In the freewheeling days of the open range, a group of British gentlemen went into business on a grand scale, building legendary cattle empires and a new industry based on beef and railroads. This is the first full account of the upper-class cowboys. 8-page photo insert.
In the freewheeling days of the open range, a group of British gentlemen went into business on a grand scale, building legendary cattle empires and a new industry based on beef and railroads. This is the first full account of the upper-class cowboys. 8-page photo insert.
“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.
Army scout, frontiersman, and hero of the American West, William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody was also a shrewd self-promoter, showman, and entrepreneur. In 1888 he published The Story of the Wild West, a collection of biographies of four well-known American frontier figures: Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Kit Carson, and himself. Cody contributed an abridged version of his 1879 autobiography with an addendum titled The Wild West in England, now available in this stand-alone annotated edition, including all the illustrations from the original text along with photographs of Cody and promotional materials. Here Cody describes his Wild West exhibition, the show that offered audiences a mythic experience of the American frontier. Focusing on the show’s first season of performances in England, Cody includes excerpts of numerous laudatory descriptions of his show from the English press as well as stories of his time spent with British nobility—from private performances for Queen Victoria and the Prince and Princess of Wales to dinners and teas with the elite of London society. He depicts himself as an ambassador of American culture, proclaiming that he and his Wild West show prompted the British to “know more of the mighty nation beyond the Atlantic and . . . to esteem us better than at any time within the limits of modern history.”
Reconstructing the increasingly contested interpretations of the meaning of public land administration, this book traces the history of the political dynamics between ranchers and federal land agencies.
The Texas state constitution of 1876 set aside three million acres of public land in the Texas Panhandle in exchange for construction of the state’s monumental red-granite capitol in Austin. That land became the XIT Ranch, briefly one of the most productive cattle operations in the West. The story behind the legendary XIT Ranch, told in full in this book, is a tale of Gilded Age business and politics at the very foundation of the American cattle industry. The capitol construction project, along with the acres that would become XIT, went to an Illinois syndicate led by men influential in politics and business. Unable to sell the land, the Illinois group, backed by British capital, turned to cattle ranching to satisfy investors. In tracing their efforts, which expanded to include a satellite ranch in Montana, historian Michael M. Miller demythologizes the cattle business that flourished in the late-nineteenth-century American West, paralleling the United States’ first industrial revolution. The XIT Ranch came into being and succeeded, Miller shows, only because of the work of accountants, lawyers, and managers, overseen by officers and a board of seasoned international capitalists. In turn, the ranch created wealth for some and promoted the expansion of railroads, new towns, farms, and jobs. Though it existed only from 1885 to 1912, from Texas to Montana the operation left a deep imprint on community culture and historical memory. Describing the Texas capitol project in its full scope and gritty detail, XIT cuts through the popular portrayal of great western ranches to reveal a more nuanced and far-reaching reality in the business and politics of the beef industry at the close of America’s Gilded Age.
The Old West was coming to an end. Two legendary outlaws refused to go with it. As leaders of the Wild Bunch, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid executed the most daring bank and train robberies of their day. For several years at the end of the 1890s, the two friends, along with a revolving band of thieves, eluded law enforcement while stealing from the rich bankers and Eastern railroad corporations who exploited Western land…until they rode headlong into the twentieth century. In The Last Outlaws, Thom Hatch brings these memorable characters to life like never before. From their early holdup attempts to that fateful day in Bolivia, Hatch draws on a wealth of fresh research to go beyond the myth and provide a compelling new look at these legends of the Wild West. Includes Photographs
An original and textured analysis of how agricultural developments in Quebec and Ontario had a significant and direct impact on rural settlement in the Prairies.
Presents an illustrated A-Z reference containing more than 300 entries related to immigration to North America, including people, places, legislation, and more.