Aloha Rodeo

by David Wolman

  THE WILD WEST SHOW kicked off at Kapi‘olani Park on December 13, 1907. The grandstands and bleachers were nearly full, and even Queen Lili‘uokalani was there to take in the spectacle. Although she had been deposed nearly a decade prior, the people adored her. She was still their queen, and her attendance added to the pageantry of the day.

  Despite heavy rains, Johnny “Cheyenne” Winters, another cowboy from Wyoming, gave a dazzling exhibition of trick roping. But when Winters went to compete, he ended up pinned beneath a horse and had to wait until the animal was lifted off his leg before he could limp from the arena. Another rider was knocked unconscious.

  The action attracted a rowdy scene around the park. When dozens of Hawaiians started climbing the fences by the cattle corral, police officers used whips to push them back. A mob began shouting and taunting the mostly white officers. Someone drew a gun, but Eben intervened and managed to convince the police to back off.

  More worrisome was the fact that the weather had delayed MacPhee’s ship until the last possible moment. Eben had to pick the cowboy and his family up at the port and drive them to the grounds himself. The audience welcomed MacPhee with three rowdy cheers, as if he was one of their own.

  When the “puncher from Wyoming” did finally mount up, he was not in peak condition; according to one account he “showed the effect of his very recent steamer experience and the heave was still in his legs and head.” MacPhee missed his first pass at the steer, although his riding showed “that he is undoubtedly in a class by himself, while his quick recovery of his lariat after his first throw showed his expertness with the rope.”

  On MacPhee’s second attempt, the crowd got a glimpse of brilliance when he caught and threw his steer in just 18 seconds. As he dismounted to make the tie, however, his horse let the rope slack and the steer regained its footing, enveloping itself and MacPhee in a cloud of dust.

  MacPhee’s wife, Della, and his daughter Inez were seated next to the queen. When the dust parted to reveal MacPhee pinned beneath the steer, Inez heard the crowd emit “a great sound like a wailing moan.” But the young girl assured the queen that her father was fine. “He just bulldogged the steer, that’s all,” she said. “Papa is too smart to get hurt in a show.”

  A moment later, MacPhee was up, unhurt and bowing to great applause. He had lost the contest but won the crowd. (He had also gained an appreciation for island cattle: “The Hawaiian steer is a tough customer,” he said later, because even when thrown they “bounce up again like a rubber ball.”)

  Ikua took first place in the “mavericking” contest, in which a group of cowboys pursued dozens of calves and raced to be the first to rope one, throw it to the ground, and go through the motions of branding.

  The fastest calf-roping time of the day was 1:02, by a young paniolo named Makai Keli‘ilike from the island of Kahoolawe. Ikua made a spectacularly fast throw, and even though his steer staggered to its feet like MacPhee’s had, he was able to make the tie in 1:28—not enough to win, but hardly a disappointing performance.

  The paniolo had done themselves and the islands proud. As rodeo fever spread through Hawaii, everyone wondered who was truly the best. In Waimea, Ikua and the other Parker Ranch boys practiced in Under-a-Minute corral, named for the quick times that local ropers clocked. By now Ikua was famous throughout the islands, but he was no outlier. George Lindsay, another Parker Ranch roper, tied a steer in 39.4 seconds, less than a second behind Ikua’s record. At a rodeo in Hilo in February 1908, Keli‘ilike won the roping contest with a time of 1 minute 6 seconds, while Archie Ka‘au‘a came in third. Ikua wasn’t there, but Eben was, and he delighted the crowd with a roping time of 1 minute 12 seconds, which as far as anyone could tell was a record for one-armed ropers.

  Also on hand in Hilo was Angus MacPhee. It had been two months since he and his family had left the mainland during a brutal Front Range blizzard and arrived in the welcoming climate of Hawaii. They decided to stay for good. At the Hilo rodeo, MacPhee failed to place in the roping contest once again, but this time a lethargic mount was to blame. According to Eben: “One of the girls up there told him that next time he had better ride the steer and rope the horse.” MacPhee did win the barrel-racing competition, at least.

