Nature's Noblemen: Transatlantic Masculinities and the Nineteenth-Century American West 0300136064, 9780300136067

In this fascinating book Monica Rico explores the myth of the American West in the nineteenth century as a place for men

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Nature's Noblemen: Transatlantic Masculinities and the Nineteenth-Century American West
 0300136064, 9780300136067

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Sir William Drummond Stewart and Aristocratic Masculinity
2 “What Shall I Do with My Son?”: Moreton Frewen and Aristocratic Masculinity on the Ranching Frontier
3 Gender and Empire: The Earl of Dunraven and Isabella Bird in Estes Park
4 “The Latest Fad of These Silly Days”: Buffalo Bill in Darkest London
5 A White Man’s Country: Elite Masculinity, Racial Decline, and the Frontier Stories of Theodore Roosevelt
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
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P
Q
R
S
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W
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Citation preview

NATURE’S NOBLEMEN

THE LAMAR SERIES IN WESTERN HISTORY The Lamar Series in Western History includes scholarly books of general public interest that enhance the understanding of human affairs in the American West and contribute to a wider understanding of the West’s significance in the political, social, and cultural life of America. Comprising works of the highest quality, the series aims to increase the range and vitality of Western American history, focusing on frontier places and people, Indian and ethnic communities, the urban West and the environment, and the art and illustrated history of the American West. Editorial Board Howard R. Lamar, Sterling Professor of History Emeritus, Past President of Yale University William J. Cronon, University of Wisconsin–Madison Philip J. Deloria, University of Michigan John Mack Faragher, Yale University Jay Gitlin, Yale University George A. Miles, Beinecke Library, Yale University Martha A. Sandweiss, Princeton University Virginia J. Scharff, University of New Mexico Robert M. Utley, Former Chief Historian, National Park Service Recent Titles Subverting Exclusion: Transpacific Encounters with Race, Caste, and Borders, 1885–1928, by Andrea Geiger William Clark’s World: Describing America in an Age of Unknowns, by Peter J. Kastor Nature’s Noblemen: Transatlantic Masculinities and the Nineteenth-Century American West, by Monica Rico Geronimo, by Robert M. Utley Forthcoming Titles The Shawnee Nation, by Sami Lakomaki American Genocide: The California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873, by Benjamin Madley The Rush to Gold: France and the California Gold Rush, by Malcolm J. Rohrbough The Cherokee Diaspora, by Gregory Smithers Making Los Angeles: Race, Space, and Municipal Power, by David Samuel Torres-Rouff

nature’s noblemen Transatlantic Masculinities and the Nineteenth-Century American West Monica Rico

New Haven & London

Copyright © 2013 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or sales@ yaleup.co.uk (U.K. office). Set in Galliard and Copperplate 33 types by IDS Infotech. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rico, Monica, 1971– Nature’s noblemen : transatlantic masculinities and the nineteenth-century American West / Monica Rico. pages cm.—(The Lamar series in Western history) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-300-13606-7 (hardbound : alk. paper) 1. British—West (U.S.)—History— 19th century. 2. Upper class—Great Britain—History—19th century. 3. Upper class—West (U.S.)—History—19th century. 4. Masculinity—Great Britain—History—19th century. 5. Masculinity—United States—History—20th century. 6. Frontier and pioneer life—West (U.S.) 7. West (U.S.)—History—19th century. I. Title. F596.3.B7R53 2013 978'.02—dc23 2012047960 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1 Sir William Drummond Stewart and Aristocratic Masculinity 19 2 “What Shall I Do with My Son?”: Moreton Frewen and Aristocratic Masculinity on the Ranching Frontier 45 3 Gender and Empire: The Earl of Dunraven and Isabella Bird in Estes Park 83 4 “The Latest Fad of These Silly Days”: Buffalo Bill in Darkest London 132 5 A White Man’s Country: Elite Masculinity, Racial Decline, and the Frontier Stories of Theodore Roosevelt 164 Epilogue 212 Notes 219 Bibliography 259 Index 277

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming, the Department of History, University of California at Berkeley, and the Office of the Provost, Lawrence University, for funding the research upon which this book is based. I also wish to thank archivists at the American Heritage Center, the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, the Scottish Record Office, the East Sussex Record Office, and the Denver Public Library for their patience and professionalism. The staff at Seeley G. Mudd Library at Lawrence have been unfailingly helpful with my constant stream of interlibrary loan requests. One of the pleasures of writing this book has been the far-flung travel it required. In Wyoming, Gene Gressley, Rex Myers and Susan Richards, and Jeremy Johnston have been wonderful hosts and lunch companions; Caryn Berg allowed me to stay in her apartment near Denver one summer; Michelle Tusan, Andrew Muldoon, John Jenks, and Patrick McDevitt provided support over a London autumn. Maya Kovskaya, Han Bing, and Xie Tianxue helped make Beijing a surprisingly congenial place in which to write about the American West. Gay Joyce always had encouraging words when I visited California. I am also grateful to Nancy Cott for inviting me to present my work at a summer seminar of the Schlesinger Institute, to Vicki Ruiz for her encouragement that week, and to the other members of my seminar group.

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Whatever disputes we western historians have among ourselves, I am deeply appreciative of the friendliness and openness shown to an interloper from British history many years ago. Now that I feel at home as a western historian, it is a pleasure to have the opportunity to express my gratitude. David Wrobel, Michael Lansing, and Katherine Morrissey read portions of the manuscript and gave deeply valuable advice. Anne Hyde and Tom Dunlap provided encouragement when I needed it most. This project would never have begun without Matt Klingle’s friendship, and it never would have been completed without his advice. I am grateful to many colleagues in Wisconsin. Bill Cronon has kept the door to the community of environmental scholars at Madison open for me. At Lawrence, Melanie Boyd, Karen Hoffmann, Marcia Bjornerud, and my colleagues in history gave helpful comments on various problems. I am particularly appreciative of the multiple readings that Faith Barrett gave to several chapters. Maggie Marmor and Stephanie Martin served as outstanding research assistants. Chris Rogers and the staff at Yale University Press have been patient beyond belief, to my deep gratitude. I wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for Yale who sent me insightful feedback, especially regarding the chapter on Theodore Roosevelt. I am also grateful to my family for encouraging my interest in history since childhood, generously supporting my education and travels, and being tactful about not asking when the book would be done. In so many ways this book is the product of a Berkeley historian. David Hollinger, Paul Groth, Sheldon Rothblatt, Robin Einhorn, David Keightley, Tom Metcalf, Irv Scheiner, and Hanna Pitkin taught me with patience and wit. I honor the memories of Susannah Barrows, Bob Brentano, Jim Kettner, Jon Gjerde, and Larry Levine; I wish I could have sent them this book. Thomas Laqueur guided the dissertation upon which this book is based with characteristic panache. Kerwin Klein challenged me to make the dissertation into a book and never let up, to my gratitude. Of my Berkeley teachers, in the end, I can only

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

quote in a slightly adapted form Bob Brentano’s words about his own teachers, including Maurice Powicke: “Having known them, I could not accept a lesser view of history than theirs.” I was fortunate also in the friendships I made as a graduate student. Marya Arfer, Robert Avila, David Engerman, Nils Gilman, Kevin Grant, Anne Keary, Hee Ko, Karen Leong, Patricia Lin, Abigail Lustig, Anthony Marasco, Margaret Pagaduan, Dan Rolde, Paul Sabin, Jason Scott Smith, Phil Soffer, Lisa Trivedi, Jonathan Zatlin, and especially Paul Romano were all friends who helped me along a path that sometimes seemed very dark. This book is dedicated to my husband, Peter Blitstein, with love.

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NATURE’S NOBLEMEN

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INTRODUCTION

Three photographs: each shows a young, confident white man dressed in fringed buckskin pants and jacket, posed against a studio backdrop of papier-mâché rocks and dried grass. Two of them hold rifles. Though they are not outside, their clothing and props evoke the outdoors, the raw truths of nature and of violence. But why are they dressed as they are? Are they actors, perhaps performers in one of the many Wild West shows popular in the late nineteenth century? One of them, William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody, was (fig. 1). For a photograph taken circa 1878 Cody chose to wear the elaborate buckskin suit he used when guiding wealthy tourists on big game hunting trips. The suit was part of Cody’s persona as a frontiersman, and he continued to wear it, or one like it, after he moved from guiding and scouting to a stage career. In fact, a buckskin suit and long flowing hair became inseparable from the persona of Buffalo Bill. The man in this picture embodied the ideal American frontiersman for several generations. The second photograph depicts Theodore Roosevelt in 1885 (fig. 2). Another famous American and a contemporary of Cody’s, Roosevelt also lived on an epic scale before the eyes of the American public. While the costume, setting, and pose commemorate Roosevelt’s hunting and ranching days in the Dakota Badlands, the photographer

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Fig. 1. William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody, circa 1878, photographed by the New York society photographer Naegeli. Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody, Wyoming; Original Buffalo Bill Museum Collection, P.69.30.

was George Grantham Bain, a New Yorker known for his ability to supply images of the nation’s leading figures to a burgeoning press hungry for material. The picture served as an illustration for Roosevelt’s book Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, about his ranching and hunting

Fig. 2. Theodore Roosevelt, 1885, in a buckskin suit. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

experiences in the Dakota Territory.1 It was the first of several books that would establish Roosevelt as an expert on western life and big game hunting. As a hunter, rancher, author, soldier, and politician, Roosevelt incessantly celebrated western manhood. According to him, western men embodied the ideal of “the strenuous life,” a Darwinian

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struggle in which men had to test themselves against nature and other men; in so doing, they advanced not merely their individual interests but also those of civilization itself. Although Roosevelt looks young and slightly uncertain in this picture, there can be little doubt about his determination to project an image of rugged strength. The subject of the third photograph, Moreton Frewen, unlike Cody and Roosevelt, is not well known (fig. 3). Frewen, the son of an old and wealthy English gentry family, ran cattle and hunted big game in Wyoming in the 1880s. He knew Roosevelt slightly and had friends in common with Cody. Yet he faded into obscurity instead of ascending into the pantheon of American heroes. Why would an upper-class Englishman dress in buckskin? Why did three such different men share the same hope of being seen as a frontiersman? This book seeks to answer these questions by uncovering the networks of elite men, British and American, who circulated between the trans-Mississippi West and the metropoles of London and New York. Each chapter explores the experiences of individuals who, by traveling these transatlantic paths, sought to resolve their anxieties about class, gender, and empire in an era of profound economic and social transformation. These men constructed gendered selves experiencing a frontier, understood as a line between civilization and savagery, humankind and nature. The men in this book saw the American West “as a global West, as one developing frontier, one colonial enterprise, among many around the globe,” a view that did not necessarily contradict a simultaneously held image of the settling of the American frontier as the defining process of American history.2 Frontier stories offered a set of cultural tools that enabled upper-class men struggling to make sense of the rise of a new democratic, industrial society to create meaning in their lives. The ritualized killing of wild animals incorporated a rich vocabulary of gestures, objects, sayings, clothing, and images that, when woven together, told a story about masculine triumph over nature. These frontier stories legitimated the power these men exercised—over women, workers, colonial subjects—by testifying to their capacity for and even

Fig. 3. Moreton Frewen, around 1878. Moreton Frewen Collection, Box 8, Folder 35, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.

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excellence at violence. At the same time, hunting disciplined violence by constraining it within a complex, nuanced web of texts, customs, rules, and institutions that defined elite hunters as sportsmen and not as so-called game butchers. All this was true for both American and British men, who jointly participated in the creation of a transatlantic community of hunters committed to documenting, regulating, and celebrating the pursuit of big game. In this book I examine some of the linkages that established that community, but in addition I emphasize the cultural specificity of British encounters with the American West. I speak of encounters in the plural because there was no single, unified British way of traveling to the West. Some men and women permanently emigrated while others sojourned for years or took short vacations. English, Scottish, and Irish origins shaped the choices and perceptions that shaped their experiences, as did religion and class. The chronological starting point of this book is the 1830s, a decade in which the British Parliament passed a political reform bill of epochal proportions, investigated conditions in the mines and textile factories that were transforming the economic and physical landscape of the country, and grappled with the cultural consequences of religious reforms that revised laws dating from the seventeenth century. As the century progressed, Britain continued to alter its constitution, to expand its empire, and to confront the results of rapid industrialization. From this vantage point, British observers of the West tended to romanticize it as a wilderness far removed from the instability of modern change. The American West exercised a particularly strong pull on members of the British landed classes, the titled aristocracy and gentry who for centuries had held a dominant position in British society. From this class, traditionally, had come Britain’s members of Parliament. Primogeniture, which reserved landed estates intact for the inheritance of eldest sons, tended to push younger sons into the military, the clergy, the learned professions, and the higher echelons of civil service, thus creating an intricate network of landed influence throughout British

INTRODUCTION

institutions; intermarriage between this category of people and the most successful merchants, financiers, and manufacturers also tended to enhance the prestige and the power of the landed elite. Yet by the third decade of the nineteenth century, this class was experiencing the beginnings of what would be a long, slow, and inexorable decline. The assault came on multiple fronts. Economically, competition from agricultural imports undermined the prices for farm commodities and led to agricultural depressions that decreased the rents upon which this class relied for this income. Politically, reform movements that demanded an extension of the vote and changes in land tenure, particularly in Ireland, wore away at the basis of landed power. Civil service reforms requiring competitive examinations as well as increasing professionalization and specialization in the military and the law also decreased landed dominance of these occupations.3 Buffeted by these winds of modernization, the British elite often turned to distant and exotic places in search of some new setting where traditional aristocratic values such as hierarchy and honor could still prevail.4 They saw the American West as one of these places, a land where British upper-class men could naturalize the social hierarchies that seemed so fragile at home. Given that British men from the upper classes experienced their world as insecure and sought escapist reassurance, why go to the American West? In fact, British big game hunters did go to Canada, India, and other British colonies, a phenomenon analyzed by John Mackenzie, Tina Loo, and other historians interested in colonial and imperial societies. However, British travelers and investors also went west. Roughly fifteen hundred British companies organized to do business in the trans-Mississippi West between 1865 and 1890.5 These companies invested British capital in a wide variety of industries, including railroads, mining, cattle and sheep ranching, farm mortgages, and timber. In addition, the growth of Western tourism drew British investors and British tourists, who established themselves as a distinct community in many western resorts toward the end of the nineteenth century.

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For instance, Colorado Springs and Manitou were popular with Britons as tourist destinations in the 1880s, but in addition many of these visitors had been among the first investors in the towns’ resort development.6 The West was textually available to the British through a wide variety of books, magazine articles, world’s fair exhibits, and Wild West show performances. Travel books about the United States written by British authors were an established subgenre by the middle of the nineteenth century. Robert Athearn’s annotated bibliography of post–Civil War British travel writing about the West lists one hundred and thirty-one titles.7 Travel writing about the West often depicted the region as one of Edenic simplicity. As one hunter wrote, “On the fifteenth day after leaving Liverpool you may dine in the Rocky Mountains on trout you have yourself caught, venison you have yourself stalked, and fruit you have yourself gathered.” This fantasy of self-sufficiency in the wilderness drew hunters who wanted to prove themselves able to hunt without the gamekeepers, servants, bearers, and other usual support staff that accompanied British hunters at home or in India. In fact, this writer claimed that Colorado was not only more interesting than Scotland as a destination for sportsmen, but also cheaper. Transporting yourself to Colorado cost a great deal of money, but once you were there you could live off the land and sleep outdoors rather than having to find a hotel or maintain another residence in the area.8 The American West reportedly teemed with game. Publications for gentlemanly sportsmen such as the Field raved about the abundant herds of deer and the streams full of trout.9 The West was home to intriguing animals, including elk, moose, mountain goats, bighorn sheep, grizzly bears, mountain lions, and, most fascinating of all, the bison. Moreover, whereas hunters in India and Africa were constrained by the complex cultural requirements of enacting imperial mastery, in the American West they bore no such burden. There, upperclass British men could imagine themselves temporarily liberated from the expectations of imperial governance. They could regress

INTRODUCTION

into boyhood and emerge renewed. The West was a realm of desire, pleasure, and freedom. Scholars of American masculinity have argued that a mythic West reassured and inspired white middle-class men shaken by economic change, women’s rights movements, immigration, and labor unrest. The mechanization and impersonality of modern life distanced men from older forms of masculinity that emphasized the role of family patriarch and Christian gentleman. Continuously tested in the struggle for success, men sought to blunt the edge of competition with male camaraderie. In compensation, they turned to western fantasies of adventure that reassured them about their virility. Theodore Roosevelt, like Buffalo Bill Cody, George Armstrong Custer, and Owen Wister, was able to assimilate his own western experiences into this cultural development, shaping it and amplifying it for a wide audience in the process.10 The popularity of Roosevelt’s cowboy imagery has often obscured the way in which his image as a rugged American man of the West satisfied his need to resolve the anxieties that beset his patrician New York upbringing. Even though Roosevelt considered himself a member of the middle class, one of the many intriguing contradictions of his personality and life is the way in which he identified himself as a gentleman whose family on both his father’s and mother’s side could be traced back for generations. Similarly, Roosevelt’s assertive nationalism has tended somewhat to overshadow his wide range of transatlantic connections and the ways in which such relationships overlapped with western ones.11 For example, Roosevelt and Wister, along with their Harvard classmates Hubert Teschemacher and Frederick deBillier, were habitués of the Cheyenne Club in Cheyenne, Wyoming, which Wister called “the pearl of the prairies.” Founded in 1880, the club was exclusive. Membership was limited to fifty, and the dues and the entrance fee were set at $30 and $50, respectively, approximately $660 and $1,100 in today’s currency.12 The membership was diverse, but wealthy northeasterners and the British landed classes predominated. The club

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contained a dining room, reading room, billiard room, card room, wine room, and overnight accommodations. Gambling, offensive drunkenness, profanity, and fighting were grounds for expulsion from the club, although the minutes suggest that these rules were often broken. Club correspondence and accounts show orders for such things as champagne, imported cigars, orange marmalade, pickled eels, and English ale. The club also subscribed to a number of eastern magazines and newspapers. The visitors’ register shows a wide variety of addresses, New York, various Wyoming and Colorado locales, and England being the most frequent.13 The club rooms in Cheyenne—and other, similar rooms in Denver and San Francisco, New York and Boston, London and Edinburgh—were the setting for exchanges of information about western investments and western hunting that wove together elite men from Britain and the United States. Sites of manly consumption and socializing operated as nodes on a network channeling capital, people, and animals back and forth across the Atlantic and into and out of the American West. The expansion of this network during the nineteenth century created, in the words of William Robbins, “a world perpetually in the process of becoming.”14 In this world, relationships formed and dissolved, landscapes were transformed, and lives changed. Hunting might seem incidental to the historical convulsions unleashed by capitalism, a mere pastime. Yet the pursuit and killing of animals in the wilderness was a meaning-making activity that actively constructed the class, race, and gender identities of many of the men who incorporated the American West into the global economy. The men in this book endlessly sought to establish, elaborate, and defend masculinity. They understood the West as a place of adventure, a notion heavily weighted with meanings. Adventure is best understood relationally, in the context of places and lives that are not adventurous. That is, it stands in contrast to the settled world of domestic order.15 The western adventures of Frewen, Roosevelt, and others like them took place within a utopian space where masculinity

INTRODUCTION

could be affirmed by effortlessly overcoming all its challenges, whether those challenges originated from other people or from the land itself. Yet the hoped-for adventure never quite materialized in the way such men envisioned. They had to perform masculinity within a social context created by their interactions with other men and women who themselves were making their own gender and racial subjectivities; indeed, without that social context, performance had no meaning at all, and yet the social context itself generated moments that undermined the coherence of the adventure. Moreover, bringing the adventure about in the first place required the use of resources in ways that stripped the exotic primitivism away from the adventure and threatened to integrate it into the world these men were trying, albeit temporarily, to escape. The production of hegemonic masculinities depended on the commodification of nature, the ceaseless transformations at the heart of capitalism itself. The use of the term “performance” in my discussion of gender draws on the contributions of theorists of gender, particularly Judith Butler, who argues that “gender is always a doing.” That is, gender, rather than being an attribute inherent in the body or a static role into which one steps, is continually constructed, continually creating the male or female self—a self that must be assembled and remade in an endless process within the cultural codes that determine what maleness or femaleness is. Such codes intersect with others that regulate and define class and race. In this book I am concerned primarily with what the sociologist Robert Connell has termed “hegemonic masculinity.” That is, my subjects are, for the most part, men who occupied the upper echelons of their social hierarchies. White, Protestant, and wealthy, they assumed they were entitled to the labor and resources of others: women, nonwhites, and working people. Hegemony, moreover, entailed “the ability to impose a particular definition on other kinds of masculinity.” The men whose lives I explore here continually performed gender within a context that conferred legitimacy on their performance while denying true masculinity to others, such as Native American men. The

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performance of gender was a crucial part of the means by which my subjects maintained their dominant social position.16 Hegemonic masculinity, like other gender constructions, can never be completely secure.17 Precisely because it relies on representational practices in order to construct and reproduce itself, gender is always vulnerable to contestation. Such practices depend on languages of word, image, and gesture and as such can be persistently appropriated, reworked, and challenged. The privileged men in this book often found this to be the case, as their efforts to impose their vision of masculinity on the other men around them faltered in response to alternative, competing performances of gender. Hegemonic masculinity is, as Connell has stated, “not a fixed character type, always and everywhere the same.” Its cultural location can always be challenged. There is a kind of melancholy yearning to masculinity, a hope that once and for all the question can be settled and the social power supposed to inhere in the possession of a certain kind of body (white, male) can be assumed. Judith Kegan Gardiner has called masculinity a “nostalgic formation, always missing, lost, or about to be lost, its ideal form located in a past that advances with each generation in order to recede just beyond its grasp.” Yet as individual men struggle both consciously and unconsciously to achieve this ideal, its very unreachability creates a certain tension. One can picture what it would be like to realize the ideal, but one cannot quite envision the means of realization, or, if one imagines the means, the lived experience of gender proves complex and often contradictory for the reasons outlined above.18 Historiographically, this book takes up a line of inquiry explored some fifty years ago by Ray Allen Billington and Robert Athearn, a line that was then more or less dropped as the New Western History moved toward studies of race, class, gender, and the environment in specific communities marked by change and conflict. Billington and Athearn described British impressions of the trans-Mississippi West in detail. Like Earl Pomeroy, who sketched out British travel in the region in

INTRODUCTION

portions of his study of western tourism, In Search of the Golden West, Billington and Athearn unearthed many long-forgotten sources and perceptively mined them for information about western life. Billington, Athearn, and Pomeroy uncovered the existence of a dialogue about the American West conducted in many languages and across multiple borders, but their approach assumed the nation-state as the fundamental unit of analysis rather than calling it into question, as I have sought to do in this work.19 Billington and the others were not alone in their belief in the fundamental necessity of the nation as a unit of historical analysis. History as a discipline originated in tandem with the modern nationstate itself. The simultaneous development of these two phenomena was not merely a coincidence; the nation justified the historian’s task and gave him the mission of searching out national origins in order to make the nation legible to its citizens. Conversely, the historian legitimized the nation’s claims to existence, unfolding stories of its founding ordeals and unique traits. In the United States, writers of history inherited a vigorous tradition of American exceptionalism that went back in certain respects to the era before independence. It framed the national past as an escape from European trajectories of development that were otherwise inevitable. Yet even as a belief in exceptionalism guided Americans toward a narrative of national difference and development, it preserved links to a broader explanatory framework that placed American history within a global, even universal, past. The United States could not be exceptional without reference to other societies that had presumably followed other patterns of growth determined by historical forces that Americans had managed to elude.20 This paradox manifested itself in the classic thesis propounded in 1893 by Frederick Jackson Turner in The Significance of the Frontier in American History. Turner argued that the United States had benefited uniquely from having access to a frontier. Unlike the people of other nations, Americans were tested repeatedly in the course of continental expansion by the necessity of forming self-reliant communities

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that could withstand the rigors of life far from civilization. Yet Turner also saw American history as part of a universal history that had been unfolding over centuries, part of a “process of social evolution” that encompassed many peoples and places. Although his thesis proposed an alternative to notions of American history as the transmission and maintenance of European institutions, he still believed that American history needed to be placed within a European, even a global, context in order to be fully understood. Indeed, as Kerwin Klein has pointed out, Turner’s vision of history as dialectic generated a profound holism in which the local and the global merged.21 Athearn and Billington came of age as American historians as the profession grappled with the Turnerian legacy. Though neither of them had been Turner’s graduate students, Billington studied under Turner’s successor at the University of Wisconsin, Frederic L. Paxson. Whatever their particular professional genealogies, each of these historians took up the question of how the history of the West might be fitted into transatlantic frameworks of explanation. Athearn’s first book, published in 1949, traced the career of the Irish revolutionary Thomas Meagher after his migration to the West. Westward the Briton followed four years later, the product of exhaustive research in British travel writing. Taking a different approach, Pomeroy integrated western history into national and transnational history by treating it as part of the history of tourism, one of the many economic and social topics that he felt had been neglected by historians afraid to explore questions that seemed to lie outside the Turnerian paradigm. Billington, for his part, wrote Land of Savagery, Land of Promise after a professional life spent advancing and defending the frontier hypothesis in impressive synthetic works that applied Turner’s ideas to specific historical developments in a way that Turner himself, most at home in the essay rather than the book, could not. Land of Savagery, like Westward the Briton, saw European travelers’ views of the West as a way of discerning what it really was, since foreigners could be presumed to see without the biases of nationalism. At the same time,

INTRODUCTION

however, both works expressed worry about the possibility that travelers could not, in fact, see accurately. Confounded by the need to find the real West through the thickets of British (and, in Billington’s case, German, French, Polish, Russian, Hungarian, Norwegian, and Dutch) opinion, Athearn and Billington struggled at times to determine the meaning of their sources. In the end they settled on a celebration of the West as being fundamentally democratic and the United States as being fundamentally exceptional. My approach, shaped by the insights of cultural studies, differs from that of these earlier historians in several ways. I am less interested in analyzing how close travel writing about the West comes to the capturing the reality of what the region was like and more attentive to the ways in which language itself structured people’s experiences and identities. Likewise, I am less certain than Athearn, Billington, and Pomeroy were that one can establish a unitary British view of a unitary West. Sources such as travel writing and investment prospectuses reveal discontinuities and contradictions when read with attention to linguistic formations, and this textual evidence undermines the essentialist assumptions that characterized mid-twentieth-century histories of British encounters with the West. In fact, calling such national and regional essentialisms into question is a vital part of this project. The American West was a place where the spatial expansion of one group of migrants displaced and dispossessed people already living there. To use Michael Adas’s words describing frontiers in Australia, New Zealand, Central Asia, and parts of Africa, this process occurred as “combinations of territorial advances that were centered, depending on time and place, on agricultural, pastoral, trading, mining, or forestry enterprises.”22 There were specific features of the West that, in combination with other forces, drew elite men to the region. It was not interchangeable with Australia or even the Canadian West. Nonetheless, from the perspective of the men in this book, it was only one of several fronts on which white men were advancing the cause of humanity. For them, the American West was unique, but it was not exceptional.23

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This book thus seeks to connect the history of the western United States with other imperial and colonial histories. It is neither a comparative history nor what some have termed an international history, that is, a history that focuses on self-conscious makers of links—for example, diplomats, missionaries, reformers, scientists—between national entities. Instead, my book contributes to what has become by now a growing body of transnational histories. Such histories uncover the networks that people create between national spaces. They are histories of mobility and exchange, of influence and revision. This is not to say that the nation did not matter to the people in this book; they were intensively concerned with the elaboration and maintenance of national identities. However, their stories demonstrate the ways in which these identities emerged through movement across national borders. Such movement necessitated engagement with local communities that were often geographically and culturally removed from individuals’ own nations, and, in turn, those local communities changed in response to these movements.24 Historians of the American West have recently become sharply attuned to the possibilities of transnational history. Scholars of the borderlands and the U.S.–Canada border have argued forcefully that our understanding of American sectionalism must be recast in view of new research into the cross-border flows of people, animals, and commodities that shaped life on both sides of those borders. However, historians have not yet followed the trail initially blazed by Athearn, Billington, and Pomeroy, thus forgoing an opportunity to locate the American West within a rich historiography of British and European empire that has also, in recent years, developed new understandings of how “transnationally, across imperial centers . . . shared notions of race and civility” and gender emerged.25 Elite men made their class and gender in multiple sites, at different times. This book shows how, at a particular historical moment, British and American men looked to the commodified nature they found as travelers and investors in the American West as a way of

INTRODUCTION

grounding their hegemonic claims to leadership. Identifying their own bodies with the national body, anxious lest their own maladies result in a faltering of national and imperial strength, they hoped to remake themselves in encounters with a romantic wilderness. Paradoxically, these hegemonic male bodies could be made and remade outside the nation, in transnational spaces of leisure and desire. Chapter 1 focuses on the life and writings of the Scottish nobleman Sir William Drummond Stewart. Stewart spent most of the period 1833–43 traveling in the Upper Missouri region, commissioning the artist Alfred Jacob Miller to create a series of artworks commemorating these journeys. As an art patron and novelist, Stewart tried to resolve his anxieties about economic, political, and social transformation in Scotland by imagining himself as a romantic frontier hero. Chapter 2 moves forward in time to the 1870s and 1880s, a period during which many in the British upper classes briefly came to believe that open range cattle ranching could be the solution to a perceived occupational and personal crisis faced by idle wellborn young men. Ranching seemed the ideal answer to the question asked by one periodical: “What Shall I Do with My Son?” Men dreamed of making their fortunes as ranchers and returning to Britain to resume lives of privilege. These hopes proved futile in the face of the harsh winters and aridity of the western plains. The chapter examines this cultural dynamic by focusing on the career of Moreton Frewen, whose Powder River Cattle Company enjoyed initial spectacular success in selling shares to London’s fashionable world and then collapsed in spectacular failure owing to mismanagement, overgrazing, and torrential blizzards. Chapter 3 weaves together the stories of the Earl of Dunraven and the travel writer Isabella Bird, tracing them to Estes Park, Colorado. Although Dunraven perceived the West as a space in which he could play out childhood dreams of adventure and escape the tumult that beset his native Ireland, others defined western space differently. Both Bird and Dunraven wrote Estes Park into their narratives of imperial

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self-fashioning. Their choices affected local residents in varied ways, distributing new kinds of power through the community and shaping its future. Chapter 4 reverses the direction taken by the other chapters and follows an American across the Atlantic to London, focusing on the run of William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s Wild West at Earls’ Court in 1882. Cody’s masculinity, performed in the context created by British discourse about western men and nature, seemed at first to be the perfect antidote to a London beset by tensions over gender, race, and class, a restorative tonic to the heart of the British Empire. His skillful use of cultural codes of gender and race were also part of his personal narrative as a self-made man and western hero. Yet Cody’s performance depended on the manipulation of the press and public in ways that raised questions about his authenticity and the stability of the London world that acclaimed him. The final chapter takes up Theodore Roosevelt’s big game hunting expedition to the British colony of East Africa and Kenya with his son Kermit. Roosevelt identified this colonial space as a “white man’s country,” likening it to the American West. He was not merely pointing out some similarities in the landscape. Kenya was a place where savagery met civilization, a frontier and thus a proving ground for white men. In going there, Roosevelt was not only recapturing his youth but also providing Kermit the opportunity to experience the therapeutic wildness necessary for successful passage into manhood.

