The Millennial Hawaiian Paniolo

Abstract

A cross the American West, for 150 years, the number of real working ranch hands has in truth been anything but large.When a million miners thronged through 1850s California, fewer than ten thousand or so cowhands (many of them Native American, Hispanic, or black) were working from Missouri to the Pacific.But the western ranch hand has assumed a symbolic prominence far out of proportion to actual numbers.Ranching was a force for change, part of a striving economy, and something novel upon the land (Starrs 1998).Into this neatly fits the Hawaiian cowboy, or paniolo, the wild Hawaiian country, and, of course, pua'a pipi, the beef provender they provided.And yet, more folks are today familiar with the ukulele, the lei, or the lilting notes of Hawaiian song than are knowledgeable about the origins and significance of ranching done the Hawaiian way.Everyone conveniently recollects that Pilgrims were the earliest Europeans to settle the North American continent.That "fact" is about as predictably wrong as it is ethnocentric; in Santa Fe, New Mexico, was a thriving Hispanic community and a finely formed full-on city a resolute thirty years before the English Pilgrims even thought to set sail for Plymouth.Inconvenient facts are swiftly forgotten.Among the most elusive details, even for aficionados of western Americana, is how early among ranch hands the Hawaiian paniolo really ranks.Paniolos were close descendents of the California vaqueros; the word for Spaniard, Español, became in its Hawaiian rendering "paniolo," just as "vaquero," in the parlance of Nevada and California, became "buckaroo" (Starrs and Huntsinger 1998).

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