Prairie Fever: British Aristocrats in the American West, 1830–1890 by Peter Pagnamenta (review)

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Peter Pagnamenta has been writing and producing social history texts and documentaries since the mid-1960s. His books include All Our Working Lives (1984), The Hidden Hall (2005), Sword and Blossom (2006), and his latest contribution Prairie Fever. In this most recent work, the author consulted the diaries, letters, and other personal papers of British aristocrats who traveled through or bought lands in the Western United States, to understand their fascination with the American West. Pagnamenta traces the promotion of the region in English society as a sportsman’s paradise shared with noble savages and exotic wild animals through literature, paintings, Indian artifacts, stuffed animal heads, and, lastly, the Wild West shows. American Indians occupied a unique place in the minds of English aristocrats because the natives posed no threat to the stability of British Empire, and fulfilled a lifestyle that shared the thrill of the hunt with the wealthiest echelon of British society. Thus, through the mid nineteenth-century English aristocrats toured the western interior of the United States to hunt and experience American Indians before they vanished. The Earl of Dunraven was so taken with the beautiful landscape and hunting possibilities of a scenic valley in Colorado that he purchased the whole valley, constructing a huge lodge to accommodate relatives, friends and acquaintances so they could enjoy the healthful airs of Estes Park.

By the 1870s, the romanticism of the American West was fast disappearing, but British interest in the region altered with this reality. Many aristocratic English families needed opportunities for their younger sons who would not inherit family estates in the British Isles. The prairies of the United States offered possibilities. Various English settlements sprang up in places like Runnymede, Kansas, and Le Mars, Iowa, attracting young graduates of Cambridge and Oxford who purchased land and built homes amid the extensive grasslands. These enclaves tried to build small “Englands” in the American frontier, creating polo clubs and Anglican churches. For the majority of settlers, these communities were shortlived and failed to generate incomes adequate to allow the English scions to live in the manner to which they were accustomed. The last lure of the American West to British investors existed on the vast rangelands of the plains. Englishmen with the economic means and the intellectual imagination to embrace the seemingly limitless grasslands invested in large cattle ranches from Wyoming to Texas.

The demise of major British investment in American real estate occurred towards the end of the nineteenth century. The Populist movement in the United States was extremely critical of foreigners owning huge tracts of what was once public lands, and pushed for laws either limiting or criminalizing land ownership by non-citizens. The resulting Alien Land Bill never had the teeth in it to totally undermine British ownership of American prairie lands, but the twin environmental disasters of the late 1880s, drought and blizzard, worked to encourage the divestment of British real estate ownership in the western United States.

Pagnamenta points out that British aristocrats played an essential role in sponsoring the artwork of Albert Bierstadt, George Catlin, and Alfred Miller...