by David Wolman
It was a scramble to get ready. The first order of business was cleaning up the place. Newspaper announcements urged residents and businesses to put all their trash cans and empty boxes and barrels out of sight. The city marshal set chain gangs to work clearing away trash from streets and alleys and hauling it to the dump.
Posters hung throughout Wyoming and Colorado advertised “An Attractive and Novel Program” that would include “Vivid Representation of Frontier Scenes: Pony Express, Emigrant Schooners, Vigilantes, Wild Broncho Riding, Roping, Throwing and other Cowboy Feats, Pony Races, Pioneer Sports, Etc.” An eight-page souvenir pamphlet listed twelve events alongside ads for hotels, grocers, shoe stores, and ladies’ wool underwear.
From its inception, Frontier Days deliberately tapped into the sentiment that something special was disappearing. In 1890, the year Wyoming became the forty-fourth state, the U.S. Census announced the end of the frontier, at least officially. It was a turning point in American history: the distinction between settled and unsettled territory was gone. As the program for the first Frontier Days put it:
The frontier line of advancing settlements has already disappeared, like misty shadows vanishing before the Sun’s Rays. The varied and adventurous life of the early explorers, the hunters and trappers and Indian fighters, the dangers and privations of the first settlers and the thrilling incidents of their struggles on mountains and plain, are now dissolving views of memory, like the “passing of ships in the night.”
The Old West would soon be gone, but the romanticizing was just beginning.
IN THE DAYS LEADING up to the contest, men from Wyoming, Colorado, and Nebraska began to arrive in Cheyenne by horseback and wagon team. Trains brought visitors by the hundreds; Angier had arranged to have round-trip tickets from Denver offered at a discount. Spectators arrived to find a freshly scrubbed city that was ready for action. American flags and red, white, and blue bunting hung from buildings and balconies.
The first battalion of the U.S. Army’s 8th Infantry Regiment marched from Fort Russell and set up camp near the fairgrounds. When they were done pitching their light A-frame tents, the men were dismissed for some rest and recuperation. The night before the big day, the city’s saloons, restaurants, hotels, and streets overflowed with people. Impeccably dressed aldermen from Denver mingled with cowhands still dusty from the trail; army lieutenants tipped their hats to ladies from Laramie; tourists from the Midwest gawked at bowlegged cowboys dressed in silk shirts and sheepskin chaps. Brass bands and the U.S. Army provided the soundtrack. Anyone who couldn’t find a hotel room could hire a berth in railroad sleeping cars hauled in for the occasion.
The next morning visitors and nearly all of Cheyenne’s residents headed for the fairgrounds—on foot and horseback, in wagons and carriages, and aboard special Union Pacific trains running hourly from the downtown depot. A dozen emigrant wagons that happened to be passing through Wyoming on the Oregon Trail joined the procession. Drawn by teams of oxen, the prairie schooners trailed horses, dogs, and children.
At noon, a special excursion train from Denver pulled into the Cheyenne depot and was greeted by a head-ringing cacophony. As the clock struck the hour, every church and school bell in the city rang, and every railroad engine and business blew its whistle. Fort Russell’s Battery A lit off thirty cannons, and hundreds of locals fired pistols, rifles, and shotguns into the sky. Cheyenne Frontier Days was officially under way.
The fairground corrals teemed with nervous livestock and men doing their best to keep the animals under control. Stray dogs nipped the heels of lowing cattle. Admission to the grounds was free, but a spot in the uncovered bleachers cost 15 cents. For 20 cents more, spectators could find a seat in the grandstand, where high-society men and women in summer fashions enjoyed “temperate and spirituous libations.” On either side of the seating area, crowds packed against the fence surrounding the half-mile track. Some sat astride horses or in carriages.
The first three events were horse races. Prizes ranged from $20 to $50, the equivalent of roughly $500 to $1,400 today. The wild horse race delivered authentic frontier-style fun. Ownerless horses were part of life in the West, where tens of thousands of mustangs still ran free. Earlier in the day, cowboys had gathered about fifty wild horses in the corral at the fairground. These were fierce, agile animals that had never been roped, much less saddled or ridden. Now ten of them were lassoed and led to the track in front of the grandstand. Twenty men stood ready, a rider and an assistant for each.
