that which should be supplanted.

  When there were no more true frontiersmen like himself left, he added, “frontier celebrations will be farcacal [sic] indeed.”

  In the meantime, though, Cody kept the shows going, while keeping an eye out for new material to freshen up the program. Hawaii’s annexation gave the showman an opportunity, and in early 1899, he sent an agent to Oahu in search of paniolo and hula dancers to join his Wild West. Because Hawaii was now part of the United States, the agent guaranteed that anyone who took the job would have their passage back home paid for, “for there is no longer any chance for the government to bring them back; they being citizens of the one common country, with the government at Washington instead of Honolulu.” The Hawaiian papers reported that the recruits would travel to the mainland in the spring, “when the weather will be less hard on them.”

  At least seven Hawaiians came to perform with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West as it toured the country. One, George Makalena, was a genuine paniolo, but the group also included two women, a policeman, a customs officer, and a college student. The event program described them all as “horsemen fully meriting the high compliment of a place in Colonel Cody’s Congress of Rough Riders of the World; equestrians full of nerve and dash and sure of seat, even if their accouterments seem outlandish and their methods surprisingly grotesque to continental riders and audiences.”

  The Hawaiians joined entertainers from eleven other countries to perform in front of audiences of tens of thousands. An account of one Wild West show in Omaha described the “Sandwich Island Rough Riders” galloping into the arena singing “Aloha ‘Oe,” the beloved song of farewell written by Queen Lili‘uokalani. The women wore shirtwaists and long red pa‘u—special split riding skirts worn during festivals—while the men were decked out in “bright-colored sections of cheap window curtaining for saddle blankets, trousers, ill-fitting and of noisome hue, coats of floor matting and a head-dress that looked like the half of a cocoanut shell with a plume plugged in.”

  Hawaiian newspapers said that the men looked hila hila, embarrassed. For their part, the Hawaiians said they were treated well, although they wouldn’t mind better costumes and more time in front of the audience.

  In 1893, just months after the overthrow of Hawaii’s monarchy, the World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago featured a Hawaii showpiece organized by white settlers pushing for annexation. Their goal was to attract even more whites to move to the islands. Visitors walked into the crater of Kilauea, complete with colored lights, “bombs and crackers,” and “a hissing, bubbling sea of lava.”

  The Hawaii exhibit also included the first hula dancing ever seen on the mainland. Jennie Kapahu, one of the two dancers, went to Chicago despite friends’ and neighbors’ disapproval of her decision to share the hula with the outside world. The group continued on to Europe, performing for Kaiser Wilhelm, the czar of Russia, and other royalty. (“They looked brave and big in their uniforms,” Jennie said. “But when I looked into their eyes, I could tell they were unhappy. They needed a lot of Hawaiian aloha. I felt sorry for them.”) Kapahu faced more criticism for her decision when she returned to Hawaii. Her white fiancé’s mother forbade him to marry a hula dancer, and whites made offensive comments wherever she walked, even to church. One day she struck back, whacking a rude haole over the head with her umbrella.*

  LIKE CODY, THE ORGANIZERS of Frontier Days understood the draw of new offerings and frequently experimented with novel events as the show became a regular annual festival. Some were flops. There was wild buffalo riding and team calf branding, with ten calves released at once pursued by twenty men. In the words of one witness, “first pair to get smoke from burning hair won.” The highlight of the contest one year was when a cowboy holding a branding iron tried to mount a horse: “When he went to get on, he dabbed the iron on his horse’s shoulder and got bucked off and lit on his iron, seat first, much to the delight of everybody.” Other gimmicks didn’t stand the test of time either, like the Gymkhana race, in which riders alternated galloping on horseback with lighting cigars, opening umbrellas, and turning their coats inside out. One year they even tried “man roping,” with a rider pursuing another around the half-mile track while trying to lasso him.

  Nevertheless, word spread among cowboys in Wyoming and beyond that there was real money to be won at Frontier Days. For a ranch hand making $30 to $40 a month, trying to save up for a $6 pair of boots, a $50 prize was a windfall.

