by David Wolman
A low point of the Parker Ranch saga took place in June 1904. Eben was in Waimea, trying to enlist paniolo to support him, Jack, and Sam in their takeover campaign. The cowboys weren’t buying it, and they advised Eben to seek justice through the legal system. One day Eben marched into Carter’s office armed with six-shooters and tried to strong-arm the lawyer into signing over control of the ranch. Carter stood his ground and Eben left, abandoning his extralegal effort for good. A Honolulu court eventually dismissed the lawsuit.
If Lizzie was caught between royalists and those supporting America’s provisional government, Eben was caught between the workaday cowboys and Hawaii’s aristocrats. He was a true paniolo who traced his lineage back to Kamehameha I. Sure, he hammed it up with pistols and polished boots. But he was also a bona fide member of a tight community of unpretentious cowboys, most of whom favored Hawaiian independence.
At the same time, Eben saw himself as part of the upper echelon of Hawaiian society, with aspirations beyond a simple life in the saddle. He liked to mingle with wealthy business owners, well-connected families, and other power brokers in Honolulu. His friendship with Dole, his support of annexation, and even the fact that he forbade his children to speak Hawaiian at home were all evidence of a man conflicted.
Instead of letting himself be dragged down by Hawaii’s political turmoil or his own compounding losses—his hand, Pu‘uwa‘awa‘a, Parker Ranch—Eben threw himself into all manner of schemes and businesses. While still working cattle on Hawaii, he spearheaded ventures ranging from shipwreck salvage to a homing pigeon messaging service. He guided visitors up Mauna Kea and was so concerned about the dire state of Hawaii’s native forests that he had woodpeckers imported from the mainland, in the hope that they would eat disease-carrying insects. (They didn’t.) He worked for a time in the shipping business and even tried his hand as an arts promoter, booking events for Hawaiian dancers and singers.
Eben finally found his calling and made the biggest impact as the self-styled ambassador for Hawaii’s ranches and champion of paniolo culture. In the winter of 1903, he donned a narrow-brimmed hat and, together with Lizzie, sailed to the West Coast, first arriving in San Francisco to visit with friends. After Eben delivered a speech to the National Livestock Producers Association convention in Portland, Oregon, he and Lizzie traveled to North Texas to learn about local ranching and feeding methods. The Texans were quite taken with the one-handed cowboy and his tales and photos of Hawaii’s ferocious bullocks. After Eben gave a presentation showing cattle being herded into the surf, The Dallas Morning News concluded that “Texas ranching is rather tame” in comparison.
They then headed east to New Orleans and on to Washington, D.C., where Eben dipped a toe in politics by telling local reporters he thought Hawaii should have more autonomy. In an interview, he argued that a set of sweeping controls President Roosevelt wanted to grant U.S. representatives in Hawaii would lead to abuses of power that contradicted the same democratic ideals used to justify overthrow of the monarchy. He may have been friends with Dole and supported annexation, but Eben didn’t want to see Hawaii infantilized, either.
In January 1904, Eben went to the White House to drop in on the president. He carried a letter from Hawaii’s governor introducing him as “one of the best cowboys on the island of Hawaii”—wording Eben himself may have suggested. As Eben later recalled, he waited in the anteroom while a clerk struggled to figure out who he was and what race he was. Fed up with the “hemming and hawing,” Eben called out: “Tell Mr. Roosevelt that Rawhide Ben of Hawaii is returning his call!”
From the Oval Office, an even louder voice rang out: “Where’s that cowboy? I’m delighted to meet Hawaii’s famous cowboy!”
Eben had finally met his match in bravado and verbosity. When he was able to get a word in edgewise, he told Roosevelt how his island had cowhands “long before anyone heard of Wyoming.”
“Say, I’d like to have you come to Hawaii,” Eben added.
Roosevelt laughed. He asked whether there was any good hunting to be had out there. Eben described one of his favorite spots, a thousand-acre area of open plain not far from Pu‘uwa‘awa‘a full of wild turkeys, geese, quail, and pheasant. He urged Roosevelt to join him on a hunt there someday, and the president said he hoped to do so.
