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Title: Prairie Fever
Subtitle: British Aristocrats in the American West 1830-1890
Author: Peter Pagnamenta
Narrator: Rory Johnston
Format: Unabridged
Length: 10 hrs and 11 mins
Language: English
Release date: 07-23-13
Publisher: Audible Studios
Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 4 votes
Genres: History, World
Publisher's Summary:
The extraordinary story of the British aristocracy's encounter with American frontier life in the nineteenth century.
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.
Members Reviews:
British style in the most unlikely places
A very good and often entertaining summary of the involvement of the British upper crust in the development of the western United States--a subject most often treated only in the small magazines of western historical societies. This is, I think, the first time the topic has been treated in depth by a British author, so the book has a different perspective than that provided in 1989 by Lawrence Woods in his excellent but long out-of print "British Gentlemen in the Wild West: The Era of the Intensely English Cowboy." New material from British journals, and quotations from letters and diaries found in British repositories make the presentation fresh, and Pagnamenta also benefited from, as he acknowledges, his access to searchable electronic databases of early western newspapers.
The chapters chronicling the role of early British entrepreneurs and sportsmen in romancing the region to their countrymen and inspiring them to follow in their footsteps are particularly strong, as is the "epilogue" that chronicles the American reaction in the late nineteenth century to what was perceived as a British attempt to recreate its system of property landlordism in the American West. All in all, a well-written, well-paced, and eminently readable book.
A new viewpoint and perspective
Artistocrats came over, between lion hunts and tolerating the Indians of India, and after bored with fixing the manor and dining with the Queen, to see the savages 1st hand, to live with trappers and kill bison and go up and down the Missouri etc. Some of them fell in love and wanted to stay, some felt scared that this way of life was fragile and disappearing, and some wanted new coffee table talk. Some brought back bison and bear and trees, and some befriended Catlin and encouraged wild west shows. A fun read
you too can know something about American history that others don't know.
It covers some unknown and surprising history about the settlement of the West during the cowboy era.The English custom of
leaving all of the family property to the eldest son meant they needed something for their younger sons and one solution was to invest in inexpensive land in the American West.
