by David Wolman
Hugh Clark drew a real sprinter. The cowboy made a perfect throw and busted his target as quickly as Ikua had. For a moment it looked like he might have a chance. But the steer flailed powerfully as Clark tried to make the tie, thrashing all four feet until the last loop was around its heels. The clock kept ticking, and by the time Clark had finished it read 1:20.4. His average time was almost 20 seconds slower than Ikua’s. In rodeo terms, an eternity.
The Hawaiians had clinched first place. The only remaining question was whether Archie could outdo Ikua.
Archie made a huge first throw and busted his animal in an astounding 36 seconds. But then he encountered the same problem as Clark, a steer that squirmed free. The paniolo had to hold the animal on the ground with brute force, and his tie ended up taking well over a minute.
Ikua Purdy—paniolo, Hawaiian, American—was the steer-roping champion of the world.
WHEN IT WAS TIME to present the steer-roping award, something had changed at Frontier Park. Although the title had gone to “a stranger, and one might almost say a foreigner,” in the words of the Wyoming Times, the Hawaiians had won over the audience.
As rodeo officials gathered on the field to present Ikua with a new saddle and a prize of $240, a man in a U.S. cavalry uniform leapt from the grandstand and ran out to embrace the paniolo. Clarence Lyman, the first native Hawaiian to enroll at West Point, was so overcome with emotion that he couldn’t resist the urge to shower his fellow islander with congratulations.
Archie’s time put him in third place behind Clark, with Dickerson in fourth. Jack, despite his asthma attack, managed to place sixth.
Ikua waved and bowed to the roaring crowd. For the reserved cowboy, this was exuberance. Later he would tell his children and grandchildren that competing in “Waiomina” was an adventure. Winning was a joy, but that was about all he ever said before changing the subject or, more likely, riding off toward the mountain to chase more cattle.
15
Gems of the Sea
E ho ‘i nā keiki ‘oki uaua o nā pali.
Home go the very tough lads of the hills.
WITHIN HOURS OF WINNING at Frontier Days, the paniolo were hit up with requests for a rematch. C.B. Irwin even put $400 on the table for a second chance. The Hawaiians passed and chose to start their journey home. Ikua and Archie took the Overland back to San Francisco and left for Hawaii aboard the Alameda. Jack and Emily stayed on the mainland for another week, visiting friends. They all left Cheyenne with a standing invitation to return, but none of them ever did.
The Alameda docked in Honolulu on September 11, 1908. Throngs greeted the ship as a band played “See the Conqu’ring Hero Comes,” but the music was almost lost amid the jubilation. Ladies in their Sunday best rushed the gangway with leis for the returning heroes. A local poet stood on the landing, drafting verses of welcome:
Alas! for all those champions—
From far across the sea,
With face all tanned and steady hand,
To meet the best in all the land,
Came our Hawaiian Three.
Those who knew Ikua noticed that he had shaved off his trademark mustache. He told a reporter that the women of Cheyenne had been so crazy for souvenirs that “they took our leis, our belts, our chaps, our spurs and everything removable that they could find about us. So when more of them clamored for souvenirs I took off my mustache and gave them each one hair and, say, there was just enough to go round.”
“Champion Roper and His Companions Are Home,” blared the front page of the Pacific Commercial Advertiser. Below the headline was a photograph of Ikua and Archie draped in leis and seated stiffly in chairs, a debonair Eben Low standing behind them. In another paper, the joy of the occasion inspired still more poetry:
Purdy, the sturdy, we’ve heard he has won.
For the little old isles of Hawaii,
The world’s roping contest, and what he has done
Is a plum in our promotion pie.
Ka‘au‘a took second, while sixth man was Low
In the steer-stringing stunt of the earth,
And it’s up to the cow-catching artists to know
What our lariat laddies are worth.
Three cheers, then, for Purdy, and then just a few
For Archie and Jack, three times three!
The boys of Hawaii who gallantly threw
For the fame of these Gems of the Sea!