  His streak of bad luck finally ended at a rodeo on Oahu in July 1908. On the first day, he clocked the fastest time of 1 minute 10 seconds. But the next day, Archie Ka‘au‘a, who had also won the half-mile pony race, managed a 55-second tie, putting him ahead of MacPhee. The paniolo were consistently matching or outperforming the Wyoming champion. But this was all taking place in the islands, far out of sight of mainland newspapers and rodeo-goers.

  BACK IN CHEYENNE, AS winter gave way to spring, Frontier Days officials were getting ready to welcome contestants from abroad. The show had started drawing the interest of top cowboys from places as far as Brazil and Argentina, each with their own distinct cowboy traditions. Word of Hawaii’s paniolo was filtering out thanks to the recent rodeos, Eben’s publicity efforts, and Buffalo Bill Cody and his international cast of performers. Even though the islands were now officially part of the United States, to most Americans they might as well have been another country.

  In June 1908, Frontier Days Secretary E. W. Stone wrote to Eben with a proposition. The rodeo’s organizers would pay travel expenses and provide room and board for a few of Eben’s best riders and ropers to compete in Cheyenne in August. All they had to bring was their own ropes and saddles; horses would be provided. “We will do our best to give the boys a good time, and assure them fair treatment in all contests,” Stone wrote. He added that Eben should send along photographs of the lads for advertising materials.

  Of course Eben said yes. Steer roping was the event Hawaiians had the best chance of winning, and Ikua and Archie were the two obvious choices. Eben later added his brother Jack to join them. Eben himself was too busy with his various business interests to go, but he solicited donations from other island ranches to ensure the three paniolo had enough money to make it all the way to Wyoming.

  Ikua, Archie, and Jack had never been outside of the islands. Suddenly they were offered a free trip across the Pacific and the chance to take home some prize money. Their descendants would later say the men were thrilled at the opportunity to compete. Yet as their journey neared, they were probably apprehensive, too. Wyoming was synonymous with rodeo champions.

  The paniolo were also inadvertent emissaries. On the heels of annexation, Hawaiian cultural identity was under threat, and the islands’ future under U.S. rule was uncertain. When the paniolo sailed out of Honolulu aboard the steamship Alameda on August 5, 1908, the Waimea Boys brought with them much more than saddles and lariats. They carried the hope and pride of the islands.

  It was a moment that went well beyond rodeo. “We have no doubts,” declared one newspaper editorial, “that these Hawaiians will return adorned in victory in the various contests, being that it is clear that the little ability of the haole cannot match that of the Hawaiian boys in this skill . . . O Hawaiians, go fetch your glory!”

  Part III

  12

  See America First

  THE SAN FRANCISCO THAT greeted the Hawaiians was practically brand new.

  Two years earlier, at dawn on Wednesday, April 18, 1906, a massive earthquake ruptured 296 miles of the San Andreas Fault. The shaking, and the four days of fires that followed, killed 3,000 people and leveled four-fifths of the city. Insurance claims filed in the aftermath equaled the entire federal budget.

  The rebuilding efforts involved razing entire redwood forests and working thousands of horses to death. But with stunning speed, a modern metropolis supplanted what had been a creaky Victorian port city. In three years, 20,000 new buildings rose from the ruins. Two months before the paniolo arrived, authorities had shuttered the last refugee camp set up for people who had been left homeless by the disaster.

  For the country at large, the devastating earthquake did little to quash a pervasive spirit of optim
ism about a better future. The United States had emerged from the Spanish-American War as a confident world power. Americans in the new century didn’t merely get by; they did things: drove automobiles, watched movies, chatted on the telephone. Every week seemed to bring new breakthroughs: skyscrapers soaring higher in Manhattan, the Wright Brothers flying farther in North Carolina, engineers digging farther across the Panama Canal.

  Of course, this buoyant script was being written mostly by white men. So it’s little surprise that The San Francisco Call noted the arrival of the “chocolate-colored rope throwers” from Hawaii. These “Kanaka cowboys,” the paper said, “think they can show the product of the wild west a few things about roping steers.”

  Jack Low’s wife, Emily, accompanied the three paniolo on their journey. Emily had dark eyes and a kind smile, and always seemed to have a book in her hand. They had been married three years before, and the trip to Wyoming was like a delayed honeymoon, an opportunity for the young couple to see the world.