1 SIR WILLIAM DRUMMOND STEWART AND ARISTOCRATIC MASCULINITY

In The Adventures of Captain Bonneville Washington Irving briefly describes a “Captain Stewart, of the British army, a gentleman of noble connexions” who “was amusing himself by a wandering tour in the Far West; in the course of which, he had lived in hunter’s style: accompanying various bands of traders, trappers, and Indians; and manifesting that relish for the wilderness that belongs to men of game spirit.”1 Irving represents Stewart’s fondness for “wandering” and hunting as evidence of his “game spirit,” an ineffable quality that marked its possessor as masculine. Such men had an appetite, a “relish,” for the undisturbed primeval spaces where they could escape the confines of civilization, not for the sake of exploration or conquest but for amusement. Irving’s is not the only text from the 1830s in which Captain— later Sir—William Drummond Stewart appears. For instance, he surfaces in the journal of the American missionary William H. Gray, who described him as being fond of fast horses, drink, and gambling. Despite Stewart’s adoption of “quite a dignified carriage . . . while in the presence of the ladies,” Gray thought that his “general conversation and appearance was that of a man with strong prejudices and strong appetites, which he had freely indulged.”2 Although Gray, in contrast to Irving, disapproved of Stewart’s “strong appetites,” the picture he

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draws of Stewart is essentially of the same man. When people looked at William Drummond Stewart they thought they knew what they saw: a nobleman and hunter who felt entitled to indulge his every desire. Stewart traveled widely throughout the Rocky Mountain West between 1832 and 1839, returning for a final trip in 1842–43. He also wrote two novels, Altowan (1846) and Edward Warren (1854), inspired by his western experiences.3 Today Stewart is best known as the patron of the artist Alfred Jacob Miller, who built his career on the watercolors, oil paintings, and sketches he produced after traveling with Stewart in the summer of 1837, but he deserves attention in his own right.4 In his hunting, his writing, and his efforts to reconstruct his Scottish estate in the guise of a western wilderness Stewart performed an aristocratic version of masculinity that was physically daring, imbued with a sense of honor, and familiar with the exotic, in contrast to emerging middleclass ideals of manhood that centered on domesticity, rationality, productivity, and self-discipline.5 Born in 1795 into a world convulsed by revolution against the ancien régime, Stewart died in 1871 in a world in which the privileges he had been raised to expect as his due had significantly eroded. In Scotland, the 1832 Reform Act resulted in an increase in the number of voters from forty-five hundred to sixty-five thousand, an increase that diluted the power of the landed classes. The decade before the passage of the legislation had been a period of deep social tension marked by outspoken protest and even riots. Edinburgh and Glasgow were growing rapidly; Glasgow, an industrial center, was twelve times its 1775 population by 1841. The Scottish statesman Lord Cockburn compared the Scotland of the 1840s to an overcrowded vessel on which the desperate passengers resorted to cannibalism.6 Stewart’s fascination with an idealized, primitive West was not unique to him or even to British nobility. As Harry Liebersohn has shown, between 1815 and 1848, an “aristocratic discourse” around Native Americans emerged among wellborn French and German travel writers, who became fascinated with their romanticized vision of the

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Indian as a “being of rank and honor” like themselves. Traumatized by the political and social upheavals of the era, such writers saw in the American Indian a kindred spirit, an exemplar of warrior culture who had been dispossessed by the powerful forces of liberalism. Liebersohn argues that British travelers did not contribute to this continental discourse of the romantic West, claiming that the racial ideologies of imperialism tended to push the British toward a more approving view of the westward expansion of the United States. His claims in this regard are insufficiently nuanced. Stewart’s encounters with the West suggest that objections to political reform, dismay at the apparent demise of deference, and disgust with the increasingly commercialized nature of British life laid the foundations for a British encounter with Native Americans and the far West strikingly similar to that which Liebersohn describes for French and German culture. Moreover, Stewart’s own romantic antimodernism coexisted with economic involvement in the sort of rural industrialization that was transforming his home country of Perthshire.7 In his novels Stewart expressed his distaste for Britain’s emerging liberal industrial society. The hero of one of them declares that he rejects “the ordinary herds of the human race, with their vulgar toil after wealth” and their “spinning jenny and exchange” and exults that “my heart bounded under the feeling that I was not beholden to the trashy twaddle of law manufactories for my freedom, but to space, to a fair field.”8 What really gave Stewart and others the freedom to travel across space was the very wealth whose pursuit he spurned as “vulgar”; since Stewart himself did not have to seek wealth he could afford to maintain his aristocratic detachment from the world of “manufactories” and stock exchanges. His wealth originated from the ownership of land, most of which was rented to tenants. Most, but not all: Stewart’s papers include a number of letters discussing a lease for a spinning mill on the Stewart lands, a mill that would advance the same social changes that he went to the West to escape. Such mills produced yarn for the many handloom weavers who experienced a brief surge of

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demand for their product before mechanized looms made them obsolete, plunging their communities into destitution that would make the 1840s a decade of terrible misery in much of the area.9 Indeed, the West of the 1830s and 1840s was as caught up in the forces of modernization as Stewart’s Britain, and the fur trade that he romanticized as a carefree way of life was actually a major agent in that transformation. In the American West the traditional pursuits of the aristocratic male—traveling, hunting, and riding—still mattered. However, even as Stewart constructed masculinity through real and textual encounters with the West he found that hierarchies of rank could not be sustained there. For instance, as he tried to exercise command over his associates on expeditions Stewart found that the people of the West were rarely as willing to submit to his direction as he expected them to be. Stewart’s novels, in turn, construct lines of stable political and class authority, but they also contain contradictory undercurrents. Even as they work to reinforce hierarchies of rank they depict the West as a place where gender and ethnicity are unpredictable, fluid, and malleable. In them the West becomes the place where men turn into women and women into men, where Indians reveal themselves to be European aristocrats and aristocrats reveal themselves to be Indians at heart. Yet these characters, so nimble at moving from one gender and racial category to another when in the West, fail to thrive when they return to Britain. Although the plots of both of Stewart’s novels end with the restoration of the protagonists to positions of rank and power, the ambiguity of these restorations suggests that not all of the exhilarating pleasures of western freedom can survive transplantation to Britain. In order to understand Stewart’s activities as a collector and writer, it is necessary first to look at his experiences as a traveler. I begin by looking at how and why Stewart went west in the first place. Stewart was the second son of Sir George Stewart, who purchased an army officer’s commission for him in 1813. After the defeat of Napoleon, the

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younger Stewart retired at half pay in 1821 with the rank of captain and spent the next few years traveling throughout Europe and the Middle East. Upon his father’s death in 1827 Stewart inherited three thousand pounds, which, to his chagrin, was placed in a trust controlled by his older brother, the new Baronet of Murthly. A tense family situation became worse in 1830 when Stewart married a young woman, apparently a servant, who was pregnant with his child. He settled his wife and son on an allowance in Edinburgh but did not join them. Instead, shortly after the wedding he departed for the United States. Even before he came to the United States, then, Stewart exhibited some of the traits that would shape his later life and his fiction. He rebelled against familial authority, both by chafing against his brother’s trusteeship and by impregnating and marrying a woman from a lower social class. The family estate, the site of hereditary authority, was also the site of hereditary responsibilities about which Stewart seems to have been ambivalent. Content neither in an industrializing Britain nor on his brother’s estate, he restlessly traveled not only to the conventional European destinations favored by his peers, but also to more unfamiliar locations. His fiction consistently contrasts the emotional and physical release available in the West with the constraints that thwarted male efforts to experience freedom and adventure in Britain. In Stewart’s first novel, Altowan, the narrator compares riding across the prairie to riding in England: “It is animating, on the foggy shores of England, to ride along the briny beach, then follow the retreating wave, and outstrip the returning surge; but the coal fire in the small room, the boiled fowl with cockle-sauce, bound the hopes of the day. In these high plains [of the West], unknown to cloud or damp, the pure aire elevates and frees the spirit.”10 The tedious routines of British life overwhelmed any attempts one might make at “animating” oneself there. In the West, by contrast, one could leave “small room[s]” behind completely and live entirely outdoors, at least in Stewart’s depictions of western life. He associated freedom with the ability to break out of the boundaries defined by domesticity, with its dull, fussy food and its

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monotonous social rituals. Outdoors, where “pure aire” revitalized the body, a man could be free; indoors, he was immobilized and stifled. Stewart spent most of his first year in the United States around New York City, but by late 1832 he had gone to St. Louis with the intention of hunting on the upper Missouri.11 Setting out with a party of fur traders in the spring of 1833, Stewart surfaced at Fort Vancouver in the winter of 1834–35, and the following year he stopped briefly in New Orleans en route to Cuba, where he spent the winter of 1835–36. In 1836, 1837, and 1838 he attended the Rocky Mountain Fur Company’s annual rendezvous every summer. He returned to Scotland in 1839, but in the fall of 1842 he traveled to the United States again, remaining there for nearly a year and traveling west again in the summer of 1843. When Stewart arrived in St. Louis in 1832 he entered a region where both European Americans and Indians were engaged in complicated relationships that encompassed elements of kinship, diplomacy, and trade.12 Over a century of exposure to epidemic disease and to the new economic and military resource of the horse had accelerated cultural change among the indigenous peoples of North America. In the first four decades of the nineteenth century the mingling and migration of people, animals, and goods continued. The economic growth of the United States in these years intensified such exchanges, including not one but several fur trades carried out among Indians, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Anglo-Americans, and Britons throughout the upper Rocky Mountains and Great Plains. All the fur-trading systems relied heavily on the productivity, good will, and cooperation of Indians, and they all linked the trans-Mississippi West to global networks of capital.13 This dynamic, competitive industry was transforming the ecologies and societies of the West, and it served as the major provider of supplies, guidance, and protection to Stewart. Without the fur trade, he would literally have been lost. Despite his dependence on the fur trade, he appreciated it selectively; in his novels he extolled what he saw as the romantic primitivism of the traders themselves but deplored the

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economic development and expansion of the United States that trade seemed to bring. Trapping beaver for profit was far from the kind of hunting Stewart sought. Rather than directly confronting a beautiful and dangerous animal, the trapper killed his prey mechanistically, in quantity. His prey itself lacked the qualities of nobility that would reflect glory onto the would-be hunter. Stewart concentrated on hunting bear and bison. In Europe aristocrats traditionally monopolized hunting privileges, demonstrating their authority through rituals of the chase. Hunting dangerous, impressive animals enabled Stewart to dramatize his courage, physical strength, and capacity for violence, traits he would have understood not only as manly but also as aristocratic. Yet the fur trade provided many of the subjects in the artwork Stewart commissioned from Miller. In the spring of 1837 Stewart met Miller in New Orleans and hired the artist to accompany him on that summer’s journey west. In 1840 Miller would visit Stewart in Scotland, staying for a year while he painted a series of large oil canvases based on sketches done in 1837. Miller’s notes on the trip, although written some years afterward, offer some insight into Stewart’s behavior on the expeditions, particularly his friendship with the métis hunter and guide Antoine Clement. Everything we know about Clement comes to us through the eyes of others. William Clark Kennerly, William Clark’s nephew, described him as “a half-breed Delaware . . . the most noted hunter on the plains and the most fearless man I ever saw—the only one who would walk straight up to a grizzly bear.”14 Clement impressed Miller as well, who remembered him as “that wild child of the Prairie” and “one of the noblest specimens of a Western hunter.”15 Miller produced numerous sketches and paintings of Clement, often standing watchfully at Stewart’s side or butchering a bison the nobleman has just killed.16 Clement accompanied Stewart when he returned to Britain in 1839. In October 1838 Stewart learned of the illness and death of his older brother, and by the following spring, Stewart, now the seventh

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baronet, was traveling back to Scotland. He paused there only for a short time before embarking on another trip, this time to Turkey. His sister chided him: “I cannot express how much I am vexed at your determination. Might not London, Paris or Naples suffice? They do so usually for tourists—you are indeed too confirmed a wanderer.”17 Stewart’s “confirmed” wandering suggests a desire to escape the title and responsibilities that were now his, but perhaps this sisterly scolding awakened his sense of duty. Stewart spent the years between 1840 and 1842 at Murthly Castle, occupied with addressing tenants’ complaints, managing his investments, and socializing with his neighbors, the conventional tasks of the British gentleman. Clement’s position at Murthly reflects the way in which, for Stewart, their relationship had never been one of equality. He wore Highland Scottish clothing chosen for him by Stewart, who reveled in the romantic revival of Highland identity promoted by Sir Walter Scott and other proponents of Celtic culture. Although Miller wrote to his brother that Stewart indulged Clement, he also noted that the hunter had been “metamorphosed into a Scotch valet” who served Stewart at the table.18 However, a portrait of Clement painted by Miller circa 1840, while they were both at Murthly, depicts him dressed in buckskin, his long, dark hair loose and flowing, a pistol in his belt and a rifle in his hand, an image that suggests that Stewart especially wanted to capture this romantic image of the western hunter (fig. 4). Clement’s presence at Murthly must have continuously reminded Stewart of the experiences they had shared in America; similarly, Miller’s stay at Murthly and his work kept the West constantly before Stewart’s eyes. From 1840 onward Stewart’s correspondence contains several hopeful references to another journey westward, although he had to delay this trip for several years because of other commitments. When Stewart returned to the American West in 1842 he found a region that had changed considerably. As a result of overhunting the Rocky Mountain fur trade shrank significantly between 1838 and 1843. Competition between the St. Louis–based American Fur Company and

Fig. 4. Alfred Jacob Miller, Antoine Clement, ca. 1840. Photo © The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland.

the British-chartered Hudson’s Bay Company had accelerated the exploitation of beaver stocks throughout the mountain West. Simultaneously, changing fashions led to a decline in demand for beaver hats, which were replaced by silk ones, and the price paid for beaver furs fell correspondingly. By 1840 the Rocky Mountain complex of economic relationships among trappers, Indians, and suppliers had atrophied.19 At the same time, the West was now attracting massive interest from the rest of the country: settlers acting on their own initiative, expanded missionary activity (a permanent Protestant mission was established in Oregon as early as 1834), government-sponsored exploration, federal efforts to pursue and establish claims to western territory, and traders of all kinds. These movements of population combined and fed one another to generate the pressures that culminated in the British

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cession of Oregon to the United States in 1846, the annexation of Texas, and the Mexican-American War. By 1843 Stewart could not ignore the changes transforming the western wilderness he had once idealized. In the opening chapter of Edward Warren he wrote that the 1830s had been “the evening of the roving life of the Far West” and that afterward, “the country was invaded by the pedlar and the idler of the east, and the missionary,” who had reduced the hunting grounds of the region to “lifeless wastes.” Yet Stewart’s nostalgia relied on important omissions. He disdained the “pedlar” whose pursuit of profit stripped the West of its life, yet he failed to acknowledge that the fur traders with whom he spent the 1830s were themselves trapping beaver for money. Similarly, while Stewart saw “idlers” from “the east” as invaders, he did not implicate himself—an “idler of the east” if ever there was one—among them.20 Stewart’s romantic self-fashioning required that he elide his participation in the intertwined ecological and economic transformations of the West. His aristocratic masculinity rested upon such gestures of disdain.21 In a bravura display of his disregard for economic rationality Stewart himself sold one of his estates to fund his trip of 1842. Departing from Scotland in 1842, he spent the winter of 1842–43 in New Orleans and by the spring of 1843 was in St. Louis, purchasing supplies and hiring servants and guides.22 An extraordinary variety of people accompanied Stewart on this journey. In the words of the former trapper and St. Louis businessman William Sublette, who did most of the organizing on Stewart’s behalf, the party comprised “Some of the armey, Some professional Gentlemen, Come on the trip for pleasure, Some for Health, . . . doctors, Lawyers, botanists, Bugg ketchers, Hunters and men of nearly all professions,” more than half of whom were “hired men Belonging to Sir William.”23 The party included Jefferson Clark and William Clark Kennerly, the son and nephew, respectively, of the explorer William Clark. Young men from the Choteau and Menard families, heirs to the wealth of the interlocking French and AngloAmerican clans who dominated the economic and political life of

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St. Louis, also joined the group, as did two lieutenants of the U.S. Army who had become friendly with the young gentlemen of St. Louis while stationed at Jefferson Barracks. The hunters, whose job was to supply meat for the party and guide the tourists on their big game quests, included Clement and his younger brother François. Among the wagon drivers was Baptiste Charbonneau, the son of Sacagawea, who as the young protégé of Prince Paul of Württemberg had himself earlier experienced life as an exotic specimen among European aristocracy. If Stewart knew about this history—and he probably did—he likely hired Charbonneau because of it, fascinated by the man’s link to a near-legendary expedition. The party also included a Jesuit en route to Pierre DeSmet’s mission. Matthew C. Field, a correspondent for the New Orleans Daily Picayune, wrote about the expedition for his newspaper in installments sent east and south via other travelers the party encountered on their way.24 John James Audubon, who was also in St. Louis that spring, commented in a letter homeward that the expedition had “just too many people of too many sorts.” Intended as an expedition commanded by one man, Stewart’s tour of the Rockies was, in reality, a diverse group of miscellaneous individuals with various reasons for joining the group. Some had not even chosen of their own free will to come. For instance, when Clark and Kennerly joined on a whim after Stewart had dined at their homes and regaled them with hunting stories, Kennerly brought his slave, Cupid. The diaries of Kennerly and Field occasionally refer to “squaws . . . picked up at the forts,” and some of the hunters brought along their Indian wives from St. Louis and Independence, one of whom gave birth during the trip.25 From St. Louis the party took various routes to Independence, where they regrouped and then followed the North Platte River to Fort Laramie and then into the Wind River Mountains, where they camped for a few weeks at Fremont Lake. The itinerary itself shows the impact of the changes in the West since Stewart’s previous journeys. Whereas his earlier goal had always been the fur trappers’ rendezvous,

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the final such meeting took place in 1840. Stewart’s party stopped at one of the old rendezvous sites, and Field noted in his diary, “Nothing was there but a goodly plenty of goats.”26 Diverse as the group was, Stewart tried to establish military order within it. However, his efforts to impose his authority on the party tended to fail. For instance, Kennerly and his companions circumvented Stewart’s insistence that each man take a turn at guard duty at night by paying the hunters and servants to take their shifts.27 Many in the party resented decisions Stewart made that prioritized the needs of one participant over another. For instance, when Stewart declared that the group would cease traveling while the Indian woman gave birth, some complained vociferously. Field noted in his diary, “The good looking squaw of Henry, the hunter, gave birth last night to a little female half-breed, and His Omnipotence, in his wisdom, has ordered camp to lay by on this account. It is, at any rate, the first occasion ever known of a mountain journey being delayed one hour for such a reason! All the camp swearing at the Old man—this is the second day now lost by blind and bad management.”28 Kennerly echoed this complaint: “There has been a great stir in camp on account of Captain Steward [sic] stopping so long when there was no necessity therefore.”29 Stewart’s humanely paternalistic concern for one member of the expedition—and possibly his effort to treat an Indian woman according to the standards of European American feminine delicacy—incurred only the resentment of others. People may have been willing to travel with Stewart, but he did not automatically command their deference. The paintings Miller had recently completed for Stewart in Scotland in 1839–40 depicted the West as a place of sensuous harmony between Indians and whites, “squaws” and men, but the internal conflicts of Stewart’s expedition of 1843 suggest the jangling realities that interrupted his fantasies when he attempted to live them out. Later, his novels would rewrite his experience to represent aristocratic masculinity as capable of immediately commanding the respect, loyalty, and obedience of all.

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When the expedition ended, Stewart again invited Clement to Scotland. Robert Campbell, Sublette’s business partner and a supplier for the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, wrote to Stewart in April 1844: “Antoine Clement called upon me and left with me your letters proposing his return to Murthly. . . . He wishes me to furnish him with money to bear his expenses to Scotland. I am very much at a loss to determine how to act in order to carry out your wishes—from your note to Antoine[,] . . . I am led to believe that you wish to have him to Murthly, but I confess I have some fears that Antoine might be led to squander the money . . . and that you might regret his having started.”30 Several months later Campbell gave Stewart an update on Clement’s doings. He had spoken again to Clement and explained “the conditions on which I furnish him the means of going to Scotland which seem[ed] to meet his views . . . but I learned that he had gone to his old haunt the Market House Tavern and was on a drunken frolic for a week.”31 Clement may have truly wished to return to Murthly, or he may have simply seen the prospect as a way of raising cash for his own purposes. Campbell’s letters do suggest a certain unruliness on Clement’s part. His drinking might be read as a refusal to be managed by Stewart and by Campbell, Stewart’s proxy. Although Campbell had been a trapper in the 1830s, by 1844 he was a successful merchant, with investments in a variety of businesses. In contrast, Clement remained a trapper, with little property. His preference for going on a “drunken frolic” instead of meeting Campbell’s “conditions” hints at the ways in which he chose to assert his autonomy and thus his manhood. Competing claims to western space, western freedom, and western manhood had the power to disrupt Stewart’s fantasies of mastery. Clark and his friends also challenged Stewart, albeit from a different class position than Clement’s. Offspring of the emerging mercantile elite of St. Louis, they too wished to establish their manhood by moving freely across western space. Shaped by the expansive,

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confident culture of the West of the 1840s, they were not likely to look to a British nobleman for permission or approval. Stewart found he could not easily compel others to play their assigned roles as he sought “a fair field” for his freedom. Nonetheless, his collecting and writing offered him alternative ways of constructing aristocratic masculinity through the discourse of western adventure. When Stewart returned to Murthly in 1839 he brought bear skins, tomahawks, baskets, bows and arrows, pipes, and other miscellaneous items meant to decorate the castle. This was only the beginning. Stewart’s correspondence in 1839–42 with Campbell, Sublette, and Miller chronicles a determined effort to ship several live bison and a grizzly bear to Murthly. Campbell and Sublette also sent “Some Burr Oak acorns Choak Cherry some Buffalo Berry Mountain currents May apple Sugar tree or Sugar Maple seed” for Stewart’s gardens.32 Although some of the creatures died en route, at least a few of them seem to have survived the trip. In August 1839 Stewart’s sister wrote to him, “What do the natives think of them wild beasts? [They] must be curious indeed and are probably the first seen in your country— of what use are they?”33 Stewart’s sister’s question had an obvious answer: They were of no practical use, and that was precisely the point. They were deliberately dramatic alterations to Stewart’s estate. It may be that Stewart’s nostalgia was as much for an age when private menageries were enactments of elite authority as for the simple sight of western animals. At the same time the Zoological Society was establishing itself as the purveyor of rational recreation to the anonymous crowds of middle- and lower-class London, Stewart clung to earlier allegorical meanings of the private zoo of “exotic captives” as the metaphor for aristocratic power. His animal collection was not open to the public, and he ascribed no national or imperial importance to it. It was a private luxury, yet, like other private luxuries of the nobility, such as the creation of an exquisite garden, it signaled the lord’s control over the land and the creatures on it. Similarly, Stewart presented several

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bison to the Marquess of Breadalbane, a gesture reminiscent of an earlier era in which the powerful sent one another unusual animals as tokens of respect and goodwill.34 Through his plant and animal collection Stewart also attempted to recreate a western touristic landscape where he had participated in a distinctive and exotic form of hunting. In this way his collection testified not only to his high rank, but also to his nostalgia for the West and the masculine self he had performed there. Stewart brought the West indoors by commissioning a set of massive wooden chairs carved in the shape of bison. He filled Murthly Castle with an accumulation of Native American weaponry, domestic utensils, and clothing. Such items were not merely displayed: Stewart incorporated them into his home as props for enacting a particular image of himself. Surrounded by Indian pipes and with a favorite tomahawk on the nightstand, he preferred to sleep on a bed of bison robes in a hunting lodge in his garden, one carpeted with Persian rugs and hung with Miller’s paintings.35 In Altowan one of the main characters, a British nobleman traveling incognito in the West, has a similar domicile: “The lodge of Roallan had been pitched; its carpets and its buffalo robes, its tiger skins and its robes of sable; choice arms of every sort hung around, and in the center stood the censer, from which was to be lit the sacred pipe.”36 Roallan’s tent alerts those around him to his extraordinary qualities: his sophistication, wealth, and skills as a warrior and hunter. Similarly, by choosing to surround himself with exotic souvenirs, Stewart demonstrated his familiarity with the West, providing himself and his guests with visual accompaniment to the stories of adventure that he told about himself. Stripped of their use value, the baskets, weapons, saddlery, and other Native American objects in Stewart’s home furnished proof of the authenticity of his personal experience and hence of the authenticity of his personality. As the literary critic Susan Stewart has written, “To have a souvenir of the exotic is to possess both a specimen and a trophy; on the one hand the object must be marked as exterior and foreign, on the other it must be marked as arising directly out of the immediate

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experience of its possessor.”37 Stewart’s things were not remarkable examples of their kind. Rather, because they had once been for his ordinary use or for the ordinary use of fur trappers and Indians they became extraordinary when brought to Murthly. There they offered silent confirmation of Stewart’s self-presentation as a romantic adventurer in the wilderness. Removed from their original contexts in order to testify to their owner’s knowledge of such contexts, these things came to exist within a new, nostalgic narrative. Stewart did make use of certain items; he slept on the buffalo robes and ate the dried buffalo tongues he had brought from America, but doing so was a choice rather than a necessity. The purpose of such a choice was to convey Stewart’s sense of himself as an adventurer at home with the exotic.38 Miller’s sketches and oil paintings offered rich and compelling evidence of Stewart’s aristocratic masculinity for the visitor to Murthly Castle who viewed them in their original context. Stewart “played a substantial role,” according to the art historian Lisa Strong, in choosing Miller’s subjects. Stewart gave the artist directions on what to sketch while traveling and later selected the specific images that would be reworked into larger oil paintings on canvas.39 While Stewart’s art collecting drew upon traditions of aristocratic connoisseurship, it also bore witness to his ability to pass between that traditional world and a more exotic, even savage, one. Hung on the castle walls or bound in albums in the drawing room, Miller’s artworks, like the Indian artifacts and bison robes, testified to the existence of Stewart’s other self by depicting him using such objects and pursuing such game. In Miller’s paintings Stewart is not trying to claim the mantle of Americanness by “playing Indian.”40 Although Miller’s paintings show Stewart among Indians, he is always clearly differentiated from them (and from other white men, for that matter). He is a distinctive presence visually, marked by his white horse, feathered hat, and aquiline nose. As fascinated as Stewart was by Indians, he was not pretending to be one. On the other hand, many of Miller’s images, including those

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that do not include Stewart, extend the notion of the noble savage to suggest similarities between the life of the European aristocracy and that of American Indians. Hunting, diplomatic negotiations between tribes, and contests of skill at riding and shooting all figure in Miller’s sketches and paintings. These activities were defined in one cultural context as traditional aristocratic pursuits and in another as traditional Indian pursuits.41 In like manner, since the Baronet of Murthly was also a hunter at home in the wilderness, so the land of Murthly itself was to be made into a wilderness in which he could be at home. But Stewart’s quixotic efforts to import western flora and fauna represented more than mere nostalgic efforts to recreate at home what he had enjoyed abroad. His botanical and zoological collecting embodied a political message as well. Stewart came of age during an era of intense agrarian unrest, one marked by enclosure and ensuing dispossession, riots against landowners, and radical critiques of the power concentrated in the hands of the landed classes. As scholars of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British landscape have pointed out, the elaboration of an idealized pastoral landscape on British estates suppressed the realities of rural crisis in order to represent a vision of harmonious order.42 It might seem that because he introduced North American species such as grizzly bears and bison in order to make his land less tame and more wild, Stewart’s project clashed with this dominant trend. Yet Stewart’s idea of wildness was highly artificial. He did not allow his lands to revert to forest, moor, or marsh. He changed his lands to reflect the way he saw himself, thereby demonstrating his control over the property that was the source of his socioeconomic power. By unnaturalizing and exoticizing his Scottish lands Stewart naturalized his privileged place within Britain’s hierarchical society. Stewart’s collection—both the artwork and the artifacts—did not reject aristocratic masculinity but instead emphasized an alternative form of it. The halls and gardens of Murthly were not an incongruous setting for Stewart’s collection of weapons and animals. They provided necessary context. By showing

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that the hunter at home in the wilderness was the same man who was Baronet of Murthly, the collection and its setting complemented one another and fused the different aspects of Stewart’s self.43 Stewart’s two novels, Edward Warren and Altowan, depict a dreamlike landscape in which trappers, British noblemen, and Indians fight, love, and hunt together in an Edenic wilderness. The novels take pains to present themselves as accurate with regard to matters of topography, natural history, ethnological detail, and historical figures of the Rocky Mountains fur trade. Bristling with footnotes and pedantic asides, these texts strive to be memoir, ethnography, natural history, and romance all in one.44 When considered together with his collecting and traveling, they offer rich insights into the ways in which the West served as a site for his performance of masculinity. They can be read as an effort at imaginative compensation for the disappointments of the journey of 1843, but they go well beyond the wish-fulfillment fantasy of unchallenged authority. For while Stewart’s fiction insists on the fundamental rightness of hierarchies of birth, it also presents gender and race as fluid categories that, in their mutation, offer liberatory possibilities. Bursting with secrets, revelations, mistaken identities, and betrayals, Altowan employs melodrama to unfold a narrative of an aristocrat who finds succor in the West yet is undone by his family. The title character is the long-lost son of the Earl of Daerwold. Altowan’s mother takes her infant son with her when she elopes with a lover; after the elopement she gives birth to a daughter, Idalie, and then dies. The children are raised by guardians in the West, among Indians and fur traders. The adult Altowan lives as a chief among the Blackfeet, but his life changes when the Blackfeet capture Roallan, a young British aristocrat who is traveling in the West, ostensibly for pleasure. There is more to Roallan than at first appears: he is the son of the earl’s second marriage and therefore Altowan’s half brother. Altowan, Idalie, and Roallan eventually travel back to Scotland, where Altowan reveals

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himself to his father by shooting one of the earl’s deer, thereby asserting his hereditary right to the estate’s game. The earl then acknowledges Altowan “in all the pride of rank . . . with haughty grace” (233). However, Altowan does not live long to enjoy his triumph. The complicated plot culminates in a masquerade ball at Altowan’s ancestral estate in Scotland, where, deceived by Roallan, Altowan dies nobly after attacking a gang of smugglers who are conspiring in a cavern underneath the castle. Gender categories turn out to be quite flexible in Altowan. Among the most important characters is a berdache named Watoe, who is interesting in his own right but also as a parallel to Altowan. Stewart characterizes Watoe as follows: “Having refused to take part in the warlike feats of the men, he had previously been consigned, under the name of Broadashe [sic], to the society, the duties, and the dress of the women. There are youths of this description in every camp, resembling in office the eunuchs of the seraglio” (53–54).45 Stewart draws on Orientalism to connect the Native American tradition of the transgender berdache with other forms of exotic gender ambiguity that may have been more familiar to his readers. However, the simile breaks down. Watoe’s social function is not to serve the women of the camp, as “eunuchs of the seraglio” might have done, and he is emasculated not literally but as a punishment because of his unwillingness to fight. As the plot progresses, however, he discovers the capacity for violence within himself and is thereby able to claim his masculinity. The novel also posits same-sex desire as the means through which Watoe can find both his ability to fight and his manhood. Watoe finds himself motivated to fight only because of his love for Altowan. At a critical point in the plot, when Altowan is threatened by Indian enemies, Watoe delivers a fervent speech: “My blood is boiling. . . . I have no fear but for your eye, when it is turned coldly on me; I will proclaim myself a man, and go to war,” his slender form dilating as he spoke. “You, who they

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say came among us protected by the Great Spirit, from beyond the wide waters, borne as the eagle when he sets his wings to the tempest, to waft him to distant lands—you, whose arm is swift, and whose eye is true, and from whose mouth comes knowledge and power—you have never known tyranny, nor been made a slave to the caprices of the strong.” His low, and not unmusical voice, was rendered tremulous by emotion, as he added, “But one has been kind to me, and but to one can I give a voluntary love in return. . . . You will see also, how I am obliged to act a part different from the Watoe who loves Altowan, and who is in his heart, no woman.” (250–51) Watoe adores Altowan for his physical vigor and also for his independence, traits that Watoe lacks. In loving Altowan, Watoe finds that “in his heart” he is “no woman” and that he can “go to war” now that he knows “no fear.” Heterosexual desire does not define Watoe’s strength and manliness. It is, rather, same-sex desire that enables him to move from being a female consigned to servile camp tasks to being a male warrior entrusted with an important mission. Despite this shift, the novel does not present Watoe as Altowan’s equal, nor does it allow for the possibility that Watoe’s affection might be requited. Racially, Altowan remains Watoe’s superior. Indeed, his Europeanness—he comes from “beyond the great waters”—is one of the traits that sets him apart from the other warriors and makes him irresistible to Watoe. Watoe dies while carrying out Altowan’s orders, in order to facilitate the beloved’s quest to be restored to his rightful place in the British nobility. He can live neither as a man nor as a woman, and he and Altowan cannot live together in the West. Altowan’s own hybridity results in his death as well. Just as Watoe does not live to reconcile his newfound masculinity with his female past, Altowan dies instead of integrating his western masculinity with his British heritage. Even the smugglers who deal Altowan his death are in cahoots with his brother, subverting the law and the rightful

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order of things by storing their goods in tunnels underneath the earl’s castle. Altowan’s family seat is literally based on criminal secrets. Although Altowan himself can employ his western fighting skills to defeat his father’s enemies, the conclusion of the novel suggests that his adventurous life has distanced him from his origins so completely that he is incapable of assimilating into British society. Roallan, who will marry Altowan’s half sister, Idalie, and succeed to the earldom, turns out to be devious and selfish, lacking in the manly sense of honor Altowan displays both in the West and in Scotland. In a long speech explaining why he prefers western life to that of civilization, Altowan articulates Stewart’s critique of the emasculating tedium of modern life: “What are the pleasures of civilized life to me, who am already blooded in the wild Indian chivalry? There is no war among the whites, where I could rise to command, but by long and servile submission; there is no tourney, there is no hunting-field among them, where danger is courted, and manhood holds a place such as here is accorded to its prowess” (227–28). European society has rejected its primitive past of medieval tournaments and chivalry. It is no longer a society dominated by an aristocratic warrior class. Instead, even the army has become standardized, and hunting has become a safe hobby. In the West, by contrast, men such as Altowan (and, by implication, his creator) can demonstrate “prowess.” Notably, the novel does not quite specify at what activities precisely “manhood” is displaying its “prowess”; the clause ends here with a semicolon and is followed by another on a different topic. Presumably, in some ineffable way, hunting and war are all honored in the West in a way that they are not “among the whites.” While Watoe can move from female to male but must die as a result, so too does Altowan pay the price for moving from the open space of the West, where he hunts and fights, to Scotland. His masculinity, seemingly as stable as Watoe’s is initially questionable, actually turns out to be strangely fragile, unable to survive transplantation from the West. In Altowan Stewart failed to imagine a way in which his western self could successfully be integrated into his ordinary existence. His

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subsequent novel, Edward Warren, returned to the same theme, also telling the story of a young man who needs to reclaim his rightful position in British society. In this novel the title character leaves Britain dispossessed, penniless, and despondent over an unhappy love affair. He travels to the West and lives among fur traders. There he meets people who will help him regain both his inheritance and his love, Isabel. At the end of the novel Edward and Isabel marry, and he establishes himself as a man of wealth and position in Britain. A cross-dressed character also plays a central part in Edward Warren. Early in his travels Edward Warren hears from the other mountain men about a notoriously wild and beautiful métis girl called Rose: “That Rose is just the finest squaw in all the red man’s country, and she is as wild as the wind, and as free; she might have had all the beaver in the mountains offered for her, the boys are right foolish the moment they get near her” (97). Early on, Rose is identified with the freedom and wildness of nature, but in the context of the fur trade she is also potentially an item that may be exchanged for beaver. However, Rose refuses to be a sexual commodity like other “squaw[s]”; she might have had all the beaver offered to her, but she resists enmeshment in the commercial networks of the fur trade by declining these offers. Despite this intriguing description Edward has no opportunity to meet Rose. He wanders off by himself and during his solitary hunt encounters a magnificent bison. He chases it, and then, as he takes his last errant shot, an Indian youth gallops by and kills the buffalo with a well-placed arrow. The two confront one another over the carcass. Stewart describes this moment in the language of aesthetic appreciation, mingled with desire. Edward admires the Indian instead of fearing him, understanding what true nobility is for the first time in his life: That countenance, on which I now gazed with fascination, was of the most faultless beauty;—the finely penciled eyebrows, arched over those almond-shaped eyes, for a moment opened upon me with darkened fire from between the long lashes,

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which again reposed on the cheek, through whose tint the late exercise had brought a warmed hue. I had never seen anything to give me the idea of a perfectly noble head before, and I supposed my admiration also spoke through my eyes, for a smile, somewhat wanton and scornful, stole over the features and curled the lips of the Indian youth. (88) Edward, “completely enthralled” (88), addresses him courteously. They engage in a chivalrous ritual of deciding who is entitled to the meat. Edward tells the young man, “ ‘As you killed, I left it for you,” and the Indian answers, “The first blood takes, and you had given her two shots before” (88). This negotiation results in an agreement to share the bison. Although they part afterward, Edward confesses to the reader that he is fascinated by the Indian, who “both attracted by a hidden spell, and repelled by a half haughty smile” (91). When the two meet next, it is again in the course of a hunt. Stalking a grizzly bear, Edward finds himself the hunted instead of the hunter. The Indian saves him from the bear attack, but, courteous once more, he offers Edward the right to take the animal’s claws as a trophy. Hunting brings Edward and his object of desire together, just as it brought Stewart and Clement together. Unlike Clement, however, Edward’s mysterious Indian is not for hire; he chooses Edward’s company out of affection. The two decide to travel and hunt together, and Edward finds himself drawn ever more powerfully to his companion: To win that smile which came so stealthily from the dark eye, flashing below the long lashes, I would have joyfully periled my life. . . . he [ran] his fingers through my entangled locks, and looked down on my face, which lay in his lap. . . . I was thunderstruck at the idea of our separation, we went on so well together and that little reserve of his left always something to be desired, and some further intimacy to be longed for; I knew not very well what, but there was an enchantment over me, one of those mysterious sympathies of romantic affection. (123)

