English Aristocrats in the Old West

This is a revised and expanded version of an article I wrote ten years ago for the now-defunct blog The Vintage Reader.

One of the reasons I've always been drawn to write about the American West is the way it's chock-full of colorful characters and fascinating stories. The open spaces and fresh opportunities of the West attracted people of all classes and nationalities in search of fortune, adventure or escape—in fact, you might be surprised to know that even as seemingly unlikely a figure as a titled English aristocrat was by no means a rarity on the plains of Texas or among the mountains of Montana.

In the 1870s and 1880s, with the open-range cattle boom in full swing, many wealthy Englishmen saw the ranching business as an excellent opportunity for investment, and American ranchers welcomed the capital the English could provide. “[English] drawing rooms buzzed with the stories of this last of bonanzas,” wrote John Clay, a Scotsman who eventually became a highly successful ranch manager himself; “staid old gentlemen, who scarcely knew the difference between a steer and a heifer, discussed it over their port and nuts.” By the mid-1880s there were dozens of foreign-owned cattle companies with millions of dollars in assets operating across the West. One example was the XIT Ranch, one of the largest and most famous of its time. At its peak the XIT, which covered more than three million acres in ten Texas counties, employed around 150 cowboys to work 160,000 head of cattle. The American syndicate that ran the ranch was in turn financed by the Capitol Freehold Land and Investment Company, organized in London in 1884, whose wealthy English shareholders included the Earl of Aberdeen and Sir Henry Seton-Karr. (The subject of British economic involvement in the Old West is interestingly explored in Cattle Kingdom by Christopher Knowlton, which I reviewed here.)

One of the most colorful British figures to grace the cattle-ranching scene was Moreton Frewen, who settled in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin in 1879. Frewen was the third son of a wealthy Sussex family, an adventurer and visionary whose many reckless financial schemes and accompanying failures earned him the nickname “Mortal Ruin.” Having squandered his own inherited fortune, he had to borrow money to set up his Wyoming venture. He bought livestock and built a two-story log house that was the height of luxury for the time and place—it included a solid walnut staircase, a musicians’ gallery in the dining-room and furnishings imported from Chicago and England. It even had a private telephone line that ran 22 miles to Powder River Crossing! The American cowboys dubbed the structure “Castle Frewen.” In 1881 Frewen married New York socialite Clarita “Clara” Jerome (whose sister Jennie became the mother of Winston Churchill), and the couple entertained in style at Castle Frewen, hosting lavish hunting parties for their guests, who included titled English aristocrats and New York society connections. But after becoming ill on one of these expeditions and suffering a miscarriage, Clara went back to New York, never to return to Wyoming. Frewen left Wyoming in 1885, adding another disaster to his resume with his dismissal from the position of manager of the failing Powder River Cattle Company.

Another type of Englishman frequently to be found in the Old West was the “remittance-man.” These were often younger sons of wealthy or aristocratic families who, since they would not inherit a title or fortune like the eldest son, went abroad or were sent abroad by their parents to British colonies such as Australia or South Africa, or to America, to make a fortune of their own—the American cattle business was seen as a good opportunity for these young men to get a start in life. In the meantime they received a monthly allowance or “remittance” from their family on which to live. The term “remittance-man” was often used as one of scorn or jeering, with hard-working Americans viewing them as lazy spongers living off their monthly checks from abroad. Occasionally, actual disgrace did lie behind aristocratic younger sons’ exile—some were dissolute or had gotten into trouble in England, and were packed off to America either as a last hope of reforming them or to keep them from damaging the family reputation any further.

While some lived up to the negative stereotype of the remittance-man, drifting about the country wearing out their lives as drifting idlers or alcoholics, many others went to work with a good will and eventually became successful ranchers on their own account. Writing in the 1920s, Wyoming rancher Struthers Burt recalled visiting a colony of English ranchers who had been well established there for many years by the time of World War I:

The thirteenth and fourteenth sons of the Scotch baronet and the next heir to the English earldom have been everything from cowpunchers and sheep-herders and camp cooks to members of the State legislature. Now they have prospered, and although they are American citizens they have built themselves—in the way the British have—ranch-houses that resemble as much as possible English country homes. It is strange to come out of the sagebrush and into the shadow of great shaggy hills and find copper jugs filled with hot water, and port after dinner, and, in the case of the thirteenth son who graduated there, an Oxford accent.

…They are a great people, the English—quietly unconquerable.

At the moment the brother of the English earl was away, helping as best he could the England whose citizenship he had given up, but to whose aid he returned when she was in trouble, but his youngest son was there, a completely American boy of eleven, who, so far as I could make out, had never been out of the United States, and who resented the slightest implication that he wasn’t an American—which, of course, he was. And where this boy was concerned something interesting was going on. This boy—they were afraid to tell him because he was such a thoroughgoing American—had at the time every chance of becoming the next Earl of So-and-So, whether he wanted or not, for his oldest brother, who had been brought up at Eton in order that he might be prepared to accept the title his father would never claim, was at the front in a Guards regiment. As things turned out, the elder brother came out of the war unscathed, but all that summer and the next the small boy in the heart of Wyoming stood upon the brink of a hazard that would have changed his life forever.