Eben had been traveling to Honolulu from the island of Kahoolawe when he first heard the results from Cheyenne. He beamed like a father: “I have good reason to feel proud,” he told a reporter. Not only was he related to the victors, but it had been his idea in the first place to show the world that paniolo are as talented as any cowboy. His pride never faded in the years to come, and he made sure that Hawaiians understood his role in this narrative. He posed for photographs with the winners, and, in future retellings, made it sound like he had been there himself.
Two nights after the Alameda returned, Eben hosted a luau in Waikiki to celebrate. The guest list included well-to-do members of the business community and Jonah Kūhiō, a Hawaiian prince and delegate to the U.S. Congress. Toast after toast kept everyone’s glasses full, and at one point Ikua was urged to speak. He gave “a very clever speech in Hawaiian,” according to witnesses, with an extra helping of thanks to his cousin for making the whole Cheyenne endeavor possible.
Then it was Eben’s turn. He announced that he was “no speech-maker,” then, as one paper put it, “proceeded to disprove his assertion by making a wonderful verbal exposition of the work and methods of Purdy and Ka‘au‘a at Cheyenne.” He waxed on about the training of young cowboys and, for the non-ranchers in the audience, detailed just how well the paniolo must have performed to beat the world’s best. As for why he had chosen Ikua and Archie to represent Hawaii, he said:
I had watched them and trained them myself, and I knew that they would never get rattled in a tight pinch. I have watched them rope wild bulls on the mountainsides under conditions and difficulties that the plainsmen never saw, and I knew that they would stand the test . . . I felt assured in my own mind that they would keep themselves in the best of condition and would be an honor to the Hawaiian Islands in every way. That, gentlemen, is why I selected them, and just how right my choice was you know now and all the world knows.
A few days later Ikua and Archie sailed home to Hawaii, with a stop in Maui along the way. On both islands they disembarked to cheers, flowers, flags, and an outpouring of joy for Hawaii’s newest heroes. Throughout the islands, celebrations continued for weeks.
ON THE MAINLAND, NEWS of the astonishing upset in Cheyenne ran in papers from coast to coast. Perhaps inevitably, there was effort to minimize the Hawaiians’ accomplishments. “Steer Lets Kanaka Win,” read one headline. “Had Clark contended with a steer as docile as that of Ikua,” a Cheyenne paper wrote, “it is probable the championship would be still held by an American.”
Many accounts mislabeled the paniolo as foreigners, showing how unclear mainlanders still were about the islands’ political status. (Even a Hawaiian newspaper drew a distinction between the paniolo and “the American boys.”) Newspapers as far away as upstate New York announced:
For the first time in the history of the Frontier Day sports at Cheyenne, the championship for steer roping has been taken away from the United States . . . This is tremendously important—more so, in fact, than the result of the Marathon race or winning the greater number of points in an Olympic contest. No one country has enjoyed a monopoly of the sport of foot-racing, pole jumping, hurdling, or tug-of-warring, but America did have a monopoly of wild horse riding, steer roping and all the sports and exercises in which the frontiersman and the cowboy took part. It is rather galling, therefore, to have this honor taken from us.
The article did at least conclude by calling the paniolo “natives of an island that is protected by the Stars and Stripes,” but that hardly diminished the overall impression of a humiliating alien
assault.
In response, the Hawaiian Star reprinted the offending piece under the title “Roping Glory Follows the Flag,” with a cheeky postscript:
Since Hawaii’s in the U.S.A., I cannot understand
Why she thus should be referred to as a sort of foreign land;
The lariat laurel still adorns a brow American
In fair Hawaii, U.S.A., and Purdy is the man!
Word of the paniolo’s victory eventually made its way to the White House. Representative Kūhiō presented President Roosevelt with a letter and a picture of Ikua, and reported that the president was delighted by the news of the outcome in Cheyenne.
THE DRAMA IN 1908 couldn’t have been better publicity for Frontier Days. If the paniolo had returned to compete the next year, they would have seen a three-way rematch between Clayton Danks, Dick Stanley, and Steamboat. Danks rode the famous bronco again, but nothing could top 1908’s performance, in part because the judges had forbidden the use of spurs. Even though the audience called for “Stanley and Steamboat!” the Oregon cowboy drew a different horse. When the results were announced—Danks in first place, Stanley in sixth—the crowd started throwing cushions and howling “rotten!” and “robbery!”