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Edward now seems to have forgotten all about Isabel, with whom he fell in love in England. The sensual imagery of the dark eyes, the fingers run through the hair, and the head laid in the beloved’s lap all point to the homoerotic dimensions of this friendship. Yet the novel explains away this transgressive desire when it turns out that Edward’s companion is really Rose, “the finest squaw” celebrated by the fur trappers. Moreover, Rose eventually turns out to be not an Indian woman at all, but the daughter of an exiled Spanish nobleman. The plot thus legitimates Edward’s attraction, showing him to be innately heterosexual and aware of class distinctions, drawn inexplicably to the one other European aristocrat in the Rocky Mountains. Edward Warren continues to imagine the West to be a country where gender can be transcended, even after the “Indian youth” is revealed to be a woman. Rose is a powerfully Amazonian character. Stewart describes her as a virginal, Diana-like huntress who rides “simply on her folded saddle-cloths, a platted rein guid[ing] her horse, a bow and quiver [hanging] from her side, and [her] seat as firm, and hand as light and true as of the strongest man.” She disdains flirtation; her “eye searched not for conquest, nor sought to retain” (167). If in her male guise Rose entrances Edward, in her androgynous female persona she is equally seductive: “There was a singular firmness and decision in this wild girl, and I felt a delicious pleasure in making her show off in all her courage and independence” (209). In her ability to cross gender boundaries Rose suggests the potential for self-transformation that western space could offer. As long as she remains in what the novel constructs as an unspoiled, remote wilderness, she is free to be a boyish girl or a beautiful boy. In an abrupt plot turn, however, Edward suddenly remembers Isabel, who has not been mentioned for hundreds of pages, and he realizes that he does not love Rose after all. The concluding section traces Rose’s development into a self-sacrificing woman who brings Edward and Isabel together. Ultimately, Rose agrees to marry another man in order to save Edward from death; later in the novel she follows

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Edward to London. By the time she appears in the final London scenes Rose is imprisoned in heavy black velvet and satin dresses, confined indoors with her hair “plaited round the brow in a black massive crown.” Reminiscent of the braided rein with which Rose once guided her horse, this “crown” of hair suggests the ways in which she has been restrained, even tamed, by visions of appropriate European femininity. She quickly wastes away from some unspecified malady and on her deathbed enjoins Isabel to be a good wife to Edward. Her last words recall her former freedom: “I did not think to die on a velvet couch, while others were careering in the sun. Ned, you remember when my favourite horse ran, others seemed to stand still” (419). Rose bears the burden of the novel’s movement from liberating western space to stifling British interiors, with their velvet couches that provide little comfort. There is a cruelty to the way in which the novel fails to imagine a life for Rose and Edward together in the West. He must return to the social position and to the domesticity that Isabel represents, and Rose must die. Rather than allow Rose’s deathbed nostalgia for the West to be the text’s concluding note, Stewart strives for a more conventionally Victorian ending. The novel concludes by editorializing about the benefits accruing to British domestic femininity through contact with the authenticity of the West. Isabel claims to have found, in Rose, an example of virtuous simplicity: “I have learned, from a study of her conduct, how much more lofty the female character is, when divested of its artificial helplessness; and I feel that I should have as much pleasure in attending to your horse, or gathering wood for our fire, where it would be necessary, as I should find it agreeable to join you in a duo, or cull you a nosegay of exotics” (420). Yet this is not the lesson that Rose, in the earlier scenes, would appear to teach. She never tends Edward’s horse, cooks his meals, or builds his fire. Uninterested in the domestic tasks of the camp, she only rides, hunts, and fights—the skills of the male warrior. The novel’s endorsement of domesticity sits in uneasy tension with the compelling possibilities presented by Rose’s alluring primitivism. After all, what makes Rose so attractive is precisely

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the way in which she challenges the alignment of femininity with domesticity by claiming the hunter’s freedom of movement as her own. Although Stewart’s writings celebrate noble savagery, his protagonists are all nobles who are only pretending to be savage. Eventually they return home to try to claim their due measure of authority and status. They have already proved their innate superiority on the testing ground of the West, where they immediately adapt to the life, quickly besting their Indian and trapper tutors in every skill of wilderness survival. Yet the novels cannot disentangle themselves from a romantic longing for the fluidity of gender identity possible in the West, and this longing at times undermines the texts’ seemingly straightforward endorsement of nineteenth-century race and class hierarchies. Although Stewart imagined the West as a place that could revitalize aristocratic masculinity, it also was for him a place of fluid identities and utopian possibilities, where an Indian boy might turn into an Indian girl who might turn into a Spanish noblewoman. Both novels represent the translation from western adventure back to European aristocratic domesticity as a highly problematic one. Altowan dies; Roallan turns out to be a scoundrel; Edward and Rose cannot be together. While Stewart’s novels do reinforce hierarchies of rank, they might also read as elegies for the lost selves that must be left behind or betrayed when the aristocratic male leaves the West and turns toward home.

2 “WHAT SHALL I DO WITH MY SON?”: MORETON FREWEN AND ARISTOCRATIC MASCULINITY ON THE RANCHING FRONTIER Christmas, 1878. In the Big Horn Mountains of northern Wyoming the snow had drifted in places to twenty feet. Moreton and Richard Frewen were thousands of miles from their home in England. Their whiskey was a block of ice, their bacon was so frozen they had to cut it with an ax, and their horses floundered in the snow. The brothers had been warned by their guides of the foolishness of attempting to cross the mountains at that time of year, but, eager to find a site for a new cattle ranch, they had pressed on. Now, in “driving snowstorms,” they wondered if they would live to see Sussex again. Writing his memoirs years later, Moreton remembered that day: “I . . . thought that this was Christmas week in a very far-away place called England, and that her country houses were full of warmth and laughter and pretty children.”1 Cold and warmth, the silent mountains and the cheerful sounds of family holidaymaking—the contrast made England seem even more “far-away” than it was. At the same time, Frewen recalled his awe at the grandeur of the country in which he was traveling. An enthusiastic big game hunter, he marveled at the quantity and variety of the game: bear, buffalo, deer, antelope, mountain sheep, and elk. The brothers traveled through valleys that looked as if they had been created for the pleasure of the sportsman. Frewen remembered “streams and lakes and beautiful open

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‘parks’ cleared by the giant hand of Nature out of the great pine woods” as well as herds of bison “great and small” that “could be seen in the sweep of our field-glasses as far as the eye could reach.” Elk and deer, as well, “tempted” the Frewen brothers everywhere.2 In passages like this, Frewen, like other British travel writers who depicted the Rocky Mountains as a “Wonderland,” celebrated the seemingly magical bounty of the American West. The essence of Frewen’s enchantment lay in his sense that the West was untouched by civilization: “The reader will bear in mind that had he in those days left the main line of the Union Pacific and headed north he could have travelled the whole way to the North Pole without again encountering ‘the steel.’ . . . It is little wonder that the minds of the young and adventurous were buoyed up by the tales of fur trappers and prospectors as to the illimitable areas—the great silent places intervening between the Yellowstone and the Peace River, full two thousand miles north.”3 To the Frewen brothers, who thought of themselves as nothing if not “adventurous,” the “great silent” land seemed to be theirs for the taking. Yet the land was not really empty. In addition to the two guides the Frewens hired, they encountered “two men working gold” and several bands of Shoshone and Arapaho Indians.4 Rather than being intrepid wilderness explorers, the Frewens were dependent on their guides. Indeed, had their guides not suggested that they stampede a herd of buffalo through a pass to create a road, the Frewens would have been trapped in the snow. Circling the herd and firing his revolver like the cowboy he dreamed of becoming, Frewen saw the bison plunge through the drifts “like porpoises playing through a wave.”5 Frewen’s simile evokes the freedom and wildness of a moment all the more sweet for its brevity. The bison herds had nearly disappeared by 1924, when Frewen’s memoirs were published, as economic development and transformed the “great silent places.” By juxtaposing his past experience with the statement that such experiences were no longer possible, Frewen underscored his claim to heroic status as a pathfinder through the wilderness who “had accomplished a journey that no man in all

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probability would ever attempt again.”6 The skeptical reader might be forgiven for wondering if the main reason no one had attempted it again was that crossing the Rockies on foot in a December blizzard was stupid and unnecessary, but Frewen’s account does not suggest he was aware of the possibility of such a reading. Instead, in a subsequent passage of the memoir, Frewen situated himself and his brother on a mountain crest overlooking the landscape, a position freighted in both British and American culture with powerful meanings of ownership: Near two hundred miles south we could see Laramie Peak. To the east was the limitless prairie, the course of Powder River showing in its broad belt of cotton woods [sic] fading out in the far distance. To northward we could see clean up to the Montana Frontier a full two hundred miles. Not a human habitation was in sight; no cattle. . . . It was just a vast unoccupied desert beyond the frontier, and we said to ourselves, “There it stretches, equally deserted, for a full two thousand miles.” Montana, Alberta, what is now Saskatchewan, up to Peace River—in the direction we were looking, it was all virgin prairie, just waiting for man. How amazing the idea that for five hundred miles at least this immense area was destined to fill up with settlers and their cattle during the next five years.7 Frewen was not mourning the disappearance of such empty country. Though enchanted by the western wilderness, the openness of the country mattered to Frewen mostly because it meant opportunity. The “virgin prairie” was “just waiting for man,” and Frewen thought he was literally the man in question. He hoped to make a quick fortune from running cattle on the open range and selling them to the packers in Chicago. He had no intention of leaving the bison unmolested or the land untouched. He wanted to fill the silence with the joyous noise of money being made.

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Like all memoirs, Frewen’s omitted as much as it revealed. To see the country as “a vast unoccupied desert” Frewen had to elide the Native people he had encountered, the prospectors and guides who provided guidance and advice, the buffalo herds plunging through the narrow pass. Consider, also, what Frewen knew about his western adventure when he wrote his account of it. By the early 1920s he was an ailing old man who knew that his dreams of a cattle kingdom and a career in Parliament had ended in humiliating failure. He had not been on the Powder River in almost fifty years, and other companies ran their cattle on the range he had once called his own. His partnership with Richard had generated animosity bordering on hatred between the two men, and Richard had drowned in 1891 after an unhappy life as full of disappointments as Moreton’s. If Frewen had been unique in his hopes and his disillusionment, he would be no more than a curiosity. Yet the story of his quick rise to prominence as a rancher and the equally rapid collapse of his fortunes mirrors a broader cultural development of the period. During the 1880s the American West drew British younger sons, family black sheep, and miscellaneous wellborn young men at loose ends. They drifted into various activities—hanging around saloons seems to have been prominent among their pursuits—but the most culturally visible sign of their presence manifested itself in the numerous British-owned ranches that sprang up in the upper Great Plains during these years. Cattle ranching attracted the British elite because it seemed to promise the revitalization of a way of life that was becoming increasingly imperiled in Britain. These men dreamed of making fortunes as ranchers and returning to Britain to resume their lives of privilege, yet their hopes proved futile in the face of the harsh winters and aridity of the western plains.8 In contrast to the figure of the cowboy, who became central to American models of masculinity, the British rancher enjoyed enormous cultural visibility for a brief time and then faded into irrelevance. Similarly, whereas the figure of the cowboy offered American culture a model of heroic masculinity, the British rancher evolved quickly into the so-called

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remittance man, a figure of comic ineptitude. In that moment of visibility, however, we see gender, nature, and capital intersecting to shape the British imagination of the West, with profound consequences both for the ecologies of the northern plains and for the elite men who sought to remake themselves there. Born in 1859, Moreton Frewen was educated privately and at Cambridge, where he ignored his studies in favor of hunting and the racetrack. By 1878 he had dissipated his sizable inheritance on gambling, a stable of fine horses, and a lavish lifestyle. Having no estate of his own and little prospect of help from his older brothers, he needed to find an income to support his hope of undertaking a parliamentary career. “What was I to turn my hand to?” he asked. “My capital was but a younger son’s portion—that and some ability to ride young horses.”9 His lack of income did not threaten Frewen’s sense of himself as a member of his nation’s elite. On the contrary, he pointed to his genealogy, his manners, and his sensibilities as evidence of his innate superiority. As he informed his fiancée in 1880, “Next to you I love the name I bear . . . more than any earthly thing. . . . After all we are much the greatest people in Sussex, at least I was always brought up to believe so, and certainly we did control all the elections, two whig dukes notwithstanding.”10 Though Frewen was not actually a member of the nobility, his family had been firmly seated in the ranks of the gentry for centuries. Despite feeling pride in his ancestry, Frewen, like his brothers, was aware that his family’s finances were declining. Soon after he and Richard went to Wyoming, Richard wrote to the oldest Frewen brother, Edward, “I am so sorry about the Farmers being in such a bad state and your rents coming in so badly, I fear rents will have to be lowered, and the only thing is we must make money enough on this side to make up for deficiencies on your side of the Atlantic.” A few months later Richard sounded the same theme: “I am very sorry times are so bad at home I thought some time ago that it was bound to come. . . . I think

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it would be worth your while coming out here[.] You could look about for investments and might really make money here to replace what you lose at home.”11 The Frewen brothers looked to their western investments as a source of revenue to replace that lost on their estates; such revenue could in turn support their political careers. As Moreton wrote to Edward, “I wish you and I were in parliament, but we must boom up the old west first and get rich before we are great.”12 To Moreton, the riches brought by western booms were not the measure of greatness. They were merely the means to an end. The Frewens were not the only landed family beset by such frustrations and dilemmas. In the 1870s the British elite was entering what would turn out to be a lengthy and in many ways irreversible period of political and economic decline, largely owing to an agricultural depression that made it difficult for tenants to pay their rents.13 As the Earl of Dunraven put it in an article for the Nineteenth Century, the times were “perilous” for landowners, who were “looked upon with most unreasonable and unnatural jealousy and dislike by rich but landless politicians” supporting higher taxes on land. The landed classes were “the butt of demagogues and of the Radical press” while the branch of government that historically represented them, the House of Lords, was “unpopular with a large section of the people.” Frustrated with the failure of the rest of society to understand what he saw as the contributions made by the aristocracy and the gentry, Dunraven added, “No class has ever deserved greater sympathy, and no class has ever been more fiercely or more unjustly attacked.” To confront the crisis, Dunraven recommended, members of the aristocracy and gentry needed to adapt. They needed to relinquish useless privileges that only distanced them from ordinary people, while diversifying their economic base and reducing their expenditures. As Dunraven, an ardent yachtsman, put it, they needed “to make what preparations they can to ride out the storm by casting away incumbrances and strengthening the crew.”14 True to Dunraven’s advice, the families who survived these years usually did so by retrenching and selling assets. Having regained their footing,

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they were determined not to lose it, and this in practice usually meant investing in stocks, bonds, and real estate. Investors sought new opportunities around the world, including the United States. The American West, far from being the primitive, remote wilderness that Frewen depicted, was in fact enmeshed in global capital networks, networks that contained significant British strands. Whereas in earlier decades British investment in the United States had been fairly limited, roughly fifteen hundred British companies organized to do business in the trans-Mississippi West between 1865 and 1890. These companies invested large amounts of capital in a wide variety of industries, including railroads, mines, irrigation companies, tourist resorts, farm mortgages, and cattle and sheep ranches. Between 1879 and 1888 thirty-three cattle companies doing business in the United States were registered in Great Britain, with a market capitalization of roughly twenty million dollars. In addition, British investors loaned money to American ranchers. In all, the British may well have had as much as forty-five million dollars invested in the American cattle business in the 1880s.15 Even as elite families sought out new sources of income, they had to figure out an answer to the question, “What Shall I Do with My Son?” This perplexing query—the title of a magazine article from 1884— increasingly preoccupied upper-class parents in this period.16 Even for those families who continued to hold their estates, the laws of primogeniture meant that only eldest sons could inherit the land and the life that went with it. For younger sons, the choices seemed to be narrowing.17 Growing professionalization in the military, civil service, medicine, and the law had made these positions more difficult to obtain. Not every young gentleman could pass the competitive examinations necessary to enter such jobs. Whereas the church had once been the frequent choice of younger sons, many now found its spiritual and intellectual obligations too daunting. With regard to careers in business, some gentlemen spurned such occupations as vulgar; others found that their public school and university education, focused narrowly on

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classical subjects, had provided them with few of the skills needed in an increasingly complex economy. Firms were becoming larger, more hierarchical, and more reliant on new techniques of managerial expertise. In addition, the new industries of what has sometimes been styled the second Industrial Revolution—chemicals, electrical items, machine tools, and optics—offered few opportunities to men with little or no scientific training, no matter how well-bred. While the banking and insurance firms of the City still offered employment to some, these fields could hardly supply needed positions to all of the surplus gentlemen. Last, any kind of public career, such as that of a member of Parliament, required an independent income. The so-called problem of the younger son affected the upper reaches of the middle class in addition to the aristocracy and gentry.18 Mid-Victorian prosperity and the enormous expansion of the public schools meant that more and more young men possessed rarefied classical educations and a sense of themselves as gentlemen. The author of “What Shall I do with My Son?,” W. H. A. Feilding, wrote, “The desire of every one, from the small farmer and tradesman upwards, to give such an education to their sons as will engender a distaste of the life led by the parents, and a desire either to become rich more rapidly, and with less labour, or to do as little work as the funds at their disposal will admit” was contributing to the increasing surplus of gentlemen in Britain.19 Such men, the second- or third-generation descendants of tradesmen, manufacturers, farmers, and the like, might have entered fairly smoothly into the family business if they had been born some fifty or sixty years earlier. As it was, their families’ upward mobility had the unintended consequence of preparing them either for a life of leisure they could not really afford or for a career such as the civil service for which they would have to compete in an ever more crowded field. Fears about the future of such young men arose partly out of demographic and economic realities, but they also represented cultural preoccupations that stretched beyond the developmental crises of a relatively small set of individuals. The surplus gentleman, as a cultural

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figure, undermined the gender ideologies of Victorian society in several ways. Occupational endowment, the ability of the father to confer a secure place in life on his son, constituted an important element of the Victorian patriarch’s identity. A son who could not compete successfully against others and who could find no meaningful role in business or public life was a testament to his father’s parental failure. Such sons themselves could not fully claim manhood. In the nineteenth century the opposite of “man” could be “woman,” but the opposite of “man” could also be “boy.” The lack of secure incomes and occupations necessitated that many young men indefinitely postpone marriage and fatherhood, two essential attributes of Victorian masculinity. It seemed to contemporary observers that the elite’s sons were in a state of extended adolescence and perhaps in danger of never growing up at all.20 Surplus gentlemen raised a disturbing prospect that exposed the anxieties at the heart of late Victorian Britain. Their presence seemed to be evidence of widespread failure at social reproduction among two generations of the upper classes. If these men could not surmount the difficulties presented to them by the Victorian economy, if all the education and privilege expended upon them added up to nothing, then something had to be seriously wrong with them and, by extension, with the society that had produced them. In an era when the vision of social existence as a Darwinian struggle had become widespread, upperand middle-class parents saw the apparent inability of many young gentlemen to succeed at a worthwhile occupation as a harbinger of overall social and even national decline. Such inability seemed to indicate that the British ruling class was so lacking in energy as to be unable to pass on its privileges from one generation to another. If this was the case, Britain could not retain its place as an imperial power. Frewen’s aimlessness made him, then, typical in some ways of the other men of his background. However, in 1878 he encountered a new opportunity that seemed to him to be a possible solution to his problems. That year Frewen’s friends Lord and Lady Adair invited him to accompany them on a trip through the United States to their cattle

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ranch in Texas. He seized the opportunity of escaping the dreary prospect of a London social season with no money at hand. As the guest of the Adairs, Frewen spent several months in the States in the spring and summer of 1878. Passing through Chicago, he met Gen. Philip Sheridan of the U.S. Army, who told him “such tales of the Upper Yellowstone region and of the wondrous wealth of big game in all the fine country between Fort Keogh and Camp Brown, its endless forests and streams, the probability of its quite unexplored recesses carrying great mineral wealth, that the trip I had so greatly enjoyed across the plains of Texas played by a mere prelude to the joys that were awaiting me.”21 In his memory Frewen linked the pleasures of the big game hunter and the rewards of the entrepreneurial investor, and when he returned to England he had already begun to think about starting his own ranch. Lord Adair, whom Frewen called “a very unusual type of man, the great cattle King. . . . T H E pioneer,” had started his ranch in Texas in partnership with Charles Goodnight in the early 1870s. Then, as Lady Adair had noted in her diary, “the yellow, treeless prairie, like a great ocean with great yellow waves, stretched away without a landmark of any sort, not even a bush or shrub, only the short yellow buffalograss” on which animals “fatten . . . in the most marvelous manner.22 By 1878, however, “St. Kames,” the Texas correspondent for the British sportsmen’s paper the Field, was pointing out that good ranges in Texas were becoming scarce. Too many cattle were crowded onto too few acres, and would-be cattlemen were discovering that the business was much more challenging than they had thought.23 Many British investors hoped to emulate Adair, but they found that by the end of the 1870s numerous sources were echoing St. Kames’s warnings. As one disgruntled former Royal Navy man wrote, only those who were “very steady and industrious” could hope even to “make a living” in Texas, and even then such men would have to “give up many English ideas” and adapt to a new society. As he ruefully concluded, a man who was capable of that much “will do just as well in the old country, without the hardships entailed” in coming to a new one.24

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Western ranching was only beginning to seize the imagination of investors, who listened eagerly to the reports of the 26 percent profit made in the first year of operation by the Prairie Cattle Company, a Scottish-owned enterprise with ranges in Colorado and New Mexico.25 One Scottish ranch manager remembered the impact the company’s success made on Edinburgh investors: “The financial officers of that conservative old city had found a new mine to exploit. The drawing rooms buzzed with the stories of this last of bonanzas; staid old gentlemen who scarcely knew the difference betwixt a steer and a heifer discussed it over their port and nuts.”26 The manager’s metaphoric reference to mines links the cattle boom to the other investments in extractive industry that pulled British capital abroad; investors were already familiar with “bonanzas” (a term that originally meant a rich vein of ore) and were primed to hear about the next one. At the same time, however, the manager’s humorous reference to “staid old gentlemen” suggests the level of abstraction that steers and heifers could assume in their guise as bonanza. Ore could be perceived as lying underground for the taking but required enormous amounts of capital and equipment to extract; similarly, ranching appeared to be an easy business in which huge profits could be made without paying attention to the particularities of cattle’s material existence. The opportunities in Texas had already begun to seem exhausted, but ranching itself still held great appeal. Frewen therefore had reason to pay particular attention to Sheridan’s description of Wyoming. The Sioux had fiercely defended the area in a continuous war culminating in the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876. The defeat of the Sioux meant that prospective investors and settlers could enter the country in relative safety. Together, the army and the railroads facilitated an incursion that simultaneously eradicated the bison herds upon which the Plains Indians depended for subsistence and cleared an ecological niche on the plains for another grazing species, domesticated cattle. In 1880 the investors’ newspaper the Anglo-American Times began publishing articles on the northern range cattle industry.

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Aristocrats like the Earls of Dunraven and Dunmore, the latter “a great cattle-breeder in Scotland,” were seizing the opportunity to place large herds in Wyoming and Montana. Texas, the region previously most famous for cattle ranching, had bred a tough strain of cattle that was improved by fattening on northern pastures and crossing with finer stock. Not confining himself to dry details, the paper’s reporter described western ranchers and their life in the terms of romantic adventure: The cattle pasture as they move, in vast droves herded by the now celebrated “cow-boy,” . . . in reality troopers of a formidable character, perhaps as fine cavalry of an irregular and undisciplined order as is possible to find. In the charge of these wild men countless herds of [equally] wild cattle move northward for months to fill up the ranches of Nebraska, Wyoming, Dakota, and Montana, to spread over the illimitable prairie stretching from the foot of the Rocky Mountains, to penetrate into the valleys and parks of the ranges, and to produce that beef which daily crosses the Atlantic, and is now familiar on European tables.27 Part of ranching’s appeal was the way in which it seemed to link the exotic and the familiar. Cowboys were both “wild men” and, in the words of another Field correspondent, “jolly fellows who, if decidedly democratic were seldom . . . disrespectful or presuming.”28 Similarly, there was something extraordinary about knowing that one’s Sunday lunch had once been roaming lands thousands of miles away. The economic threat represented by American beef exports became domesticated as the western cattle industry became more accessible to the British investor and reader. Moreover, ranching presented not only a good investment opportunity, but also an explicit solution to the dilemmas of the landed classes. The Anglo-American Times advised “those hurt here by American competition”—that is, those who derived their living from

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agricultural rents—“to take a hand in the competition” by moving their capital into agricultural investments abroad “instead of striving against the inevitable.” That some aristocrats were in fact doing this only served to reassure the Anglo-American Times that the nobility were capable of demonstrating intelligence and adaptability. After all, asked the newspaper, “is it not wiser to become great meat-producers themselves in the opening land, than to sit down and wail over the departing fortunes of the pursuit at home?”29 Many such articles seem to have been written by publicists who were on the payrolls either of railroads or of cattle ranchers hoping to attract investors. They astutely tailored their message to assuage the anxieties of their readers, claiming that ranching would be the salvation of the landed classes by yielding high profits. Travel books about the American West also described the region in glowing terms. Arthur Pendarves Vivian, a big game hunter, son of a baronet, and related by marriage to the Earl of Dunraven, noted in his Wanderings in the Western Land, “They tell me that nothing can surpass the condition of the cattle after a few months’ feeding in the summer time on the luxuriant herbage.”30 Vivian spent several months in the West, but even travel writers who hardly stopped in the West at all contributed to the images of bounty and easy wealth available on the northern plains. Gazing from the window of a train, Lady Mary Duffus Hardy observed “a wide expanse of desolation covered with tiny gray-green buffalo grass, only there are no buffaloes now to eat it.” Through her field glasses she saw “an army of animated ant-hills.” These, she was told by other passengers, were “immense herds of cattle, thousands strong, who are sent up there to get their own living some months of the year, and then descend to the valleys as fat as butter, a mine of wealth to their owners.”31 The “meaner animals”—that is, cattle—in this description seemingly need no care at all; in her account, even the work of herding cattle disappears. The cattle seem to take themselves onto the range and round themselves up in the fall, magically “as fat as butter” and yielding a “mine of wealth.” The instability

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of Hardy’s metaphors—are the cattle like butter or a mine?—suggests the mystification that surrounded the range cattle business. Again, the links between labor and nature disappear, replaced by a fantasy in which nature magically yields commodities. Another disappearance in this rhetoric occurs at the point where Hardy observes “buffalo grass” lacking “buffaloes now to eat it.” Whether Hardy was aware of it or not, a strong link existed between the slaughter of the immense bison herds that had inhabited the plains in the early nineteenth century and the infrastructure that made ranching and tourism possible. Hunters had slaughtered the buffalo for their meat, which fed railroad laborers, and for their hides, which commanded good prices in the East; in turn, the railroad transported tourists west and cattle east, for without cattle cars to ship animals hundreds of miles to the Chicago slaughterhouses the post–Civil War expansion of the ranching industry would have been impossible.32 Like Frewen, who ruefully admitted that “some ability to ride young horses” was all he possessed in the way of possible professional skills, the sons of the British elite gravitated to ranching not only because it was regarded as being profitable, but also because it was perceived as the ideal match for their temperaments. The rancher, so British investors thought, did not have to dig in the dirt or mess about with uninteresting animals like hogs and chickens. Open-range ranching required equestrian ability and large swaths of land. If it was dirty, hard work, it appeared to be dirty and hard in the same way that mountaineering or big game hunting were. Managing a ranch seemed a profession ideally suited to impoverished country gentlemen who possessed few skills other than shooting and riding. As Isabelle Randall, the wife of a wellborn British rancher in Montana, wrote in a letter home: “I don’t call riding after stock hard work. Of course it is, really, but still it is very different to the regular manual ‘grind’ of a farm-hand. I don’t think gentlemen are fitted for that. . . . Jem says that he thinks an Englishman, who has been used to hunting in England and ridden all his life, can kill a Western American when it comes to riding, and that he can ride

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greater distances with greater ease to himself and the horse he is on; and that stockwork is all that an Englishman is good for, if he wants to go in for hard work.”33 Another writer informed readers of his account of western travel that a young man who took up cattle ranching “would have horses to ride and plenty of space to ride over, with the prospect of becoming . . . wealthy,” adding as a caution “if he studied his business and persevered with it.”34 Articles about American ranching filled British periodicals for the elite. In the columns of publications like the Field hopeful would-be ranchers discussed where to go, what to bring, how to start, and whether their skills would be of use in their new life.35 Publicists, such as those writing for the Anglo-American Times, assured British readers that life in Wyoming was delightful. The conjunction of quick money and a pleasant life outdoors seemed irresistible. For instance, one report published in 1880, declared, Two sons of lords are now about reaching their cattle ranche [sic] in the Territory of Wyoming—Horace Plunkett and A. Roache [sic]. The Hon. A. Roache is said to be well-known in Ireland as a good rider; and the Hon. Horace Plunkett is also regarded as an excellent sportsman; so it is expected they will combine hunting with cattle-raising and have a good time generally in the far Northwest. . . . We have seen some letters from a young gentleman who in London dates from a fashionable square. . . . The life is as wild as anything one can picture, yet enjoyable. Game abounded, and the work was sufficient to keep all so actively employed as not to leave time to be annoyed with the inconveniences.36 Such accounts often seem drawn almost from the pages of juvenile fiction, and indeed the late nineteenth century saw a spate of adolescent novels published for the British market about bright young lads who experienced thrilling adventure while seeking their fortunes in the West. For instance, in George Henty’s Redskin and Cowboy (1892)

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young Hugh Tunstall, heir to a Cumberland estate, flees a harsh guardian to embark on a career as a cowboy who is so quick on the draw that other cowboys call him Lightning.37 The American frontier provided both raw material waiting to be transformed into wealth in the form of commodities and the raw material for experiences that would transform boys into virile men. Indeed, promoters of ranching sometimes spoke of it as the solution not only for the economic problems, but also for the cultural ills that plagued the landed elite. They claimed that the rigors of western life would teach young men how to be independent and hardy. J. S. Tait, the author of the transparently titled pamphlet Beef Bonanza, informed the Field that “there is no better arena for developing a strong, bright, and self-reliant character than the cattle field of the Far West.” One rancher recounted how he had formerly been a useless dandy who spent his time “sauntering about the handsome salons of the ‘Continental’ [hotel] at Paris” but now had “exchanged the boulevards for the prairie and the Opera for the saddle,” thus combining wholesome pleasure with profit.38 Ranching could toughen up youths who had gotten soft from overexposure to urban life, female influence, and lack of any useful role in society. As depicted in the periodical press and travel literature, western life seemed to offer the possibility of a new life for surplus gentlemen. Frewen’s visit to the United States and his exposure to ranching occurred at a moment when the western cattle industry had assumed new visibility in British culture. Ranching as an occupation possessed a particular appeal for men of his background, an appeal that extended beyond the promise of profits. If ranching could stabilize the disturbingly unsettled gender status of the surplus gentleman, what might it do for Moreton Frewen? Frewen returned to England in August of 1878 after spending most of the summer in the West with the Adairs. A letter he wrote from London later that fall to his sister-in-law in Sussex indicates that he

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already planned to return to the United States to become a cattle rancher, but it also reveals the way in which he saw ranching only as one possible option as he charted his course back toward a life of privilege in England: “My last 2 months in England served to show me how very much more suited to my rank is life with you than anywhere else: I don’t allow for a moment that I am not capable of being quite happy as a ‘cattle rancher’ only I’m in love with England and I mean to return soon, a rich man. By what precise means from matrimony to highway robbery I don’t know. Still it’s going to be so.”39 Frewen encloses “cattle rancher” in ironic, distancing quotation marks, as if to acknowledge the strangeness of the term to both writer and reader. His humorous tone does not entirely offset the intensity of his use of italics, which emphasizes the desperation he feels at the prospect of living a life not “suited to [his] rank.” Frewen’s plan was to return to the United States to see the northern plains country of which Sheridan had told him. He managed to talk his brother Richard into joining him in the ranching venture. Like Moreton, Richard was a young son at loose ends. Unlike Moreton, he was an experienced traveler, having spent some time in Africa, and, moreover, he still had most of his inheritance. By the end of 1878 the two brothers were journeying through the Big Horns; by the spring of 1879 they had selected a range and begun to build a house and outbuildings. During that year they traveled widely through the United States, purchasing cattle and supplies.40 Sometime in 1879, in New York, Frewen met Clara Jerome, the woman who would eventually become his wife. His correspondence with her reveals yet another dimension to the crisis of the British elite. Clara Jerome was born in 1851.41 Her father was Leonard Jerome, a shopkeeper and lawyer from upstate New York who had made a fortune speculating on Wall Street. Jerome was an avid racing fan and horse fancier who had invested in several racetracks around New York City, and it is likely he met Frewen in these raffish circles and invited him to the famously lavish Jerome mansion on Madison Square. Frewen

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may also have known the Jeromes by reputation. In 1874 Clara’s younger sister Jennie had married Lord Randolph Churchill, the second son of the Duke of Marlborough, giving Clara and a third Jerome sister, Leonie, entry into the social circle around the Prince of Wales. By 1879, however, Leonard Jerome’s losses on Wall Street made it difficult for the family to maintain households in both New York and London, and Clara and Leonie returned with their mother to New York. Moreton’s life thus far had exemplified the dilemmas of the stereotypical wellborn younger son schooled to uselessness. Clara and her sisters typified another culturally weighted figure of the era: the American heiress searching for a husband among the British elite. When Jennie married Churchill, his family had been distraught at the idea of their son marrying an American girl from an obscure family, regardless of her beauty or her father’s wealth.42 However, throughout the 1870s and 1880s several similar marriages took place between sons of prominent British families and American heiresses.43 By 1887 Oscar Wilde, writing in the Court and Society Review, termed the trend an invasion. In a flurry of metaphors Wilde described American women as ready for “combat” and British families as dying organisms in need of “new blood, fresh sap.”44 Comments such as Wilde’s furthered the same images of the British elite that the articles on the surplus gentlemen had. In their own way Clara and Moreton each embodied different aspects of the crisis of the British elite. Like the western plains, women such as Clara Jerome were supposed to bring American wealth and new energy to men like Moreton. When Clara and Moreton met, Clara was twenty-eight years old, living in the shadow of the charismatic Jennie, and still unmarried. The Jeromes had raised their daughters with one goal in mind: to make glamorous marriages to wealthy, prominent men. Clara may have been wondering how many more opportunities she would have before she moved out of the category of marriageable girl and into that of spinster aunt. She may have seen Moreton as a viable husband despite the fact that he was a younger son with a dubious past and vague future. For

