Aloha Rodeo

by David Wolman

  At the turn of the century, the most famous woman competing in rodeos was probably Lucille Mulhall, a rider and trick roper from Oklahoma. When Mulhall was a girl, her father bet her she couldn’t rope a fence post three times in a row. She did. According to one story, when Teddy Roosevelt visited her family’s ranch, he bet her she couldn’t lasso a coyote from horseback. She did that too, then killed it with a stirrup and gave Roosevelt the pelt.

  At fourteen, Mulhall started performing in her father’s Wild West show, where she was billed as the Champion Lady Steer Roper of the World. “Little Miss Mulhall, who weighs only 90 pounds, can break a bronco, lasso and brand a steer and shoot a coyote at 500 yards,” wrote the New York World. “She can also play Chopin, quote Browning, construe Virgil and make mayonnaise dressing. She is a little ashamed of these latter accomplishments, which are a concession to the civilized prejudices of her mother.” Will Rogers, astonished by her virtuosity, still couldn’t resist the chauvinist take, calling her “the only girl that ever rode a horse exactly like a man.”

  Women had so far been forbidden from competing in Frontier Days bucking contests because, in the words of one planner, “We don’t have time to haul women bronco fighters to the hospital.” Organizers changed the rule in 1904, but only as a promotional gimmick; they didn’t expect any women to come. But when Kaepernick heard that she could compete, she set off alone for Cheyenne, over a hundred miles away. She followed the railroad tracks most of the way, riding one horse and leading an unbroken mount named Tombstone.

  It turned out she was the only woman participating that year, but Frontier Days promoters still made hay of the news: “The real active idea of Woman Suffrage was thus demonstrated in Wyoming at a Frontier Days show,” said Warren Richardson, the event’s chairman.

  When Kaepernick led Tombstone out onto the mucky track, spectators jumped onto their seats, cheering. Witnesses described the horse as “long, lean and lanky, [and] full of deviltry, with eyes blazing at the injustice of being burdened with such a monstrosity of a saddle.” The crowd watched as Kaepernick climbed onto the horse, settled herself, and gave the signal to turn the animal loose. Tombstone spun, sidestepped, twisted, and stood on his hind legs, spraying mud in every direction. Moments later the horse reared up so high he toppled over backward, a notorious move called a “widow-maker.” Spectators screamed.

  But Kaepernick deftly slid to one side just before Tombstone hit the ground. Undeterred, she remounted as the horse scrambled to his feet. The audience roared with delight. In due time, Tombstone stopped and looked about, amazed. Kaepernick was still on board.

  It was one of the most remarkable exhibitions of bronco riding Cheyenne had ever seen, the Wyoming Tribune concluded, tacking on the backhanded compliment that it still “would have been exciting had the rider been a man.”

  After Kaepernick’s demonstration, the men had no choice but to ride in the mud. Kaepernick rode in the finals, but was disqualified because she touched the rigging with her free hand. But her effort showed what women could do in the rodeo arena, and soon the sight of a cowgirl riding a bronco or racing a pony was unremarkable.

  The same year Kaepernick thrilled spectators for the first time, Frontier Days also saw one of the most daring and spectacular stunts in its history—performed by the son of a former slave.

  Bill Pickett was born in the 1870s in the Texas brush country, the second of thirteen children. His father was African American and his mother was Native American. With a compact body and outsize confidence in his athletic ability, Pickett had dropped out of grade school to work as a ranch hand. He proved to be so talented with animals that he began performing at fairs and rodeos in Colorado, Arizona, and Texas.

  As many as one in four cowboys in the American West was African American. Recently freed slaves and their children found that the West offered more autonomy and opportunity than the East, where racism was more entrenched and often the only jobs available were service positions like elevator operators or railroad porters. By the late nineteenth century, close to fifty all-black towns had been founded across five western states and territories. African American cowboys worked on ranches and helped with cattle drives, where they earned the same wages as whites and more than Mexicans. In a Dodge City boardinghouse, Denver saloon, or Cheyenne hardware store, a black cowboy’s money was as good as anyone’s.

