Edmund "Ed" Hedemann
Year Inducted: 2002
Kaneohe Ranch | O'ahu
Kualoa Ranch | O'ahu
Bar None Ranch | Hawai'i
Ed Hedemann’s career as a cowboy started at age 12 when his uncle, Kaneohe Ranch owner Harold Castle, invited him to tag along on a cattle drive. In his early years, Ed would spend summers working at McCandless Ranch and Kahua Ranch, helping catch wild cattle. He remembers long chases through the forest, following a pack of barking dogs on the heels of a massive wild bull, and hair-raising moments when the bull was cornered.
Leading the bull back to the corral was also tricky. The animal was left tied to a tree overnight, then one cowboy on horseback had to drop a rope on its horns while another set it loose. “As soon as the bull was free he would be coming after us,” Ed writes in his book, Training Horses and Stories of Long Ago in Hawaii. “He is mad, hungry, and he wants anybody that doesn’t look like a cow.” The trick the cowboys used was to get the bull to chase them down the path that led to the corral.
Ed writes that the forest was often so thick; the cowboys couldn’t ride any faster than a trot. The ground could be treacherous as well.
Once when he was following a young cow she abruptly disappeared in front of him. “She dropped into a large lava hole, about ten feet in diameter,” he says. The cowboys had to rope her by the horns and legs and pull her up to solid ground.