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his part, Moreton must have known of the large marriage portions many American millionaires’ daughters brought to their husbands.45 Other factors were at work. Clara was ethereally pretty; Moreton was lively and dashing, capable of telling a wicked anecdote of London society or a tale of daring western adventure. And he could declaim his devotion in heroic terms: “You cannot but be true; when I think of those dear eyes, so lately all my world, it seems blasphemous to speak of doubt. Clara darling it shall be; I will win you from the whole world, I have sworn it. I pray for it, I pray for you come what hap. Be mine still darling. It is not long to wait.”46 That they would have to wait seemed clear throughout 1880. Frewen had little in the way of an income to support Clara in the way she expected, and her father’s finances had weakened to the extent that he was unwilling to offer a marriage settlement. There seems to be have been some hesitation on Clara’s part as well, some well-founded uncertainty about Frewen’s personal and financial stability. Against these oppositions, then, Frewen cast himself as a determined lover who would throw himself against the obstacles posed by others in order to pursue and achieve his goal. Even at this early date his cattle venture was showing signs of shakiness owing to overspending and constant quarreling with his brother, yet his letters to Clara offered him a way of writing out a different life for himself, a successful one. In them he could depict a future different from his past and his present: “Bertie Grey who was my god at Cambridge has made his first speech in [the] House, & is now famous: such a success. & I long to measure words with him from the opposite side of the House. What a very busy life we are to lead.”47 Frewen’s letter skips over the arduous process of finding the funds to support a family and a political career. Instead he envisions the “life we are to lead” as needing only Clara’s willing cooperation to make it happen. Frewen’s letters to Clara reveal his effort to remake himself professionally and personally. For instance, he separated himself from the fashionable life he’d left in London:

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Those absurd societarians—once my world—think that I am “broke” & it never occurs to their self love, that any one could tire of that vapid monotony they call life. Truth to tell necessity did send me west but inclination and every good gift of my nature will keep me here, if you will let me. I would wish to be here till I am so rich, that I can do anything at home, & I know here that is a matter of very few years, the west is growing like a mushroom. I will never return to an idle life again if I have millions; you would not wish it would you? as we are capable of being more than a twin unit of society.48 In this letter Frewen both claimed he was tired of the “vapid monotony” of London and acknowledged that he would not have left London if he had not, in fact, been “broke,” a judgment he surrounds with distancing quotation marks. He asserts that he has changed, that he wishes to be more than a dandy about town. What had effected this transformation? In another letter, composed after a long night talking over London scandals with a visiting friend, Frewen wrote to Clara in a fever of moral anxiety: “The longing was on me to go on my knees to my darling and implore her to keep me [in] exile ever away from all the awakening wickedness of that world . . . the past season in London would seem to have turned all heads. They seem to have commenced a very carnival of vice; I used to fancy that the world was not really bad only the few, but now they all seem to glory in shame.”49 Now removed from his earlier haunts, he depicts himself as awakened to their moral deficiencies and casts Clara in the role, so central to Victorian culture, of the woman whose moral character has the power to redeem a man on the verge of going wrong forever. Together, the West and Clara would rescue Frewen from his wastrel past and make him into an adult after a drawn-out adolescence. Frewen’s vision of the future never included settling permanently in Wyoming. The West was always a means to an end, allowing

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him to “do anything at home.” However, he did think that after his ranch had served to make his fortune, he would keep it as a vacation home. Frewen imagined Clara as the center of a future lively and fashionable social scene in the Rockies, after wealthy developers had made the area into a resort and the Frewens had established themselves in it as one of the leading families. He wrote, “You will only be the first darling, not nearly the last, to come to our western wilds a few months each year; I am so certain that when this glorious country is better known, its sport, its scenery and its climate, it will become as usual to have a shooting box in the Big Horns, as a river in Norway, or a forest in Scotland.” A few days later he insisted, “After all you’ll have an empire here, though that dear Clare you find everywhere methinks—at least you’ll be lady paramount in a district as large as all Ireland, & how fashionable you’ll make the Big Horns next year.”50 A “fashionable” wife, a successful career in Parliament: Frewen’s western fantasy contained not only the dreams of big game and profitable ranches but also the realization of the dreams he could not afford to dream in England. He would become the ideal upper-class British man—wealthy, a sportsman, committed to public service—and his wife would be the appropriate consort for such a man, producing prestige for them both through her skillful display of taste and social connections. Through 1879–80 Frewen’s efforts to establish a ranch mirrored his efforts to convince Clara to marry him. These two projects were really two aspects of Frewen’s effort to remake himself into a different, new man, a successful one who would win his bride as well as establish a cattle kingdom in the West. Together, these two aspects of his masculinity would define his passage from bachelor immaturity to married, adult stability, from boyhood to manhood. In December 1880 Clara agreed to marry Moreton, and the wedding was held the following June at the fashionable Grace Church in New York. Afterward, the couple traveled to Wyoming, where they planned to spend the summer with a houseful of guests. At first Clara enjoyed the “Home Ranche,” writing enthusiastically to her mother

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and sisters about the scenery and fresh air. Soon she was pregnant, asking her mother to send out baby clothes and a new dressing gown. Clara’s time on Powder River came to an abrupt end, however, when she became ill while camping out. Over the long hours jolting by coach to Cheyenne for medical care, she miscarried, and soon afterward returned to New York to convalesce. She never returned to Wyoming, and she and Moreton spent most of the next few years apart, as he dashed back and forth between London and Wyoming in an effort to keep the ranch afloat.51 Frewen’s effort to establish himself as a husband and father seemed to be over before it had even begun. Frewen’s dream of making the Big Horns into a fashionable resort failed to take the region’s remoteness into account, with grave consequences for Clara. Frewen took a similarly desultory attitude toward some of the other material realities of his choices. When in Wyoming Frewen participated in the business of his ranch only sporadically. He did learn how to rope and brand cattle.52 Frewen joined the Wyoming Stock Growers’ Association and served occasionally as an ad hoc official in the recently organized Johnson County, where his ranch was located.53 However, he occupied much of his time with hunting, riding, reading, writing letters, and entertaining, the traditional pursuits of the country gentleman. Indeed, much that Frewen did could not be justified as part of the business of running a successful ranch. He created a life of luxury hundreds of miles from the nearest rail head. In keeping with his hopes of making the Big Horns a fashionable destination for Britain’s titled and wealthy, he invited a constant stream of guests to his ranch for hunting and riding. Clara’s departure ensured that Frewen’s ranch would remain as it had begun, a male-only space. This homosocial context shaped the ways in which Frewen enacted masculinity as a western hunter and rancher. As a ranch manager or as the host of friends and investors, he performed the role of westerner for an all-male audience. Frewen reveled in the masculine power he felt he derived from his sporting experiences.54 As he bragged to his brother, who was at home in Sussex,

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“I am enormously fit; I was 17 consecutive hours on foot and horseback one day last week and all I [ate] was a rib of an elk I killed which I roasted. . . . I got back to camp . . . at 11 pm not a bit tired.” Frewen wrote essays for the British sportsmen’s periodical the Field on “Big Horn Sport,” “booming up” the country, and offered advice to friends who wrote him about arranging hunting trips.55 For him, the economic appeal of ranching could never be separated from the opportunities for recreation it afforded. Whereas in England his inability to establish himself professionally and personally had threatened to emasculate him, his Wyoming ranch was like a stage on which he could perform a masculinity defined by his physical vigor. His knowledge about “Big Horn Sport” constituted for Frewen something he had never had before: a body of expertise. Only in the context of the West could Frewen’s hitherto useless abilities to excel at sport become a professional advantage. Moreover, Frewen was particularly concerned about preserving the big game of the region, not so much for humanitarian reasons as for class ones: “There are a lot of Texan ‘skin hunters’ killing our beautiful elk & buffalo in hundreds; I want to go up with two sheriffs and range the mountains nearly to the Yellowstone. . . . it will get on my mind if I’m a [month] in New York, and feel that each moment these miscreants are murdering out our handsome beasts.” What bothered Frewen was not hunting animals per se, but hunting them without adhering to the code of the sporting gentleman; he objected to hunting in quantity and for profit. Moreover, hide hunters ruined the sport for others: “If they are allowed to work their wicked will all the winter, goodbye to sport in these mountains, and they would lose their chief attraction wanting the great herds of buffalo and elk.”56 Among the possible uses of a game animal—as food, as a source of hides, as an object of desire for the sportsman—Frewen clearly privileged the last use. As he instructed Clara, “You know the sporting instinct implies a great deal beyond killing: the love of new wild experiences, the artist’s soul, the love of untutored nature.”57 Hunting for sport elevated

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violence to a quasi-spiritual experience through which the sportsman escaped the dreariness of daily life. Frewen’s opposition to hide hunters expressed a complicated set of assumptions about the correspondence between access to nature’s resources and human hierarchies of power. Just as hunting enabled Frewen to play the role of a western adventurer at home in the wilderness, so his ranch headquarters afforded him a way of performing aristocratic masculinity with an exotic, western inflection. The Frewen brothers built a massive log house, complete with rudimentary telephone to the nearest telegraph office and furnished it in a strange blend of quaint western Americana and luxuries imported from Europe. Though somewhat distressed at the cost of keeping up such an establishment (“we find somewhat to our horror that this shooting box of ours is costing £180 a month to keep up”), Frewen was proud of the lavish display he was able to mount for his guests. In a letter to Clara, written before she visited, Frewen noted that he ate for dinner green pea soup, a fish from the river, and “Roast Beef of our own growing” as well as champagne and added, “& after this you will think me a most degenerate ‘cow puncher’ but I want you to see that really the fact of being 200 miles from anywhere has not prevented my living in real comfort.” As for the house itself, one visitor, on seeing the main hall, said, “I did not think there was such a pretty room out of England!”58 Yet Frewen’s own description emphasizes its exoticism over its Englishness. Rather than simply reconstruct an English country house, the Frewen brothers had created a romantic fantasy of rustic ease: “Such a beautiful ‘old’ hall the great massive pine trees, all rough hewn, & covered here and there with head and horns, buffalo robes, & beaver skins, Indian bows arrows and bead work. Here and there pretty masses of creepers which scramble at will into the gallery, from which opens out the doors for the upstairs rooms. Twenty of us can dine in the hall comfortably & after we can move out and lounge on the piazza, and watch the great purple shadows stealing down over the prairie from the mountains.”59 His hall had only been built within the past eighteen months, but Frewen described it as old. Although he

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places the word within quotation marks, as if to call attention to his own pretensions, he cannot sustain the distance of this gesture, dubbing the porch a “piazza” (with no quotation marks) from which a large party of guests might absorb scenic beauty. One would not know from such a description that Frewen’s ranch was a workplace. Like Hardy’s depiction of cattle who rounded themselves up, Frewen’s sketches of life on Powder River masked the labor necessary to make a successful ranch. Frewen’s extravagant style of living in Wyoming embodied his expectations of what it meant to “open up a new country.” Yet he was frustrated; he found it difficult to maintain good relationships with his employees, neighbors, and manager, few of whom seem to have been impressed with his posturing and arrogance. He objected to what he perceived as the excessive egalitarianism of American society and characterized other ranchers as “these rough western men,” complaining that “being a gentleman is much against one here, as in the colonies generally.”60 Although the United States was not a colony of Great Britain, in Frewen’s mind its roughness and egalitarianism qualified it as a colonial space. Frewen believed that his own brother Richard was the greatest obstacle he faced. Richard was less profligate than his brother, and the two men quarreled constantly over expenditures. The failure of their other ventures, such as an ill-fated investment in a Texas bat guano cave, only added to the distrust and bitterness between them.61 In 1882 Moreton bought Richard out. Richard immediately left for England, where he began seeking investors for a new cattle venture of his own. Moreton, for his part, had to pay off the loans he had assumed in order to purchase Richard’s share of the ranch. Since cattle companies were the talk of British investors, it seemed a good idea to reorganize the ranch as a joint stock company. By July 1882 Frewen was in London drumming up a board of directors and shareholders. When the Duke of Manchester consented to be Frewen’s chairman of the board, he wrote jubilantly to Clara, “So my trouble is over, it is easy to find people to serve with a Duke!”

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His letters overflowed with descriptions of lunching with people, dining with people, driving with people, all of whom agree to buy stock in his company; he urged Clara to buy luxuries, promising her that from now on lots of money would be available for them both.62 In the fall of 1882 the Powder River Cattle Company announced its organization. 63 Frewen’s success at floating his scheme seemed unlikely to those who knew him best as a ne’er-do-well horseman and gambler, but in promoting a western cattle company he had caught the wave of public interest. As one of Frewen’s friends, eventually a major shareholder himself, wrote to him, “In your heart of hearts you must feel amused— and perhaps flattered—at the readiness of people to entrust you with the spending of £300,000 in the Rockies, when if you had asked them for it to lay out in a cattle speculation in England they would probably have met your proposal with more of derision than of enthusiasm!”64 Primed by the literature they had read in sportsmen’s periodicals and travel books, Frewen’s friends, relatives, and acquaintances committed their funds to the enterprise and persuaded their friends and relatives to do so as well. Few of these investors seem to have made any effort to learn about the range cattle industry in any depth or to have sought out firsthand information about it from anyone other than Frewen himself. Frewen’s social connections bestowed an unwarranted credibility on his claims, as did the context of overheated rhetoric surrounding American cattle ranches as an investment. There were good reasons for potential investors to scrutinize Frewen’s claims closely or for that matter to look carefully at any cattle company seeking capital. Most northern plains ranchers of the 1880s depended on an open range; that is, stockraisers rarely bought land and simply grazed cattle on the public domain. Ranchers did not feed their cattle in wintertime, instead turning them loose to feed on whatever forage they could find. Open-range ranchers rounded up their animals twice a year. The first roundup was in order to brand and castrate the calf crop, while the second was to collect the cattle who were to be sold that year. Cattle raised this way had to be relatively cheap, and

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Texas-style ranchers seldom interested themselves in improving the blood of their animals, relying instead on hardy longhorns.65 Winter was the most economically vulnerable time of year for the open-range rancher. Because his animals fended for themselves, every year he had to prepare himself for some losses after the storms. The critical factor was how well the cattle had done over the spring and summer. If because of drought, disease, or overcrowding the cattle were in a weakened condition to begin with, then winter could be a true catastrophe.66 On the other hand, if the cattle had survived the winter in fair condition and if beef prices in Chicago were high enough, the rancher could reap a profit because his costs were low. There were few incentives to induce the open-range rancher to conserve the range and few barriers to running as many cattle as he could. Indeed, as the price of beef began to fall in the early 1880s, many ranchers began running more and more cattle in order to make up in volume what they otherwise would lose on price. Some ranchers also tried acquiring blooded stock and improving their breed of animals in order to command higher prices per unit, while others became involved in feeding operations, either feeding their cattle in wintertime or shipping cattle to fattening yards and sheds before marketing them. In addition, as ranges became more crowded, ranchers began to file land claims in order to secure range rights, and this often involved expending capital for fencing and other improvements.67 As they struggled, they usually turned to their investors for more capital, but such money was not always easily forthcoming. Tensions between managers and investors were widespread in the range cattle industry. Managing a cattle outfit was a challenge that few investors really understood. Faced with the task of fitting the requirements of distant shareholders to the actual situation on the range, most managers improvised and hoped the investors would endorse the solution later. Such endorsement rarely followed without some friction. Investors, for their part, were seldom told the full truth about what was happening to their money, as annual reports often strategically

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omitted key information that might trouble them.68 Many ranchers, after the initial boom, could not secure the capital needed to strengthen their weak companies. They became seriously overextended and dangerously vulnerable to instabilities in local and world financial markets as they juggled numerous loans from Cheyenne, Denver, Chicago, New York, Boston, London, and Edinburgh.69 Although Frewen possessed no shortage of ideas for increasing the profitability of the Powder River Cattle Company, he found almost from the moment of incorporation that actually managing such an enterprise required skills he did not possess.70 Frewen rarely saw himself as being accountable for his own problems, preferring to blame his brother, his employees, his board of directors, other ranchers, the state of the ranges, and even the British government’s failure to repeal beef import restrictions. Frewen’s troubles with his board began early and continued to fester despite, or perhaps because of, his efforts to assert himself in the enterprise. “I mean to have an awful row with my own Board and they will see whether they or I have the whip hand,” he wrote to Clara in October of 1882, only a few months after the Powder River Cattle Company had gone public. “But the long and the short of it is that I will not after the way they have behaved go on with this Board, their suspicions are most insulting and dishonorable to themselves.” In the early months of the new venture Frewen spent freely on new cattle and ranch properties, prompting the London manager of the company to caution him.71 However, Frewen often entertained shareholders at the ranch in an effort to impress his directors with the value of their investment, and these attempts to woo investors with hunting, riding, and sightseeing occasionally succeeded in smoothing over conflicts.72 The tensions between Frewen and his board, however, could not be easily dissipated over the long term. A year after the founding of the company Frewen was still having problems with his business associates, still employing an aristocratic hauteur with them which they rarely found impressive or attractive. He would dismiss legitimate

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questions about the running of the ranch as impertinent interference in a gentleman’s affairs.73 Such conflicts would have been less serious had the company been profitable, but the figures for 1883 were disappointing. By the end of September Frewen was admitting in his letters to Clara that the company had far fewer marketable cattle than he had thought and that the dividend paid to stockholders was going to be disappointing.74 Unlike most of his stockholders, Frewen had access to information directly from the West. His employees informed him frequently about the state of the ranges in letters that increasingly became more urgent, such as this one from 1883: “It Is no use Talking there Is all Ready too many Cattle on the Wyo Ranges . . . of course it IS very nice for young manager and his Private Set to Be all in fine offices at Cheyenne and set around drink good whiskey and Smother good Cegars, but that won’t keep poor Cattle alive and I fear you will lose heavy if this Winter Is Severe.”75 Frewen took such warnings seriously. Aware that the Powder River ranges were in trouble, he began pressing the London management to endorse the establishment of a feeding operation at Superior, Wisconsin, and to move the company’s herds north into Alberta. Reacting to the speculation-fueled boom in cattle ranches, ranch managers on the northern plains had become increasingly committed to finding new ranges, often looking north to Canada. Both Frewen and Richard, who had found investors for a cattle company of his own after parting ways with Moreton, eventually became passionate proponents of the idea that new ranges in Alberta would be the salvation of their companies. In a letter from 1885 Richard, once again in his brother’s good graces, sang an old song, this time about Alberta. There, he claimed, the Frewens would find “as good or better a sporting place than the Big Horns were at their best. A country where there are lakes waterfalls glaciers and mountains. Beautifull scenery. Where no white men have ever been” and where trout, salmon, bears, elk, deer, mountain goats, and bighorn sheep could all be found. Richard added, “Dont it make your mouth water[?]”76 A move to

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Alberta did not represent a shift in the way in which the Frewen brothers saw nature but only reproduced the original rhetoric of nature’s bounty, there for the taking. From 1883 onward a drumbeat of warnings sounded throughout the correspondence and reports of the Powder River Cattle Company: the range is overstocked, the range is worn out, “if a hard winter does come there is bound to be a heavy loss of cattle.”77 The situation prompted pessimistic assessments such as this one of Richard’s to his brother Edward: “Things West are very bad, Cheyenne is worse than dead, and the cattle business in the greater part of Wyoming is doomed. . . . all the Westerners are thinking about is as to who can get . . . the Lion’s share of the plunder.”78 Moreton’s predictions became successively more dire. In the fall of 1886 he informed the London manager of the company, “The more we can winter feed the better this winter. At least the lives of those fed will be safe. It is no use mincing matters, the ranges are in such a state, that if the winter is a severe one in Montana and in Wyoming the entire business will be blotted out. There are miles on miles of Powder River that would starve a grasshopper.” From Chicago he wrote to Edward, “The ranges in Wyoming and Montana are in such a state that nothing but a miracle can save us from fearful losses the coming winter.”79 At least one British investor was convinced that the days of endless bounty on the western plains had come to an end as a direct result of the search for occupations for younger sons: Lord Rosslyn wrote to Frewen, “The entire cattle business is overdone so many idle young fellows found an opening for their capital and a sort of occupation that there are I am assured one hundred million beeves on the western Ranches!! It is not a very hopeful lookout.”80 The winter of 1886–87 annihilated the company’s herds. In 1884 the Powder River Cattle Company’s calf brand was nine thousand. In the spring of 1887 the company could find only fifteen hundred calves.81 The company’s demise was protracted and painful. Frewen became more and more obnoxious, and his shareholders became more and more disappointed and resentful. Nearly every ranch employee of

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any importance was compelled to take sides, while endless transatlantic telegrams and letters hinted at dark conspiracies, personal dishonor, and dire impoverishment.82 By January of 1887, even before the full extent of the winter losses was known, Frewen was being forced off the board, as the company needed money gravely and several directors would lend only on condition that Frewen resign.83 Frewen claimed not to care, as he was already involved in new get-rich-quick schemes that had nothing to do with cattle, such as a deal to secure the American marketing rights for a new kind of railroad lubricant.84 Indeed, some of his investors were similarly tempted. As the Powder River Cattle Company collapsed under a weight of bickering, lawsuits, and dead cattle, the Earl of Rosslyn wrote to Frewen, “I have heard of an extraordinary tin mine in Australia not a very great way from Adelaide wanting I believe only energy to develop into a large profit—but I have done with such things.”85 The company was liquidated and most of the remaining herds sold in 1888–89. Such sales paid off some, but not all, of the company’s debts; many investors were never paid anything. Many cattle companies, already tottering, collapsed after the winter of 1886–87. A drought in the summer of 1886 scorched an already depleted range, and cattle were unable to gain enough strength to survive what proved to be an unusually long winter. Temperatures consistently below freezing, huge drifts of snow, and fierce winds savaged the herds. The fences erected by ranchers in an attempt to secure their range rights tended to prevent cattle from moving through the blizzards, and many froze to death bunched against the wire. A short-lived thaw in January proved no boon, as the subsequent freezes sealed whatever forage there was under a layer of ice through which cattle could not break. Ranchers throughout the plains had suffered a catastrophe. Not only did thousands of animals die from starvation and cold, but the cows that did survive could not calve. As the snow melted in the spring, ranchers found the remains of their cattle everywhere. Numerous cattle companies announced serious losses and went into reorganization or liquidation, rocking the local economies of the

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northern plains.86 As one of Wyoming’s major bankers, Morton Post, wrote to his wife, “ ‘I found conditions [in South Dakota] much the same as in Cheyenne. We just trusted these people too far. The assets of most of them will not begin to pay off their indebtedness. . . . how though does one go about foreclosing an entire community? I am straightening out the mess the best I can.’ ”87 The Powder River Cattle Company was not a typical Britishowned ranch; in fact, it arguably was the worst-managed and least profitable of all such enterprises. Yet Frewen’s voluminous writings, when read in relation to other sources, articulate the hopes and dreams he and others like him had for their western holdings. British ranchers envisioned their ranches as a playground for sportsmen as well as a profitable business. Such fantasies of leisure depended for sustenance on both a certain ideal of gentlemanly pleasure and a delight in the riches that American nature held in store. Even investors who had little interest in amusing themselves stalking elk or fishing Wyoming’s rivers wanted to believe that the northern plains were endlessly fruitful. Promoters like Frewen both subscribed to and cannily manipulated such images of bounty. When Frewen urged his friends and relatives to invest or even to move out and start ranches of their own, he praised the “virgin” range with its wealth of grass, but he never claimed that the range could last forever. The idea was to make money quickly: “You see our range is a virgin one, and grass will be splendid and cattle fatten rapidly and winter safely for say four years yet: after that profits will fall off.”88 This picture becomes more complicated when one considers how Frewen promoted the northern plains cattle industry to potential investors. Although he admitted to his close friends and relatives that the bounty of the open range could not last forever, when he was presenting his ranch to investors he could not resist linking his project with the dominant discourse of the West as a place of inexhaustible abundance. Like other cattle industry promoters, Frewen relied on the wishfulness of investors to attract capital for his own ends. Later, when Frewen warned

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that the ranges were overstocked and depleted, none of his backers wanted to believe him. Even Frewen himself could hardly think of a better solution than to find a new land of bounty, a new virgin range. The West was merely one site in a global system in which peripheral regions provided raw resources to metropoles until such resources were exhausted and capital moved on. A vision of the West as a destination for surplus British capital was also a vision of the West as a destination for surplus British gentlemen. Just as the collapse of the cattle boom undermined confidence in the financial potential of ranching, so surplus gentlemen took on a more ambiguous appearance as the cattle boom receded. By the late 1880s a new figure had emerged: the remittance man. The remittance man was a wellborn, well-educated young British man who had been sent to the West to make something of himself only to become helplessly dependent on remittances from home. Sometimes the remittance man was sickly, addicted to alcohol, or a gambler; in other cases he was simply ineffectual. Unable to succeed in Britain, unable to succeed in the United States, the remittance man represented the utter failure of elite British masculinity to function in the modern world. Stories of remittance men circulated through the press, through travel accounts, through fiction. Remittance men were not unique to the American West. They could be found in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Africa, that is, anywhere the British Empire putatively offered a fresh start and a healthy outdoors life.89 The American West, as far as the remittance man was concerned, could not be effectively distinguished from the colonies. Indeed, many would-be advisors of the remittance man and his friends suggested that the United States offered more economic opportunities and easier routes home than any other destination. A lively discussion about which places were most likely to transform remittance men into successes continued in print through the late nineteenth century and into the early years of the twentieth.90 Was it disloyal for the remittance man to go to the United

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States? Some argued that the American West was simply part of the greater Britain of English-speaking Anglo-Saxons and that to sojourn there or even emigrate there was to build Anglo-Saxon solidarity. Others argued that remittance men had an important duty to build the British Empire when they emigrated, in territories that were still formally affiliated with the empire. The debate over destinations for remittance men recast this somewhat pathetic figure as a significant one, one whose choices could affect the destiny of nations. As needy as the remittance man was, by framing the discussion of his options as a matter of international relations or imperial policy, the conversation threw him into prominence. Anxiety over what the upper and middle classes should do with their sons in an increasingly competitive world fueled businesses such as Charles Stewart and Co., who from their office on Cockspur Street in central London provided information on emigration, booked tickets, shipped luggage, and changed money for the prospective gentlemanly emigrant. Enterprises such as this one catered to the emigrant with capital to spare and a desire to find a “desirable” new residence abroad, and in their promotional literature they gave the names and colleges or regiments of the various retired officers, university men, and so forth who had emigrated under their auspices. Similarly, the Anglo-American Times maintained a reading room at its offices where “young gentlemen seeking information on fields of Settlement and Investment in the States” could meet with like-minded individuals or research western opportunities.91 Remittance men surface in travel writing, continually popping up to startle narrators with their cultivated accents and well-connected backgrounds in remote locations.92 They were sad figures, loitering around saloons and hotel lobbies, reading the newspaper all day, fearful of losing caste by associating with too many Americans but cut off forever from the social world they knew best. Occasional newspaper items attest to the vagaries of the remittance man’s life, as when a brief item in the Anglo-American Times reported on the intention of Lord Sholto George

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Douglas, the youngest son of the Marquess of Queensbury, to marry a “very pretty waitress in a gambling saloon,” with the result that his English companions had him institutionalized for insanity.93 The remittance man was often depicted as an innocent easily defrauded of his family money by western con artists, and newspapers and advice pamphlets frequently warned against being too trusting of promoters offering deals that were probably too good to be true. Against the prevailing current of enthusiasm for the possibilities of western profits, such writing expressed anxiety about the risks of mobility, both for capital and for young men. Whereas the rhetoric surrounding western ranching often portrayed it as an easy way for young men to redeem themselves, the remittance man pointed toward the possibility that in fact ranching was not so easy. Capital might be lost, and remittance men might remain dependent into adulthood, unable to help their families or even themselves. The remittance man, in his weakness, symbolized his culture’s fear that British masculinity was imperiled both in Britain and abroad. Thus, like his close relatives the surplus gentleman and the husband-hunting American girl, the remittance man embodied the fears of a landed class sliding toward comparative impoverishment and political irrelevance, and he reveals the extent to which such fears were expressed in gendered terms. A pair of novellas published in 1897 explain the remittance man’s dilemma as a problem of gender. Both Hilda Strafford and The Remittance Man, by Beatrice Harraden, depict a community of upperclass British men growing fruit on ranches in California. Hilda Strafford is about a wellborn, wealthy Englishwoman who comes to California to marry her fiancé only to feel miserable away from her London life. Her husband works himself literally to death for her, but she cannot reconcile herself to life in California. It is not really her fault, Harraden suggests, for the world of the remittance man is one in which only men can understand what other men are going through. Whereas for British women western life means heartsick isolation from the refined world, for men it offers the chance to escape office drudgery and demeaning

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dependency: “No more small clerkships for us, no more imprisonment in airless offices; but out-of-door freedom, and our own lives to ourselves, and our own land.” Strafford destroys her husband’s chance of a reclaimed masculinity, with its “freedom” and “land,” with her essential femaleness, which ties her irrevocably to London. He can move into a new world, but she cannot, and as a result his attempt to remake himself fails. The Remittance Man also centers on a relationship between two English people in California. Here, the two main characters are men. One is a successful fruit grower, but the other does not apply himself to anything, preferring to rely on his monthly remittance. The two men are close, but their friendship founders when, for his friend’s good, the fruit farmer writes to England and suggests that the remittances be stopped. Eventually the remittance man learns to work hard, and the friends reconcile. For the remittance man in this story the emotional pressures and rewards of male friendship are what gradually induce him to change his ways to fit those of his new environment. His friend’s intervention enables the former remittance man to move from a childish dependence to mature, manly independence. Although The Remittance Man seems to end happily, both novellas present all their characters as objects of pity. They can make the best of things and start over, but it is assumed that none of them would have chosen this life if they had had a choice. The novels articulate a longing for British society that is figured through nostalgia for Britain’s mild climate and green landscape: “Tom Lauderdale leaned against the wall of his hut, and began thinking of the old country, so tenderly loved by all Englishmen in exile and out of exile. He thought of the rivers and trees, and running brooks and deep lanes, of the ferns and mosses, and of everything green and fresh.” Unlike the arid, sunbaked landscapes of the West, England possesses a soothingly domesticated landscape, where the “brooks” and “lanes” are hardly differentiated for being natural or artificial.94 Remittance men might gain their manhood, but at the price of accepting exile.

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In the technical sense, Frewen was not a remittance man, as he did not live indefinitely on money sent from home; he preferred instead to extract it from credulous investors. Indeed, he was briefly and spectacularly successful at linking his personal enterprise to a broader British discourse of aristocratic cowboys and western abundance. Yet his eventual haplessness in the face of economic and environmental realities and his unending, unrealistic search for the big payoff as well as the increased skepticism of his friends and family that accompanied each new venture—eventually he carried the sobriquet Mortal Ruin with him around London—mark him as bearing a strong family resemblance to the remittance man. Frewen’s career shows how one of the most mythologized chapters in American history, the era of the open-range rancher and his cowboys, is also the story of Britain’s effort at resolving its dilemma of surplus gentlemen. While the frontier may have represented egalitarian promise to many Americans, it also represented the redemption of the landed elite to many Britons. In yet another ironic turn to the story, the American West, for the British gentleman, became not the place where men proved themselves, but the place where gentlemen failed at precisely the task they had traveled so far to accomplish: the redemption of themselves and their class. Moreton and Clara Frewen were to drift from home to home for much of their lives, and they were frequently separated as Moreton traveled frenetically promoting one scheme or another. They had three children, none of whom ever saw Powder River. The Home Ranche fell into ruins. Frewen died in 1924; characteristically, he did not finish his memoirs, which were published posthumously in their incomplete state. In a letter of condolence to the family, Rudyard Kipling wrote, “He lived in every sense, except what is called common sense, very richly and widely, to his own extreme content.” Indeed, to his family’s misfortune Frewen had always shrunk in revulsion from anything “common.” In Kipling’s telling, Frewen’s picaresque life itself became a kind of aesthetic project that drew its power from his resolute sense of entitlement in the face of unending disappointments, failures, and

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rebuffs. Kipling added, “If he had ever reached the golden crock of his dreams he would have perished—also, which does not count for much now of course, he was wholly a Sahib.”95 Kipling’s telling choice of words—“sahib” was the honorific term by which Indian servants addressed British men on the subcontinent—located Frewen within a broader imperial world of racial and class hierarchy. The sahib was the archetype of British male power. To Kipling, what Frewen was—a British gentleman—mattered more than what he did or did not do. Although fretfully acknowledging that being a sahib did “not count for much now of course,” Kipling knew that being a sahib had always counted, immensely, to Frewen. The West offered Frewen a spectacular stage on which to be one, even if it gave him little else in the end.