The ranching Englishman is seldom seen in popular mid-20th-century Western fiction or movies, but he appears quite frequently in turn-of-the-century fiction. A good example is B.M. Bower’s Her Prairie Knight, which features a British-owned cattle company operating in Montana and also the Gilded Age trend of social-climbing American heiresses marrying into impoverished noble English families (with the book’s spunky heroine resisting her ambitious mother’s efforts to hustle her into such a match). In A.M. Chisholm’s The Land of Strong Men,  a cheerful young remittance-man who faces a girl’s prejudice against his type and gets an education in ranching life is a prominent supporting character.

The foreign-controlled cattle empires were not destined to last. The very success of the cattle boom eventually led to overcrowding and overgrazing of the open ranges; droughts led to prairie fires that further damaged grazing lands, and on top of that, in 1885 the United States Government ordered all cattle removed from Indian Territory, forcing those herds onto already crowded ranges. Cattle prices were beginning to drop. The final blow came in the terrible winter of 1886-87, as raging blizzards and sub-zero temperatures wiped out fifty to seventy-five percent of some herds. In the wake of the “Big Die-Up,” as the disaster was known, many of the big cattle companies collapsed, went bankrupt or changed hands.  By the 1890s, the XIT Ranch in Texas had begun selling off its land and cattle in order to pay back their British investors, and in 1912, the ranch ceased operations. “Castle Frewen” in Wyoming was demolished about the same time. The era of the cattle empire and the open range had come to an end—but not all of the cattle companies failed completely. Those that were left adapted to the new methods of ranching, which involved more careful managing of feed and livestock on smaller, fenced ranges, and continued to do business—like the fictional Northern Pool of Her Prairie Knight—into the early 20th century. Instead of grazing their cattle on the shared public domain land of the previous decades, they often depended on land leased from the government, like the ranches in the novel.

The English also appear throughout the pages of memoirs of the Old West. In No Life For a Lady, Agnes Morley Cleaveland wrote of her neighbor in New Mexico ranch country, a young Englishman named Montague Stevens, who despite losing his left arm in a hunting accident was both skilled and fearless when it came to riding or driving spirited horses over rough terrain or hunting grizzly bears in the mountains. In 1896 he brought home a bride from England, a “lady of quality…[who] had defied all parental opposition to come and marry her childhood sweetheart.” Agnes and a friend drove to the Stevens ranch—seventy miles from her home and a hundred from the nearest town—to pay a courtesy call on the new bride.

Her husband and the other men of the ranch, she explained, had gone to the roundup. She was alone at the moment, save for old Dad, a white-whiskered patriarch whom we had all known since ever time was. The ranchwoman whom her husband had engaged as maid-of-all-work had departed the day after the arrival of her new mistress.

“It was really most surprising,” Mrs. Stevens said. “I said to my housekeeper, ‘We’ll not dine till your master’ (broad a) ‘arrives,’ and she whirled on me and said, ‘I’ll have you know I ain’t got no master’ and off she went. Evidently in America one does not speak of oneself as master to the servants.”

“One does not,” I assured her. “Not in Socorro County, at any rate.”

…Boxes from England had yielded their contents in the form of hangings, tapestries, silver plate that had belonged to more than one earl; but an Arbuckle’s Coffee packing case served as woodbox beside the fireplace. Equally violent contrasts were in evidence on all sides. To do us honor, our hostess dressed for dinner as she might have done had she been entertaining us at her country place in England. Her black lace gown was by Worth. An engraved ruby ring, reputedly a stolen idol’s eye, was but one of her jewels of historic lineage. This was not ostentation. It was a simple act of courtesy such as she had grown up to consider fitting.

At dinner there was imported curry from India, and rare vintages of wine; and Dad served the tomatoes in the can he had just opened by cutting two gashes in its top with an axe. Throughout, our hostess made smiling quips that invited us to enjoy it all with her. After we had retired to the ‘drawing-room’—but not before Dad had begun to clear away the dishes—she played the piano and sang for us, in a voice whose natural beauty the London Conservatory of Music had skillfully enhanced. The log ranch house, one hundred miles from Magdalena, nearest point of civilization, rang with melody fit for the angels to hear.

Agnes wrote:

Because of knowing Mrs. Montague Stevens, I think I understand the English. The world will do well not to make premature prophecy of their decadence. Only once do I remember having seen Mrs. Stevens flinch. She had just received a letter from her aged mother in England. It said: ‘I sincerely hope, my dear child, that you have a trustworthy coachman. I would feel easier in my mind if I were assured of it.’

If Montague Stevens ever had a trustworthy horse, none of us knew it. As for a trustworthy coachman…well…

With so many interesting stories and tidbits about the English in the West having seeped into my imagination over the years, it’s not surprising that I should incorporate the subject into a story at some point—and that story turned out to be The American Pony, the fifth book in the Mrs. Meade Mysteries, in which the plot revolves around an English baronet’s family spending some time on a ranch in turn-of-the-century Colorado. It was fun being able to weave bits of the historical knowledge I’ve accumulated into the creation of these characters! Mrs. Meade, also a guest at the ranch, is “interested in seeing what an English baronet was like, never having met one before,” but before long, in characteristic Mrs. Meade form, she has “ceased to view the Marslands as a titled English family, and saw instead a nice family, an interesting family; but one not without their troubles…”

…and as you know, when Mrs. Meade begins making those observations, things are about to happen!

The American Pony releases July 25th, and you can pre-order the ebook now!