When the contest official shouted, “Go!” two men sprang at each horse and tried to strap a bridle and saddle on the terrified animal. This was the start of fifteen minutes of absolute madness. Horses bucked, kicked, bolted, screamed, or simply lay down.
Overeager spectators kept crowding onto the track, despite repeated warnings. One Wyoming State Tribune reporter judged this as excessively risky for women: “It is a curious and inexplicable thing, the unaccountable desire of dozens of ladies to stand on the racetrack, totally oblivious to the extreme novelty and danger of their position.” To his relief, they eventually hiked up their petticoats and removed themselves to a safe distance. A number of “sturdy citizens” were called into service to help police keep the crowd back.
By the time the winner of the wild horse race managed to ride his mount all the way around the half-mile track, some of the mustangs hadn’t even been saddled yet. The event was over, but the wild horses weren’t finished. Later in the afternoon, they broke out of their corral and stampeded up the racetrack. The herd turned and drove straight at—and then through—the bleachers, splintering planks and parting the crowd like a screaming sea. God knows how, but no one was badly injured.
Anyone who thought the wild horse race would be the day’s most exciting event had to reconsider when the bucking horses were led into the arena. The struggling animals could barely be contained inside the track, and kept knocking over men trying to put on bridles and saddles. Sometimes a cowboy would bite or twist a horse’s ear to distract it when the saddle was being slid into place. In the words of one witness, “The scene of the wildest kind of beasts raving and jumping and attempting to jump the fences kept the crowd at a distance and presented a thrilling scene.”
Bronco busting—teaching a horse to accept a saddle and rider—was a legitimate job in cattle country. Riders earned good money for each horse they broke. But there weren’t any standards or rules at the time for judging bronco riding as sport. Each man just had to hold on as long as he could and hope the horse put on a good show for the judges. Unlike today’s eight-second time limit, the ride went on until the horse stopped bucking, the rider was thrown off, or the judges decided they had seen enough. There were a few rules for the cowboys: they could use only a plain halter and a single braided rein held in one hand. If the rider’s other hand touched any part of the rigging, known as “pulling leather,” it meant disqualification. Beyond that, a cowboy just had to not get killed.
When each man was ready, he yelled, “Jerk ’er!” An assistant yanked the blindfold off the horse and got out of the way as the snorting bronco went ballistic. Each animal bucked differently. Horses reared on their hind legs and switched directions in midair. One second an animal would crowhop—make stiff-legged jumps—or “swallow its head” by arching its back. The next moment it would sunfish, twisting its body into a crescent as if trying to touch nose to tail. Other movements were dubbed the double O, the corkscrew, and the high dive.
Riders had a choice of techniques to both infuriate the horse and stay aboard for an extra fraction of a second. A cowboy might kick the animal in the ribs or fan it with his hat to get its blood up. For further encouragement he could jam a thumb in a sensitive spot in the horse’s shoulder to make it buck harder. Sometimes fans even chanted, “Thumb him! Thumb him!” Other cowboys found that a little gum resin on the chaps helped keep them stuck to the saddle.
The bronco riding at the first Frontier Days “was pronounced by old timers as equa
l to anything they ever witnessed,” declared the Daily Leader. Bill Jones of La Grande, Wyoming, was the winner, becoming the first in a long line of local champions.
On the frontier, most people believed that bucking couldn’t be trained or forced; certain horses had it in their blood. Owners pampered their prizewinners like star athletes. Yet some saw bronco busting as animal cruelty. That year, the Colorado Humane Society sent a representative to monitor the action. When the man started to lecture a small group of onlookers about how the show should be canceled, “two cowboys gently slipped a rope over him and took him to the buffalo corral, where they tied him up with the buffalo for the afternoon, releasing him just in time to take the excursion train back to Denver.”
Between contests, the Frontier Days audience enjoyed skits and dramatizations of recent events that were fast becoming part of western lore. At one point, six draft horses pulled an old Deadwood stagecoach onto the track. Masked men playing the part of highwaymen gave chase, firing blanks into the air, but before they could complete the holdup, a rescue party of armed cowboys saved the day. It was a scene many residents of the Wyoming Territory could relate to or may have even lived through.