BY THE END OF 1905, Eben was back in Honolulu, throwing his energy into organizing the biggest “Cowboy Carnival” the islands had ever seen. Some of the Parker Ranch aces were already in town; all Eben had to do was send for their horses, secure steers, feed, and other equipment from Oahu ranches, convince his friends in the polo and horse-racing world to lend him a venue, and publicize the event. As the consummate promoter, he saw this as a reasonable to-do list. If he could pull it off, the event would make a profit. Even if it didn’t, it still promised to be a hell of a show.
Organizing the rodeo was a way to show off so much paniolo talent in one place. (“He was always promoting something,” Eben’s daughter once said.) But there may have been another motive for setting up the event. That same month, the latest chapter of the ongoing legal battle over Parker Ranch was playing out in a Honolulu courtroom. Eben had arranged for a group of paniolo from Waimea, including his cousin Ikua and half brother Archie Ka‘au‘a, to testify about Carter’s mismanagement of the ranch. In orchestrating the Cowboy Carnival, Eben was likely also out to show that the Waimea Boys were his boys, that everyone working together under his leadership was the natural order of things, in the hopes that a certain judge in Honolulu would see it that way, too.
Whatever his motives, it’s a testament to Eben’s influence and drive that, after only a few weeks of preparation, the Cowboy Carnival at Kapi‘olani Park on October 21, 1905, drew one of the largest peacetime crowds the islands had ever seen. “The town has practically been turned over to the cowboys for this afternoon,” reported the Honolulu Advertiser, “and nearly all Honolulu will be on hand to witness the merry sports of gents of the spurs and lariats.”
Like Cheyenne Frontier Days, the Cowboy Carnival at Kapi‘olani blended Wild West skits, lighthearted games, and dead-serious sporting contests. (The winner of the bucking event suffered “nothing worse than a dislocated shoulder which was speedily put into commission again.”) Eben pumped the press with details—the steers were “about the wildest specimens he has ever seen,” he told one reporter—and gave an exhibition of one-armed roping. The papers also ran stories about the star cowpunchers, including Ikua, “said to be the champion of them all.” Eben bragged that his cousin could rope and tie a steer in twenty seconds.
By the turn of the century, a basic set of rules for roping contests was widely accepted, with very little variation from place to place. In broad terms, a man on horseback tried to lasso a sprinting steer, throw it to the ground, and tie its legs together as quickly as possible. Each animal got a head start—originally as much as 150 feet, but this was shortened over time—before a waved flag signaled the rider to take off in pursuit.
As the steer bolted forward, it could weave, stop dead, or change direction on a dime while the horse thundered up behind. At the right moment, the cowboy threw a lasso at the speeding animal. If he hit his target, he tied a quick knot around his saddle horn. The second the loop settled, a well-trained horse would stop short and brace itself, snapping the rope taut and “busting” the steer off its feet.
Before the horse had even stopped, the rider had already jumped down to run at the stunned steer. A cattle-savvy horse kept the rope tight enough so the steer couldn’t get back on its feet, but not so tight that it dragged the steer along the ground. The cowboy then took a short “piggin’ string,” held in his teeth or tucked under his belt, and whipped it around the prone steer’s feet and finished with a quick knot called a hooey.* The clock stopped when the contestant threw his hands in the air to show he was done. If the animal struggled free of the rope, the attempt didn’t count. In most early rodeos, each contestant had two tries, and the average of the two times constitut
ed a final score.
During the steer-roping event that winter in Honolulu, Archie Ka‘au‘a scored a time of 1 minute and 33 seconds, among the day’s fastest. But because he had made three throws, one more than the rules allowed, he was disqualified.
Everyone assumed Ikua would easily take the roping prize. For the past few years, the unassuming paniolo had been winning contests throughout the islands, whether it was an organized event or impromptu challenge from peers. By 1905, he was widely recognized as Hawaii’s top roper, “the cowboy king of the islands,” as one newspaper put it. But that day at Kapi‘olani Park, a young rider from Oahu roped and tied his steer in 46 seconds. The crowd went berserk and assumed the contest was over.
They were wrong. Ikua was next. He brought his steer down with one of his famously wide loops. When he finished tying, the clock read 38.75 seconds. There’s no record of Ikua’s reaction, but it’s hard not to think of him wearing the knowing grin of a maestro.