The Stanley-Steamboat matchup was bittersweet for those who had fallen in love with the mighty horse. The bronco spent his twilight years in a Wild West show until 1914, when he had to be put down after an injury caused by running into barbed wire. The “grand old horse of the passing west” earned a seven-paragraph obituary in the Daily Leader, and is still remembered as one of America’s all-time great bucking broncos.
Stanley was killed when a horse fell on him at a rodeo in 1910. But after his death, his story took an even stranger twist: Dick Stanley was in fact Earl Carl Shobe—and he was wanted for murder. Shobe had been part of a team of outlaws who ran in northern Wyoming in the early years of the twentieth century. He was linked to murders as far away as Chicago, prompting him to flee to the West Coast, grow a goatee, and assume the alias Dick Stanley.
But laying low wasn’t in Shobe’s character. In Oregon, he and his brother started the Stanley Bros. Congress of Rough Riders, and he became so confident in his new identity that he was willing to travel to Cheyenne and take center stage at Frontier Days, even though there was a $5,000 reward out for him.
For the sexual assault of his next-door neighbor, Pete Dickerson was arrested and was soon breaking rocks at the Wyoming State Penitentiary in Rawlins. Clayton Danks eventually quit rodeo and found work as a sheriff. He served as a Frontier Days judge and lived to ninety-one, irked to the end that he couldn’t be inducted into the Rodeo Hall of Fame while he was still alive. “I considered shooting myself to get my name on the list,” he joked.
None of these rodeo stars would have known such success had it not been for Buffalo Bill Cody, who died in 1917. His traveling show turned cattle-country skills into an enormously popular spectacle with worldwide appeal. Yet Cody did more than that: he helped shape, for better and for worse, the very concept of the Wild West, and by extension the myth of America itself.
If there was ever a single rodeo that challenged that myth, it was Cheyenne Frontier Days in 1908. 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.
At home in the islands, the paniolo triumph in Cheyenne was far more than a sports victory. Ikua, Archie, and Jack became the first superstars of twentieth-century Hawaii, the first heroes who weren’t politicians or royalty. By winning in Wyoming, the men had put the islands on the map and had shown the world what Hawaiians could accomplish. As the Hawaiian Star put it: “Now that they have seen a man from the Parker Ranch beat all their champions, they will realize that the Hawaiian Islands are something more than a hula platform in the mid-Pacific.”
The win was something that “all Hawaiian hearts can be happy about, for the honor garnered by our boys,” wrote another paper. Hawaiians were still grappling with the injustice of annexation and the cultural onslaught wrought by explorers bringing cattle, missionaries bearing Bibles, and foreign politicians exercising the breathtaking arrogance of imperialism. Ikua and his cousins hadn’t set out to become a symbol for Hawaiian strength and identity in the new century, but that is exactly what they became.
IKUA PURDY NEVER LEFT Hawaii again. Back on Parker Ranch, he took the prize saddle he had won in Cheyenne, stuck it under his porch, and got back to work. As far as anyone can tell, he never used it, shrugging it off like he did the title of world champion. He still competed, though. On New Year’s Day in 1909, at a rodeo event in Waimea, he bested Jack, Archie, and other locals by roping a steer in 47 seconds.
In 1918, drawn by an offer of higher pay in Kauai, Ikua left Parker Ranch. Two years later, he moved to Ulupalakua Ranch on Maui, where he worked alongside his friend and former rival Angus MacPhee.
Ikua and his family stayed at Ulupalakua for the next thirty years. The Purdys lived in a brown ranch-style house set in a grove of eucalyptus, beside which Ikua planted fragrant ilang-ilang trees. From the window of his tiny bedroom he looked out on cattle pastures and, in the distance, the Pacific Ocean. Across the street stood a small stone church and the cemetery where MacPhee would later be laid to rest in 1948.
On the mainland, the paniolo were virtually forgotten. But time only burnished their legacy in Hawaii. Ikua eventually stopped competing in rodeos, but continued to serve as a field judge and gave the occasional interview. By the 1930s, his story had begun to sound more like folklore: as one article put it, the world champion roper, still going strong at sixty-four, had been born “with the dust of the range, smoke of the branding fire in his nostrils.”
