Elisabeth Grace Foley

Historical Fiction Author

English Aristocrats in the Old West

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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…]

Trails of Thought II: Law and Lenience

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A series of occasional bite-sized musings on the history of the American West.

In the still-evolving picture of the average Westerner’s mindset and values I’ve slowly formed over the years, I’ve noticed that if the West had one peculiar moral flaw or idiosyncrasy, it was…not precisely lawlessness, as in deliberately flouting all law or restraint, but a tendency to draw an arbitrary distinction between “good vs. bad” and “lawful vs. unlawful” which sometimes led to a curious lenience toward certain types of law-breaking. Often you might find a Westerner characterizing somebody as friendly, brave, kind, a good sort of fellow, but oh dear, he has that inconvenient habit of stealing horses or shooting at people! Westerners seemed inclined to overlook or minimize a little law-breaking—so long as it didn’t involve cruelty or taking advantage of a weaker or helpless person—if the lawbreaker fit their definition of “a good man” in possessing some of their most highly valued personal qualities: e.g. physical courage, straightforwardness, determination, loyalty to friends, etc. I remember being struck by this attitude when reading Charles Siringo’s A Cowboy Detective, in which Siringo so often casually noted becoming fast friends with men he was assigned to track down and help convict (usually for robbery of some type) or quite unselfconsciously described one of them as a splendid chap or words to that effect.

I suppose the positive flip side of this failing might be giving short shrift to the man who was technically lawful, but personally corrupt; the supposedly upstanding citizen who is only one outwardly, but is essentially cruel and cowardly or takes advantage of others by legal means. I sense that the type of average Westerner I’ve described would have very little patience with such a one. Well, that’s good. But I can’t help thinking (broadening scope a little here) that the hypocrite type of antagonist has been overdone in fiction generally, or rather consistently mishandled—his wrongdoing persistently blamed on religion or respectability itself, instead of a recognition that his real perfidy lies in wearing the externals of those things as a false veneer.

Getting back on track…this Western moral paradox of “good” versus “lawful” is the one thing I’ve found most puzzling whenever I encounter it. But as I think it out, I begin to see dimly where it might come from. Independence of character, and especially independence of thought, has always been a distinctive element of American and particularly American Western values; and as John Truby points out in The Anatomy of Story, a good way for a writer to create a character flaw is to envision how a strength carried too far can become a weakness, or a positive trait have a negative flip side. Perhaps the Westerner’s independence of character—extremely valuable in its place—sometimes tended toward a belief in his own ability to decide right and wrong based on situation rather than standard.

Eugene Manlove Rhodes, whose fiction displays the moral paradox as much as any of his contemporaries and perhaps more so, took this discussion head-on in a telling campfire conversation from his short story “An Executive Mind”:

“And who’s to be the judge of whether it’s a good law or not? You?”

“Me. Me, every time. Someone must. If I let some other man make up my mind I’ve got to use my judgment—picking the man I follow. By organizing myself into a Permanent Committee of One to do my own thinking I take my one chance of mistakes instead of two.”

“So you believe in doing evil that good may come, do you?

“Well,” said Jeff judicially, “it seems to be at least as good a proposition as doing good that evil may come of it…there isn’t one thing we call wrong, when other men do it, that hasn’t been lawful, some time or other. When to break a law is to do a wrong, it’s evil. When it’s doing right to break a law, it’s not evil. Got that? It’s not wrong to keep a just law—and if it’s wrong to break an unjust law I want a new dictionary with pictures of it in the back.”

That’s both the strength and the weakness right there. Enough strength and independence of mind to seek for the difference between justice and injustice, but too much independence in believing fallible human nature is capable of deciding what’s right without an objective standard. (So many earnest stories muddle onto the rocks here, having characters agonizing over whether they’re doing right or wrong, but leaving them adrift without an objective standard to measure their conduct by!) To judge a fallible human law you need the infallible measuring-stick of God’s law—by the campfire, as well as on the city street.

image: “Tall in the Saddle” by W.H.D. Koerner

Previously: A Good Man

The Cowboy and the Sailor

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A few years ago, one of my sisters was doing a lot of reading about the Age of Sail, particularly the life of the common seaman during the golden age of British seafaring in the 17th and 18th centuries, and (as is common in our family) filling me in thoroughly on everything she was learning. There was a time when I felt almost equipped with enough knowledge to put to sea and manage a modest-sized sailing ship myself. But one night when we were talking I realized something interesting: there were a number of remarkable parallels, in both a practical and cultural sense, between the British tar and the American cowboy. For some reason that conversation was called to my mind again recently, and looking back over it, I realized that there were actually even more parallels than I noticed at the time—so as a matter of interest, I decided to tally them up:

  • Both were working-class, outdoor professions involving strenuous physical labor and conflict with the elements; both professions became surrounded with an aura of romance even in their own times, with the British sailor and the American cowboy each becoming a figure symbolic of their respective nations.
  • Both were freelance laborers who frequently traveled widely, signing on as a crew member of different ships or cattle outfits for varying periods of time.
  • Both carried all their worldly possessions with them in a single portable piece of luggage: the sailor’s sea chest, the cowboy’s war sack.
  • Both wore clothing specifically adapted to the conditions of their work, which society at large considered “picturesque,” eventually borrowing and adopting elements of their costumes for general wear.
  • Both were known for singing at their work, and specifically for inventing their own songs inspired by or fitted to their tasks: sailors’ sea shanties for hauling on ropes, cowboys’ lullabies sung to soothe restless cattle.
  • Because of their physcially demanding nature, both professions were primarily the domain of young men: elderly sailors or cowboys were not common.
  • Owing to specific aspects of the work, very tall or large men were less common in both professions: sailors had to be agile for climbing and could not be too tall to stand up below decks in ships of the period; and cowboys who spent most of their lives in the saddle tended to be lighter and leaner men as well.
  • Both had the reputation of possessing upbeat dispositions and a distinctive sense of humor.
  • Both had a reputation for being roisterers, fond of wine, woman, and song.
  • Both had a criminal alter-ego who turned the tools of their trade to unlawful use: the pirate and the rustler.
  • Despite the hard and often dangerous nature of their work, men from both professions were often known for having a strong emotional attachment to the wide-open, untamed natural setting they belonged to—the open sea, the open range—a sense of restlessness and wanderlust that drew them to it.
  • Both the sailor and the cowboy were often considered rough and less than respectable by polite society, but at the same time credited with qualities such as bravery, dependability, tenacity, and loyalty—in other words, perhaps not the kind of person you’d want to mix with socially, but definitely the kind you’d want on your side in a fight.

Am I the only one to have made these connections? Looking at this list laid out in detail I find it hard to believe at least some of it hasn’t struck somebody before. I’ve never come across the analogy myself in any of the reading I’ve done, but I’d be fascinated to hear if anyone else has!