3 GENDER AND EMPIRE: THE EARL OF DUNRAVEN AND ISABELLA BIRD IN ESTES PARK On June 19, 1874, in Estes Park, Colorado, Griff Evans, a settler, fired a shotgun at his neighbor James Nugent. Nugent, known to the valley’s residents as Rocky Mountain Jim, was a local trapper and guide, famous in the region for surviving a ferocious grizzly attack. The Earl of Dunraven, who knew him slightly, remembered him as “an extraordinary character, civil enough when sober, but when drunk, which was as often as he could manage, violent and abusive, and given to declamation in Greek and Latin.” Fortunately for Nugent, there was a doctor staying in Estes Park, Dunraven’s friend George Kingsley. Kingsley examined and treated the wound and got Nugent moved to Denver, where he clung to life for three months though seriously wounded. Meanwhile, Evans got a lawyer and turned himself in. He was eventually discharged on the grounds that he was acting in self-defense. Yet even twenty-five years later, Estes Park old-timers still held varying opinions about the case. Dunraven, in his memoirs, claimed that the quarrel between Evans and Nugent had been “about a woman—Evans’s daughter.” Nugent, on a bender, had accosted Evans and “a sort of duel ensued.” Kingsley’s account of the fight, however, doesn’t mention Evans’s daughter. In his telling of the incident, Evans and another friend, “a wandering Englishman who was dawdling around in those parts on the pretence of hunting,” were simply sitting on the front porch when Jim came along,

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drunk, and aimed his gun at them. What neither Kingsley nor Dunraven mentioned was that some people in Estes Park believed that Dunraven himself had set in motion the chain of events that led to the killing.1 Today the gateway to Rocky Mountain National Park, Estes Park in the 1870s was no more than a hamlet of ranchers, miners, and farmers. Yet even at that early date the mountain scenery and abundant wildlife of the region were attracting tourists, who relied on local residents for services and supplies. Dunraven first saw Estes Park in 1872 and decided to acquire land there for a private retreat and a small hotel. As a result, the community split between those who saw the earl as a welcome source of capital and employment and those who perceived him as a threat to cherished American values of egalitarianism, opportunity, and individualism. For his part, Dunraven thought of himself as a defender of what he called a hunter’s paradise. An Anglo-Irish nobleman active in colonial policymaking, he saw the West as a therapeutic space where he could escape the tensions produced by imperial rule and the stresses of modern urban life. In 1873, even as Dunraven and his agents were acquiring land in Estes Park, his compatriot Isabella Bird spent several months in the valley. The book she published based on her letters home, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879), turns a searching eye on her fellow Britons, particularly on their performance of masculinity. Disavowing male violence against both wildlife and other human beings, Bird offers an alternative, the language of lyrical nature appreciation, emotional connection, and evangelical religion. Yet these alternatives are rejected by those, like Nugent, whom she most wishes to see redeemed by this discourse. Moreover, Bird crafts an adventurous authorial persona, one that claimed the male privilege of mobility. Riding her horse across hundreds of miles, climbing mountains, and rounding up cattle, Bird presented herself as challenging the association of womanhood with stability and domesticity. A Lady’s Life is ambivalent about the hegemonic masculinity performed by men like Dunraven; as a middle-class white woman in a colonized context, Bird moves between domesticity

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and adventure, pointing out the limitations of each but unwilling to surrender the benefits of either.2 In the West both Dunraven and Bird fashioned different selves from the people they were at home. Both negotiated gender and class within a global context that made the West imaginatively and physically available to them as a space where they could experiment with new identities. At the same time, Dunraven and Bird found the West appealing because of their own unstable subject positions in Britain. Like William Drummond Stewart and Moreton Frewen, Dunraven and Bird sought western solutions to the experiences of marginality and helplessness with which they struggled at home. It is easy to interpret this experimentation as liberating and even subversive, but to do so would be too simple. Their romantic escapism integrated local communities such as Estes Park into broader economic and cultural networks and expressed itself in travel books that produced the West for metropolitan consumption. Both engaged intensively with empire throughout their lives, albeit in different ways, and their western sojourns were part of that engagement. For Dunraven and Bird, the stationary self at home and the traveling self who went away were different, but these two selves defined and sharpened one another.3 When he first traveled beyond the Mississippi in 1871, Dunraven was confronting a new set of responsibilities: as a husband, as a father, and, having recently succeeded to his father’s title, as the new earl, a major landowner, and member of Parliament. Despite these concerns, he returned to the west in 1874 to travel the Yellowstone region with his friend and guide, John “Texas Jack” Omohundro. In addition, Dunraven purchased a sizable portion of the land around what is today Estes Park, near Rocky Mountain National Park, in Colorado, reserving part of it as a retreat for himself while also building a hotel and attracting an elite group of tourists. As he moved toward an adult life of new responsibilities, he sought out the place he had dreamed of as a boy and returned to it repeatedly for the next decade and a half.

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Dunraven loved the West because it offered him an escape. But an escape from what? Dunraven’s life paralleled the modern history of Ireland; he was born in 1841, in the decade of the Great Famine, and he died in 1926, four years after the establishment of the Irish Free State. The owner of large estates in Ireland, England, and Wales, Dunraven came of age expecting to govern in Ireland on behalf of the British Empire. It was clear enough to the young Dunraven that Ireland was changing rapidly and that the British rule in this nearest and oldest of colonies would not endure in his lifetime unless major reforms were embraced. He believed ardently, however, that moderation, deference, and compromise could safely guide Ireland into the safe harbor of a renewed British Empire. Dunraven’s life reflected the complicated religious and cultural politics that vexed the relationship between Protestants and Catholics, Irish and English, during his lifetime. Like most of the Anglo-Irish elite, Dunraven’s parents were Protestants. However, his father converted to Roman Catholicism in 1855 while his mother remained a devout Protestant. Even before this, Dunraven’s parents were divided over religious questions, and in his memoirs he would describe his “earliest recollections” as being “of some implacable difference” between his parents. He was happiest when rambling around the countryside with his hunting and fishing gear and his dog or when reading stories of western adventure. These opportunities for escape ended when his father, hoping to convert him, sent him to school in Rome and forbade him to communicate with his mother. Dunraven later would remember this period as “very lonely” and himself as a miserable youth “choking in an atmosphere of religion.” He never converted to Catholicism and marked the beginning of his adulthood from the moment he insisted on being sent to Oxford instead of to the Catholic college in Birmingham his father had selected.4 Dunraven had a mediocre university career and then served briefly as an army officer. The main way in which he distinguished himself in these years was by writing stories for the Daily Telegraph,

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first as a war correspondent on a military expedition to Abyssinia and then during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. As a peer, he possessed a hereditary seat in the House of Lords, and he pursued his political career with sporadic energy, eventually serving briefly as under-secretary for the colonies in the 1880s. Adventure attracted him, but for the most part he enjoyed the life of a titled, wealthy young officer around London: attending balls, hunting, lounging at his club. He married in 1869, and a daughter was born the following year. The year after that, in 1871, he became the fourth earl upon the death of his father.5 For Dunraven these were years of gilded pleasure and peaceful domesticity, but for Ireland they were turbulent times. Ireland had been ruled directly from London since the Act of Union in 1800 abolished the Irish parliament and added Irish members to the British Parliament at Westminster. The vast majority of the land in Ireland was owned by a minority of men, mainly Protestants, whose families had been associated with the English subordination of Ireland in one way or another over the centuries. Dunraven could trace his family’s descent back to the Celtic chieftains of the third century, but his ancestors had intermarried extensively with the English and Welsh nobility and bore titles granted by the British monarch. He was the first Earl of Dunraven actually to have been born in Ireland.6 In the decades after the devastation of the famines of the 1840s a new mood of militant nationalism emerged. While moderate programs for some form of self-government, or Home Rule, commanded the attention of Irish members of Parliament in London, more radical nationalists, the Fenians, envisioned complete independence, to be achieved through armed struggle if necessary. In the wake of a failed Fenian revolt in 1869 and numerous incidents of agrarian unrest, Parliament passed two major laws dealing with Irish reform. The first disestablished the Protestant Church of Ireland, relieving the majority Catholic population from paying mandatory taxes to support it; the second instituted some legal protections for agricultural tenants. These new policies did not quell calls for further reform, calls that

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strengthened with the formation of the Home Rule Association in 1870. During the 1870s waves of anti-landlord feeling wracked the country, with mass meetings calling for reduced rents in the short term and wholesale land reform that would bestow farms on tenants in the long term. As major landlords, Dunraven and his friends became the targets of repeated campaigns like these. His life thus unfolded within the context of a rising tide Irish nationalism, a tide that would culminate in the Easter Rising of 1916 and the creation of the Irish Free State after years of ferocious rebellion and civil war. Dunraven, like most other members of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, was a strong supporter of the union between Ireland and Great Britain. He firmly believed that Ireland’s interests were best served by remaining part of Britain. At the same time, however, Dunraven identified himself as Irish. Whereas his forebears had mainly resided at Dunraven Castle, the family home in Wales, he chose to live in County Limerick at Adare Manor. As a young boy he wandered around the estate and got to know some of the tenants, who would stand him up on a table and encourage him to give a speech, which consisted of the declaration, “I am an Irishman born and bred.” It was Dunraven’s misfortune, however, to live at precisely the moment when this vision of Anglo-Irish aristocratic leadership became untenable.7 Even as British policy in Ireland foundered on the rocks of Irish nationalism, Dunraven turned to the West. Big game hunting provided a way for him to imagine himself in a multiplicity of new ways: carefree boy, stalking Indian, buckskin-wearing frontier hero. In trying on, even playing with, these different personae Dunraven could temporarily evade the political and social upheavals that were transforming his world. He was not the only member of the Anglo-Irish ascendency who loved the West. Horace Plunkett, the third son of Baron Dunsany, ranched in the 1880s on Powder River. His friends Alexis Roche and Edmund Roche, sons of Baron Fermoy, visited the West to hunt several times; the Earl of Mayo was a guest of Plunkett’s on Powder River. William French, an illegitimate son of the third Baron de Freyne, ranched from

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1883 to 1899 in New Mexico. Dunraven was, however, the most prolific author among these men, and his writings open a window into their way of thinking.8 In the West, Dunraven could taste what seemed to be the enduring and uncomplicated pleasures of wilderness life and masculine friendship. His position as tourist in the West enabled him to overlook and evade the conflicts generated by conquest, even as he benefited from the railroads, telegraph wires, and national parks that conquest made possible. The desire to live out a fantasy from childhood explained why Dunraven made his first trip west. The desire to live out a fantasy of adulthood, a fantasy of empire without consequences or challenge, explains why he kept coming back. Isabella Bird, in comparison to the Earl of Dunraven, came from an entirely different segment of British society, and yet her childhood was no less marked than his by intense parental investment in both religion and empire. Her father, Edward, was born in 1792, one of the ten offspring of Robert Bird, the second son of Warwickshire gentry, who retired to the country after a successful career in Indian and North American trade. Several of Edward’s siblings joined the East India Company or went to the subcontinent as missionaries; he himself studied for the bar and went to Calcutta in 1825 to practice law there. Yet Edward had already undergone a profound religious awakening as an undergraduate at Cambridge, and after the death of his wife and young son in India he returned to England, joined the clergy, and prepared to dedicate himself to “doing in half a life a whole span of work in God’s vineyard,” in the words of Isabella Bird’s early twentiethcentury biographer.9 He found a position in Yorkshire and remarried; Isabella was born in 1831. The family moved constantly during Bird’s childhood, as Edward’s strenuous doctrinal views made it difficult to find a parish that could tolerate him for long. Educated at home with her sister, Henrietta, born in 1834, Bird grew up in an atmosphere of intense religiosity, tightly knit to the nuclear family unit.

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By her late teens Bird had fallen victim to a variety of symptoms. She underwent an operation to remove a tumor from her spine and continued to suffer back pain. She also experienced rashes, nausea, headaches, muscle spasms, fatigue, and insomnia. She frequently felt depressed and could not concentrate on anything. As one biographer has pointed out, Bird’s illness, possibly carbunculosis (a staphylococcus skin infection that afflicts the back and legs), may well have been exacerbated by the treatments she received: bleeding, multiple surgeries, and heavy doses of opiates and potassium bromide, an antiseizure medication widely prescribed in the nineteenth century for nervous disorders. It would be a mistake, however, to draw a firm line between the somatic and the psychological when considering Bird’s poor health. Expert medical opinion in this era defined symptoms such as melancholy, distraction, anxiety, and fatigue as disorders originating from some sort of disturbance in the functioning of the nervous system, often looking to spinal diseases to explain symptoms that twenty-first-century medicine would probably define as psychological. Bird’s miscellaneous symptoms made sense within this framework: her depression, insomnia, and agitated moods might have been seen as symptoms of the same disease that was causing her backaches, skin lesions, and spinal tumors. Moreover, Bird’s lengthy episodes of poor health unfolded within a highly gendered culture of illness.10 Mid-nineteenth-century medical knowledge imagined women’s bodies as being wracked by what was called nerve force. Women needed this energy for ovulation, pregnancy, labor, and lactation and were, as a result, susceptible to hysteria and convulsive disorders. Indeed, many doctors believed that women were perpetually ill. Women who menstruated regularly were weakened and sickened by their periods; women who did not menstruate regularly were “abnormally ill.” Pregnancy, childbirth, and lactation weakened women and made extreme demands on their health, but on the other hand women who did not bear children also experienced nervous disorders because their bodies were not fulfilling their natural functions. There was no way a woman could

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escape the dictates of her reproductive system and its corresponding demands on her nervous system. In the words of one doctor, “Every woman is, according to temperament and other circumstances, always more or less an invalid.”11 The medical historian Nancy Theriot has observed that doctors in the nineteenth century conducted a vigorous debate about the origin of women’s maladies: “Even while the gynecological view” of women’s ill health as essentially gynecological in origin, “held sway, a spirited discourse among alienists and neurologists articulated a very different set of assumptions.” These experts argued that women’s nervous systems differed from men’s; they were more sensitive and thus they affected the reproductive system rather than the other way around. This theory left open the possibility that environmental factors, such as family tensions, could be straining the patient’s nervous system to the point of ill health. While the debate over the etiology of women’s illness continued, only a few doctors challenged the notion that women’s bodies were inherently more susceptible to disease than men’s. The main difference was in treatment. Doctors adhering to the gynecological explanation were far more ready to adopt surgery, such as hysterectomy, as a solution to women’s health problems, even when the link between a given symptom, such as low spirits, and the reproductive organs was unclear. Other doctors preferred to recommend rest, a change of scene, and exercise as a cure for nervous problems, believing that the entire nervous system needed to be restored by means of a change in the patient’s environment and activities.12 This is not to say that men did not suffer from similar maladies, as we shall see. It is enough to observe that Bird grew up in a culture that defined her female body as being intrinsically weak and sick. The emotional and cultural dimensions of her illness extend beyond a simple enactment of her culture’s expectations of physical frailty. We cannot know for certain how Bird experienced her body, how her parents and sister saw her illnesses, or how the many doctors consulted by the family viewed her symptoms. There are, however, some suggestive aspects of

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her biography that, examined closely, might point to a reading of Bird’s invalidism as a kind of self-expression. Women like Bird were not passive blanks onto which doctors inscribed their assumptions about gender; rather, women themselves participated in the construction of themselves as gendered beings whose invalid bodies spoke.13 What might have been impossible to express in Bird’s family except through a troubled body and an unending analysis of mysterious symptoms? There were her father’s two dead sons, the one lost to cholera in India and the other born between herself and Henrietta. We cannot know if Edward Bird expressed disappointment at the lack of a male heir, but it was certainly possible. Then, too, there were the multiple relocations owing to tensions over religious doctrine with unruly parishioners who refused paternal and clerical authority. Edward’s own health was not good, and he nearly died from scarlet fever when Isabella was a young girl, threatening the family with the loss of not only its emotional center but also its only source of income. Finally, there were the limited prospects available to Bird herself. There is hardly any need to review the myriad constraints on a British middle-class woman of her generation. Suffice to say that though she was curious, observant, a voracious reader, and an adept writer, her world could hardly imagine any other path through life for her than one of circumscribed domesticity. However, as she coped with “neuralgia, pain in [her] bones, pricking like pins and needles . . . excruciating nervousness, exhaustion, inflamed eyes, sore throat, swelling of the glands behind each ear, stupidity” and saw one doctor after another, she could achieve, to employ Theriot’s words, “a sense of female self-hood that was ego-, as opposed to other-directed.” In 1864 Bird wrote, “I feel as if my life were spent in the very ignoble occupation of taking care of myself, and that unless some disturbing influences arise I am in great danger of becoming perfectly encrusted with selfishness”; one senses the conflict between the conscientious attention to others that was the hallmark of womanly virtue in her culture and the pleasure she derived from her “selfishness.” Chronically ill, Bird could refuse social invitations, travel, enjoy “late rising and frequent

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meals,” and pursue the projects that interested her, all in the name of preserving her health and following her doctor’s orders.14 As Bird grew into her twenties and thirties, she remained unmarried. No evidence exists to indicate whether this was by chance or inclination. What we do know is that in mid-nineteenth-century Britain, more and more middle-class women never married, triggering a cultural crisis akin to that of the slightly later furor over the surplus gentleman. The census of 1851 showed that for every 100 men in England and Wales there were 104.2 females, and the gap only grew over the next few decades. The class composition of this group is difficult to ascertain, but debates about “redundant women” centered on the plight of middle-class women. Barred by gender from entering most middle-class occupations, barred by gentility from pursuing other occupations without a steep decline in status, such women occupied a tenuous position that could become desperate without the economic shelter of a male breadwinner. Teaching was, by far, the occupation that most impoverished gentlewomen took up, but often they were ill prepared for this role because of their own uneven educations.15 Yet it was not so much the economic distress, potential or actual, of the redundant woman that troubled Victorian social observers. Celibacy was bad for women’s health, and, in addition, single women posed a threat to the gender order merely by existing outside the idealized dyad of man and wife. In a piece from 1869 entitled, “Why Are Women Redundant?” the industrialist, reformer, and essayist W. R. Greg wrote, “Marriage, the union of one man with one woman, is unmistakably indicated as the despotic law of life. This is the rule.” Women’s bodies decreed that marriage and children were their inevitable destiny. Victorian ministers, physicians, and other self-styled experts on the problem of redundant women understood the family to be the bedrock of social stability. A spinster was not merely an individual tragedy but an agent of social crisis. In her single state she called the naturalness of the entire Victorian gender system into question, exposing it for the social construction it was.16

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Various reformers proposed solutions to the dilemma of unmarried women. Greg argued that women should emigrate to the colonies in search of husbands, and in fact some philanthropists developed and supported schemes to promote female emigration. Though workingclass women were numerically the greater proportion of female emigrants to the colonies, it was middle-class women for whom emigration was proposed as the solution to being superfluous and whose emigration was sometimes seen as a way of uplifting the colonies morally and tying them more closely to English culture. Others, such as the feminist Frances Power Cobbe, proposed that women be provided with better educations so that they could enter a wider array of occupations and live more satisfying, useful lives regardless of their marital status. As a single woman, then, Bird occupied a position that was intensely scrutinized and analyzed within her culture. Her unmarried status had become associated with the prospect of unheard-of spatial mobility for women via emigration and with the possibility of novel opportunities for professional careers. On the other hand, however, Victorian culture located her on its margins because of her spinsterhood. The tensions of this position would shape the ways in which she wrote about her travel experiences in the West as well as elsewhere.17 By the early 1850s Bird found herself beset by “lassitude” but nonetheless able to read extensively, write numerous letters, nurture a fledgling career writing magazine articles, and even pursue home study of chemistry. Her doctor suggested that she take an ocean voyage for a change of scene and air, a recommendation that physicians frequently made to those suffering from nervous complaints.18 The trip, which began in 1854, took her to Canada and the United States and lasted seven months. While traveling, Bird found that her symptoms vanished. On her return a friend introduced her to the publisher John Murray, who brought out her first book, The Englishwoman in America, in 1856. Bird’s health failed again, and her father urged her to take another trip to the United States, where she traveled for nearly a year before returning. This pattern would define the rest of her life. Periods of

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illness at home would alternate with periods of robust good health while traveling. By 1873, when she arrived in Estes Park, Bird was en route to Britain, having visited Australia, New Zealand, and Hawaii on a journey that began in July 1872, only two months after Bird returned from a six months’ trip through the Mediterranean. Bird’s poor health, ironically, provided her with a justification for the kind of constant travel that would have been highly unusual, though not unheard of, for a woman of her class and time. Women were strongly identified with home, with the stability that was the opposite of mobility. Middle-class women traveled as loyal wives or daughters, as partners to missionaries; they might travel with friends or relatives as tourists to genteel destinations. Bird managed to convince herself and others that travel was the one thing standing between her and the grave. In Britain she was assailed by back pain, insomnia, headaches, depression, and skin rashes. She would consult doctors, rest, be cosseted by her sister and her friends, until it became obvious to all that only travel would relieve her misery. Traveling, she rode horseback for miles, climbed mountains, and endured primitive conditions and extreme weather. Despite the differences of class and gender, both the Earl of Dunraven and Isabella Bird approached and experienced the West as a space for self-discovery in which the complex challenges of their British lives could be temporarily evaded. Their stories would converge in Estes Park. Western nature, along with a particular model of western masculinity that drew upon nature for its power, provided Dunraven with the stability and reassurance he sought in a time of increasing doubt regarding the legitimacy of his authority in Ireland. For Bird, by comparison, western nature and western masculinity gave her a way to legitimate her womanliness while asserting a unique claim to spatial authority through her movement as a traveler. Boyhood immersion in the western novels of the Irish adventurer Mayne Reid instilled a deep fascination with the west in the Earl

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of Dunraven. Writing his memoirs some fifty years later, he recalled his first trip west: “I was young . . . and my boyish brain-cells were stored to bursting with tales of Red Indians and grizzly bears, caballeros and haciendas, prairies and buffaloes, cowboys and voyageurs, and had not yet discharged or jettisoned their cargo.”19 The first part of his trip in 1871 had taken him to visit friends along the Atlantic seaboard; now, finally, he was in the place he had dreamed about for so many years. Yet as Dunraven watched the train pull away from the Nebraska platform where he had disembarked, he felt uncertain, even abandoned. He tried to remind himself that he was finally in the “the wild and woolly West,” but the vastness and the stillness of the plains overwhelmed him. He sat down, stared into the horizon, and “tried to realize that I was in the middle of those prairies that, thanks to Captain Mayne Reid, had haunted my boyish dreams.”20 Rather than being elated by this realization, Dunraven found himself oppressed by the emptiness of the country. It seemed blank and empty, whereas his fantasy had been richly populated with bison, Indians, hunters, and cowboys. Then he saw two horsemen approaching from a distance. He waited, wondering. They drew closer and pulled up in front of him with a flourish. Their buckskin suits and broad-brimmed hats told the young earl that these were the true Western men whom he sought. They introduced themselves as Buffalo Bill Cody and Texas Jack Omohundro. Dunraven’s western adventure had begun. The scene, as staged in Dunraven’s memoirs, seems almost too good to be true. The tenderfoot aristocrat, soon to become a seasoned big game hunter; the great open sweep of the desolate plains; the sudden appearance of two colorful adventurers already garnering fame for their frontier exploits—all these elements combine to situate Dunraven at the center of a conversion narrative, the moment at which his identity dissolved and reemerged as something new. Guides such as Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack facilitated the tourist hunter’s search for big game and his passage into a new male identity. The guide could ensure that his client transcended the limitations of childhood fantasy because the

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guide could initiate his clients into the simple, wholesome life of camping, away from the trammels of civilization. Moreover, as someone who had participated in western conquest, the guide connected the hunter to the historical process of colonization. He embodied the western hero, someone who had been part of thrilling escapes from Indians and dangerous confrontations with grizzly bears, mountain lions, and stampeding bison. He had helped to tame the continent. This entire project, however, depended on the guide being what he claimed to be, on the intricate network of words, gestures, and images that the guide and the client wove between them as a way of establishing their shared manliness, and on the transparency of the guide’s identity as a real western man. Such performances always raised the question of authenticity: Was the guide really the knowledgeable westerner he claimed to be? Had the client really learned how to rough it in the west? or was he still a tenderfoot at whom the guide was laughing when his back was turned? Myriad expectations, many of which were unspoken, shaped the close personal interaction at the heart of the guide and client. Successful guides knew how to meet these expectations without ever appearing servile. Many men tried to succeed as guides in this era. The Field correspondent William Baillie-Grohman, reminiscing about his first few trips to the Rocky Mountains, commented ruefully on the “wiles and traps” that beset the naïve wealthy tourist on his first trip west, where “n’er-do-well loafers” dubbing themselves “Bearclaw Joe” and “Scalp Jack” made “trundling tenderfeet through the country” their “favourite occupation.” Westerners themselves enjoyed contemplating the traps that could be set. A Rocky Mountain News item about a “London millionaire” who had hired Buffalo Bill Cody and Wild Bill Hickok as guides and “for their delectable society” commented, “The man of millions is expected to foot all the bills—he certainly will feel like booting both of the Bills, before he returns.”21 To meet clients’ expectations, the guide had to do more than merely get the client to the place where he could shoot at game. As

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Louis Warren has commented, big game hunting was “a realm of commerce and theater, in which the best guides packaged a whole range of signal ‘frontier experiences’ for the clients.” Through his clothes, speech, and command of marksmanship and horseback riding, the successful guide realized the mythic white Indian. Like James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo, he knew everything that Indians knew but remained white, appropriating native knowledge of nature and thereby symbolizing the white claim to legitimate sway over American wilderness. Indeed, guides claimed to have authoritative knowledge of Indian woodcraft and of Indians themselves. Dunraven’s friend Kingsley explained that Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack and other professional hunters like them understood “every double and turn” of the “subtle, twisty and twiny” Indian mind. At the same time, it was important that the guide not be too primitive. He had to be one of nature’s noblemen: confident but not arrogant, modest but not simple, wild but not coarse. This was a difficult line to walk, and some of Cody’s and Omohundro’s associates, for example, Wild Bill Hickok, couldn’t walk it. Hickok’s propensity for violence and his inability to control his drinking hurt his career as an army scout and tourist guide despite his solid reputation as a true westerner who was knowledgeable about the plains. By contrast, Cody and Omohundro excelled at what Joy Kasson has termed “plains showmanship,” the ability to offer an entertaining spectacle as a scout, hunter, and guide.22 Born in Virginia, Omohundro drifted to Texas as a youth and served in the Confederate Army. After the war he returned to Texas, where he became a cowboy. He came to North Platte, Nebraska, in 1869 trailing a herd of longhorns and remained in the area, tending bar, teaching school, and scouting for the 5th U.S. Cavalry Corps stationed at Fort McPherson. Around this time he met Cody, who was also working as a scout for the army.23 In the early 1870s, through his friendship with Cody, Omohundro gained access to increasingly lucrative opportunities to enact western manhood for a variety of

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audiences. When Omohundro met Dunraven in 1871, both he and Cody were on the brink of moving from obscurity to visibility as guides and performers. Like Cody, Omohundro drew on a vocabulary of visual cues in order to present himself as the living embodiment of the western hero. His clothing, gestures, and speech all contributed to his overall effect, one that had an impact not only on paying clients and theater audiences but also on susceptible neighbors. The diary kept by Ena Raymonde, a young woman settled on a farm near North Platte in the 1870s, reveals how Omohundro performed what Raymonde termed “handsome, dashing, manly manhood” for others. Omohundro visited Raymonde numerous times in 1872, and the two went riding together frequently. To her, he was “certainly one of my beau-ideals of a hunter or a ‘Scout.’ ” Raymonde was fascinated by Omohundro’s business schemes (including an ill-fated project to capture bison and ship them live to eastern showmen), his friendships with titled nobility, and his theatrical tours with Buffalo Bill. For his part, Omohundro made sure she knew about the publicity he and Cody were getting by sending her newspapers that described the sensation they were making.24 Dunraven saw Texas Jack’s friendship as an important means of establishing his western credibility. As Jack’s friend, Dunraven was no longer a tenderfoot or a greenhorn; he belonged. In Dunraven’s travel book The Great Divide (1876) their relationship works because Dunraven can fit into the West, and Jack is a natural gentleman who would be at home in London. Dunraven depicted Omohundro not only as a western figure comfortable in Salt Lake City but also as a debonair, metropolitan one. “Jack is a tall straight, and handsome man, and in walking thorough the well-watered streets of Deseret in his company I felt the same proud conscious glow that pervades the white waistcoat of the male débutant when for the first time he walks down St. James’ Street, arm in arm with the best dressed and most fashionable man about town.” St. James’ Street, the site of London’s most prestigious gentlemen’s clubs, becomes aligned in Dunraven’s metaphor

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with the wide streets of Salt Lake City; Texas Jack becomes a dandy. By virtue of his physical desirability and Dunraven’s affection, Omohundro was relocated both in class and in spatial terms. Kingsley preferred to liken Texas Jack to a rakish Elizabethan hero, “all life, and blood, and fire, blazing with suppressed poetry.” Jack costumed himself in fringed buckskins and elaborately embroidered moccasins, “his short, bright brown curls covered by a velvet cap with a bright gold band around it,” and he enjoyed telling stories about his latest love affair, lending a hint of extra romance to his image.25 The mutual understanding between Dunraven and Omohundro rested to some degree on a shared whiteness that transcended nationality. Men such as Omohundro and Cody, though originating from a lower class background than their clients, interacted with those clients as racial equals who could establish a kind of rough equality on the expedition. Dunraven’s fond praise of Omohundro evokes the guide’s own use of language to position whiteness as the marker of sincerity and camaraderie: “A better hunting companion than Jack was in those days, or a more reliable friend, it would be hard to find. There was nothing mean about Jack; he was—to use one of his own Western phrases—a real white man.”26 Manliness and race mutually constituted one another; Omohundro’s whiteness was part of his appeal, for it promised that Dunraven, also white, could access the primitiveness of the West without blurring the boundaries between races. Whiteness also served Omohundro well—it wasn’t acceptable for his race to be in question. For Omohundro to continue to find employment as a guide and eventually as an actor, he needed to reassure clients and audiences that proximity to wilderness had not polluted the white Indian’s whiteness. Being a successful guide entailed a measure of impersonation. Tourists expected their guides to be real western men, but real western manhood, as tourists understood it, comprised various gestures, images, and speeches that themselves originated in popular fiction about earlier frontier heroes like Daniel Boone, in journalistic accounts of western

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life, and in the inventions of guides themselves. True, Cody and Omohundro had scouted for the U.S. Army, and their riding and shooting abilities were genuine. The satisfaction they gave the tourists who employed them as guides, however, depended on an intricate interweaving of real and false, truth and fiction. This instability presented both a challenge and opportunity to Cody and Omohundro. On the one hand, they were in fact the authentic Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack. They were not actors; they were simply playing themselves. Yet being “Buffalo Bill” and “Texas Jack” involved imposture; they were always playing a part. No mere adjunct to the hunt itself, campfire storytelling gave the guide a stage on which to perform his western masculinity and helped to create a bond between the guide and his client. A combination of earthy (though never coarse) humor, thrilling adventure, and information about the best way to survive on the plains, the campfire story drew the guide and his listeners together into a shared experience. In The Great Divide Dunraven describes himself listening to Texas Jack’s campfire stories—“some thrilling tale of cattle raids away down by the Rio Grande on the Mexican frontier; graphically describing some wild scurry with the Comanches on the plains of Texas; or making us laugh over some utterly absurd story narrated in that comical language and with that quaint dry humor which are peculiar to the American nation.”27 Cody and Omohundro perfected a repertoire of gestures, jokes, and imagery that lifted their stories from mere recounting of experiences to a kind of art. They replaced clients’ boyhood reading with another kind of bedtime story, the better for supposedly being true. Listening to campfire tales, Dunraven and other British hunters vicariously patrolled the Mexican border, at war with resistant Comanches. They could participate, if only imaginatively, in the conquest of western places. Even Omohundro’s sobriquet, Texas Jack, aligned him with a frontier, with a multiethnic, contested space where Anglo-Saxons had to defeat other races in order to secure manifest destiny, just as Buffalo Bill’s name connected him with the game animal

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most desired by gentlemanly hunters. Listening to Texas Jack and enjoying the cozy camaraderie of the campfire, Dunraven could indulge in the pleasures of conquest without having to confront the messy realities of empire. Guides also performed a quasi-therapeutic role for their clients. Late nineteenth-century tourists in North America in search of western big game understood their experiences within a medical discourse about the damage modern industrial civilization could wreak on male nerves. If doctors prescribed travel for women afflicted by nervous complaints, they also treated men, whose nerve force could likewise be depleted by any number of stresses. The neurologist George Miller Beard, the author of American Nervousness (1881), had diagnosed the anxiety, self-doubt, and lassitude troubling middle- and upper-class urban men as neurasthenia, an ailment that arose from excessive mental activity in the competitive environs of the university, the stock exchange, the courts of law, and other arenas of male activity. The strain of such activity “overtaxed” a humanity that “could not keep up with is own external creations.” Confined to offices and drawing rooms and harried by the ever-increasing pace of urban life, elite men seemed to be faltering in body and soul alike. Other possible causes of neurasthenia included profound shock, such as the death of a parent, or sexual excess. Excess obviously was a vague, flexible category that might cover everything from wishing to have sex with one’s wife too frequently to masturbation to homosexual urges or behavior. Whatever its etiology, neurasthenia afflicted men with depression, fatigue, hopelessness, anxiety, and distraction. These symptoms threatened a man’s sense of himself. Whereas women were defined as weak, vacillating, and emotional by nature, men were supposed to be the opposite. Manliness meant having a strong will, a sense of purpose and confidence—being crushed by one’s own despair was the antithesis of manliness.28 The concept of male neurasthenia spread across national borders to figure in medical discourse through the Anglo-American and

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European world. In Canada antimodernism combined with fears about racial decline and class strife to bring the white male body into new prominence as the site on which the national body needed to be grounded. Strong nerves were a resource that the modern nation needed in order to sustain itself, but paradoxically it was precisely the requirements of expanding industry and empire, sharpened by the fast-paced developments of modern technology, that could overtax the male nervous system. It was bad enough that some men could not find suitable occupations for themselves, but the prospect of “shattered nerves” among the ruling classes posed the possibility of national and imperial decline. To combat weak nerves, educational experts nurtured a militarized cult of competitive athletics that they believed would strengthen the faltering wills of British boys.29 For instance, Hely Hutchinson Almond, the headmaster of Loretto School, promoted school sports as “the strong joyous discipline which gave firmness to the nerves, and vigour to the limbs” that would later be sacrificed on the imperial battlefield. The British gentleman had to fight on two fronts: against the enemies of the British empire and against his nerves. He could not surrender to emotions or doubt. The ideal was, in the words of the historian J. A. Mangan, that of “a neo-Spartan warrior, untroubled by doubt, firm in conviction, strong in mind and muscle.” In the last quarter century of the 1800s, as Darwinian ideas became popularized, this ideal took on new strength as anxiety about racial competition and weakened “racial stock” emerged.30 Doctors agreed that the best treatments involved exercise, fresh air, and new experiences; travel frequently was prescribed to neurasthenics. Authors of books about big game hunting and western travel argued that the best treatment for stressed-out men was to calm the mind and exercise the body, restoring the patient to a state of vigorous manhood via a new environment, preferably involving fresh air and bodily exertion. Playing competitive sports such as football helped prevent neurasthenia, but, particularly for men past college age, the extended vacation became the standard prescription for the overworked

