Prairie Fever
British Aristocrats in the American West 1830-1890
-
- $14.99
Publisher Description
“A deeply researched and finely delivered look at what can best be described as a counterintuitive slice of American history.”—Washington Post
From the 1830s onward, a succession of well-born Britons headed west to the great American wilderness to find adventure and fulfillment. They brought their dogs, sporting guns, valets, and all the attitudes and prejudices of their class. Prairie Fever explores why the West had such a strong romantic appeal for them at a time when their inherited wealth and passion for sport had no American equivalent.
In fascinating and often comic detail, the author shows how the British behaved—and what the fur traders, hunting guides, and ordinary Americans made of them—as they crossed the country to see the Indians, hunt buffalo, and eventually build cattle empires and buy up vast tracts of the West. But as British blue bloods became American landowners, they found themselves attacked and reviled as “land vultures” and accused of attempting a new colonization. In a final denouement, Congress moved against the foreigners and passed a law to stop them from buying land.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
From the 1820s, stories like James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales enticed Britain's nobility to America's West. The first wave came to hunt bear and buffalo and helped document the demise of the wilderness they encountered. A second wave consisted of settlers in colonies that attempted to solve the problem of younger sons of noble families who had neither estates nor because of political reforms in Britain opportunities in the army or civil service. The final wave, seeking to profit from the cattle boom of the 1870s, provoked political backlash by acquiring huge ranches and using public lands for grazing. Pagnamenta (Sword and Blossom: A British Officer's Enduring Love for a Japanese Woman) provides a lively account of British adventurers, weaving in sardonic reminders of the dark side of aristocratic wealth. One man's Irish estates, for example, "had been a source of constant aggravation, ever since he evicted two hundred tenants to clear space for a new castle and park for himself." British social history meets American manifest destiny in Pagnamenta's successful recounting of "a long and improbable chapter" of the Victorian Age. 8 pages of b&w illus.; maps.