  Life on the range was hardly free of racial discrimination and persecution. Blacks were often barred from participating in rodeos, which is one reason Pickett went by the vague moniker “The Dusky Demon.” Racial epithets were common in print and conversation, and African American cowboys were frequently given the hardest jobs, like handling fighting bulls and testing river crossings on cattle drives, although this may have been as much a testament to their ability as anything.

  But competence was competence. Skin color meant little to ranchers who needed hardworking men to supervise their fast-growing herds, and in time a handful of African American cowboys gained a measure of fame. The former slave Nat Love, aka “Deadwood Dick,” wrote a popular 1907 autobiography full of stories about winning rodeos, meeting Billy the Kid, and escaping from Pima Indians.* Al Jones, an African American driver from Texas, served as trail boss on four major cattle drives in his career, including one leading 2,000 steers in 1885. Stagecoach Mary Fields, the first black postal carrier in the United States, was said to have broken more noses than any other person in Montana. Fields smoked cigars and packed a .38 Smith & Wesson under her skirts. She also babysat local children and gave flowers from her garden to baseball players whenever they hit a home run.

  In Cheyenne, as in Hawaii, race relations were relatively progressive compared to the country as a whole. The Inter-Ocean Hotel, the largest in the city, had been built and managed by Barney Ford, an African American, and the city hired its first African American policeman in 1881. In the 1880s, the segregated 9th and 10th Cavalry regiments were assigned to nearby Fort Russell under Captain John “Black Jack” Pershing, who went on to command American forces on the Western Front in World War I. (Indian tribes called the African American servicemen Buffalo Soldiers for the color and texture of their hair.) Cheyenne citizens had “solemnly resolved to hate and detest the colored troops before their arrival,” reported the Daily Leader, but the men conducted themselves so admirably that “contempt soon turned to respect.”

  When Pickett stepped into the Frontier Days ring in 1904, the audience was primed for something extraordinary. His signature move was called bulldogging, and it consisted of taking down a full-grown steer using only his teeth.

  As a teenager, Pickett had watched trained bulldogs take down bulls: a “heel dog” went for a leg, while a “catch dog” latched onto the animal’s nose or lip. He decided to try it himself, alone, at the age of sixteen. He survived long enough to master the feat, and became the only person in the country who could make a living doing it.

  Bruises, blows, burns, and lacerations were all part of rodeo competition, just as they were in the daily life of a cowboy. Horses tumbled during races and steers thrashed while being roped. Men stumbled off the field battered and bleeding from the nose, mouth, even the ears, or lost consciousness from whiplash. One autopsy of a dead bronco rider found the man’s liver had been torn loose.

  But bulldogging was extreme even for rodeo. In front of the Frontier Days grandstand, Pickett leapt from a horse and grabbed a wild-eyed steer by the horns. Using his whole body for leverage, he twisted the steer’s head until its nose pointed straight into the air. The thousand-pound animal bellowed and gasped for breath, its tongue dangling. The steer jerked Pickett off his feet again and again, but he held on.

  Then Pickett leaned over the steer’s neck and dug his teeth into the animal’s lower lip. With a showman’s flair he let go of the horns, threw his arms wide, and slowly sank onto his back. The steer’s neck twisted even farther around, and in a moment it lost its footing and rolled over on top of him.

  The crowd was dumbstru
ck. First-time spectators thought Pickett had surely been crushed to death. But a second later the steer rolled to the side and Pickett stood up unhurt, bowing and smiling to deafening applause.

  The animal had barely staggered to its feet when Pickett did it all over again. One witness called the performance “one of the most startling and sensational exhibitions ever seen at a place where daring and thrilling feats are commonplace.”

  BY 1907, FRONTIER DAYS was hands down the greatest show of its kind, attracting 20,000 people to Cheyenne every summer. It was also a huge source of local pride, since Wyoming cowboys had never lost the two most prestigious events: steer roping and bronco busting. New challengers from Colorado, Arizona, and beyond only intensified the competition. “Wyoming punchers naturally wish to keep the championships in this state,” wrote the Denver Post, “and the talent from the outside is equally determined to capture the trophies.”