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bourgeois man. Vacationers sought out a variety of destinations— Scottish trout streams, the Swiss Alps, remote Maine fishing villages, Adirondack cabins—and increasingly the American West became a popular destination for the modern man overwhelmed by work.31 Such escapes involved a temporary flight from adult responsibilities in that the journey to the woods was also a journey back to boyhood. Such a return depended on the homosocial environment of the hunting trips. Though there were exceptions, generally few women went on such vacations in the West, and so the masculine space of the hunting trip echoed the adventure narrative’s rhetoric. The high value placed on the all-male hunting party occurred in a period of increasing concern among educators and doctors that excessive feminine influence from mothers and sisters would make boys soft. Soft boys would eventually grow into weak men. A burgeoning body of child-rearing experts prescribed all-male environments for boys that would take them away from their emasculating female relatives. For adult men, “massive infusions of boyishness” in similar all-male settings were indicated.32 The hunting trip enabled males to shed the crippling inhibitions supposedly imposed on them by an overly feminized civilization. The participants saw such trips as being therapeutic because they enabled grown men to get in touch with the boy within and draw on that inner boy’s reserves of energy. The hunting trip, therefore, purportedly enabled men to recover their inner boyish selves by fulfilling childhood fantasies of adventure in the company of other men. We have seen how fears of decline shaped the elite British fascination with the American West in the case of Moreton Frewen and the remittance man. Yet even for men who were secure economically the West possessed an allure as a space in which a man could restore himself, and this allure stretched across the Atlantic to incorporate men like Dunraven. Men who had not been diagnosed as neurasthenic sought out such journeys for their prophylactic effects. As one hunter wrote, “An impulse, often irresistible it seems, leads man away from civilization, from its artificial pleasures and its mechanical life, to the forests,

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the fields, and the waters, where he may have that freedom and peace which civilization denies him. If this be not so, then why is it that the man of affairs as well as the man of leisure feels again the joy of his youth as he bids farewell to his office or his club, and seeks the solitudes of the woods and the plains?”33 After escaping from “mechanical life” into a setting where he could recapture “the joy of . . . youth” the privileged man could return to work renewed. In fact, the American West was an ideal locale for such renewal. There, the British tourist could place himself within a narrative of conquest without having to deal with the strains and complexities of imperial rule. Late nineteenth-century British travelers in the West frequently analyzed its recent history within the context of racial thought, arguing that it was a British heritage of civilization and empire building that compelled Americans to their frenzied commercial and industrial activity. As one observer put it, the cities and railroads in what had so recently been an unpeopled frontier “in a hundred ways, forcibly impresses the traveller with the conviction that he is amongst the same race that has conquered India and colonised two great continents.”34 Travelers thus impressed could align the United States with Great Britain and assure themselves that America’s gain was also Britain’s.35 This theme, one of the most frequently repeated in British travel writing about the United States, appears in many contexts. For instance, William Bell’s account of the growth of St. Louis reflected his belief in the progressive power of Anglo-Saxon settlement. From 1764, when “a party of French trappers and traders” found the settlement, to 1804, the year of the Louisiana Purchase, St. Louis is a slowly growing but sleepy backward town. In the possession, first, of the French and then of the Spanish, who abandon themselves to what Bell delicately calls “social bonds” with Indian women, St. Louis is inhabited “mostly by half-breeds” who lived in hovels “little better than a wigwam.” But when the Americans take possession, “what a startling event this must have been for the little community of Frenchmen, squaws, and halfbreeds!” Bell credited the establishment of a post office, newspapers,

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a fire company, roadmasters, schools, and mines to the people who “spring from our own hardy and prolific stock.” Indeed, Bell propagandized for the annexation of all of northern Mexico by the United States on the grounds that such an event would benefit Anglo-Saxons everywhere. Such an event would be “a real gain to the civilised world” and “a source of unfeigned congratulation to all branches of the AngloSaxon family, a fresh and valuable addition to their territories.”36 Bell portrayed Americans as the equals of British imperialists and colonialists, as having the capacity to draw upon British traditions of rule and prosperity. Territories developed by one branch of the “Anglo-Saxon family” were, in his view, fundamentally the proud possession of all that family’s branches. British readers, Bell implied, had no reason to feel threatened by American expansionism, as the Americans were in a sense simply the deputies of the British, spreading Anglo-Saxon culture and power in the Americas in a sort of imperialist division of labor.37 The historical specificity of the West was blurred, subsumed into a global pattern of colonial peripheries that were available as locales for the testing and proving of Anglo-Saxon manhood. Reviewing The Great Divide in 1876, the Field concluded that it was to the credit of the “Anglo-Saxon race” that “young men of high rank and easy fortune” such as Dunraven “are nevertheless willing and eager to go forth into the wilds, and voluntarily, for the sake of hunting and travel, to undergo such hardships as Lord Dunraven makes nothing of.” Dunraven’s love of hunting in “the wilds,” regardless of the location of said wilds, was evidence of his racial fitness for leadership.38 In the West it was possible for British men to allow themselves to act boyishly without worrying that by doing so they would loosen the controls of imperial rule. Describing himself after a midday picnic en route to Yellowstone, Dunraven observed, “You are not trespassing and nobody can warn you off. There is plenty of fish in the river, some whisky left in the bottle, lots of bread in the buggy; and you run no risk of being disturbed, for there is not another human being within miles.” With such solitude came renewed physical strength; addressing

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his reader, Dunraven declared that in the West “you can throw back your shoulders, expand your chest, and inhale a full draught of fresh pure air; with a sense of glorious independence only to be enjoyed in such a large country.” Dunraven’s language, read carefully, demonstrates the erasure of the history of conquest in the area. He was not “trespassing” and yet, as other passages in his book imply, he was aware that even as he took his trip, in the early 1870s, Native people were engaged in a struggle for their land and sovereignty. Glossing over this fact, Dunraven presented himself as being liberated from the cares of modern life. Dunraven’s emphasis on being able to take deep breaths contrasts with the stifling experiences of high society’s London season: “Think of it, ye fashionables, ye toilers of the season, who pass laborious days panting in the dusty jam of a London summer, and spending perspiring nights struggling on a staircase, inhaling your fellowcreatures, absorbing fat dowagers, breathing men and women!” Despite the fact that Dunraven and his fellow “fashionables” are among their society’s most privileged members, he characterizes them as “toilers.” Even their social events are unpleasant struggles in which men gasp for breath while being pressed by “fat dowagers” at balls and receptions. Dunraven’s nightmarish picture also evokes other aspects of metropolitan life. Receptions of the sort he was describing were often political as well as social occasions. Young men like himself, of whom much was expected, were supposed to capitalize on such opportunities to develop the friends who could advance their careers. It was no wonder that Dunraven sometimes felt he couldn’t breathe when “struggling on a staircase.”39 In order to strengthen their nerves and experience the freedom that the West promised, elite British hunters needed to learn to be self-sufficient in the wilderness. William Baillie-Grohman, a renowned hunter and frequent contributor to the Field under the name of Stalker, described himself in an essay tellingly entitled “At Home in the Rockies.” The article depicted an idyll of soft breezes and majestic

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mountains. Beaver, deer, otters, and trout played in lakes and streams while wild geese and blue-winged teal glided overhead. After the day’s hunting is over, Baillie-Grohman rambles toward the blaze of the campfire and a supper of trout and bighorn steak, finally bedding down in a nest of bear and buffalo hides. Such delights, he informs the reader, can be sampled only if one is willing to adapt to the ways of the country: “I fancy many a good and true man’s lips will curl with disdain as he reads that guns have to be cleaned, cartridges require loading, clothes need patching with sailor’s needle and buckstring thread, while boots are sorely in want of grease—and all this, reader, to be done with our own, our very own, hands; not to mention our groom’s duties of saddling our horses and taking them to water when they are thirsty.” Baillie-Grohman’s ability to act as his own groom, to do everything with his “very own hands” actually set him above the other “good” men who were too soft to shift for themselves in the wilderness. Paradoxically, in this setting a man was more masculine if he could cook and sew because then he was more independent. Moreover, while cleaning and loading guns were conventionally masculine tasks, they were usually the responsibility of a gentleman’s servants. Categories of both gender and class were destabilized on the hunting trip, as elite masculinity could be secured only by doing things that were usually done by those lower in the social hierarchy.40 For instance, Dunraven’s brother-in-law, Arthur Pendarves Vivian, described the camping process in loving detail in his Wanderings in the Western Land (1879): selecting the site, building the fire, pitching the tent or making shelters out of tree branches, and cooking meals. Concocted of game and bread made in the frying pan, these meals were “not to be equalled for enjoyment by the best dinner of the civilized world.” Vivian contrasted this wholesome, health-giving simplicity with the elaborate dining to which he and probably most of his readers were accustomed. “There is no doubt about it,” he asserted, “that camping out gives an appetite and a relish which are never forthcoming in the domesticated routine of home life, and however many meals are

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consumed, that miserable production of civilized life, indigestion, is a complaint unknown in the backwoods.”41 Bodily processes that had been deranged by excessive “domesticated routine” would be set right in the atmosphere of manly comradeship and demanding exercise that characterized the hunting trip in the West. In the social world of men like Dunraven and Vivian complicated rituals of afternoon tea, dinner parties, festive luncheons, and so on were associated not so much with mere eating as with social display and ceremony. As the author of Manners and Tone of Good Society (1888) declared, dinner parties were “a test of the position occupied in society by the dinner giver” and a “direct road to obtaining a recognized place in society.” Nearly everything at such events—invitations, seating, menus, the serving of food—proceeded according to set rules. All this robbed men of their health. By contrast, informal meals of game and frybread cooked outdoors invigorated men and liberated them from social rituals planned by women. While celebrating escape from convention, figured as the stifling complexities of traditional, feminine, indoors domesticity, hunters reveled in the creation of a male outdoors domesticity centered on the campfire, with its simple fare and colorful stories.42 Elite sportsmen simultaneously reinforced the separation between a boring domestic world of women and an exotic world of adventurous masculinity. The one depleted men, and the other restored them. The consumption of large quantities of wild game was crucial to the camping out experience. Carnivorousness was construed as evidence of the superior vigor of Anglo-Saxon men.43 Elite hunters fancied themselves at the top of the food chain, powerful predators who relished in the spoils of their kill—Frewen bragged in his letters about his ability to travel for days subsisting on elk ribs from his own kills. Big game hunting enabled the staging of the vigorous, virile body. The pursuit of big game placed the hunter into the landscape in an activity that was nothing if not highly physical, embodied, and violent. By killing game and consuming it in a variety of ways—eating the meat,

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skinning the carcass, taking the animal’s head—the hunter performed his dominance over space and nature. Aristocratic men like Dunraven prided themselves on their independence. Secure from having to work for a living, they were supposed to be able to exercise political judgment purely on behalf on the nation’s good. To which nation did Dunraven belong? As an AngloIrish peer, his entire life rested upon the premise that Ireland was an integral part of Great Britain, and yet it was becoming clear that many, perhaps most, Irish subjects of the queen rejected this notion. Dunraven’s own life, until he came west, had often been one in which he sorely felt the lack of control over his destiny. He had been a child trapped in the middle of his parents’ domestic war of religion. University and military life had merely been a way of marking time while he waited to succeed to his father’s title; he had not particularly distinguished himself intellectually or politically. Even after succeeding to the title it was not clear what path he should pursue. Years later, in a memoir about his hunting days, Dunraven recalled the sense of competence and freedom that camping enabled him to achieve, perhaps for the first time in his life: The great joy comes when, be it on the plains, among the mountains, or in the deep woods you become craftsman enough to take care of yourself and realise the truth of what the Indians said: “Wigwam lost maybe, but Indian not lost.” Oh, the joy of going out by yourself alone in the wilderness or woods, with your rifle, hatchet, knife, a box of matches, a tin pannikin, a little tea and sugar, and a biscuit, complete and independent. The delight of searching for and finding the sign of your quarry, the scientific stalk, the kill. Then to prepare and hang up the carcase, to build a little fire, boil a pannikin of tea, eat a biscuit, smoke a pipe, find your way back to camp. . . . Then you feel a man—a real man, free of the free woods, and after all, is not the freedom, the liberty of self-dependence the one essential in life?44

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Despite the tremendous privileges into which he had been born, Dunraven had not yet had much experience of independence, this “one essential in life,” when he first came west. In the West he came to see himself as a “craftsman” who could embrace Indian truths, having been schooled by true western heroes who knew Indian ways. He could read the landscape to find his “quarry” without getting lost. He could content himself with the simplest of meals, obtained by his own efforts. In Estes Park, however, Dunraven found that the West also could be unruly. A seasonal hunting ground used by both the Arapaho and Ute, Estes Park took its name from Joel Estes, a farmer and sometime prospector who settled there with his family in 1860. Though Estes sold his homestead and moved on in 1866, the late sixties saw a constant trickle of settlers into the valley, which benefited from its proximity to fast-growing Denver and the mining fields of the region. Among the settlers was a Welshman named Griff Evans, who by 1873 was running a small ranch and boardinghouse on the old Estes homestead. Evans’s dual occupation was not unusual in Estes Park. Many of his neighbors combined ranching, small-scale prospecting, and farming with the provision of services to those who sought out the area for big game hunting, an attempt at climbing Long’s Peak, or a hoped-for cure from lung ailments in the mountain air. This nascent tourist industry lacked the capital to develop a road into the valley and build a hotel, but it did help to sustain those like Evans, who offered horses, guiding, and simple food and lodging to the visitors.45 To Dunraven, Estes was “a hunter’s paradise.”46 Several large herds of elk roamed the area, as did whitetail deer, grizzly bears, and bighorn sheep. Entranced though Dunraven was with Estes Park’s possibilities as a game preserve, he also saw its potential as a cattle ranch. Like many of his contemporaries, both British and American, he saw no contradiction between these two land uses. In his memoirs he recalled that “[Estes Park] was an ideal cattle-ranch, and to that purpose we put

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it. We swamped out a sort of road. . . . We pre-empted, and bought land along the water, and commanding the water, had a great area of splendid grazing country, and we put in cattle.” Though Dunraven was doing no more than his neighbors in Estes Park did—most people in the area ranched or hunted or hosted tourists or did all three at some point—that glancing reference to “commanding the water” suggests the ways in which he had power to claim control over the valley’s resources to an extent that the rest of the community could not. As a British subject Dunraven was not eligible to file claims under the Homestead Act, but he apparently found a way around this obstacle. The details are somewhat murky but apparently his agent, Theodore Whyte, paid men to file claims that were then (presumably for a fee) transferred to the Estes Park Company, an entity with the same London banker as Dunraven. By 1874 Dunraven owned approximately ten thousand acres in Estes Park.47 These activities signaled to the valley’s other residents that development was forthcoming on a scale hitherto impossible on their limited resources. The Rocky Mountain News reported that Dunraven planned to build a new “large hotel” both in Estes Park itself and in the town of Longmont, which was situated at the entrance of the road that led to Estes Park. Rumors of a sawmill and new roads throughout the park also spread. Some of the valley’s residents welcomed these changes. For instance, Evans hosted Dunraven on the earl’s first visit to the area and quietly sold him land.48 Others possessed a different perspective. If Estes Park became the property of the earl, tourists might be discouraged from coming unless they were his expressly invited guests. Those who provided services to these tourists would no longer be small entrepreneurs bargaining directly with their customers but the hired hands of a largely absentee landlord. Additionally, Dunraven’s efforts at controlling water and pasture were sure to be resented by those who saw their own stock as equally, if not more, entitled to those resources. No homesteader, Dunraven visited his property only in the spring and summer. For the rest of the year he left it in the care of

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Theodore Whyte, who had told Dunraven about Estes Park in the first place. Whyte came from Dunraven’s world; the younger son of a colonel in the British army with substantial Irish landholdings, he would eventually marry the daughter of the Earl of Airlie. Whyte had several altercations with other Estes Park residents over his studied ignorance of their claim boundaries, exemplified by his reputed practice of driving Dunraven’s stock into others’ pastures and leaving salt to keep the animals from straying.49 The possessor of a prime spot at the valley’s mouth, James Nugent was therefore also ideally situated to be in the middle of this conflict. Little is known about Nugent. He seems to have been a former fur trapper who lived alone and eked out a living as a guide and market hunter. His appearance was startling: the grizzly bear attack had left him with severe facial scarring and the loss of an eye and an arm. In Bird’s travel narrative, however, he leaps into focus as the wayward son of a British officer from a “good old Irish family” who ran away from home to become “one of the famous scouts of the Plains, and . . . the original of some daring portraits in fiction concerning Indian frontier warfare.”50 In Bird’s description, Rocky Mountain Jim is not just another old hunter but an example of upper-class British manliness and an adventure hero. Bird’s depiction of Rocky Mountain Jim forms a critical part of her travelogue, which describes a trip made in the autumn and winter of 1873. From Australia, New Zealand, and Hawaii, she intended to travel east across the United States and back to Britain, but she was in no hurry, as she ended up staying in Colorado for months. She took the train east from San Francisco, stopped briefly at Lake Tahoe, and disembarked at Greeley. From there, all of her traveling was done on horseback except for one wagon ride from Greeley to Fort Collins. Bird spent most of her time in Estes Park, but she also passed a few weeks traveling around Denver, Colorado Springs, and other communities.51 Because Bird spent the fall and winter in Estes Park, whereas Dunraven preferred to be there in summer, they did not meet there.

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As far as I have been able to discover, they never met in Britain either. However, Bird was not the only Britisher in the area. A Lady’s Life locates Bird within a network of British emigrants to Colorado. Far from being isolated in a pristine wilderness, she finds herself in something of a neighborhood, albeit one in which the residents live comparatively far apart from one another. Before she arrived in Estes Park she stayed for a few weeks with a family of settlers named Chalmers and for another few days with another British family named Hughes. In A Lady’s Life the Chalmers and Hughes episodes serve as a prologue for her time in Estes Park. They present contrasting studies of British emigration.52 The Chalmers family rented Bird “a single room of the rudest kind, with the wall at one end partially broken down, holes in the roof, holes for windows, and no furniture but two chairs and two unplaned wooden shelves, with some sacks of straw upon them for beds.” What really horrified Bird about their homestead was their “hard, narrow life” of unremitting manual labor and extreme Calvinism. Chalmers and his wife, as depicted in A Lady’s Life, are frugal, sober folk, and yet their homestead is a failure. Livestock are always going lame or getting sick, tools and harnesses always breaking. The ruinous state of the Chalmers dwelling, surrounded by “an abundance” of snakes and “alive and noisy with forms of insect life, large and small, stinging, humming, buzzing, striking, rasping, devouring!” reflects, in Bird’s representation, the essentially savage nature of the family themselves despite their Christianity and work ethic. Yet it remains somewhat unclear to the reader why people who work so hard are so unsuccessful. Only when one looks at the Hughes family can one see how and why the Chalmers household has gone wrong.53 Hughes is an example of “who should not come to Colorado,” in Bird’s opinion. The son of a well-to-do London physician, he came to Colorado in hopes it would cure his lung disease. In Bird’s telling, neither he nor his wife possesses the practical skills necessary to succeed as settlers, and in material terms they lead a “wretched existence.” Yet

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Bird finds them “lovable” for their refinement: “As soon as Mrs. Hughes spoke I felt she was truly a lady; and oh! How refreshing her refined, courteous, graceful English manner was, as she invited us into the house!” Although the Hughes house is primitive, the addition of such items as curtains, plants in a container, and “above all, two shelves of admirably-chosen books” give it the feeling of “a home, and not . . . a squatter’s cabin.” Bird situates herself as a “lady” comparable to Mrs. Hughes, someone who is able to appreciate her elegance and taste, unlike the Chalmers family, who scorn the Hugheses as frivolous. In contrast to Mrs. Chalmers, who “despises everything but work” and whose daughter has “as much manners as a pig,” Mrs. Hughes loves poetry, and her young sons are “refined, courteous, childish gentlemen, with love and tenderness to their parents in all their words and actions.” Whereas Mrs. Chalmers has failed to embody Bird’s Victorian ideal of refined womanhood, Mrs. Hughes is able to uplift all around her through her angelic presence.54 Yet although they differ, each family flounders, and their failures at emigration originate from gender failure. Mr. Chalmers claims to know the way to Estes Park, but he becomes hopelessly lost; he literally cannot find his way in the world to which he has brought his family. He cannot exercise benign leadership over his household domain, establish order over his unruly family by guiding his wife and children toward prosperity, and successfully navigate the challenges of the landscape. Mr. Hughes is also a failure. Despite his education and good manners, he cannot support his family and has stranded them in isolation and hardship. His life of ease has not prepared him for the challenges of the frontier, and he is unable to find the inner resources or physical vigor necessary to overcome the deficit of inexperience. True manhood requires both hardihood and gentility. Yet Bird positions herself within each of these households as a person who can move from one gender position to another, doing whatever task might need to be done. She can lasso and saddle a horse at the Chalmers homestead and guide the group home when he gets

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lost trying to find the way to Estes Park. At the Hughes’s she can step into Mrs. Hughes’s place and do some housework that the fragile woman finds exhausting. Whereas in Britain Bird is herself a delicate invalid, she vigorously upholds domestic standards around the Hughes household through her energetic interventions. Whatever needs to be done, Bird can do it, whether it requires masculine or feminine skills. Both the Chalmers and Hughes segments of the text allow Bird to construct a persona that can occasionally take on unfamiliar challenges usually reserved for men while retaining the female privilege of commenting on others’ domestic lives.55 The Chalmers and Hughes families offer a kind of counterpoint to the life Bird finds once she gets to Estes Park. Whereas the two families are conventional households that have become deranged and disordered, Estes Park presents the reader with an array of unusual and apparently invigorating domestic arrangements. From Rocky Mountain Jim’s lone cabin to the motley assortment of boarders at Evans’s home to the “bachelor” life that Bird took up with two young men in November 1873 when Evans and the other residents of his boardinghouse left the valley, all of these situations are in some way more functional than the households of either Chalmers or Hughes. As much as Bird applauds Mrs. Hughes’s feminine sweetness, her ambivalence toward domesticity becomes marked during the Estes Park passages of the text; here, it is clear that Bird rejoices in the opportunities Estes Park provides to liberate herself from the tasks of housekeeping. In Estes Park Bird rented a small cabin from Evans, taking her meals in the main house with the other boarders. The cabin, built of unchinked logs and lacking glass windows, offered only the rudest kind of shelter to Bird, but she describes it in A Lady’s Life as a “cheery mountain home.”56 What made Estes Park “home” for Bird? Her relationship to Estes Park was one of intense aesthetic admiration mingled with curiosity about the valley’s human residents. She not only absorbed the valley’s beauties through riding, sketching, and writing but also

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engaged the community; what made Estes Park a home was the sense of relationship that she had with some of the people there as well as with the natural world. Although Bird became friends with many people in the small community, including Evans and a couple named Dewey who were also tourists, her most intense attachment seems to have been to Rocky Mountain Jim. A Lady’s Life introduces Nugent to the reader in a dramatic way. Bird had been trying to reach Estes Park for several weeks, but no one seemed to know the trail. When she finally found someone willing to guide her there from the town of Longmont, she and her guide made a “tremendous ascent” on horseback during which “wild fantastic views open[ed] up continually” through “chasms of immense depth” and past “mountains with snow gleaming on their splintered crests” until she finally came to a cabin that “looked like the den of a wild beast.” Bird describes herself as being not at all frightened by the report that this was the “home, or rather den, of [Rocky Mountain Jim] a notorious ‘ruffian’ and ‘desperado’ ” for she “longed to speak to some one who loved the mountains.”57 Before she ever meets Nugent she presents him as a kindred spirit who, like her, loves the wildness of the mountains. Indeed, it is precisely his untamed state that implicitly establishes a relationship between them: Bird too perhaps wishes to live in a “den,” although she cannot directly state this desire. Nugent, when he appears, has a dualistic quality because of the injuries he sustained in the bear mauling. One side of his face is a ruin, whereas “the other might have been modeled in marble.” Although his clothing is “almost falling to pieces” his voice is “cultured” and “his accent refined.” As Bird rides away, Nugent observes, “You are not an American. I know from your voice that you are a countrywoman of mine. I hope you will allow me the pleasure of calling on you.”58 From his first appearance the text emphasizes Nugent’s Britishness, his cultivation, and his savagery, all of which combine to create a complicated reflection of and connection to Bird, who likewise blends refinement with a love of the wild.

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Like Bird herself, a middle-aged unmarried woman from a genteel background who rides intrepidly through snowstorms armed with a revolver, Nugent is not what he first appears to be. He is both rough and civilized; his appearance is savage, but his voice is cultured. The text underscores the similarity between the two by means of a bizarre episode that occurs on the night when Bird first arrives at Evans’s ranch: “A short, pleasant looking man ran up to me and shook hands gleefully, which surprised me; but he has since told me that he thought I was ‘Mountain Jim, dressed up as a woman!’ ”59 Why someone would think the hypermasculine Rocky Mountain Jim was riding around in drag in the middle of the night is left unclear; instead, the text moves on to identify the “pleasant looking man” as yet another “countryman,” Evans (who was born in Wales). Bird’s self-presentation in the text is that of someone who can astutely read the accents and gestures of others accurately in order to determine their origin, enabling her to move adeptly through the confused social space of the West, while others, less skilled at decoding interaction, might even mistake a woman for a man. At the same time, one can read this passage as expressing a kind of wish on the part of Bird, a desire to, in fact, be “Mountain Jim dressed up as a woman,” a wish that cannot be completely fulfilled. Over the next few months Bird apparently spent considerable time in Nugent’s company. He guided her in her ascent of Long’s Peak and took her on many long horseback rides. Her portrait of Nugent is one of a man of great gifts ruined by his uncontrollable drinking and fits of rage. He finds himself entangled in violent disputes with most of the men in the area at one time or another, but to women he is always “chivalrous”; to Bird alone he confesses his heartbreaking personal history. Bird describes one of these intimate conversations as taking place during a long ride during which the sky was “black with an impending snowstorm.” Nugent’s story reads like a sentimental romance: born into a good family, he is spoiled by his mother and rebels against his father. He falls in love with an angelic girl he sees only at church, but his parents oppose the match, and after she dies he runs

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away from home. He spends his life as a trapper and scout, embroiled in “violence and ruffianism” and indulging, whenever possible, in “drunken sprees.”60 The key detail of having been born to a British officer from a good family (a detail that appears nowhere else in mentions of Nugent) can be read as situating Rocky Mountain Jim, seemingly an exemplar of western masculinity, back into a narrative of Britishness. He is an example of how a British man can come to ruin in the west if he lacks the right female influence; he does not even have the meager help that a Mrs. Chalmers or Mrs. Hughes might offer. He is a kind of shadow of Dunraven, in fact; like Dunraven he is from the Anglo-Irish elite, like Dunraven he loves to hunt. Yet he is also a hopeless and somewhat helpless case, unable to extricate himself from dilemmas of his own making, and in this way he recalls the wastrel sons of the remittance man genre. If Rocky Mountain Jim is, in Bird’s representation, an example of the strengths and weaknesses of British masculinity, as a narrative figure he points back to western adventure tales. His Rocky Mountain moniker, his career as a hunter and scout, and even his appearance—long blond curls, a flowing mustache and “imperial” beard, the handsome if ruined features—evoke Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack.61 Like them, he provides the British visitor—in this case Bird—with a way of becoming part of the western landscape. Yet unlike the narratives written by British big hunters Bird’s text focuses on the difficulties that the protective Nugent must undertake to make her proposed adventure a success. This is most apparent in the description of her ascent of Long’s Peak. The first part of the trip goes by with the two deep in conversation, riding through exquisite scenery that was “one series of glories and surprises.” Camping overnight, after songs and storytelling, Nugent commands his mastiff to stand guard over Bird. The next day, however, as the ascent continues, Bird describes herself as falling into a state of “extreme terror.” She makes it to the summit only by being roped to Nugent much of the way; the rest of the time she crawls on her hands and feet. The other two people in the party, young men, say “almost

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plainly that a woman was a dangerous encumbrance.” Yet Jim is “gentle and considerate beyond anything, though I knew he must be grievously disappointed, both in my courage and my strength.”62 Far from making a triumphant ascent of Long’s Peak, Bird emphasizes her weakness and fear and the power the mountain has over her; because of Nugent’s guidance, however, she is able to reach the summit and safely descend. That night, after being “deposited on the ground wrapped in blankets,” she sleeps and awakens in the middle of the night to find Nugent and his dog also awake by the fire. Nugent, “the handsome side of his face lit by the fire,” tells her of a “great sorrow” that has darkened his life and weeps. Bird asks, “Was it semi-conscious acting, I wondered, or was his dark soul really stirred to the depths by the silence, the beauty and the memories of youth?” Whereas for other travelers the central question was whether or not the guide has really performed the adventurous feats of warfare and hunting for which he is famed, Bird’s text represents Nugent as potentially acting at being the sentimental hero. Her concern is whether he really feels the tender emotions he professes to feel.63 The mountain location of this pivotal conversation situates this part of Bird’s account within a wider body of Victorian mountaineering literature. As historians of British mountaineering have pointed out, the activity became codified by middle-class men who climbed as a way of demonstrating their physical prowess, technical understanding, and superior gentility. Mountaineering, like other forms of athletics, also required discipline, organization, courage, and strength, and its adherents understood their sport to build and sustain manliness. It did attract some aristocratic participants, but the leadership of climbing societies such as the Alpine Club was dominated by middle-class professionals. Bird, the daughter of a lawyer-turned-clergyman and a spinster whose circumstances were genteel but hardly luxurious, centers the major episode concerning nature in her text on this middle-class activity, an implicit contrast to the aristocratic hunting narratives of men like Dunraven.64

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Bird’s emphasis on mountaineering, analyzed in this context, indicates her middle-class identity in contrast to the elite men who hunted in and around Estes Park. Moreover, her self-deprecating account of her climb, by turns humorous and pitiable, refuses the claim to mastery enacted by male mountaineers. For her, the experience is one of “painful and unwilling submission to the inevitable” harshness of the terrain, “of trembling, slipping, straining, of smooth ice appearing when it was least expected” and of being “perfectly sick and dizzy.” She does reach the summit but refuses to narrate this accomplishment as an achievement of her own, giving Nugent all the credit. Her guide has not made it possible for her to experience independence; on the contrary, she has depended on him throughout the entire attempt on Long’s Peak. By climbing a mountain Bird has reinforced, not undermined, her feminine dependence on a stronger, male figure.65 To Bird, Estes Park was not a place to be conquered. Her text depicts her as refusing the mastery over nature and space that outdoors leisure could have provided. She also avoided seeing Estes Park as a potential commercial space. Whereas most British travel writers celebrated the economic opportunities to be found in the West, Bird celebrated Estes Park precisely because it lacked hotels and thriving businesses and was instead “grand, solitary, uplifted, sublime, remote,” and, not least but last, “beast-haunted.”66 Yet she and her big game hunting compatriots had more than their nationality in common. To Dunraven and Bird alike, Estes Park mattered most as a space of leisure, not of labor. Like the valley’s other Euro-American residents, they tended to elide the history of Native American use of the area and its resources. Their travel and their writing, mutually constitutive, integrated the West into a wider global network of leisure in which some spaces became designated as the locations of emotional and physical renewal, thereby erasing or subsuming other possible ways of relating to the land. In addition, like the elite hunter, Bird sought to touch the West through a friendship with a western hero—or possibly villain? The extensive passages of A Lady’s Life that deal with Rocky Mountain Jim

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tell a story of Bird’s fascination and fear of violence and its power to undo manliness. As a woman, Bird claims the authority to persuade Jim to stop drinking and fighting. At various points in the text he tells her that she is the only person in whom he can confide, and she takes these opportunities to urge him to reform his way of life. “No one else could or would speak to him as I could,” she declares, implying that this unique power rests on her intuitive understanding of Nugent’s heart. However, these efforts are unsuccessful: “Don’t speak to me of repentance and reform,” he tells her dramatically.67 While these passages indicate both the way in which Bird’s middle-class femininity requires the ministering stance as well as the way in which Nugent is not completely beyond the scope of moral discourse, they also reveal the limits on the power of genteel femininity to work its civilizing mission in the West. Similarly, although Bird claims she knew his innermost secrets, this sits oddly with her statement in footnotes that she wrote of him “only as he appeared” to her and that she learned “the worst points of his character” only after she had left Estes Park, presumably following press accounts or in letters reporting the fracas resulting in his death. Bird’s uneasy textual maneuvering around this question of possibly incomplete knowledge suggests the recognition that her ability to read others may not have been as secure as she claimed it was. Indeed, Bird’s letters to her sister indicate that Bird found Nugent to be deeply emotionally disturbing. He was infatuated with her, a “terrible revelation” to her, as she found him repellent because of his drinking and history of violence. She also found him “loveable and fascinating,” noting that “he is a man whom any woman might love but no sane woman would marry.”68 Ultimately, Bird’s writing frames Nugent’s situation in the language of evangelical pity. Nearly her last references to him portray him as an object of compassion: “As I looked at him, I felt a pity such as I never felt before for a human being. My thought at the moment was, Will not our Father in heaven, ‘who spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all,’ be far more pitiful?”69 Having failed in

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her attempt to reform Nugent and having refused the role of becoming his domestic helpmate, she could still make sense of her encounter with him by assimilating him into humanitarian discourse, linking him to the hopeless drinkers and sinners who populated the pages of Victorian charity reports and evangelical tracts. Somewhat surprisingly Bird identifies herself as the ultimate agent of Nugent’s death. Practically the last thing she does in their friendship is to introduce him to “Mr. Fodder,” a young man who, “dressed in the extreme of English dandyism,” wishes to go to Estes Park and hire Nugent as a guide. In his “lemon-colored” kid gloves, Mr. Fodder appears laughable compared to Nugent, whose “gentlemanliness of deportment brought into relief the innate vulgarity of a rich parvenu.”70 Dressed in stained buckskin rags as he is, Nugent is still one of nature’s noblemen. Mr. Fodder, according to Bird, will turn out to be the person at whose “instigation (when overcome by fear)” Evans will fire at Nugent; Bird alludes to this in a footnote, hesitant to allow this chain of events into the main body of the text. As Bird presents him, Nugent’s life can end only in violence, as he refuses the possibility of reform she has offered him. He too has failed to embody her expectations of masculinity. His tales of western adventure notwithstanding, his reluctance to embrace the values of temperance and self-control she urges upon him demonstrates that he, like Chalmers and Hughes, cannot support a home and family. Bird’s understanding of manliness includes domesticity as well as physical strength and courage. In this, her parsing of gender in Estes Park fits a model of masculinity that historians have identified with the early to mid-nineteenth-century middle class in both Britain and the United States. In this model, which was in the process of being eclipsed by a newer, more physically oriented notion of male gender, Christian faith and familial virtues were essential qualities of a true man. Given Bird’s middle-class evangelical background, it makes sense that her understanding of manliness involved the role of the loyal husband and father, the cultivated man who could support his wife in the joint project of creating a true home.71 As liberating as Bird