  Visitors from as far away as Europe arrived in Cheyenne, walked under a huge festival arch of flowers and flags, and were greeted by huge moving images projected onto a canvas hung on the side of a bank. Men from the Selig Polyscope Company showed two dozen black-and-white “flickers,” including films of rolling trains and the view from a hot air balloon. Motion pictures were still so new and captivating that thousands crammed in close to watch blurry scenes they could easily see in the real world: bucking broncos, cattle milling in corrals, and stagecoach holdups.

  In the evenings, every street corner had some kind of vendor or tout: a magician selling soap, a vendor of false mustaches, a blind man singing patriotic songs. Revelers tooted tin horns and whooped as cowboys in spotless white chaps and brightly colored silk shirts strode about with an “awkward, stiff-legged gait that seems forever hampered by imaginary spurs,” as Leslie’s reported. After months with only animals and one another for company, cowboys were thrilled to be out and about, attending masquerade balls and dancing to brass bands playing popular new tunes like “Shy Ann”:

  Shy Ann, Shy Ann, hop on my pony

  There’s room here for two, dear

  But after the ceremony

  We’ll both ride back home, dear, as one

  On my pony, from old Cheyenne

  But the scene was not always so cosmopolitan and civilized. The Cheyenne sheriff had to appoint dozens of special deputies during Frontier Days to keep an eye out for pickpockets and con men. One year the carousing visitors got particularly rowdy, “turning over the stands of hawkers and engaging in other deviltry.” After midnight they found the gutters full of doughnuts and rolls that food-stand workers had tossed out when they closed. “These were converted into missile[s] by the crowd and were soon flying in every direction, to the detriment of hats and clothing.”

  Despite the closing and commodification of the frontier, the West was still wild. Danger and brutality still lurked beneath the sheen of modernization—and sometimes made appearances at Frontier Days. One of the competitors in the riding and roping events of August 1902 was a forty-year-old cowpuncher named Tom Horn. Horn was six foot two, with “a head that would have elected a congressman, except for a pair of deep set black beady eyes,” in the words of one cowboy. He worked as a prospector, rancher, Pinkerton detective, and army scout. Horn’s ruthlessness drew him into Wyoming’s ongoing range wars, where he worked as a hired gun.

  By 1901, Horn had already been linked to several murders. “Killing is my specialty,” he once said. “I look at it as a business proposition, and I think I have a corner on the market.” Horn’s past finally caught up with him one drunken night in Cheyenne in January 1902. A deputy U.S. marshal got Horn to admit he had killed a fourteen-year-old sheepherder with a rifle from three hundred yards away, calling it “the best shot that I ever made and the di
rtiest trick that I ever done.”

  Horn was still a free man when Frontier Days came in August. When word spread that he was going to compete, a local cowboy said the news “got a lot of town people out just to see if the phantom Horn was real and what he looked like.” (His performance in the steer-roping contest was lackluster.)

  Later that year, in one of the early West’s most infamous trials, a jury found Horn guilty of murder. He briefly escaped the Cheyenne jail by overpowering a guard, but was quickly recaptured and eventually led to the gallows. At Horn’s request, two cowboys sang “Life’s Railway to Heaven” before the trapdoor opened.

  Horn swung for seventeen minutes before dying.

  8

  The Rider

  HUNCHED LOW IN THE saddle, the paniolo spurred his horse down the narrow forest path. Mud sprayed from galloping hooves as the rider leaned from side to side to avoid being lashed by ferns and koa branches.

  There are moments in the life of a cowboy when speed is everything. This was one of those times. It was May 1892, and nineteen-year-old Ikua Purdy was racing toward a small town on the coast some thirty miles away. Five miles behind him and another half mile up Mauna Kea, his cousin Eben Low was bleeding to death.

  Like his grandfather, Ikua had the wiry and powerful body of a featherweight fighter. He had large brown eyes and dark hair. His hat was turned up in front in the vaquero style, which was now the style of the paniolo. He wore a bandanna around his neck, and his boots were tucked into stirrups covered with leather tapaderos.