Some details of the paniolo’s story mutated over the years. Many people in Hawaii, including members of the Purdy family, came to believe that the trio’s hosts in Cheyenne deliberately provided them with bad horses. The claim traced back to a 1909 article in the Pacific Commercial Advertiser that incorrectly stated Ikua had been given “an untried and poor horse.” From other accounts and expert analysis of contemporary photographs, however, it’s clear that the horses, when they did finally show up, were top-quality mounts.
For his part, Ikua was loath to boast about his unofficial role as “cowboy king of the islands.” He once told his son and grandchildren, “I may have that title, but on Mauna Kea, there are so many cowboys like me.”
Besides, if Hawaiians needed to celebrate local cowboys, they always had Eben Low. The self-appointed elder statesman of paniolo culture would fill that role for decades, tirelessly promoting Hawaii and himself. In 1909, Eben moved to Honolulu to run his salvage and shipping business. He also continued organizing annual parades, although he moved the date from July 4 to June 11—Kamehameha Day.
Eben also befriended, and at one point even tried to start a business with, Angus MacPhee. In a bizarre coincidence, MacPhee lost his left hand in a hunting accident on Parker Ranch in 1910. The two men competed every now and then in one-armed roping contests.
Just a few years after the adventure in Wyoming, Jack Low died of a brain aneurysm in the hamlet of Kukuihaele on the north side of Hawaii. He was fifty-four years old. In 1918, Archie Ka‘ua‘a was severely injured when he was struck in the chest—not by a horse or charging bull, but by the engine crank of a backfiring Ford Model T. He died soon after, only thirty-six years old.
A month before Archie’s death, the Waimea Boys, minus Jack, had reunited for a rodeo contest at Kapi‘olani Park in Honolulu. Organized by Eben and MacPhee, it was the first “real roundup” in years and included cowboys from all over. The media played it up, recalling the story of the celebrated paniolo of Parker Ranch who had vanquished the mainland’s best.
In 1953, The Honolulu Advertiser ran an article marking Eben’s eighty-ninth birthday, accompanied by a photograph of the old cowhand seated in a wh
eelchair. The paper described him as a “cowboy, sailor, cattle rancher, civic leader and affectionately known to early day paniolo as ‘Rawhide Ben.’” Ebenezer Parker Kahekawaipunaokauaamaluihi Low passed away in 1954, aged ninety. His ashes were scattered near the summit of Mauna Kea.
In his twilight, Ikua took pleasure in watching his grandchildren learn to ride—saddle, bareback, it didn’t matter as long as they were on a horse. Anyone was welcome in the Purdy home, but whenever conversation would drift toward the topic of Ikua’s prowess, he would say something like “There are plenty of things to talk about besides me.”
He died on July 4, 1945, at the age of seventy-two. Until his death he was still working cattle at Ulupalakua Ranch. He was survived by his wife, nine children, and three grandchildren.
Ikua was inducted into the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum’s Rodeo Hall of Fame in 1999, ninety-one years after his triumph in Cheyenne. In one obituary, Eben Low was uncharacteristically brief: “No one was his equal.” It was the tribute Ikua Purdy deserved. Not the best Hawaiian cowboy or the best roper in the islands. Just the best.
Epilogue
On the Mountain
No alien land in all the world has any deep, strong charm for me but that one . . . Other things leave me, but it abides; other things change, but it remains the same.
—MARK TWAIN, writing about Hawaii in 1889
JANUARY 2018: THREE PICKUP trucks wind their way up the reddish dirt road, flanked by barbed wire fence strung between bleached wooden posts. To the west, across the plains of Waimea, sunshine splashes the verdant slopes of the Kohala Mountains. To the east, grazing cattle dot rippling pastures and cinder cones. The snow-frosted summit of Mauna Kea floats in the background.
Much of this rangeland is still owned by the Parker Ranch, but Mānā Road—unpaved, rutted and rocky in sections, overgrown with thick grass in others—is open to the public. A mile or two back are the crumbling stone remains of Jack Purdy’s island homestead. Up ahead lay the gravesites of John Palmer Parker and his descendants.