In a nod to Cheyenne’s lawless early years, a mock vigilante committee, “masked and armed to the teeth,” pulled a Laramie humorist and newspaperman from the grandstand and hustled him toward a makeshift gallows across the track. He played along until the noose was dangling over his head. Then he finally said, “This is carrying a joke too far, boys,” and ducked away under the judging stand. The vigilantes strung up a dummy in his place and riddled it with bullets in front of the crowd.
When it grew too dark to hold the steer-roping contest as planned, the first ever Frontier Days was over. The whole event took only about six hours. But for the four thousand people who were there, the celebration had delivered on its promise of spectacle, sport, and thrill. A visitor from Toledo, Ohio, said: “I am a surgeon in a State Insane Asylum, and used to excitement, but Cheyenne takes the cake.” That evening, the winners collected their prizes and day-trippers boarded trains back to Denver. The 1st Cavalry Regiment band played at the depot as the cars rolled out, trailing cheers from open windows. Everyone else filled the streets with carousing, dancing, and innocent gunfire.
After running the numbers, Frontier Days organizers concluded that the first large-scale rodeo in history had nearly broken even. Public opinion was more conclusive. As one newspaper pronounced, Cheyenne had just hosted “the greatest and most successful occasion ever celebrated in the West.”
Part II
6
Warriors to Wranglers
IKUA PURDY WAS BORN on Christmas Eve 1873 at Mānā, the Parker family residence just outside Waimea. At that time of year, imported trees and bushes like holly, magnolia, and hydrangea bloomed around the estate, which was fast becoming a social and economic hub of the island. The Parkers would have been hosting Christmas services and parties, balancing Bible verse and libation in equal portions, as well as festivities highlighted by hula dancing and ukulele.
Across the cobbled road of the main compound, cattle grazed in pastures surrounding the small family cemetery where patriarch John Palmer Parker was buried. In a clearing a few miles west, toward Waimea, pansies planted by Jack Purdy bloomed around the stone house he built in the 1830s.*
In Hawaiian terms, baby Ikua had the koko, the blood, of royalty. On his mother’s side, he was the great-great-great-grandson of Kamehameha I, the towering warrior who had unified the Hawaiian Islands. Harry Purdy, Ikua’s father, came from a line of esteemed cattlemen and was himself an accomplished Parker Ranch cowboy. Ikua’s uncles John, George, and James were all renowned paniolo. But the ancestor whose life perhaps most influenced Ikua’s destiny was his grandfather, the legendary bullock hunter Jack Purdy.
ONE EVENING IN THE fall of 1857, two Frenchmen who were touring the island of Hawaii sat down in a saloon in Waimea. They were captivated by the spell of Mauna Kea and wanted to hire a guide to lead them to the summit. When the Frenchmen asked around, the response was almost unanimous: they needed to talk to “the best rider in the Islands, the most fearless hunter of wild bullocks, the man who knows best the forest trails and the mountain passes . . . in sheer daring no one surpasses Jack Purdy.”
Stalking and killing Hawaii’s wild cattle had become a notoriously dangerous profession, one that “put tiger hunting to blush and made capturing wild elephants seem a small thing.” Visitors and explorers traded tales of the hunters’ wild adventures and regular brushes with death on the slopes of the volcano.
Purdy, age fifty-seven, was known for his backcountry resourcefulness and a stamina that bordered on superhuman. He agreed to meet the two men, and as the evening progressed, Purdy downed “slug after slug of small glasses of gin, which seemed to have no effect other than to give him courage to lay aside his normal taciturnity.” They settled on a price—250 francs, plus tip—and agreed to rendezvous at daybreak the next morning. Then Purdy proceeded to tell a story that would help cement his legacy in Hawaiian lore.
There was an Englishman in the islands named Julius Brenchley, Purdy said, a capable and undaunted beast of a man. Brenchley had once walked from St. Louis to British Columbia, where he then sailed for Hawaii. Like so many travelers before him, he fell in love with the place and stayed.