  When a reporter interviewed the men, Ikua, who was most comfortable speaking Hawaiian or pidgin, had little to say about the upcoming contest. Archie, however, spoke “with the simple modesty of a leading lady who knows herself a headliner and wants the world to share her knowledge.” He boasted of winning the island championship: “I roped, threw and tied four steers in 1 minute and 35 seconds.”

  “And Mr. Purdy, is he a champion, also?” asked the reporter.

  “Purdy? Well, I believe Purdy did the trick once in 38 3/4 seconds. But it was only one steer. My time was for four steers.” Whether Archie said this with an elbow and a wink to his cousin, the reporter didn’t say.

  THE NEXT MORNING THE Hawaiians traveled to the Ferry Building on the Embarcadero for the first step of their overland journey to Cheyenne. They had never seen a structure like it. Each of the clock faces on the 245-foot tower was the size of a small corral. Crowds surged under its long arched arcades. Inside the building, sunbeams fell through the skylights that ran the length of the Great Nave, two stories high and longer than two football fields.

  Eyes wide, the paniolo made their way through the multitudes and boarded a ferry across San Francisco Bay, a fresh west wind pushing away the morning fog.

  As the ferry drew closer to Oakland, the passengers could see a forest of ships’ masts lining the Central Pacific Railroad’s two-mile Long Wharf, where freight trains waited to load and unload cargo. The paniolo found the Southern Pacific’s No. 2 Overland Limited waiting at the Oakland pier.

  Operating the western half of a route that ran from San Francisco to Chicago, the Overland was the finest rail experience in the West, and possibly the country. The train had electric lights, drawing rooms, and smoking parlors. The Hawaiians could eat in the buffet car or the ritzier dining car, with food and service comparable to the most upscale restaurant. They moved between cars thanks to the recently invented closed vestibule, and took in the scenery from the open rear platform of the observation car. Emily would have been at home in the library car, stocked with carefully curated volumes of fiction and travel. Jack might not have loved the engine smoke coming in through the open windows, aggravating his asthma.

  To a cowboy from Hawaii—or the average mainlander, for that matter—the Overland Limited was like a luxury hotel speeding along at thirty miles an hour. But what made it truly exceptional wasn’t the brass fixtures in the washrooms or the starched sheets in the pull-down Pullman beds. It was the route itself, a sweeping introduction to the landscapes and history of the American West. Much of the Overland’s itinerary traced in reverse the paths of explorers and wagon trains that had ventured toward the Pacific just decades before.

  After a mid-morning departure, the Overland left the smelting works, sugar refineries, and waterfront canneries of Oakland. It passed the town of Rodeo, whose name recalled the days of Spanish vaqueros and their annual roundups. The train was then divided into segments and rolled aboard the paddle steamer Solano, then the largest ferryboat in the world, for a short hop across a branch of San Pablo Bay.

  The Overland continued into the broad, fertile Sacramento Valley, where workers from Mexico and East Asia tended crops. It was open country, dotted with groves of spreading oaks whose twisted branches recalled the koa trees on the slopes of Mauna Kea.

  Gold-dusted Sacramento came next. In addition to being the nexus of the 1849 California gold rush, the state capital was home to a colony of about a hundred native Hawaiians who had been brought by pioneer John Sutter to work at Sutter’s Fort.* The Hawaiians settled at the junction of the Feather and Sacramento Rivers. The San Francisco Call described how the “big brown men and women” held luau, danced hula, and intermarried with members of the local Maidu tribe. (“The salubrious climate,” the writer noted, “is engendering in this languorous race an aptitude for labor.”)

  From Sacramento, the Overland steamed toward the peaks of the Sierra Nevada. Orchards of pears and prunes gave way to evergreen forests as the engine slowed and strained against the increasing grade. The paniolo had been on higher mountains—Mauna Kea tops out at almost 14,000 feet—but there was nothing on Hawaii like the sheer granite relief of the Sierras.