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herself finds her “bachelor” life, she avoids recommending it as a model to be emulated. In contrast to Dunraven, who in The Great Divide and his other travel writing addresses the reader as “you” and urges him to experience the joys of the outdoors life as an antidote to the stresses of civilization, Bird implies that her experiences are unique and unrepeatable. The “you” she addresses is her sister, who embodies the imperative that women stay at home. If Jim Nugent resisted Bird’s attempts to reform him, he had his own notions of what manhood meant. The violence in Estes Park erupted, at least in some versions of the events, when he chose, as an American and a longtime westerner, to challenge Dunraven’s claims to the valley. Scattered references to Nugent in accounts of Estes Park hint that he was one of Dunraven’s most vocal critics. For instance, one Estes Park resident recalled that Rocky Mountain Jim barred passage through his property to the “fraternity of English snobs and aristocrats to pass through the sacred precincts.”72 Enos Mills, another longtime dweller in the area, declared, “At the time that Jim was shot he seemed to be making a winning fight against the land scheme. Naturally the oldtimers were with Jim, and a consensus of their opinions is that ‘English gold killed Jim for opposing the land scheme.’ ”73 While some residents of Estes Park believed that Evans had shot at Nugent on Dunraven’s orders, two men named Sprague and Mills and other Estes Park settlers later alleged that a mysterious Lord Hague had been either in the employ of Dunraven or bought off by the earl in order to prevent him from testifying in the case. Lord Hague was actually William Haigh, a wealthy Englishman who came to Estes Park to hunt in the summer of 1874 and who stayed with Evans. Evidently Haigh and Nugent clashed. One newspaper report suggested that Nugent had been hired by Haigh and then fired, though it did not give any reasons. All of this took place during the same summer when Whyte and his employees were having the valley surveyed and platted with an eye to eventually opening it to the filing of homestead claims. Haigh did in fact testify in court on Evans’s behalf, describing Nugent’s behavior as so

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threatening as to reasonably be construed as a deadly assault justifying Evans’s act. While another witness claimed that Haigh (“Hague”) had encouraged Evans to keep shooting, others supported his testimony and recalled his words as, “Look out, Evans, he’s going to shoot.”74 The language Nugent’s defenders used in their description of the conflict opposed egalitarian Americans against “snobs” like Dunraven. Nugent seems to have embraced this language, writing from his sickbed after the shooting, “I, a law-abiding American citizen, have been shot down by two English ruffians who boast of royal blood coursing through their veins, and well-filled pockets. . . . Great God! is this your boasted Colorado? That I, an American citizen who has tread upon Colorado’s soil since ’54, must have my life attempted and deprived of liberty when the deep-laid scheme to take my life has failed, and all for English gold!” There are multiple possibilities here. Perhaps Bird was correct, and Nugent was himself of British origin. In this case he would have been repudiating his past in favor of a self-fashioned identity as a democratic American who would spurn “English gold.” Alternatively—and this is the more likely reading as there is little evidence to confirm Bird’s highly romanticized account of Nugent’s past—the injured hunter was not rejecting his past so much as reaching for the familiar language of liberty and democracy, asserting his right to the “soil” in contrast to “ruffians” who justified their behavior on the basis of their birth and wealth.75 We can’t really know who James Nugent was or if he even wrote the letter that appeared in the newspaper under his name. Certainly the accounts of his shooting imply that Evans shot in selfdefense rather than at the instigation of a conspiracy. The words attributed to Nugent still convey a sense of someone who had his own take on what it meant to be a western man. Bird grounded her claim to Estes Park on her emotional response to it, “by right of love, appropriation and appreciation.” She had made a “seizure” of its “peerless sunrises and sunsets,” the “glories

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of mountain and forest” and had made a “stereotype” in her memory of the valley’s beauties to keep forever. “Estes Park is mine,” declared Bird, adding, “Mine, too, in a better than the sportsman’s sense” were the elk, bighorn sheep, mountain lions, and other magnificent wildlife. On the one hand, Bird’s lyrical assertion of ownership reads as a romantic celebration of her affinity for place, but in the context of the conflict over Estes Park it assumes a more aggressive tone. Bird claimed that Estes Park was “no man’s land,” and although her ostensible meaning was that the area was unsurveyed the phrase also suggests that she wished to oppose her claim to that of the sport hunters who saw the park as theirs.76 Isabella Bird, James Nugent, Griff Evans, the Earl of Dunraven—all of these people and other residents and visitors as well sought to claim Estes Park. For some, the valley’s resources needed to be integrated into an extractive economy of ranching and mining. For others, the area’s primary resource was its scenery, which could attract tourists and make the community competitive with Colorado Springs, Manitou, and other Colorado towns that were drawing tourists in sizable numbers by the early 1880s. To tourists, Estes Park was something to be consumed, an experience of scenery, fresh air, and revitalizing exercise that would restore the troubled modern body and mind to health.77 Dunraven’s memoir represents his Estes Park idyll as one eventually doomed by the incursions of those who would have turned the landscape to uses incompatible with his dream of a retreat in a “glorious place.” With some irony, Dunraven skimmed over the end of his Estes Park venture: “It became evident that we were not to be left monarchs of all we surveyed.” The “we” here is somewhat unclear. It might refer to Dunraven and his associates or to himself and his hunting buddies. Whoever it was who had hoped to be “monarchs” of Estes Park, there was no way for them to stop people who “were drifting in prospecting, fossicking, pre-empting, making claims.” By Dunraven’s account, he merely yielded to overwhelming external pressures when he contributed

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to the development of Estes Park. “So we prepared for civilization,” Dunraven remembered. “Made a better road, bought a sawmill at San Francisco, hauled the machinery in, set it up, felled trees, and build a wooden hotel.” The agent of these disruptive forces cannot quite be identified. Are “people” the same as “civilization,” and just how have these people who have interfered with Dunraven’s plans compelled him to set up a sawmill? Dunraven’s text elides the real part that he played in the transformation of Estes Park into a tourist destination: “People came in disputing claims, kicking up rows; exorbitant land taxes got into arrears; we were in constant litigation. The show could not be managed from home, and we were in danger of being frozen out. So we sold for what we could get and cleared out, and I have never been there since. Estes Park has long ago become civilised, highly civilised, indeed fashionable. Hotels, private houses, guides, expeditions and all the rest of it. But I would love to see again the place I knew so well in its primeval state.”78 Seen through the lens of memory, Estes Park was never valuable as a source of profit. Rather, it was as a “primeval” setting for escape that Dunraven wanted it, and the more “fashionable” it became, the less it provided that escape. Such escape also required the willingness of men like Texas Jack to play their parts, and, as we have seen, sometimes you could wind up with a Rocky Mountain Jim, drunk and violent, instead of a genial and gentlemanly Texas Jack. Hunting trips like those Dunraven took also relied on a transportation network that was itself in the process of remaking the West. Without the railroad and the presence of cities such as Denver, Estes Park could not have become either a personal retreat for Dunraven or a popular tourist destination for many. This network of economic and social relations, in turn, rested upon conquest. British tourists did not always lack sensitivity to the plight of Native people. Dunraven specifically told his readers in The Great Divide that the history of American Indians was a “story of mismanagement, of rights withheld, treaties broken, and promises unfulfilled,” and he could adopt a kind of flexibility and relativism that suggested an ability

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to look beyond narratives of racial superiority. For instance, in referring to the “Fort Kearny massacre” (also known as the Fetterman massacre) of 1866, Dunraven remarked, “Why it should be called a massacre, by the way, I don’t know. If the Indians had all been killed instead of the soldiers it would have been a battle.” However, like nearly every other British traveler Dunraven believed that Native Americans were a doomed race, unable to compete against racial superiors. “The law of the survival of the fittest” was in operation, and it was “too late for regrets.”79 Regardless of individual attitudes of sympathy or callousness, the British traveler could benefit from the expansion of empire without having to assume responsibility for it. Whereas hunting in Africa or India enmeshed the British sportsman within multiple vocabularies of hierarchy—of ethnicity, of colonial governance, of rank—in the United States men like Dunraven could pursue an escapist fantasy of communion with nature that could easily set aside indigenous claims. For the elite hunter, areas such as Estes Park were not particular places fraught with local associations, tied into a seasonal rhythm of subsistence, as they were for the Indians who had once used the valley. Rather, the West was a space, a kind of container for experiences based on representational precedents such as schoolboy books of adventure. Dunraven did not have to consider how his presence in western places partook of the maintenance of power, whereas in Ireland and in London he would always have to consider his role as the fourth earl, a member of Parliament, born to help man the creaking vessel of British rule in Ireland. While British big game hunters shared much with their American counterparts, including the fear of neurasthenia and the search for renewal via an idealized experience of nature, they differed in this important respect. Whereas the white triumph over the Native American other was central to the performance of hegemonic American masculinity, it was more peripheral to the British big game hunter, who renewed himself for the ordeal of imperial rule by going to someone else’s frontier.

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Bird might seem to have had little in common with her compatriots. It certainly appears, on the basis of her letters and other writing, that she tried to distance herself from other British travelers, with their “Lord Dundreary drawl.”80 Yet in many ways her encounter with the West paralleled that of the British sportsmen who so attracted her disdain. Like them, she sought out the West because she wanted to remake herself into someone stronger. The West could cure her faltering body and her discontent with her life, but, again, it was not so much as a particular place that Bird loved Estes Park, as it was the embodiment of a romantic wilderness ideal. Perhaps this is why she never returned to Estes Park, despite traveling widely throughout her life. Bird had little interest in “fashionable” places, preferring places in a “primeval state.” In Bird’s later years she journeyed through Japan, China, and present-day Vietnam and Singapore and became a medical missionary. She visited India, Turkey, present-day Iran and Iraq, Korea, and Tibet and made additional trips to China and Japan. She published accounts of all of these travels. She grew famous; she was the first female member of the Royal Geographical Society. She died in 1904 with her luggage packed for yet another journey. Bird’s text shares some close affinities with the travel writing of Mary Kingsley, Amelia Edwards, and other Englishwomen who constructed subjectivities for themselves that combined womanliness, mobility, and colonial superiority. Bird’s life of travel engaged her in the project of creating knowledge about places that her metropolitan readers understood to be barbaric and backward. As a medical missionary she saw herself as bringing progress to such places. For her, the trip through the Rocky Mountains was a chapter in a continuous passage from the confines of domesticity into a wider world, a passage that depended on and perpetuated the privileges she enjoyed as an Englishwoman. She did not leave the West behind, however. Rather, she brought it with her; her “global experience was shaped in no small part by her time in the West.”81 Dunraven continued his service to the cause of British rule in Ireland throughout his life. Unlike Frewen, Dunraven did not need Estes

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Park to restore his wealth or social position, both of which were secure. Dunraven was no surplus gentleman; he had multiple estates and a seat in Parliament. And yet, in a way, he was superfluous, to Ireland. Dunraven sincerely felt that landlords like himself could help revitalize Irish society by adopting more advanced land management techniques on their holdings, that landlords and tenants could work together to develop the Irish economy, and that as a result mutual understanding would flower between factions and groups that viewed each other with cold hostility. Probably the greatest political triumph of Dunraven’s life was the crucial role he played in convening a conference on Irish land reform in 1902. Working with the chief secretary for Ireland, George Wyndham, Dunraven brought together representatives of both landlords and tenants to issue a report presenting a plan whereby tenants would purchase their farms from the landlords. Like many Irish moderates, Dunraven fervently hoped that the Wyndham Land Act of 1903, which made the report’s recommendations into law, would be the foundation for peace and stability in Ireland. Similarly, he argued for a policy of political devolution that would gradually shift more responsibilities for self-rule to an Irish assembly dominated by the landowning class. Yet by the early 1900s Dunraven’s hopes for a moderate resolution to the tensions wracking Ireland were tragically out of step with the accelerating momentum toward open conflict between radical nationalists and radical unionists. By the time he died in 1926 Dunraven had witnessed the establishment of self-rule for most of Ireland, the partition of the country into north and south, and the outbreak of a ferocious civil war between factions of the Irish nationalist movement. “An Irishman born and bred”? Yes, and then again, no. Dunraven loved Ireland, yet spent his life at the apex of a colonialist power structure that was no less oppressive for being mitigated by his personal efforts to work with his tenants on his estates and by his sincere attempts to effect reform on a national scale. The very confidence he had in his entitlement to leadership demonstrated his incompatibility with the revolutionary moment, with all its bloodshed and passion,

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that marked Irish history in the early twentieth century. Divided between Catholic and Protestant parents, between British and Irish allegiances, Dunraven strove throughout his life to reconcile these fragments into a whole. On the prairies, in the mountains, and at sea— yachting was his other great passion—he could overcome his own Great Divide and feel complete. He could find, in the company of Texas Jack and in the spacious valley of Estes Park, the kind of contentment that seemed to elude him elsewhere. As a boy he escaped the religious tensions of his family by immersing himself in adventure novels and outdoor play. As a man he traveled to escape the miseries of history that marked his homeland, its inexorable reckoning with hundreds of years of colonial violence. In either case, respite could only be temporary.

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4 “THE LATEST FAD OF THESE SILLY DAYS”: BUFFALO BILL IN DARKEST LONDON

In 1887, when William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody brought the Wild West show across the Atlantic for the first time, he was already America’s most famous embodiment of the archetypal frontier hero. Taking the Wild West to London represented not only a financial risk undertaken in hopes of major profits, but also a bid for a new level of cultural legitimacy. Although several western shows had sprung up over the 1880s in imitation of Cody’s, none had toured internationally. In London, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West would claim to be the preeminent, indeed perhaps the only true, interpreter of the western frontier to the world.1 In the words of Cody’s publicists, the show was no mere entertainment but “an exact reproduction of daily scenes in frontier life, as experienced and enacted by the very people who now form the ‘Wild West’ Company.”2 The power of the “reproduction” lay in the claim that those who were doing the reproducing had themselves “experienced” the scenes they now imitated. And yet it remained a simulacrum. The performers were not actually in the West, not actually hunting bison or fighting a desperate battle for control of territory. Their guns fired blanks. After the gunfights the dead got up and walked out of the arena.3 Rather than destroying the show’s appeal, the controlled, explicitly performative nature of Cody’s Wild West enhanced it.

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The show’s title referred to a place, the West, but the performance represented not only a place but also a time. As Richard Slotkin has written, “If the Wild West was a ‘place,’ rather than a ‘show,’ then its landscape was a mythic space, in which past and present, fiction and reality could coexist.”4 The narrative that the Wild West show unfolded for spectators drew them into a history that told the story of a particular place as an abstract “drama of civilization.” Cody’s spectacle reassured Americans about their national destiny in an era of unprecedented social and economic change. It offered a narrative that could guide audiences’ understanding of the American past.5 Yet the Wild West show succeeded equally with British audiences, who presumably did not share Americans’ investment in the future of the United States. The show attracted prominent visitors ranging from William Gladstone to Sarah Bernhardt, and it even managed to lure Queen Victoria out of the seclusion of widowhood for a special performance. Cody and the rest of the cast were nearly daily features in the London press for months. Despite some spells of bad weather, which made the show’s open-air arena less than pleasant in the London chill, over a million visitors came to see the Wild West during its London run of 1887. Additional thousands saw the show on its post-London tour of Birmingham and Manchester. According to one reporter, “You could not pick up in the most obscure quarter of London any one so ignorant” as to be unfamiliar with Buffalo Bill Cody. “His name is on every wall. His picture is in nearly every window.”6 The fact that the show celebrated the American conquest of the West as a national achievement did not preclude seeing that conquest, or the show representing it, as a racial achievement in which the British people could share.7 Cody and his publicists emphasized the show’s presence in Britain as a gesture of Anglo-American friendship and unity. In this, they capitalized on the immediate context of the Wild West’s London run: the American Exhibition, to which it was adjacent, and the national celebration of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, with which it coincided. The Wild West show drew upon this

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context to make a reading of the show as a shared narrative of racial triumph more plausible. The show also spoke to existing British images of the American West. As we have seen, by the time Buffalo Bill came to London, the West was familiar imaginative territory in British culture as a profitable (if risky) investment and a source of manly renewal. Cody’s show, rather than presenting a never-before-seen Wild West to the British, actually conformed to expectations that already had been established by tourism, fiction, and travel writing. The scout in the buckskin suit, the feats of riding and shooting, the bison, and the Indians—all of these central elements of the Wild West Show had recurred in British discourse about the trans-Mississippi West for over a generation. Yet by bringing these images to the heart of what was then the world’s greatest imperial metropolis and deploying the technologies of the emerging publicity industry, Cody brought the commodification of western fantasy for international consumers to a new level.8 London in the 1880s contained multiple discourses of pleasure and danger. Tremendous wealth and terrible poverty coexisted in a city that numbered in the millions. Immigrants from Ireland, eastern Europe, India, and China brought new languages and faces to streets that seemed continually jammed with traffic. Scandals, strikes, and political conflict filled the newspapers. Cody’s very celebrity implicated him in these same forces that held the city in their mesh. As we have seen in earlier chapters, British fears about the elite’s decadence, imperial weakness, and gender instability had been mapped onto western space and western narratives. In his willingness to please the wellborn patrons who invited him to their parties, Cody acquired the dubious patina of the nouveau riche American pressing for an entry into British high society. On the one hand, by bringing the Wild West to London Cody restated, in new and spectacular terms, the frontier promise that western masculinity was as accessible to Britons as it was to Americans. On the other hand, like the narratives about failed investments, remittance men, and idle tourists, he presented yet another example of the

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ways in which that frontier promise could remain unfulfilled, even fraudulent. The Wild West had evolved gradually from Cody’s past as a hunter, scout, and melodramatic actor. His previous experiences gave him the opportunity to hone the image he would later present as a performer in London. The story of Cody’s development as an entertainer can be said to begin at many places. One place to start might be September 1871—a few months before Dunraven stepped off the train in Nebraska—when Cody guided a high-profile party of army officers, newspaper editors, and eastern businessmen (including the Wall Street financier Leonard Jerome, the future father-in-law of Moreton Frewen) on a buffalo hunting expedition. In the 1890s Cody remembered this group as “the best equipped hunting party I have ever been with.” Three hundred men supported the hunters as drivers, cooks, and guards. Sixteen wagons of supplies, including copious amounts of champagne, accompanied the group as they managed to kill over six hundred bison. Gen. Philip Sheridan, who had his own reasons for hosting wellconnected sportsmen on the plains, had hired Cody for this job. He hoped to weaken Native Americans by decreasing the bison population, but he also saw this as a way of ingratiating himself with influential patrons who could advance his career and that of his protégés. Cody’s career as a plains showman, then, intersected with the highly politicized and anxious situation of the U.S. Army on the plains in the post–Civil War period. For his part, Cody knew that by providing a purportedly authentic western experience for his patrons he could gain access to economic and social opportunities far beyond those otherwise available to him.9 As early as 1871 the dime novelist Ned Buntline had featured Cody in a series of articles, and Cody had been a character in a few melodramas set in the West. The participants on Sheridan’s tour were familiar with Cody from such sources. Henry Davies, the expedition’s self-appointed chronicler, declared that “from these stories the idea

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had sprung, that in him we should meet the typical desperado of the West, bristling with knives and pistols, uncouth in person, and still more disagreeable in manners and address.” Cody was able to deliver on the promise of such texts in a way that entertained, rather than frightened, tourists. “Instead of all this,” Davies wrote, it was a “pleasant surprise” to find that Cody was a “mild, agreeable, well-mannered man, quiet and retiring in disposition, though well informed and always ready to talk well and earnestly upon any subject of interest, and in all respects the reverse of the person we had expected to meet.” One of Cody’s greatest talents was to be the “reverse” of what clients expected while at the same time meeting their expectations of what a western hero should be. Davies could hardly restrain himself from writing a glowing description of Cody’s physical appearance: “Tall and somewhat slight in figure, though possessed of great strength and iron endurance; straight and erect as an arrow, and with strikingly handsome features, he at once attracted to him all with whom he became acquainted.” Cody consciously sought to capitalize on his good looks, heightening the impression he made through his clothing and choice of mount. Riding his “snowy white horse” and dressed in a fringed buckskin suit, “carrying his rifle lightly in his hand, as his horse came toward us on an easy gallop, he realized to perfection the bold hunter and gallant sportsman of the plains,” according to Davies.10 Cody built on this success when Sheridan chose him to help guide the highly publicized hunting expedition of Grand Duke Alexis of Russia in 1872. This gave Cody an opportunity to stage frontier spectacle on an even grander scale, with himself as the impresario who loaned his horse to the grand duke and tutored him on the best way to shoot buffalo.11 Ambitious guides like Cody and Texas Jack Omohundro needed their clients as much as their clients needed them, and for more than mere income. By becoming known as the preferred guide of General Sheridan and the Earl of Dunraven, Cody and Omohundro burnished their reputations in more than one way, as the guides who possessed both wilderness expertise and familiarity with the wealthy and titled.

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Decades later Cody continued to burnish his credibility as an expert on high-class hunting, as in 1894 when he published an essay in Cosmopolitan entitled “Famous Hunting Parties of the Plains.”12 With the right combination of personal qualities, a guide could, at this moment in the 1870s, move from scouting and guiding to the pages of the press and the melodramatic stage. Many former scouts portrayed heroes such as Kit Carson and Daniel Boone on stage; some scouts, including Cody and Omohundro, simply played themselves. Demand for theatrical productions about frontier adventure was so high that eventually scouts were playing one another in a frenetic series of overlapping productions. Donald McKay, a former army scout, played Kit Carson in October 1874, only to himself be depicted by an actor named Oliver Doud Byron in a play entitled Donald McKay a few weeks later. Audiences could hardly keep straight which men had actually been scouts and which were merely impersonating them, and it’s likely that many didn’t care. But those who really had been scouts and who really had been connected with top generals and European nobility jealously guarded these claims to distinction against their competitors.13 Audience members might believe that these men really were who they claimed to be; they might decide that although these men really were Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack, they were nothing more than big phonies; they might compare the real Bill and Jack to other actors. As the possibilities multiplied, seats got sold. Paradoxically what drew Davies to Cody and Dunraven to Omohundro was the authentic westernness of the guide, which could be experienced as a performance of westernness that itself could be transferred into a more formally marked performance space, that of the theater. Yet the success Cody and Omohundro found in show business depended in part on their connection to real army officers and noblemen who could attest that they were indeed the real thing and not a charlatan in a fancy outfit.14 This is not to say that fancy outfits did not matter. As when guiding, Cody and Omohundro relied on their good looks and knack for wearing clothes stylishly in order to succeed as actors. Reviewers

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repeatedly focused on the spectacle of the male body on stage in Cody’s and Omohundro’s performances, commenting on their figures, faces, hair, and expressions. Cody was “a model of manly beauty. . . . About six feet in height, straight as an arrow, perfectly proportioned, with fine, waving hair falling down upon his shoulders,” and Omohundro had a “frank, laughing countenance, [a] wealth of dark, curly hair” and a “fine physique.” Presumably handsomeness had nothing to do with scouting and hunting skills, but both men knew how to market themselves as objects of desire. A publicity poster from 1874 shows Texas Jack in the out of doors leaning on his rifle, his feet crossed at the ankles like a dancer’s. He wears boots that call attention to his small feet and pointed toes, a fringed jacket, and a very wide-brimmed hat decorated with an elegant plume. A fringed sash around his waist emphasizes his trim physique. Although he has a lariat hanging over his shoulder, there are no cattle in the picture, no bison—in fact, there’s nothing especially western about the scene other than Jack himself, and yet Jack seems to be presented not as a man of action but as a stylish, even rather feminine, fashion plate.15 This image dates from the year after Cody and Omohundro parted ways professionally, and it may have been influenced by the tastes of Omohundro’s new wife. In 1873 Omohundro married an Italian actress and ballerina he had met while touring. Because the couple wanted to headline together in their own shows, they started their own company and continued to tour throughout the decade. Seven years later, at the age of thirty-three, Omohundro died of pneumonia in Colorado. Cody went on to greater things, creating the Wild West show and proceeding to secure a place in American history. By moving the performance outdoors, breaking up the melodramatic narrative into vignettes of battles and hunts, and adding demonstrations of roping, riding, and shooting, Cody strengthened the claims to reenactment over acting. The show no longer was restricted by the narrative conventions of melodrama. Real horses, bison, and stagecoaches could be used. Instead of featuring only one or two actual former scouts in

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a cast of professional actors, the show would comprise only people who had actually lived in the West and did in fact possess the skills of riding, roping, and shooting. Indeed, Cody avoided the word “show” altogether, insisting that this was no mere circus act but an uplifting display of historical and ethnographic information. This didacticism was part of Cody’s bid for middle-class respectability after nearly a decade spent in the world of melodrama, a world associated with rough working-class audiences.16 Yet Cody managed to retain his old fans. The extraordinary cross-class success of the Wild West suggests that Cody’s timing was highly fortuitous. Just as the frontier seemed to be slipping away into the past, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, in its raucous glory, could be seen as evidence that the American frontier would never really close. By renewing themselves with an entertaining and educational day with Buffalo Bill, audiences were partaking in a ritualized reconquest of the frontier and thereby constructed “an idealized national memory” of the West that defined them as an American public with a particular history.17 Far from being a gray backdrop to the colorful Wild West, London itself was a spectacle. Approximately 4.5 million people lived there, in a metropolis that was, in the words of one observer, “a whole kingdom in itself,” containing more Scots than Aberdeen and more Irish than Dublin. Immigrants came to London from eastern Europe, from China, and from all parts of the British Empire, including the subcontinent of India and British possessions in Africa. The physical landscape of the city was constantly changing as buses, trams, subway lines, and suburban trains transformed former genteel suburbs into districts for the respectable working classes and quiet country villages into genteel suburbs. Yet many people still lived in horrifically overcrowded tenements. Each day thousands upon thousands of people circulated through the city’s streets, along narrow alleys dating from centuries past, and grand avenues newly created to move traffic more quickly through the central business, government, and shopping areas.18

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The vast city simmered with class, gender, and ethnic tensions, often framed by contemporary observers in metaphors of darkness and light laid over the city’s east–west geographical axis. Against the brilliance of civilization represented by the government buildings of Westminster, the luxurious hotels and shopping arcades, the proud edifice of the Royal Academy, and the elegant gentlemen’s clubs in the west of London, they contrasted the East End’s dark slums. In the volatile space between West and East Ends violence could erupt. In 1886–87, spurred by a militant trade union movement, a series of riots over unemployment broke out in the center of the city; workers in match factories, at gas companies, and on the docks went on strike in 1888 and 1889. A vigorous press published horrifying, graphically illustrated exposés with such headlines as “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” (child prostitution) and “The Bitter Cry of Outcast London” (slum conditions). The East End also became the object of intense scrutiny from middle-class social investigators and reformers, to whom it seemed that unspeakable depravity was breeding at the heart of the glittering capital of civilization. Research into new areas of sociological and psychological knowledge preoccupied the educated classes, who feared that unless they shed light on the dark places of London, civilization would degenerate into savagery.19 Far from being an ethnically homogeneous, economically harmonious city, London pulsed with tensions, and its poorest districts were frequently likened by horrified upper-class visitors to the darkest spots in the empire. The spectacularly gory, terrifying murders committed by Jack the Ripper in the late summer and fall of 1888 seemed to realize these fears in nightmarish form. The more immediate setting of the Wild West show mirrored the chaotic and overwhelming abundance of sensations that London itself offered. To visit the Wild West in London during the summer of 1887, people first had to find their way to the American Exhibition in Earls Court.20 Intended as a showcase for American products, the exhibition was the brainchild of an Englishman, John R. Whitley.

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Whitley, part owner of a linoleum company, had met with various setbacks in his efforts to organize an exhibit celebrating American progress. The press discovered that he was falsely claiming royal sponsorship for the project, and he had to reschedule his exhibition for 1887 to avoid conflicting with the Indian and Colonial Exhibition of 1886. In an effort to garner some positive publicity, Whitley sought out Cody’s business partner, Nate Salsbury, on a trip to the United States in 1886 and contracted with the Wild West for a long run at the exhibit. Both the American Exhibition and the Wild West show opened in the spring of 1887.21 Like other expositions of the era, the American Exhibition held in London in 1887 sought to awe visitors with a spectacular building and a wide array of sights. The main gallery contained 136,800 square feet of space for an astonishing panoply of products, from ice cream makers and canned fish to grain rakes.22 One of the most elaborate exhibits was a diorama of the harbor and city of New York housed in a building built so that the visitor could imagine himself or herself on board a ship entering “ ‘the gateway of the New World.’ ” The surrounding grounds encompassed twenty-three acres containing toboggan rides, bandstands, cafés, and an electrically lit pleasure garden. The gardens also included, in the words of one newspaper, “Indian huts, and a real log cabin, such as so delighted the elder generation in the days when ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ was in vogue.” A specially built railroad enabled visitors to tour the entire ground.23 The spectacular dimensions and abundance of sights of the American Exhibition offered an apt setting for the visually rich, dynamic pageantry of the Wild West. Like Cody’s show, the American Exhibition played with the distinction between the authentic and the false. The diorama of New York City presented the visitor with an artificial experience of travel, but the log cabin was real in the sense that it could be touched and entered—and yet not a real cabin from “the days when ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ was in vogue” but merely a facsimile. Cody and his cast performed in an outdoor amphitheater that seated approximately

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twenty thousand on benches under a giant canvas awning decorated with rocks, trees, and a panorama of the Rockies as a backdrop. The size of the arena, “where a rough settler’s hut broke the monotonousness of the expanse,” created a feeling of spaciousness in the midst of crowded London.24 A two-page illustration from the Illustrated London News offers the reader a bird’s-eye view of the exhibition, a large empty space bisected by railroad tracks and dominated by the long Exhibition Hall and the oval space representing the Wild West show area. Sedate groups of visitors and horsemen stand around these structures, which are themselves surrounded by the pleasure gardens with their elaborate fountains. The city has been relegated to the edges of the illustration, and in fact central London seems farther away still, as orderly rows of suburban dwellings comprise the setting around the Earls Court exhibition grounds. Inset illustrations with titles such as “Lassoing Wild Steers” and “Indian Camp” provide another level of framing for the image, conflating the American Exhibition with the Wild West Show. Though the exhibition’s program lists such varied participants as billiard table manufacturers and “desiccated cocoa nut” processors, the Illustrated London News’s artist ignored the visual possibilities of these subjects in favor of a different commodity, that of the exotic West.25 In fact, the Wild West show seems to have been the major draw of the exhibition. Finally, one reporter wrote, expositions had become enjoyable; they were no longer pedantic collections of “Christmas cards, letter files, extract of beef, and artificial teeth.” Although “a few timid people may still profess that they go to study artificial teeth . . . nobody will believe them. They will go to see Buffalo Bill, and the vast majority will say so.”26 Despite Cody’s claim that his show served an educational purpose, at least some observers saw it as an alternative to the didactic tedium of the typical exposition. Yet the Wild West show contributed, in turn, to Whitley’s efforts to portray the American Exhibition as a means of increasing international understanding. Business leaders from both Britain and the United

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States held a special meeting on the exposition grounds to discuss the creation of a Court of Arbitration to which disputes between Britain and the United States could be referred. The London Times emphasized that the Wild West in particular, rather than the exhibition as a whole, enabled Britons and Americans to understand that they were truly one people, united in the conquest of savage territories and people. As the Times declared, “Civilization itself”—perhaps in the form of new international bodies to resolve conflicts that might otherwise be the pretext for war—“consents to march onward in the train of B U FFAL O B I L L .”27 By celebrating Cody’s Wild West, the Times implicitly reserved violence for the management of racial others while explicitly ruling it out of bounds as a means of settling disputes between civilized nations. What exactly did visitors to the Wild West see after they entered the arena and took their seats? The show that performed in London that year was essentially the same one that had run in previous years in the United States. It always began with the playing of “The Star Spangled Banner” and a “Grand Processional Review” that featured the entire cast circling the arena. Cody was always the last to enter, galloping to the center of the arena, sweeping off his hat, and bowing to the crowd. (His horse bowed too.) The rest of the show interspersed shooting acts with vignettes reenacting the work of the Pony Express, an attack on an emigrant wagon train, an attack on the Deadwood Stage Coach, and “Phases of Indian Life.” The show also featured several exhibitions of stunt riding, horse racing, and “cowboy fun,” which entailed rodeo-style roping and riding tricks. A narrator with a megaphone described the action and provided a loose commentary to help unify the entire show, while the “Cowboy Band” played musical accompaniment that also served this function. The show concluded with a reenactment of an “Attack on a Settler’s Cabin by Hostile Indians. Repulse by Cowboys, under the leadership of Buffalo Bill.” The Wild West thus drew to a close with a triumphant defense of white domesticity and settlement.28 The “Bison Hunt,” another popular act, dramatized control over nature. No bison were actually killed in the show; the “Bison Hunt” was

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really a display of high-speed horsemanship amidst a herd of stampeding bison, which charged around and were eventually herded, with much shooting of blank cartridges, out of the arena. British readers already knew this animal as the quintessentially western beast, and Cody had one of the largest herds in captivity.29 As the bison became increasingly rare, many spectators probably believed they were looking at an animal that would be extinct within a few years. Bison underscored the historical passages that the show featured. In animal form, they were living relics of a passing era, much as the show’s human performers were. Cody himself was the show’s center, and he carefully constructed his stage persona. As had been true during his earlier scouting and stage career, Cody deliberately dressed the part of a western hero, with his long hair, buckskin coat, Stetson hat, and intricately decorated cowboy boots described by a Nebraska newspaper to be “the most elaborate and best pair of boots ever made in this state.” Cody’s horse also had a costume, appearing in the grand entry with a gilded headstall and breastplate. When Cody and his horse made their entry they epitomized horse and rider working together. Cody’s agents plastered the city with posters announcing the show and bearing his picture. From the start of the show, observers could easily pick out the recognizable figure of Buffalo Bill. One American newspaper reporter covering the Wild West for a New York paper described him as wearing “a close-fitting suit of buckskin” and the aforementioned boots, appearing “every inch a prince” even when performing for actual royalty.30 In addition to appearing in several of the reenactments, Cody had a solo act in which he galloped around the arena and shot at glass balls fired into the air by an assistant. Cody invested his performance with intense charisma. Observers frequently described him as a centaur, a word that evoked a mythic unity with nature. Years later an Englishwoman remembered how she and her family had enjoyed the Wild West: “We were all so impressed with this fine-looking American gentleman on his beautiful white horse. . . . My relatives kept saying, ‘What a handsome man’ and ‘What a rider.’ . . . People would look at