Brenchley was a seasoned mountain man and horseback rider, and it wasn’t long before he and Purdy met. The two became friends, of a sort. Like the small handful of other men who had the right stuff to make a living in the hills, they developed a gentlemanly rivalry marked by “comradely taunts and monosyllabic aggressions from behind a mask of polite manners and chivalrous restraint.” The result was an ongoing “contest in audacity, in which neither the one nor the other came out the final victor.”
That is, until the incident with the bullock. Purdy and Brenchley were on a multiday trek toward Mauna Loa, the island’s second highest summit, packing nothing except rifles and blankets. They slept at the snowline the first night and continued uphill the next morning. Along the way they shot and ate ducks, goose, and other wild birds. But soon they ran out of gunpowder—an oversight so obvious it suggests they had also packed ample booze—and in short order were out of food.
If they pushed hard, Purdy said, he knew a place “where wild bulls abounded.” They hiked another twenty miles before coming upon an area of marshy swamp.
Brenchley, standing ankle-deep in muck, was skeptical. “Where are your wild bulls?” he asked.
“There, in the woods,” Purdy said coolly.
“And how shall we attack them?”
“There are any number of ways,” Purdy said. “I shall turn the bull over to you when he can no longer defend himself—the rest will be your problem.”
With that, Purdy took off into the trees. A few minutes later Brenchley heard the familiar sound of snapping branches and trampling hooves. It was a full-grown bull, charging straight for him.
The animal was fifty yards away and closing fast. But when it tried to cross a pool of mud, the bull’s feet sank deep. In seconds it was trapped, unable to do anything except to toss its head and roar in frustration.
Purdy emerged from the thicket, muddy and self-satisfied. “So there’s our dinner,” he said. “All we need to do is kill the creature.”
Brenchley asked how on earth they could do that without being trapped or gored.
“Why, I thought you had the courage and dash for that,” Purdy said, starting to gather marsh rushes. He tied them into two bundles and used them to make his way across the mud, alternately standing on one and moving the other forward. When he reached the entrapped animal, he took out his hunting knife and killed it with a single thrust.
Brenchley stood speechless as his rival cut a large slab from the bull’s side and leapfrogged his way back across the mud. Before long they had a fire going, the giant bloody steak sizzling on hot rocks around the edge.
Did Purdy embellish? Perha
ps. Yet his account is a window onto the very real challenges that Hawaii’s bullock hunters and wranglers faced. This environment was light-years from the beachy, palm-shaded Hawaii of popular imagination, and working cattle here was as difficult and deadly as it was anywhere.
ONE OF THE FIRST outsiders to document the work of the paniolo was the British explorer and travel writer Isabella Lucy Bird. Bird took her first overseas adventure to the United States in 1854 at age twenty-three, on doctors’ orders to help cure depression and insomnia. The book that trip inspired, The Englishwoman in America, was the first of a series of bestsellers that lyrically chronicled extensive tours across the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and, as they were still known at the time, the Sandwich Islands.
Bird’s writing and photography of faraway places was vivid and unvarnished. “This side of Hawaii to my thinking is hideous,” she later wrote of her 1873 visit to the island’s rocky and arid northwest.
She was more appreciative of the climb from the coast to the highlands:
Every hundred feet of ascent from the rainless, fervid beach of Kawaihae increased the freshness of the temperature, and rendered exercise more delightful. From the fringe of palms along the coast to the damp hills north of Waimea . . . there is not a tree or stream, though the scorched earth is deeply scored by the rush of fierce temporary torrents . . . No water, no grass, no ferns . . . The red soil becomes suffused with a green tinge ten miles from the beach, and at the summit of the ascent the desert blends with this beautiful Waimea plain, one of the most marked features of Hawaii . . . There were frame houses sheltered from the winds by artificial screens of mulberry trees, and from the incursions of cattle by rough walls of lava stones five feet high . . .
On Hawaii, Bird found a multiethnic mix that would become even more diverse with the arrival of immigrants and laborers from the Americas, Europe, and Asia. Hawaii owed its remarkable diversity in part to its location; it was the perfect place to break up a long sea voyage and resupply. A taste of life in the islands was enough to convince many visitors to stay and build new lives. Imported labor for Hawaii’s industries, particularly sugar, added to the diverse milieu.