Book Review-Aloha Rodeo-Three Hawaiian Cowboys, the World's Greatest Rodeo, and a Hidden History of the American West

Review: Aloha Rodeo: Three Hawaiian Cowboys, the World's Greatest Rodeo, and a Hidden History of the American West by David Wolman and Julian Smith

Strap yourself in for a story where cowboys aren’t the agents of American imperialism, where they don’t fight the indigenous population, and where the cattle they work have a nasty habit of killing people. All of which sounds like an alternate history work of fiction, but is in fact the story of the “paniolos” who worked the nascent cattle ranches of Hawaii.

I heard about this book on NPR a few years back when it came out and finally got my ears on it this year. It was worth the wait.

As a history book, I’ll note, that it reads more like the pop history it is then a work of academic rigor, though I haven’t checked its sources. Some of the historical connections seemed a little light, and in cases to carry some biases in their telling, but that doesn’t change the main story line or effect the enjoyability of the story as a whole.

For instance the brief treatment of Iosepa, Utah deserved more than its quick handling as an aside on their train ride from California to Wyoming. It’s a fascinating story that deserves more telling than it got.

It spans much of the modern history of Hawaii, from the arrival of europeans to the end of the monarchy. Cattle were brought to the Hawaiian archipelago in 1793 when George Vancouver, a British captain dropped off a load of 10 black longhorns. This was of course more than a friendly gesture, one intended to intimately link the futures of Hawaii and England, beware of Brits bearing gifts it seems.

It all starts to ramp up after King Kamehameha protects the surviving cattle from being killed and you end up with 20,000 cattle with little fear of people and no fear of predators.

Their expanding reign of terror continues largely uninterrupted until the 1830s when King Kamehameha III recruited vaqueros from California, then a part of Mexico, to come teach his people how to manage the cattle.

Thus was born one of the older cowboy traditions in the geographies that would become the USA. These “paniolos” eventually were given the showdown that we all hoped for with the cowboys of the American West when in 1908 they arrived in Cheyenne Wyoming for Frontier Days, the largest rodeo in the world at the time.

Their techniques were different, their approaches distinct, these "interlopers" didn't just struggle to fit in to the extremely white Cheyenne, they also struggled to fit with the other cowboys who spent their lives working cattle. In the end their victory placed them as figures of legend, though it took a century more for it to be enshrined in a hall of fame.

The authors sum the whole premise of the book up well when they write "Just as the binary conceits of the American West — cowboy versus Indian, civilization versus wilderness, good versus evil — were crystallizing in the national psyche, along came a small posse from afar whose story pushed back against such simplistic thinking."

Besides those profound thoughts it's just a fun fun ride that is over as quickly as a ride on a bronco's back.

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