  Frontier Days was big enough that even nonhuman performers were becoming celebrities. One infamous icon was a bronco named Steamboat, a coal-black gelding with three white feet and a white star on his forehead. He was so full of dynamite that he broke a bone in his nose while being branded (or castrated, depending on the story), leaving him with a distinctive whistling breath and a nickname that stuck.

  Steamboat’s reign started at Denver’s Festival of Mountain and Plain in 1901 and lasted nearly a decade. In his prime, he was the most notorious bucking horse in the West, and perhaps in the country, drawing people from hundreds of miles away to watch him in action. He was a big animal, over 1,100 pounds, with the “muscles of a plow horse, but the speed of a Greyhound,” as one reporter put it.

  Steamboat would often squat as he was being saddled for a ride. Then:

  By the time the bronc buster was set in the stirrups Steamboat’s belly’d be almost touchin’ the arena dust. Then, the second they’d jerk that blindfold he’d explode! He’d bust out to the middle of the arena as if he wanted the stage all to himself and he’d put on the damnedest exhibition of sunfishing and windmilling I ever seen. His best trick was to swap ends between jumps and come down ker-slam on four ramrod legs.

  Steamboat’s signature move was a twisting kick that sent his head and forelegs in one direction and his rump and hind legs in another, mane and tail whipping in every direction. Almost every man who dared to mount Steamboat called him the worst horse he ever rode. One rider said he couldn’t eat anything for several days afterward. Another, who stayed on for ten seconds, woke up lying on a blanket behind the stands with no memory of anything beyond the first few jumps. He couldn’t speak above a whisper for a month.

  “There was a portion of ham in Steamboat and a lot of sportsmanship,” one expert wrote. He never refused to buck or bucked into a crowd, and he never kicked or trampled a rider after throwing him. He simply “unloaded a bronco rider a day just like clockwork and when led back by the grand stand was applauded for his effort.”

  At the 1907 bucking event in Cheyenne, heavy rains had turned the grounds into clinging mud. Eben Low was among the crowd that day, watching Steamboat chuck rider after rider. By the end of the competition, just two men remained: Clayton Danks, the cowboy who had dazzled Teddy Roosevelt a few years earlier, and a rider named John Dodge.

  Dodge rode Steamboat, who bucked a hundred yards down the field, turned around, and bucked all the way back before launching the cowboy off his back. Dodge hit the ground so hard he lay still for several moments before climbing to his feet.

  Danks rode his bronco to a standstill and won the championship. Audiences would have to wait another year to see the superstar cowboy ride the “far-famed outlaw cayuse.”

  In addition to seeing a legendary bronco in top form, Eben also witnessed an outstanding steer-roping contest. While bronco riding was a battle of strength and will, roping was a test of technique and speed, and fans reacted accordingly. As one reporter put it: “The winner of a cattle-roping contest is a bronzed hero” and “an object of admiring envy to every man.”

  Roping also had its fair share of risk. At major rodeos like Frontier Days, steers were selected for age and bad temperament. “A 3-year-old steer is just in the prime of life as far as ability to run is concerned,” explained the Denver Times, “and his general cussedness rises above par at that age.” Their horns were fully grown as well. Thrashing steers could kick, headbutt, or gore cowboys trying to tie them up. A lassoed steer could even yank a contestant’s saddle right off his horse and dash away with it.

  The world roping record had been set at Frontier Days in 1906 by a cowboy named Charles “C.B.” Irwin, who clocked the seemingly unbeatable time of 38.2 seconds. If any challenger in 1907 could top that, it was Wyoming’s own Angus MacPhee. Thirty-two-year-old MacPhee had grown up in Chugwater, a speck of a town forty-five miles north of Cheyenne. His parents had immigrated from the Scottish island of Islay and had held on to at least a piece of their heritage; in 1886, his father founded the Islay Post Office near Laramie.

