In August 1908, three unfamiliar riders found its way to Cheyenne, Wyoming, their hats adorned with wildflowers, to compete in the world’s ideal rodeo. Steer-roping virtuoso Ikua Purdy and his cousins Jack port Low and Archie Ka’au’a acquired travelled 4,200 kilometers from Hawaii, of all places, to check themselves against the toughest riders in the West. Dismissed by whites, who regarded as themselves the only true 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 concealed Background of the American West legends.

An unforgettable individual drama set against the rough-knuckled frontier, David Wolman and Julian Smith’s Aloha Rodeo unspools the fascinating and little-known true story of the Hawaiian cowboys, or paniolo, whose 1908 adventure upended the traditional history of the American West.

What few understood when the three paniolo rode into Cheyenne is that the Hawaiians were no underdogs. These were the product of the deeply engrained cattle tradition that was doubly old as that of the Great Plains, for Hawaiians had been running after cattle within the islands’ durable volcanic slopes and through dense tropical forests since 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.” In the turn of the twentieth hundred years, larger-than-life personalities like “Buffalo Expenses” Cody and Theodore Roosevelt capitalized on the national obsession using the Wild West and helped transform Cheyenne’s annual Frontier Times celebration into an unrivaled rodeo spectacle, the “Daddy of ’em All.”

The hopes of all Hawaii rode around the three riders’ shoulders during those dusty days in August 1908. The U.S. experienced forcibly annexed the islands just a decade earlier. The youthful Hawaiians brought the satisfaction of the people attempting to protect their cultural identity and stressed about their long term under the rule of overlords an sea away. 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 very idea of the Wild West. Mixing sport and history, while exploring questions of identification, imperialism, and competition, Aloha Rodeo spotlights an overlooked and riveting chapter in the saga from the American West.