Prairie Fever: British Aristocrats in the American West 1830–1890 by Peter Pagnamenta

(Norton, $28)

Forget those images of rugged settlers filing across the Great Plains in tattered wagons, said Scott Martelle in The Washington Post. The wanderers Peter Pagnamenta focuses on in his “deeply researched and finely delivered” book were cut from far fancier cloth. Serving up a “counterintuitive slice of American history,” the British writer homes in on the oft-overlooked migration of aristocratic Britons to the wide-open spaces of mid-19th-century America. Influenced by such popular tales as James Fenimore Cooper’s The Prairie, scores of otherwise idle second- and third-born sons flocked to Iowa, Kansas, and various points farther west. Seeking adventure and sometimes land, they encountered tornadoes and plenty of animosity.

Pagnamenta has “lovingly excavated” a lost and “deeply weird” world, said Miranda Seymour in The New York Times. Runnymede, Kan., a town established by a wealthy foreigner, was England on the prairie, except that its settlers were encouraged to play cowboy as well as polo and cricket. In the “delightfully absurd community” of Le Mars, Iowa, residents donned traditional foxhunting garb to chase prairie chickens. Many of the sportsmen who “trek through Pagnamenta’s pages” sought to slaughter not ground fowl but the West’s storied buffalo. One of them, Sir St. George Gore, is said to have killed as many as 6,000.

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“Not all the English grandees whose experiences Pagnamenta chronicles were game-slaughtering fools,” said Dale L. Walker in The Dallas Morning News. William Drummond Stewart, a Scottish lord, became a friend of Kit Carson and a revered mountain man. But the bulk of these well-heeled adventurers destroyed everything in their path, and Pagnamenta tears into them “with a satirical wit keen as a stropped razor.” They were undone in the end not by their buffoonery but by an 1887 act of Congress that banned land-grabbing by foreign tourists. Despite all the damage they did, readers should have a great time seeing them taken to task.