In Maui's Upcountry, Where the Paniolo Roam At the Oskie Rice Arena, the Friday night lights hung in the damp, mid-December Hawaiian air. Beaming through Maui's notorious red clay dust, the lights served as a backdrop to one of the Upcountry's biggest annual events. On the metal bleachers, families were bundled against their idea of the cold: a winter chill that sank just below 60 degrees. There were coats, blankets and hoodie strings pulled tight. There was Portuguese soup and Puerto Rican stew at the family-run concession stands, where the handwritten menus were scrawled in thick felt marker, crossed through as the "onolicious" fried ice cream or pork with tofu and macaroni ran out. All around us, children treated the bleachers as a jungle gym, climbing and dangling and hopping from bench to bench. On the highest bleacher, a girl with sun-streaked hair and sun-kissed skin popped up at my feet like a mischievous gopher. Startling me, she shrieked, giggled and monkeyed away. On the grass, behind the arena's wire-and-post fence, a little boy in a tan cowboy hat paced in black cowboy boots with tiny silver spurs. The rodeo was about to begin. When most mainlanders picture Maui, they see surfers sliding down mammoth waves, bays crowded with sailboats and waterfalls alongside the ragged, verdant Hana Highway. But the Upcountry, which sweeps across the island's interior and climbs the volcanic foothills of Haleakala, is another Hawaii. Instead of beaches, surf shacks and shaved ice stands, the region has chilled air; sprawling, multigenerational cattle ranches; and a paniolo - Hawaiian cowboy - tradition that precedes its mainland American counterpart by half a century. "They were running horses up here," a trail guide would later tell me, "when they were still settling the Midwest." In the Upcountry, Hawaiian culture is cowboy culture. There are weekly line dances at the local community center, an annual Independence Day rodeo that draws local kids home, and working cattle ranches like Ulupalakua (established in 1845), where the ranch store serves sandwiches stacked with fresh beef, elk burgers and smoky barbecued Kalua pork. In paniolo towns like Makawao, Kula and Pukalani, faded Western facades have found second lives as art galleries, sushi joints, proud "locavore" bistros and the odd New Age shop selling wind chimes and Tibetan imports. But the ranches and their traditions endure. It's a history that began in the 1790s, when the British explorer Capt. George Vancouver gave a handful of longhorn cattle to King Kamehameha I, the first ruler of a unified Hawaii. The king put a kapu - an order of protection that is both sacred and legal - on the animals, forbidding them from being slaughtered. The longhorns took surprisingly well to the island and they multiplied; by the early 1820s, the stampeding cattle were tearing through towns and devouring crops. In 1832, Kamehameha III, the king's son, brought in vaqueros, skilled horsemen of Spanish descent, from Mexico (paniolo is thought to derive from españoles, or Spaniards) to contain the swelling herds. The cowboys taught the Hawaiians the skills of their trade. These skills, and the lifestyle that goes with them, are still in evidence on Maui's half-dozen or so surviving ranches. At family-owned Ulupalakua, said Ilima Loomis, the author of two books on the paniolo who lives in nearby Haiku: "They still have cowboys on their payroll living in the ranch housing. That's old school. During plantation days, that's how it was. You lived in ranch houses and you'd buy your flour, your beans, your salted pork or whatever at the ranch store. AT THE MAKAWAO RODEO, cowboys can show off their skills. In December, when I was there, the grand prize was a one-year supply of Monster Energy drinks. The event, the smaller of Maui's two largest annual rodeos, was preceded by a paniolo parade through downtown Makawao, a historic ranch town surrounded by farms and pastures. Along Makawao's antique main street, a high school band played ukuleles; two monstrously large, insectlike dune buggies were bedecked with glittering Christmas garlands; and a vintage tractor tied with candy-striped bows towed Santa and Mrs. Claus on a trailer decorated with Japanese paper lanterns. Midway through, the rodeo queen appeared - a blue sash across her chest, a tiara hugging the band of her cowboy hat; she rode in pirouettes on her white horse, waving at the crowd as if she knew each of them personally. In Makawao, a town of about 7,000 that's the center of Maui's close-knit Upcountry communities, she may well have.