Maui Branding Irons
The exhibit highlights the history of Branding Irons and their unique designs shown both by the physical irons themselves as well as their demonstrated use on a hide skin.
For thousands of years, humans have branded cattle as an undeniable claim of ownership. The ranchers of East Maui continue this practice today, using the same ancient technology – a hand-forged length of iron, flame-hot, which stamps an indelible symbol into the hide of bovine hindquarters.
The symbols are simple. ‘Ulupalakua Ranch’s brand looks like a down-hanging horseshoe. Haleakala¯ Ranch has two: its original “ac” brand represents two of the ranch’s founders, and the “roofed H” symbol distinguishes its artificially inseminated heifers. Well over a hundred Maui brands are registered with the Hawai‘i Department of Agriculture.
On Maui’s big ranches the branding round-up takes place two or three times a year, when calves are about four months old and ready to be “weaned out.” Cowboys come from other ranches to share the ritual. The work is gritty and dangerous, as it often involves wrangling five or six hundred calves in a single day. The heifers become breeding stock. The males become steers. As one rancher said, “It’s one of two bad days in the otherwise blissful life of a Maui cow.”
In the mid-nineteenth century, Hawaiian cowboys had to manhandle feral cattle, fierce and big-horned. These intrepid paniolo branded their captures as a mark of conquest. And yet, even in today’s more settled times, branding is still necessary. Large tracts of leeward Haleakala remain open-grazed by both branded and feral cows. Ranching, Maui-style, is still a brawny, little-mechanized industry. You can regard branding irons as a symbol of Maui’s open spaces and close-held traditions.
