When people picture Maui, they usually think of beaches, surf shacks, and waterfalls, said Freda Moon in The New York Times. They don’t think cowboys, or a cowboy culture older than any on the American mainland, but that means they’re forgetting a vast stretch of the island. Maui’s interior, known as Upcountry, is “another Hawaii”—a land of multigenerational cattle ranches, weekend line dances, and Fourth of July rodeos. It has arguably been cattle country since the 1790s, when a British explorer gave a handful of cattle to Kamehameha I, the first ruler of a unified Hawaii. Those cattle thrived: By the 1820s, their descendants were so numerous they’d run rampant, and Kamehameha’s son called in skilled horsemen from Mexico to contain them. Maui’s paniolo culture was born.
I happened to catch part of Maui’s big December rodeo last year. Before the event, a parade wound through downtown Makawao, featuring a high school band playing ukuleles, a tractor pulling Santa Claus on a trailer decorated with Japanese lanterns, and a rodeo queen on a white horse “waving at the crowd as if she knew every one of them.” (In this close-knit town of 7,000, she probably did.) My husband and I got our own mounts a couple of days later, when we took a horseback ride through a 40,000-acre ranch with Pony Express tours. “As we set off on our ride, a two-hour loop through the pastureland that blooms with fireworks-hued lantana, purple jacaranda, and white-blossomed pamakani,” dust from the trail coated our skin “with a fine red-brown powder.” “I go home with the greatest tan,” said Melissa, our guide. “But it just washes off.”
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