  Sunset came just as the Overland crested 7,000-foot Donner Pass, where, in the winter of 1846–1847, a snowbound party of pioneers had had to resort to cannibalism. Two decades later, railroad crews tackled the hardest engineering challenge on the transcontinental route: digging and blasting seven tunnels through solid rock, in a place where the snow could pile up to forty feet high. No traveler could pass through these tunnels without marveling at the monumental labor it had taken to lay the tracks.

  Ninety percent of those laborers were Chinese, brought to the United States to fill a shortage of workers in the West. They endured backbreaking work and institutionalized racism, living in segregated line camps like the one that came through Cheyenne. Resentment over the fact that they worked for less than whites led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The only federal legislation in American history to ban immigrants of a specific ethnicity, it also forbade Chinese who were already in the country from becoming citizens. The law wasn’t repealed until 1943.

  The August light was fading as the Overland pulled into the lumber town of Truckee. Forest fires had destroyed the city over half a dozen times already, and the paniolo and Emily likely saw the glow of yet another blaze that was burning east of town. From Truckee, passengers on the Overland sped in comfort across the merciless landscape of northern Nevada, sweltering even at night despite the breeze through the open windows.

  The sun was up by the time the train entered Utah. Travelers sipped their morning coffee and watched the landscape flatten and bleach into the otherworldly Great Salt Lake Desert, where the salt flats stretched south like an infinite sheet of paper.

  Just forty miles south of the rail line was the most isolated community of Hawaiians on the mainland. Iosepa, Utah, was named after the Mormon elder Joseph F. Smith, who had served as a missionary in the islands and was the nephew of the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith. Native Hawaiian converts to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints had first immigrated to Salt Lake City in the 1870s, but they experienced such discrimination in the Utah capital that church leadership decided they would be “better off” living somewhere else.

  That somewhere was Skull Valley, Utah, a setting as unlike Polynesia as anywhere on Earth. When the first forty-six Hawaiian settlers arrived in the valley in August 1889, they found a desolate basin hemmed in by mountains at the southwest corner of the Great Salt Lake. The islanders could handle the heat, even the dryness, but the bitter winters and economic hardship were almost too much. As the Hawaiians huddled in poorly insulated homes, their children died from whooping cough. Eventually the settlers started growing crops, raising carp in ponds, and mining gold from the nearby mountains, and by 1908 the population of Iosepa was almost 200.

  But leaving Salt Lake City didn’t mean the Hawaiians had left prejudice behind. When a hand
ful of leprosy cases broke out in Iosepa, Utah papers blamed the Pacific Islanders for bringing the “devil’s disease.” Hawaii had a well-known leper colony on Molokai at the time, where people with advanced cases were relocated, and whites believed Hawaiians were more susceptible to the illness.*

  Residents of Iosepa pined for their lost homes, painting images of whales and sea turtles on the walls of caves above the town. In 1917, six years after Iosepa won an award as “the most progressive city in Utah,” the church president emptied the settlement. Even though many of the younger residents knew nothing besides life in Utah, the church ordered them all to return to Hawaii to help build a temple on Oahu. The Skull Valley land was sold and the homes and irrigation canals the settlers had struggled to build were abandoned.

  As the Overland pushed east into the Wasatch Mountains, the paniolo marveled at formations such as Devil’s Slide, a pair of parallel limestone ridges plunging downhill for hundreds of feet, and Pulpit Rock, the massive boulder where the Mormon prophet Brigham Young was said to have preached his first sermon in Utah. In Echo Canyon, the railroad tracks crossed and recrossed a mountain torrent under gray masses of stone. The shriek of the locomotive echoed off cliffs and peaks tinted red with iron.

  Then, finally, came the arid hills and flatlands of southern Wyoming. Soon it was night again. Green River, Rawlins, Laramie, the Continental Divide—all came and went in the darkness. Less than an hour after sunrise, at 6:35 A.M. on Friday, August 14, 1908, the Overland groaned to a stop in Cheyenne and the islanders stepped down onto the platform.

  WITH SIX DAYS TO go before the rodeo, Wyoming’s capital was in a frenzy of preparation. The city expected up to 30,000 spectators. Every bed in town was full, from the $3.50-a-night rooms at the Inter-Ocean Hotel to the 15-cent bunks at the Salvation Workman’s Hotel, coffee and doughnuts included.