It was a huge moment for the Waimea Boys, Hawaii’s growing community of rodeo fans, and paniolo as a whole. As the Sunday Advertiser wrote, “the world’s record for roping and tying a four-footed animal is not many seconds less than the time made by Purdy.” Soon enough, he would have a chance to test himself against the world’s best.
10
A Royal Good Time
IN THE AUTUMN OF 1907, Eben Low was back on the mainland—this time in Cheyenne.
Months of travel had taken him from Massachusetts to Los Angeles and Nevada. His final stop was Frontier Days. “They treated me royally,” he later told a reporter. “I was given a marshal’s badge which permitted me to go anywhere and everywhere on the grounds. Captain Hardy, champion rifle shot, and myself, palled around together and had a great time.”
In Wyoming, Eben took in a show that had few equals in North America. Frontier Days had grown larger every year since its inception, adding new events, bigger prizes, and more Wild West drama. A few years earlier, one of the attendees was none other than the cowboy president himself, Theodore Roosevelt.
Roosevelt had been to Cheyenne once before, in 1900, to give a speech at the opera house as William McKinley’s vice presidential candidate. In May 1903, as president, he went for fun. The city welcomed the mustachioed commander in chief like a long-lost son and arranged a special one-day show at Frontier Park just for him. Seated in a special stand inside the track within spitting distance of the action, Roosevelt watched the events with almost childlike excitement. The wild horse race, he later recounted, was the finest riding he had ever seen. Whenever the United States needed cavalrymen in the future, he mused, “these are the men we want, for with them courage is infused by the life they lead.”
A Nebraska cowboy named Clayton Danks rode a vicious bull during the showcase for the president. Danks had started competing in rodeos as a teenager, and was already being called “one of the most spectacular and perfect riders in the West.” Despite the beast’s best efforts to stick a horn through him, Danks stayed on.
When the day’s exhibition was over, Roosevelt said his visit to Cheyenne was “as pleasant a forty-eight hours as any president ever spent since the White House was built.” Danks, meanwhile, would go on to win two Frontier Days championships in the coming years.
Sitting in the stands in 1907, Eben Low watched Indians perform “scalping dances” and other demonstrations between rodeo events. Some of the same Indians appeared in town in the evenings at band concerts and masked balls. Barely a generation had passed since the last major battles of the Indian Wars: some of the people who walked the streets had likely participated, on one side or the other, in Custer’s Last Stand (1876) or the Wounded Knee Massacre (1890).
Reporters covering Frontier Days noted how visitors gawked at “dignified and stoical Red Men stalking gravely along the streets, brushing shoulders with the haute ton”—high society—“with startling sang froid.” People were particularly interested in the fact that cattle injured during the rodeo were given to the tribes to butcher and turn into jerky. Yet fascination with Native Americans’ eating habits didn’t stop there: “If there is anything which a real live Indian likes more than whisky it is the flesh of a nice fat dog,” one newspaper declared, “and after Frontier day there will be less barking about the streets at night.” In an article titled “Dog Eat at Injun Camp,” the Wyoming Times described how a white visitor took part:
One dainty, charmingly attired young lady expressed the desire to partake of the feast . . . with a wry grimace and a series of extraordinary facial contortions, the remarkable gastronomical feat was at last accomplished and the crowd of expectant visitors were almost converted to cannibalism when to their astonishment they heard the young lady pronounce the dish delightfully palatable.
During Eben’s two visits to the mainland in the early twentieth century, he was disturbed by the country’s pervasive racism. “It is too bad that hurts are given and errors are made, and apologies follow, when all we have to do in our world is accept each other as people!” he wrote. “You learn to take people as they come, keeping your own dignity, your own sense of values, and being able to recognize a Real Man when you find one, colored or white.” It sounded enlightened but didn’t exactly mesh with how Eben and Lizzie felt about Hawaiian ways and the Hawaiian language.
In Wyoming, bigotry was no less pervasive than it was in other parts of the West. Yet women and African Americans both featured prominently—and positively—in Frontier Days’ early years.