  As the crow flies, riding straight north would have been the fastest way to get to the plantation town of Honokaa. But the undulating landscape of the mountain flanks, carved into deep gulches by torrents of rock and rain, made a high-speed traverse impossible. Instead, Ikua had to ride northeast, almost directly downhill toward the Pacific Ocean. There he would follow the rough cart road along the coast to Honokaa, where he hoped to find a doctor and bring him back in time to save Eben.

  Ikua dashed through sweeping grasslands for the first few miles before he entered thick forest. Gritty soil and mud gave his horse decent purchase, at least compared with the ankle-busting lava fields elsewhere on the island. The climate on the north side of Hawaii varied between punishing heat and cold. Fog and blowing mist often engulfed riders. Even when visibility was clear, there were other obstacles to contend with. Trails deteriorated into faint and splintering footpaths, overgrown with berry bushes and ferns, as they flowed from the uplands to the forests below. Paniolo horses like Ikua’s were accustomed to galloping downhill, but hazards like stumps, mud pits, and downed logs lurked everywhere.

  Ikua knew that if anything went wrong—if he was thrown, if his mount stumbled and injured itself, or if he was simply too slow—Eben wouldn’t make it.

  TWO DAYS EARLIER, IKUA, Eben, and six other cowboys had ridden out at dawn to hunt wild cattle. “Rawhide Ben” had led the party of crack ropers, including his brother Jack, his half brother Archie Ka‘au‘a, and their cousin Ikua. They rode in silence as sunrise swallowed the last few stars, a winding procession like a train of ghosts.

  At twenty-eight, Eben was like an older brother to the men, especially Ikua, who grew up emulating Parker Ranch cowboys who had worked with his father and uncles. Eben’s expert riding and roping, combined with his magnetism and entrepreneurial drive, made him a natural leader. That particular week in the summer of 1892—only months before the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy—Eben had secured a contract to deliver animals to a cattle dealer on the coast for $7 a head.

  The first day of the hunt was a tiring success. The group captured a number of young bulls, cows, and heifers, but the men also had their share of falls and near falls, stumbling over logs or getting thrown when a horse slipped or cut sideways. They returned to camp, a crude but snug cabin at 6,500 feet on the northeast slope of the mountain. They spread out their bedrolls and made sure the horses were well fed for the next day’s work.

  After coffee at three A.M. the next morning, they were off again, breathing clouds into the thin, cold air. The trail through the forest was so crowded with vegetation that the men had to ride single file. When the rising sun gave enough light, Eben rode to the top of a rocky outcrop to scout the terrain. This was often his favorite moment of the hunt: seated on a trusted horse and staring out over the landscape he loved, he listened for the sounds of wild cattle and mapped a plan of action in his mind.

  But Eben’s enthusiasm was tempered by the absence of his brother. Jack Low had refused to leave the cabin that morning. Although Jack wasn’t as ebullient as his brother, he was a fast and fearless rider, and in Eben’s opinion as skilled a roper as any of the men.

  The night before, Jack had a dream in which someone in the family was in danger of being hurt or killed. When the cowboys woke to prepare for the day’s ride, Jack was convinced that the only way he could keep this premonition from coming true was by not roping that day. The Low brothers prided themselves on being practical, can-do cattlemen, not prone to superstition. Yet hearing his brother share his dream, even at the risk of teasing from the others, made Eben decide not to push the matter. He and the others would ride without Jack for the day and reconnect with him after sunset.

  The paniolo worked their way into the gullies and hidden thickets, where they could hear the soft bellowing of the animals. Eben, Ikua, and Archie soon came upon three large black bulls and immediately gave chase. Eben was about to pitch his lariat when his horse stumbled in a hog hole, left by a wild pig rooting for dinner.

  Horse and rider went down in a heap, but neither were hurt. Another rider managed to rope the bull. Ikua and Archie, to no one’s surprise, each captured a bull of their own. They tied the animals to trees while the riders went back to the cabin for a rest. Then it was out again to track some more.

