Aloha Rodeo: Three Hawaiian Cowboys, the World’s Greatest Rodeo, and a Hidden History of the American West Audiobook (Free)

In August 1908, three unidentified riders arrived in Cheyenne, Wyoming, their hats adorned with wildflowers, to compete in the world’s most significant rodeo. Steer-roping virtuoso Ikua Purdy and his cousins Jack port Low and Archie Ka’au’a experienced travelled 4,200 miles from Hawaii, of all places, to check themselves against the toughest riders in the West. Dismissed by whites, who regarded as themselves the just accurate cowboys, the indigenous Hawaiians would astonish the country, returning home champions-and American about Aloha Rodeo: Three Hawaiian Cowboys, the World’s Greatest Rodeo, and a Hidden Background of the American Western world legends.

An unforgettable human drama place against the rough-knuckled frontier, David Wolman and Julian Smith’s Aloha Rodeo unspools the interesting and little-known accurate story of the Hawaiian cowboys, or paniolo, whose 1908 experience upended the traditional background of the American Western.

What few understood when the three paniolo rode into Cheyenne is that the Hawaiians were simply no underdogs. They were the product of a deeply engrained cattle tradition that was twice as aged as that of the fantastic Plains, for Hawaiians had been chasing cattle on the islands’ rugged volcanic slopes and through dense tropical forests because the late 1700s.

Tracing the life span story of Purdy and his cousins, Wolman and Smith explore the dual histories of ranching and cowboys in the hawaiian islands, as well as the meteoric rise and sudden fall of Cheyenne, “Holy City of the Cow.” On the turn from the twentieth century, larger-than-life personalities like “Buffalo Expenses” Cody and Theodore Roosevelt capitalized on the national obsession using the Wild Western and helped transform Cheyenne’s annual Frontier Times special event into an unequalled rodeo spectacle, the “Daddy of ’em All.”

The hopes of most Hawaii rode around the three riders’ shoulders during those dusty times in August 1908. The U.S. had forcibly annexed the islands only a 10 years earlier. The young Hawaiians brought the satisfaction of a people struggling to protect their cultural identity and stressed about their long term under the rule of overlords an sea apart. In Cheyenne, they didn’t just astound the local people; they also overturned simplistic considering cattle country, the binary narrative of “cowboys versus Indians,” and the concept of the Crazy West. Blending sport and background, while exploring questions of identification, imperialism, and competition, Aloha Rodeo spotlights an overlooked and riveting chapter in the saga of the American West.