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. [Read more…]