  That afternoon, one rider captured a large cow that gave Eben an uneasy feeling. The raging animal had charged the cowboys, rushing with such unexpected speed that she almost got one man.

  Calculating risk was part of the job: paniolo tried to avoid taking unnecessary chances that could lead to accidents, but they needed a good haul. This time, instead of tying the unruly bullock to a tree and having to ride back uphill for it later, they decided to run it straight down to a paddock near the cabin.

  Eben took responsibility for leading the animal, which had already tripped and fallen once on a rope that one of the men had let slack. He double-checked his saddle and made sure his lariat was looped around the cow’s neck and the other end tied firmly to his saddle horn.

  The moment the cow got to its feet, it charged him. But the paniolo was ready. He spurred his horse down the path toward the paddocks with the bullock in pursuit, leading it exactly where he wanted it to go. Galloping downhill with the furious cow behind him, Eben held his reins and lariat loosely in his right hand. With the other he quickly coiled the excess rope to take up any hoof-tangling slack.

  Eben worked hard to keep the cow close to his left flank, taking in and teasing out rope. The goal was to give the animal just enough of a sense of imminent vengeance that it kept coming, without letting it get near enough to succeed—all while looking back over his shoulder and guiding the racing horse with his knees.

  Horse and bullock thundered down the slope. Suddenly the bullock bolted to the right, crossing behind the horse. Just then a tree flashed past to Eben’s right.

  As rawhide hissed through his fingers, Eben saw the hazard in an instant. The lasso tied to the saddle horn led around his left side to the cow—which was about to pass on the far side of the tree.

  When the rope ran out, Eben would be cut in half.

  Instinct took over. There was no time to untie or cut the rope. Eben hauled on the reins and jammed his left knee into the horse’s flank, veering it to the right. He took the sudden slack and threw the rawhide over his head from left to right.

  The maneuver likely saved his life. But in the confusion, Eben’s left hand fell between the
saddle horn and the rope. At that moment, the rope ran out.

  It felt like his horse had been struck by lightning. Jolted by the impact, the huge bullock flew off its feet and flipped three times in midair. The rope snapped like thread.

  Eben brought his startled horse to a stop, panting and blowing. He looked down at his left arm and saw nothing but pink and red. Blood was starting to pour from the mangled flesh. Shock blotted out the pain at first.

  The other cowboys were off their mounts in a flash. One set to work tying a bandanna to slow the bleeding. They were about five miles from a bare-bones cabin at Hopuwai, a remote camp in an open plain that was often pummeled by cold winds blowing up from the coast. Eben insisted he could make it there on horseback. He cradled his arm and remembered Jack’s premonition. Already the adrenaline was wearing off and the hurt was taking hold. He needed medical attention, but it would have to come to him.

  Before they left for Hopuwai, the paniolo had to send someone for help. There was little or no discussion of who it would be; a quick nod may have been all it took. Ikua knew the braided trails, landmarks, shortcuts, and hazards of Hawaii’s high country better than anyone. And he was fast.

  As the group began a slow ride to the cabin with their injured leader, Ikua took off racing toward the coast.

  GROWING UP ON PARKER RANCH, Ikua spent his childhood riding horses and hunting wild pigs. By age ten, he was already working alongside the Parker Ranch cowboys, and like Eben, he was tracking and roping wild cattle by his teen years. His saddle was a gift from the Parkers, who served as quasi-godparents to him and so many other ranch hands.

  By the late 1800s, the Parker Ranch covered about 300,000 acres, with an estimated 25,000 head of cattle. John Palmer Parker’s son, John Jr., co-managed the ranch with his nephew Sam. Unlike his uncle and grandfather, Sam Parker preferred a playboy lifestyle. Mānā had always served as a meeting place and rest stop for travelers crossing the island, much like the Hawaiian archipelago was for Pacific sailors. Sam continued that tradition, but with an aristocratic twist. He turned Mānā into a getaway for the rich and famous, surrounding the humble New England–style saltbox building with manicured gardens, ornate fountains, and outbuildings for guests and workers.