Wyoming was a women’s rights pioneer from its earliest days. On the frontier, women had to shoulder many of the same responsibilities as men, whether it was navigating a wagon trail or running a ranch. In 1869, before the Wyoming Territory was even two years old, the legislature passed an unrestricted women’s suffrage law, the first of its kind in the country. Allowing women to vote was partly a strategy to attract more female settlers; at the time, there was only one woman for every six men. (“We now expect at once quite an immigration of ladies to Wyoming,” declared one paper. “We say to them all, come on.”) But the law was also motivated by changing values: William Bright, a legislator and saloon owner in South Pass City, spearheaded the effort because he judged his wife “as good as any man and better than convicts and idiots.”
The move drew a predictable backlash—from the liberal Northeast, no less. Harper’s Weekly wrote that “Wyoming gave women the right to vote in much the same spirit that New York or Pennsylvania might vote to enfranchise angels or Martians if their legislatures had time for frivolous gaiety.” Regardless, the suffrage milestones continued. In 1870, Esther Hobart Morris was appointed the country’s first justice of the peace in South Pass City, 250 miles from Cheyenne. Fifty-six years old and six feet tall, Justice Morris was described as “mannish” and “lantern-jawed,” and her appointment was decried as “unnatural” and “dangerous.” Her first case involved prosecuting her male predecessor for refusing to turn over the court docket after he resigned in protest of the new suffrage law. The case was dismissed, the docket never delivered, and Morris bought her own.
The following spring, the first grand jury to have women members convened in Laramie. The case was a manslaughter charge relating to a barroom shooting. (The courtroom also saw America’s first female bailiff.) The six women on the jury had to enter the courtroom veiled, and newspaper editorials expressed concern about the effect the experience would have on their fragile constitutions: “It will be almost a miracle if some of the delicate women who are going through this painful ordeal do not sink under the weight of their privations and return to their homes with shattered nerves and reduced health.” It took the jury two days to return a verdict of guilty.
Wyoming also had relatively liberal divorce laws. Other states required women to wait up to a year before they could remarry, but in Wyoming the wait was only sixty days. In a place with so many more men than women, “grass widows” had little trouble finding another partner. It was so common for women to travel up from D
enver to take advantage of the law that one of the most prominent divorce firms in the United States, New York–based Hoggatt & Caruthers, established a branch office in Cheyenne in 1899. Today, Wyoming’s state motto is “Equal Rights.”
ON A SOAKING WET September day in 1904, a tall figure led a horse into the arena facing the Frontier Park grandstand. Bertha Kaepernick was twenty-two years old, “a strong husky gal of German descent,” in the words of one witness, with bright brown eyes and brown hair. Rain had turned the track into a morass of mud, and the cowboys were insisting that the bucking contest be postponed because it was too dangerous. But the crowd—drenched, restless, and eager for action—booed and protested the delay until Kaepernick stepped forward.
Kaepernick had grown up on a ranch in Colorado. When she was five, her father had placed her on the back of a horse and said, “Now, Bertha, be sure you stay on board. If you get off, there may not be anyone around to put you back on.” She did, and from then on it was hard to get her off a horse. She soon began competing in rodeos. At the time, cowgirls were welcome to help out on farms and ranches. But if they dared compete in what were considered the manliest of contests, cowgirls faced a deep-seated sexism that branded them “loose women” or “strenuous dames.” Some even argued that bronco riding was harmful to a woman’s reproductive system (yet somehow not a man’s). Nevertheless they persisted, sometimes riding and roping in full-length bloomers or split riding skirts.
Annie Oakley’s sixteen years of touring with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West made her the most celebrated example of a woman succeeding on her own terms in an overwhelmingly male arena. When he wasn’t standing frozen so his wife could shoot a cigarette out of his mouth, Oakley’s husband, Frank Butler, served as her secretary and manager. Oakley advocated for women to carry guns for protection; in one newspaper article, she showed women how to hide a gun under an umbrella. By her own estimate Oakley taught 15,000 women to shoot. She also campaigned for equal pay and advocated for women to pursue an active life outside of the house, even if it involved typically “male” pursuits like shooting and riding bicycles. “I think sport and healthful exercise makes women better, healthier, and happier,” she said.