  MacPhee was a slender man with a narrow nose and gray eyes. By eighteen, he was working as a bronco buster for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West in Chicago. His next job was running supplies to gold miners in Alaska by dogsled. In 1898, MacPhee joined other experienced cowboys, miners, and athletes training as part of the volunteer regiment that would come to be known as the Rough Riders, led by Colonel Leonard Wood and his second-in-command, Teddy Roosevelt. MacPhee and other Cheyenne cowboys went to war in Cuba and the Philippines, and years later, MacPhee’s daughter would recall how her father and “Colonel Teddy,” now president, reunited at Frontier Days in 1903 “like two hugging bears.”

  MacPhee began entering rodeo contests and winning, eventually becoming a five-time Frontier Days champion. In 1907, Eben watched closely as the Wyoming cowboy tied his first steer in 37.4 seconds, a full second faster than Irwin’s record. Nobody else came close that round or the next. MacPhee made another perfect throw in the finals, with a time of 58.8 seconds, and his combined time earned him the title.

  Taking in the competition from the stands, Eben was impressed by MacPhee’s performance. Yet the one-handed cowboy also felt Waimea Boys like Ikua were as good as any of the competitors gathered in Cheyenne. He had such confidence in his fellow paniolo that he would, without hesitation, “pit them against the finest in the world and wager my silver spurs and $2,000 saddle against anyone in a contest with them, whether on mountains or plains.”

  Even if he was wrong, a contest pitting Wyoming’s best against Hawaii’s best would be worth the price of admission. Before the results of the 1907 Frontier Days contest were even announced, Eben decided to invite the steer-roping champion to compete in Honolulu. He contacted the local papers and promised to cover the expenses of any cowboy who came to Hawaii for the matchup—and guaranteed him a “a royal good time.”

  Eben made his offer the same afternoon MacPhee was crowned Frontier Days titleholder, and the Wyoming cowboy accepted the invitation on the spot.

  11

  Go Fetch Your Glory

  EBEN LEFT FOR HAWAII aboard the steamship Manchuria out of San Francisco, his entrepreneurial instinct in overdrive. As one Parker Ranch cowboy put it, “God put Eben here to promote the paniolo.” His experience in Cheyenne had inspired him to put together a huge rodeo and cowboy carnival in the islands.

  Eben arrived in Honolulu at the end of October, picked early December as the date for a Wild West show, and got to work assembling a program. His visit to Frontier Days had shown him how important media coverage was, and he played the local papers like a pro. Eben made sure reporters knew that cowboys were coming all the way from Wyoming to compete, including world champion roper Angus MacPhee, “terror of the steers.”

  With Eben’s prodding, the press covered MacPhee like an international celebrity and painted the contest as a showdown between the mainland champ and hometown hero Ikua Purdy. “Eben Low Says Natives Can Not Be Beaten,” read one headline, followed by Eben’s assertion that Texas cowboys “have not
hing on the native product.” The paniolo worked in tougher conditions, were better with the lasso, and—lest anyone forget—herded cows into the ocean.

  Part of the promotion involved educating Hawaiian readers about the paniolo temperament, or a glamorized version of it. They were “modest, unassuming fellows, who do their work as they find it and think nothing of the performance,” wrote the Pacific Commercial Advertiser. “Danger is their daily portion and hardship their lot, yet they are always on hand with the goods and come bad luck or good, figure it is all to be in the game . . . In this respect they certainly differ from a type of the western cowboy, with the loud mouth and the large obtrusive gun.”

  In many ways, Ikua did fit this image of the modest cowboy. He was quiet, relished his work, and appreciated the rhythm and independence of it. Still, before the contest in Honolulu, Ikua said he could go toe-to-toe with MacPhee—give him “a hard tussle,” as he put it. After all, Ikua’s top time (38.75 seconds) was barely a second slower than the Wyoming cowboy’s best (37.4 seconds).

  It’s impossible, though, to know how much Ikua, or MacPhee for that matter, bought into Eben’s narrative of epic rivalry. Ikua certainly had other things on his mind: earlier that year, his wife had delivered a stillborn child. Compared with the heartbreak of such an event, the excitement of a sporting match may not have even registered.

  Nevertheless, the contest generated plenty of headline-worthy drama—hometown underdog squares off against haole champ—with an obvious subtext of colonial tension. The time had come for Hawaii’s paniolo to show the mainlanders what they could do.