Book Review: Aloha Rodeo (Hawaiian cowboys, Wyoming's Frontier Days) (OT)

Aloha Rodeo: Three Hawaiian Cowboys, The World’s Greatest Rodeo, and a Hidden History of the American West, by David Wolman and Julian Smith (HarperCollins, 2019, 242 pages, $27.99)

A: What did Hawaii and Wyoming* have in common in 1908?

A: Cowboys!

Q: Cowboys?

A: Yup.

Primarily a history book, Aloha Rodeo will tie many well-known facts together if you have lived in Hawaii or Wyoming (or even many locations in the West) – from the annexation** of Hawaii to the near-extinction of the American buffalo to wild cattle (an invasive species) introduction on the Big Island to the Parker Ranch, a town in itself with 300,00 acres. From Queen Liliuokalani to Cheyenne’s Frontier Days (according to Wikipedia, the rodeo is now ten days long!)

Fortunately, the book is fairly short for other readers. The first couple of chapters can easily be skipped with no loss of momentum while the crux of the story, about the three Hawaiian cowboys (paniolo) who win surprisingly at an early rodeo on the mainland, takes only the final quarter of the book and sounds much like the re-telling of an athletic competition, play by play.

Surprising tidbits of historical culture can be found: having canines for dinner (and not for company), the history of bulldogging and how real canine bulldogs did their job, the origin of the name of the Buffalo Soldiers, a wolf-roping event*** that was such a disaster, it was never held again.

Another thread running through Aloha Rodeo educates the reader about the Wild West of America which lasted only a few decades before the Easterners started idealizing the rapidly disappearing life and times of the American Cowboy with dime-store novels and not-so-realistic re-enactments of life such as Custer’s Last Stand and Wild Bill Cody’s Wild West Show with Annie Oakley. What the Easterners wanted, the Easterners got, in the way of titillation, much of which ended up in our children’s history books.

This reviewer believes the subtitle is quite a bit off as well. The reader expects a story about three Hawaiian cowboys but that only really begins two-thirds of the way through. Aloha Rodeo is primarily a history book with a few stories tossed in, followed by a blow-by-blow description of a rodeo. For those not familiar with rodeos, it may awaken an interest. The World’s Greatest Rodeo may refer to Cheyenne’s Frontier Days although the Calgary Stampede was more familiar to this reviewer growing up in the American West. And finally, this reviewer never really found out what the hidden history of the American West referred to. Perhaps an Easterner will understand that, however.

Nevertheless, there are plenty of topics touched upon to whet the appetite besides rodeos and the equine history of the Hawaiian Islands and their invasion by Americans: the near extinction of the buffalo, women’s rights, cowboy life, to name a few major ones.
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*Wyoming’s motto: Equal Rights (a story in itself about women in the Wild West). According to the Denver Post, writing about an early rodeo in Wyoming, “When a young lady is gritty as well as pretty, she wins the crowd.” (p. 192)

**Hawaii surrendered to the US in 1898 and, two years later, held the Big Island’s first Fourth of July rodeo. The state has historically been a crossroads of people and cultures: in 1900, the island of Hawaii’s population of 154,000 was composed of 20% Hawaiians, 40% Japanese, 7% Caucasian (haole), 17% Chinese, 11% Portuguese and 5% part-Hawaiian while the mainland was 90% white –  Hawaii was truly more of a melting pot than the mainland was.

***Wolves were feared and hated in the West of yesteryear. This event consisted of roping two wolves, half-grown canines, one of which was petrified and took to ground in the grass, attempting to hide, trembling, while the other was lassoed after only 50 yards and then drug behind the galloping equine. Fortunately, the audience was not impressed with this barbarous cruelty and the event never again was part of Frontier Days.