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him and say, ‘My word!’ ” On horseback Cody seemed a throwback to an earlier, chivalric age when men rode beautiful stallions rather than taking buses and trains to offices and factories, as most Londoners did. The Illustrated London News gushed: “He is a perfect horseman, an unerring shot, a man of magnificent presence and physique, ignorant of the meaning of fear or fatigue; his life is a history of hairbreadth escapes, and deeds of daring, generosity, and self-sacrifice, which compare very favourably with the chivalric actions of romance and he has been not inappropriately designated the ‘Bayard of the Plains.’ ” The News’s reference to Bayard alluded to Pierre Terrail, signeur de Bayard, a fifteenth-century knight celebrated in French history as the epitome of chivalric virtue, “le chevalier san peur et san reproche” (the knight without fear and without reproach). Invoking Bayard thus allied Cody with a European history of romantic glory. The reporter who wrote this story, tellingly, could not say precisely who had designated Cody as “the Bayard of the Plains.” This moniker seems to have been applied to Cody exactly once, namely, in this article, evidence of the ways in which British observers sought to incorporate Cody into a familiar narrative of aristocratic valor.31 Cody’s abilities as “an unerring shot” complemented his horsemanship. Mastery of firearms symbolized the control over technology that enabled conquest. This idea was central to the Wild West’s publicity for years. The show’s program explicitly informed British readers that “without the rifle ball we of America would not be to-day in possession of a free and united country, and mighty in our strength.32 There were also sexual metaphors linked to the control of the gun. The marksman could direct his desires and control his violent urges rather than spraying bullets randomly. In the British context Cody’s marksmanship associated him with an aristocratic culture of shooting at country manors and the big game hunts of the imperial ruling class. Gun ownership was not widespread in Britain, and guns were not the important talisman of universal masculinity in the United Kingdom that they were in America. Cody’s superb skills as a marksman, then, could be read by

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London audiences as a demonstration of his innately aristocratic ways, another way in which he was the “Bayard of the Plains” while simultaneously underscoring his exoticism as an emissary from a place where guns were every man’s right.33 Cody and his publicists ensured that his public image was neither rough nor savage. Cody’s autobiography, for sale at every performance, described his courtship of and marriage to a respectable white woman, and the show’s program included a sentimental poem describing his love for his infant daughter. His reassuring domesticity reinforced his claim to be a hero in whose hands civilization was safe. Though Cody’s wife did not travel with him to London, his eldest daughter, Arta, did, and she accompanied him on social engagements. Promotional pamphlets contained stories about Cody’s childhood that presented him as originating from an idealized middle-class home: “ ‘A better son never blessed a mother, wild as he is,’ said Mrs. Cody with love in every tone, as her glance followed his form. ‘Rough he may be to others, but to us he is as kind and gentle as the breeze of a summer eve.’ ” The written texts constructing Cody’s public persona reflected the domestic values that acts like the “Virginia Reel on Horseback” and “Attack on a Settler’s Cabin” presented. While such acts were set within the wild space of the show’s arena, they enacted heterosexual courtship and the importance of defending the nuclear family.34 Cody’s respectability and his unique claim to be presenting an edifying spectacle instead of just another circus drew many eminent guests to Earls Court. The startling juxtaposition of Cody’s Wild West with a procession of titled and fashionable visitors became one of the most highly publicized aspects of the show’s London run. The Prince of Wales, his wife, and their retinue came for a preview performance on May 5. The prince asked for a tour of the stables, was introduced to Cody, Annie Oakley, and a number of other stars, and gave the contents of his cigarette case to the Lakota headman Red Shirt. Later he sent Cody a diamond and ruby pin in the shape of a horseshoe bearing the three feathers of the prince’s insignia.35 In the words of

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Cody’s nephew, Al Goodman, who was employed with the show, his “Uncle Will” was “getting up in the highest class of people.” Victoria’s other children visited as well, as did the kings of Denmark, Greece, and Belgium and other royalty.36 Cody commemorated these visits with two posters depicting the showman surrounded by portraits of “Distinguished Visitors to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, London 1887.” One version contained portraits of male royalty, the other of female royalty, their visages arrayed around a central portrait of Buffalo Bill, suggesting that they were satellites who, in their willingness to come and see the show, had paid a kind of tribute to Cody. The most striking example of Cody’s success in attracting “the highest class” was the command performance for Queen Victoria on May 11. Although 1887 was her Diamond Jubilee year, Victoria had appeared in public only rarely since her husband had died in 1867. Her extended and intense mourning surpassed the requirements of etiquette and by the mid-1870s had led to press criticism of her remoteness and even her failure to perform her duty. By 1887, however, preparations for her Golden Jubilee had raised her public profile and increased her popularity, as that summer she made various public appearances around London. Nonetheless, Cody and his head publicist, John Burke, described Victoria’s willingness to venture out of Windsor Castle and into London in order to see the Wild West show as a singular triumph for Cody. In particular, they made much of the supposed fact that Victoria had bowed in recognition of the American flag when it was dipped in salute of her. As described by Burke in his biography of Cody, Buffalo Bill: From Prairie to Palace (1893), this incident constituted a historical moment of unprecedented power and meaning: “For the first time in history since the Declaration of Independence a sovereign of Great Britain had saluted the star-spangled banner—and that banner was carried by Buffalo Bill. It was an outward and visible sign of the extinction of that mutual prejudice, sometimes almost amounting to race hatred, that had severed the two nations from the times of Washington

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and George III to the present day. The hatchet was buried at last, and the Wild West had been at the funeral.”37 Burke’s theological allusion—in Catholic and Anglican theology an “outward and visible” sign of inward grace accompanies each sacrament—underscored the solemnity with which he expected readers to understand this event. Buffalo Bill had presided over, even brought about, a kind of marriage between Britain and its former colony, and “race hatred” would now be replaced by racial solidarity.38 Yet, appearing as they did amidst coverage of other royal appearances occasioned by the jubilee, British press accounts of the queen’s patronage tended to place the Wild West into a broader context. For instance, illustrations of the queen’s visit to the Wild West in the Graphic occupied the bottom half of a page; the top half depicted a royal visit to a London hospital. The Graphic’s illustrations did not show the queen bowing. Rather, they displayed the dipping of the American flag while “Horse and Rider [Made] Obeisance.” The Wild West became not so much a triumph of American significance and instead was anglicized into yet another tribute to the long-reigning monarch. Some strands of popular culture did indicate a certain level of uneasiness with Victoria’s choice of entertainment. It was true she had not patronized the British stage (though she had been to circuses) since her husband’s death, and satirists like Vesta Tilley, the music hall singer, pleaded with Victoria to “give the English stage a chance” instead of patronizing foreign shows.39 Reporters depicted Cody as a man of humble origins and simple ways who, owing to his innately “lofty” and “courtly” nature, was “unembarrassed and himself in the company of princes and kings.”40 Cody’s confidence suggested that masculinity could not be affected by external circumstances or context; regardless of the setting, Cody was always “himself.” Cody did indeed have some experience at rubbing shoulders with the wealthy and titled because of his work as a hunter’s guide on the plains. By 1887 Cody had been presenting himself for years as one of nature’s noblemen, on easy terms with all men because

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of his prowess at riding, shooting, and hunting. His social life in London only restaged the image he had developed guiding Sheridan’s hunting party in 1871 and the Grand Duke Alexis in 1872. London newspapers dredged up material on Cody’s link to aristocratic hunters, often with little regard for accuracy, as when the Courier of London described an expedition on which “Lord Dunraven and the Duke Alexis of Russia were exploring the West” together. As far as the Courier was concerned, the more important detail was that “the noble lord, in speaking of his scout’s qualities, declared ‘that his eyesight could be depended upon like a field-glass, a wonderful judge of distance, always ready to tell how far off it was to water, a natural gentleman in his manners as well as character.’—a truly handsome tribute from an accomplished traveller.”41 On the basis of such connections Cody received numerous invitations to luncheons, dinners, and other parties as well as to more informal social occasions such as rides in Hyde Park. He dined with the lord mayor and with Lord Randolph and Lady Churchill (the former Jennie Jerome, Clara Frewen’s sister) and was made an honorary member of several clubs. He also gave his own parties, including two lavish events at the Wild West encampment itself. At one of these the former prime minister William Gladstone was the guest of honor; the other was attended by James G. Blaine and various well-known Americans who were residing in London at the time.42 At all of these events Cody presented himself as a natural gentleman who innately understood how to consort with the titled and fashionable. Other Americans in London at the same time described Cody’s social success with fascination. Special Correspondent T. C. Crawford of the New York World (who would later gain renown for reporting on the Appalachian feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys) commented that Cody was “in as much demand at all kinds of high society gatherings as if he were a visiting prince. Indeed few visiting princes could have as many invitations thrust upon them as he has had since his arrival here.” When Cody attended the closing meeting of the elite Coaching Club with the member of Parliament and admiral Lord

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Charles Beresford, a crowd even greater than that surrounding the Prince and Princess of Wales gathered around the coach. Beresford’s invitation was in itself a sign of Cody’s popularity among London’s elite, but it also hints at the ways in which social success was facilitated by extant networks between Britain and the American West. Beresford, the second son of the Anglo-Irish fourth Marquess of Waterford, had visited Moreton Frewen on Powder River; his brother Delaval ranched in Mexico and Canada. Beresford was related to the aristocratic, landrich and cash-poor Anglo-Irish Leslie family, into which Clara Frewen’s younger sister Leonie married in 1884. Beresford was also a member of the notorious Marlborough House set that centered on the Prince of Wales and the scandal-ridden sons of the Duke of Marlborough, one of whom, Lord Randolph, as noted, was married to Clara’s older sister Jennie. Cody’s social connections in London intersected with established linkages between the worlds of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, the western range cattle industry, and the social elite of London in ways that at first may not be apparent.43 Marshall Wilder, an American comedian, was in London in 1887 and frequented the same social circles. He later wrote in his memoirs that Cody was “the greatest, most unapproachable, thoroughly howling success that America ever sent to London.” Wilder explained Cody’s appeal by connecting it to his friendships with the British elite: A great many English noblemen and other gentlemen have been coming over [to the United States] for years to hunt big game; society and the newspapers haven’t got hold of them, for they didn’t come for that sort of thing. It is generally the bogus noblemen and gentlemen that New York society takes up strongly and then drops in a hurry. Well, these people always went West, of course, in search of their game, and consulted our army officers . . . and the officers selected guides for them. A few years ago Bill was the favorite guide for any army officer who wanted to go out to look for game, consequently Bill was

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guide for hundreds of these gentlemen, and they discovered what a splendid good fellow he was. Whereas New York society falls for “bogus” aristocrats, the real nobility went west for big game, implicitly opposed in this text to the frivolous “sort of thing” reported in the society pages of the city newspapers. Unlike the faux gentlemen who bamboozled unsuspecting New Yorkers, Cody was a genuine “splendid good fellow” who impressed himself on these gentlemen as “born well and well-bred,” so much so that he became, in turn, part of their stories about the West: In fact, as one nobleman, whose name I won’t give, said to me once, confidentially, “It was a great relief to me to have Buffalo Bill come over here. I have done a great deal of shooting in the West, and though I say it myself, as you Americans put it, I did it pretty well. But I brought home so many antlers, and skins, and furs, that it seemed to some of my acquaintances I must have got some of them with a golden bullet or at least with a handful of silver shot. Bill had always been my guide, so he no sooner landed and became acquainted than people began to ask him about some of my exploits. They repeated to him the stories I had told them, and Bill, being a veracious man, had to admit I had told only the truth. In fact, he sometimes added a point or two which I had omitted, not so much out of modesty as for fear that if I told the whole truth nothing that I said would be believed. That set me up at once among my acquaintances, and as soon as some other sportsmen heard of it they also hurried to Bill for certificates of character and sportsmanship. Cody and his elite guests reinforced each other’s narratives of the masculine self. When they were hunting in the West he had enabled them to see themselves as having an ostensibly primitive experience that nevertheless remained safely within the boundaries of civilized manliness. When they returned to London they could describe Buffalo

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Bill and in doing so provide the sort of lively detail that gave their stories a startling ring of truth. Yet too much color could make their stories suspect, too much like a tall tale and not enough like something that might really have happened. Even the unspeaking testimony of “antlers, skins, and furs” could not fully corroborate their claims to hunting prowess; perhaps someone else had shot these animals, or perhaps they had even purchased these things. Cody’s advent in London, then, could serve to authenticate the version of themselves they performed when narrating their western travels. Likewise, for Cody the patronage of the wealthy, titled, and well connected had set him apart from the other scouts, hunters, and guides hanging around North Platte in the early 1870s. Such associations were stepping-stones that he crossed, one by one, to New York, to his stage career, to the Wild West, and eventually over the Atlantic. For his elite clients Cody had perfected his trademark imagery: the spotless buckskin suit, the white hat, the perfectly groomed flowing hair, and the gentle, self-deprecating humor. His manners were always “graceful” and “gentle” without being “in the slightest degree subservient” or “cringing.” As Wilder wrote, “Bill always seemed to know exactly what to do and say. . . . I must express my pride and delight, as an American, at the figure Bill cut in society. He fills a full-dress suit as gracefully as he does the hunter’s buckskins, carries himself as elegantly as any English gentleman of leisure, uses good grammar, speaks with a drawing-room tone of voice, and moves as leisurely as if he had nothing to do all his life but exist beautifully.” From his poverty-stricken childhood in Kansas in the violent decade before the Civil War to his scrabbling for work as a teamster and buffalo hunter, Cody had always had far more to do in his life than merely “exist beautifully.” Though he romanticized his past in his autobiography, he never pretended to have come from a less humble background than he actually had. He breathed just a whisper of homely, authentic masculinity into the parties he attended and conveyed a little of his rough glamour to his patrons through his nearness. By wearing both buckskin and broadcloth so well Cody reassured men that they too could put off the drab clothes

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of the office and the drawing room and put on their cowboy outfits if they so desired. Escape to the world of one’s dreams was possible; after all, escape from obscurity and hardship had been possible for him.44 Other Americans also fashioned a masculine identity within this circuit of mutually reinforcing stories. Wilder’s account of Cody’s success in London positioned its author simultaneously as a friend of Cody, a friend of fashionable gentlemen, and an American commenting on Britain for American readers. Wilder’s knowing tone situated him as a participant in the fashionable world, a man who, like Cody, had used his show business talent and determination to gain access to society. Wilder was born with a spinal defect and was under four feet in height, and in view of this fact his admiration for Cody’s physical presence and graceful movement takes on new significance. While it would probably be misleading to say that Wilder identified with Cody, he does seem to have taken vicarious pride in watching Cody’s beautifully dressed body represent American manliness in a foreign land. Fashion’s favor, however, was short-lived by nature. To some observers Cody’s popularity was simply one more craze that a jaded society had taken up for the sake of amusement. As the Nation soberly observed from Boston, Nothing can well be odder than the attention paid in England to “Buffalo Bill,” or, as he is there known, “Colonel the Hon. William F. Cody.” He is literally the great lion of the season in London. He is an honored guest at the fashionable parties, invited out to dinner everywhere, and passes a good deal of his time in the company of royal personages. In fact, he has had a far more flattering reception than any foreigner without official rank or antecedents to help him. Garibaldi was much less favorably received, although he was, when he went to England, one of the most famous and romantic heroes of the day. Cody’s social success, like that of Fred Archer the jockey, marks the enormous space which pure amusement now occupies in the

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life of the well-to-do classes in England. The number of people who follow amusement as a business has probably increased ten-fold during the last forty years, and the place of people who furnish amusement has been correspondingly exalted. Americans of any grade or species who can do this are especially successful in London society. Their stories, their jokes, their songs, their new card tricks, their skill in poker and euchre, sometimes supply the place, in giving them social consideration, of nearly everything else which makes a human being respectable.45 The dizzying, restless pace of modern metropolitan life demanded ever-newer forms of entertainment, to be discarded as soon as something else came along. Cody’s popularity did not herald a new era of Anglo-American comity or a rebirth of white manliness. Far from it—it was a symptom of a modern society crazy for celebrity and novelty. Similarly, not every account of Cody appearing in the London press idealized him; some satirized him as a dupe of the fashionable world who did not realize he was being patronized. or was it high society that did not realize it was being taken in by an American swindler? Poems like “The Rajah Sees Britannia’s Bill” humorously depicted a social world in which no one was what he claimed to be, but it hardly mattered as long as one was amused: On Earl’s-court plain there dwells a man Whom we know naught about Except that he his life began As trapper and as scout. His hair so long, his twang so strong Have won the town’s goodwill E’en lords incline, and ladies pine, To dine, with Buffalo Bill. Yes, it’s Buffalo Bill wherever we go Buffalo Bill and his Wild West Show

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Day after day more popular grow; It’s Buffalo Bill, with high and low, Everything’s Buffalo Bill, you know— And the “rage” still goes on quickening, Buffalo Bill is here and there, Buffalo Bill is everywhere! Saved for him is the honoured chair; Much admired is his lengthy hair; Petted is he by the young and fair— It is really somewhat sickening! Ladies at him in rapture gaze, Poets write him heroic lays; All Society hymns his praise— Buffalo Bill is, in short, the craze The latest fad of these silly days, That the town has set its eye on. He may be noise, but he is new, His tales are strange, if not quite true; His hands, if horny, are tender too, And it’s known he’s run some Indians through; So with all his faults, you see he’ll do To be made a social lion!46 In the eyes of the author of this poem Cody’s appeal had less to do with the noble values of a vanished era of adventure than with London’s incessant craving for novelty. Cody claimed to have killed Indians, but his hands were as “tender” as they were rough. The truth value of Cody’s claims to heroism, however, did not matter to “the town,” comprised of lords and adoring ladies who were drawn by Cody’s sexual allure as symbolized by his trademark “lengthy hair.” Yet the implication was that while Cody was everywhere for a time, his fame was a mere craze or fad. Perhaps he was a fraud, but no one took him

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seriously anyway. The fuss being made over him was ridiculous, according to another press account.47 Rather than being an embodiment of enduring values of courage and conquest, Cody was merely another disposable commodity. Similarly, the popular song, “Buffalo Bill, or The Wild West Show” addressed the listener in the persona of the “Ringtail Roarer,” the “Terror of the Plains” who now in “tip top drawing rooms” had charmed “handsome ladies” and made English competitors for female attention look “just like . . . ‘bucking mules.’ ” The Buffalo Bill of the song claimed he not yet been civilized, and in fact had made the calm precincts of Kensington into a Wild West, but the song also pointed out that Cody and his boys had, in a way, tamed themselves by chasing buffalo for “a shilling.” This song, like the humorous poem complaining that “Every hoarding is plastered, from East-end to West” with posters bearing Cody’s visage, implied that Cody and the Wild West were after all merely another product to be sold and then discarded when it had ceased to be fashionable. The anonymous author of an article in the Era even warned Cody and the rest of the Wild West show cast against succumbing to the blandishments of celebrity. While it might be pleasant to be “the hero of the hour, on softest couch reclined” and to be surrounded by adoring women, such environments were emasculating and would invariably “demoralize” the westerners. Moreover, they would only find themselves “deserted for some later sensation” after “Society, with its customary fickleness,” lost interest. The article implies that a man who was too popular in “Society” would become dependent on others’ favor, unlike a true man who could determine his own worth. The Era argued that the Wild West show served to remind Londoners that “there may be something worth living for besides scandal, social supremacy, and sensuous sentiment,” but apparently even the Wild West was not impervious to these seductive dangers. In fact, as another popular song, “The Wild Wild West of London,” put it, compared to the cast of Cody’s show London itself contained “a fiercer lot of savages” and “maidens, in their war-paint” who could be seen any night in London’s West End.48

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The “Society” Cody understood himself to be entering was itself subject to constant redefinition. Earlier in the century elite social life in London had centered on the court and on the most prestigious aristocratic families. By the 1880s, however, those who were in “Society” agreed that it was changing. Manufacturers and businessmen, Americans and South Africans, even Jewish people were now welcome in homes that a few decades earlier would have spurned such individuals regardless of their wealth. Social events themselves were more frequent in number and more impersonal. Garden parties, which enabled hostesses to ask people to their homes without admitting them to the inner sanctum of the house itself, and masquerades, which played with the sense of performance and unfamiliarity that seemed to characterize social life among the elite, were the most fashionable entertainments of the era. The Earl of Dunraven, who attended several masquerades with Jennie Churchill and Clara Frewen, recalled enjoying the excitement they felt at going out in disguise among people they barely knew. At the same time, he remembered this era as one in which “ ‘Society’ was hard pressed” for money and “took to worshipping the Almighty Dollar unabashed.” Himself free of financial worries, Dunraven saw this development as “demoralising” in the way it enabled sleazy people to enter great houses by the “back stairs and saunter . . . out the front door.” A wide variety of publications featuring abundant illustrations chronicled social doings, undermining the fiction of intimacy among related elites who were understood to be each other’s familiars. Society was an opulent spectacle of privilege for an audience that extended beyond those who participated in that spectacle.49 Nostalgic writers imagined a past in which London’s elite had been a pageant of the nation’s leading aristocratic families arrayed in stately majesty around the monarch. Society now resembled a “vast and complicated machine” with countless moving parts. Various “sets” formed around key figures such as the Prince of Wales, whose Marlborough House set became notorious for its profligacy and scandalous love affairs. Some, like Lady Dorothy Nevill, herself the daughter

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of an earl, complained that there was too much moneymaking in social conversation, too many speculators “who, by some lucky coup,” were now “welcome in houses where formerly [they] would scarcely have been allowed in the servants’ hall.”50 In this context one might see Cody’s status as a social “lion” in a new light. His social success may attest to the ways in which the rituals of privilege that had once constituted London society had given way to a new kind of display and a new kind of public. The new society had some things in common with the old. In both, wealth mattered, but the new society did not scrutinize the sources of that wealth too closely, whereas the riches of the old society had rested on the landed estates of the nobility and gentry, a source of wealth now in decline.51 Cody lingered on the borderland between ruffian and gentleman; his image shifted between the categories of the authentic and the fraudulent, calling the very stability of those categories into question. His very westernness defined him as a creature who could shift from one category to another. In March 1887, a few months before the Wild West show opened in Earls Court, the Illustrated London News ran an article about the increasing numbers of “scions of good homes” who planned to “turn cowboy.” The newspaper cautioned its readers to beware, lest they become “men who, like Martin Chuzzlewit, found the West made up of very questionable Edens.”52 Chuzzlewit, the eponymous hero of Charles Dickens’s novel, had gone west only to find he was the dupe of canny, dishonest land speculators who had promised him a paradise and given him a malarial swamp. Dickens’s fictional account of disappointed hopes was only one of numerous texts from the 1830s and 1840s, including Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans, that depicted the American frontier as a raw wilderness infested with deceit and dishonor. The novel The Way We Live Now (1875) by Anthony Trollope, Frances’s son, further illustrates this aspect of the American West as the source of sinister forces that threaten to undermine English morality and, along with it, English prosperity and happiness. The plot of the

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novel centers on a proposed railroad line from Salt Lake City to Veracruz, Mexico. Paul Montague, a key character in the novel, is a young man from a genteel background whose aunt and uncle have moved to California to grow fruit. Paul gets into trouble at Oxford and is expelled. He takes himself and his inheritance of six thousand pounds to California, where he loses his heart to a widow with a shady past and his money to his uncle’s unscrupulous business associate, the slick San Franciscan Hamilton K. Fisker. Fisker’s scheme to float fraudulent railroad bonds on the stock exchange depends on Montague’s social connections as well as on the backing of the shady financier Auguste Melmotte, who finds various impoverished noblemen to sit on the board of the proposed railroad. Trollope’s novel weaves together speculation in western railroad stock, the heartless pursuit by fortunehunting men of the heiress Marie Melmotte, the uselessness of aristocratic youth, and the invasion of London society circles by Americans, Jews, and assorted other foreigners into a drama about the decline of English moral standards. Like the worthless IOU’s the young gentlemen of the West End exchange at their high-stakes card games, the railroad stock represents nothing of real value. The Way We Live Now shows how risk and failure clung to British narratives about the West like rumors whispered about a newcomer to society. “West” was a term that could also refer to a location in London itself. Divided between the West End and the East End, the city contained two opposed zones of high and low. The elite male had access to the entire city; as a flaneur he could avail himself of pleasures across boundaries of class and explore the city at will. The toff who resorted to the pleasures of commercial sex and disreputable music halls and gambling joints was one of the stock figures of late Victorian culture. He could enjoy the pleasures of the West End, its clubs and exclusive shops, as a working-class man could not. Yet he could delve into the disreputable theaters and bars of the East End as a woman of his own class could not. He could go wherever he wanted, from the halls of Parliament to the lowest slums. He even could turn this ability into the

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game of masquerade. Newspapers, charity reports, and sociological studies abounded with narratives about men who lived among the poor without exposure while disguised as tramps or laborers.53 The elite male’s freedom to move through urban space, either as himself or in disguise, betokened his privileged position at the top of the social hierarchy. Cody, with his ability to move from western space—the frontier, relocated to Earls Court—to the drawing rooms of the elite, was similarly mobile. Yet the urban terrain was the site of challenges to the social order from actors who called the security of that elite man into question. Prostitutes, protesting workers, educated New Women, and racial others also walked the streets, which became a place where a constant negotiation over power and weakness, visibility and secrecy took place. Even as upper- and middle-class men assumed their superiority in the public space of London, that superiority was not assured. Narratives such as “The Bitter Cry of Outcast London” and “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” typified this new vision of the city as frightening and overwhelming, and although they positioned their middle-class authors as powerful expositors of these dark places, they were also shot through with anxiety about the anarchic elements of the city. Could the figure personified by Buffalo Bill tame this wilderness that was so near and yet so terribly unfamiliar? On one hand, it would seem that Cody’s image as a shining warrior on horseback reassured Londoners that the answer was a clear yes. On the other hand, however, Cody’s own masquerade, the ways in which he winked at the possibility that he too was not really what he seemed to be, threatened to undermine the very pleasures of stabilized masculinity that he promised in his show. Whereas the well-to-do disguised themselves in order to explore “darkest London,” Cody disguised himself to take on the West End, not the East. This aligned him, in some ways, with the workingclass gent or swell, the youth who emulated the dress and manners of the elite male as a strategy of sexual conquest. Although the gent sought out women of his own class, not the women of the reception rooms to

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which Cody was admitted on the strength of his masquerade, the way in which Cody blended rough origins with smooth manners in his social appearances echoed the gent. Cody’s public image also raised the specter of an even more horrifying figure, the gentleman whose polished exterior concealed primitive urges that could wreak terrible violence. Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, published in 1886, articulated the fear that civilization could not restrain the base, animalistic passions that lurked within. Likewise, the sensational series of newspaper articles “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” laid the blame for London’s child prostitution trade squarely at the door of aristocratic perverts who craved ever-younger children to despoil. Perhaps Cody appeared to be a gentleman, but what acts of savagery had he witnessed on the plains, and how might those sights have warped him? In an era when rumors circulated that Jack the Ripper was actually an insane physician, a demented aristocrat with grotesque sexual tastes, or even the Prince of Wales himself, driven mad by a life of debauchery, the question of civilization’s power to restrain primitive passions had taken on new significance.54 Despite the ways in which Cody’s performance of masculinity would seem to be a means of symbolically taming London’s wildernesses, the ambiguities of his persona only underscored the class and gender tensions that held the city in their grip. As Cody put it in a letter to Gen. Nelson Miles asking for a testimonial, he “wish[ed] to be treated like a gentleman” and not like one of “the many imposters who have gone before.” The careful and thorough work of the Cody publicity machine—the letters reprinted in the program, the autobiography for sale during the show, the photographs—all of these were designed to support his claims. Cody and his publicists skillfully made use of his London successes, absorbing the fruits of their advertising labors into an ongoing campaign to represent him as the “veritable W. F. Cody known as Buffalo Bill” who had not only acted as a scout and guide on the plains but also had received royal

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approval. For Cody western masculinity was a way of climbing up in the world. Under the flowing locks and broad-brimmed hat was the mind of a Gilded Age businessman with his eye out for new opportunities. From London he wrote to his brother-in-law, “There is lots of money to be had in this country [England] for 3 percent—and if you hear of a big syndicate that has got a good honest thing that requires lots of money, I believe I could float it over here. I am running with such men as the Rothchilds now.”55 In some ways Cody was yet another in a long line of American sharpsters with yet more schemes to promote among innocent British investors and travelers—even if they never made it beyond Earls Court. When Cody brought the Wild West to London he began a new chapter in the story of the British romance with the American frontier. He told his part of this narrative not only in the arena but also in the performances he gave during carriage rides in Hyde Park, in drawing rooms, and at banquets. His enactment of western masculinity resonated with specific cultural preoccupations. Like tales of fortunes waiting to be made in Wyoming, Cody seemed almost too good to be true: too pure, too brave, too noble, a hero out of juvenile fiction. Like inflated cattle company stock, Cody was perhaps less than what he seemed to be, the target of suspicious whispers about deception. Precisely because British discourse about the West defined it as the source of renewal for British masculinity in decline, Cody’s representational strategies around deception and authenticity raised different questions for a London audience than they did in the United States. Cody could attest meaningfully to the hunting triumphs of elite British sportsmen only if in fact he was a reliable witness on the topic of true western masculinity. If he was in question, then so were they. Perhaps his success in London proved the truth asserted in a letter written to the Times in 1883 by “An Englishman Long Resident in the United States”: “unscrupulous but shrewd Yankees” all too often “outwitted” and “swindled” trusting English people. Although Cody was central to his show’s spectacle, its story of white triumph, of civilization over savagery, resonated with British

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audiences independently of Cody’s individual performance. Taken as a whole, the Wild West show promised Britons that they too could be part of the world-historical progress of Anglo-Saxonism. British audiences could view the Wild West show this way because of a body of rhetoric and analysis produced by travel writers and political analysts that elaborated a global historical narrative linking Great Britain and the United States as imperial partners for a new age. Ultimately, western masculinity became detached from any specific place and developed into a template for hegemonic masculinity on any frontier, in any space where civilization grappled with recalcitrant colonial subjects. Cody sought the imprimatur of international approval and aristocratic patronage as a way of burnishing his claim to represent authentic western masculinity. He and his publicists presented his London run as a triumph of Anglo-American rapprochement, as a historical moment reaching far beyond mere entertainment. In many ways this effort was successful; Cody was by far the most famous western showman of his day, a man whose name has become essentially synonymous with western manhood. He did a great deal to advance the creation of an imagined global West, a fantasy playground of cowboys and Indians that could be experienced through new forms of representation even if viewers never went to the West. He took this West out of the boys’ stories and travel books and gave it new, fabulous life. However, his very success could be interpreted as a commentary on the instability of modern life. The body of the western hero, seemingly so impervious, could in some contexts be a mere tailor’s dummy, a device for selling a costume. Western masculinity was becoming increasingly detached from particular places, floating freely into culturally produced spaces like that bounded by the Wild West arena.

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5 A WHITE MAN’S COUNTRY: ELITE MASCULINITY, RACIAL DECLINE, AND THE FRONTIER STORIES OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT In March 1909 Theodore Roosevelt went to Africa to hunt big game. In his copious baggage was a double-barreled rifle, suitable for shooting elephants and rhinoceros, presented to him by British friends and acquaintances. The inside of the case was inscribed with a dedication “in recognition of his services on behalf of the preservation of species by means of national parks and forest reserves, and by other means,” and a list of those who had contributed to the gift. The names engraved there included Lord Curzon, the former viceroy of India, Sir Harry Johnston, the explorer and colonial administrator, Frederick Lugard, the governor-general of Nigeria, and, turning up in distinguished company as he was fond of doing, Moreton Frewen.2 This gift, of the finest gun Britain could make, from some of Britain’s best-known statesmen and colonial officials to the former American president symbolizes the way in which the pursuit and conservation of big game linked upper-class men together across national borders. In the 1880s, as a rancher in South Dakota, Roosevelt crossed paths with British ranchers, and as a politician and historian he maintained relationships with numerous British statesmen, diplomats, and intellectuals, many of whom shared his fascination with hunting and his concerns about the decline of white masculinity. This network expanded far beyond 1

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metropolitan London to encompass Britain’s imperial possessions, where American men journeyed as tourists and even, at times, as settlers. Roosevelt’s African safari retraced these connections and strengthened them, as press coverage and his own account of the trip, African Game Trails, make clear. Even en route to Africa Roosevelt encountered British planters, civil servants, and officers as his shipmates. “They were a fine set, these young Englishmen,” he mused. “They reminded me of our men who have reflected such honor on the American name, whether in civil and military positions in the Philippines and Porto Rico, working on the Canal Zone in Panama, taking care of the custom-houses in San Domingo, or serving in the army of occupation in Cuba.” Roosevelt established a connection between these British servants of empire and those who acted in the interests of the United States overseas; each was motivated by “honor” rather than economics. By listing the locations in which Americans were advancing American empire Roosevelt implicitly divided the globe into British and American spheres of interest. Africa was for the British (and perhaps the Germans) while Latin America and the Pacific would be “tak[en] care of” by the United States. Of “these young Englishmen” he admitted that he “felt as if [he] knew most of them already, for they might have walked out of the pages of Kipling.” Roosevelt linked Americans and Britons in a shared imperial project, a “white man’s burden,” a phrase drawn from a poem Kipling wrote specifically to exhort Americans to impose imperial control over the Philippines.3 As Paul Kramer and John Plotz have observed, Kipling’s poem asserts British power to evaluate American competence at imperial rule. The final stanza of the poem promises that “the judgment of your peers” would “search your manhood.” Americans would need to “establish its resemblance to, even its identity with, the judges,” who would look for evidence of masculinity as demonstrated through the racialized exercise of power. Roosevelt’s rhetorical embrace of his Kiplingesque shipmates was a response to such challenges from a former

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president who had stoutly seized a new role for the United States on the global stage.4 Roosevelt’s thinking about Kenya as western space reproduced and strengthened the same discourses that shaped British writing about the West. This is not to argue that Roosevelt derived his understanding of race and manhood from such writing. Roosevelt’s preoccupation— perhaps obsession would be the better term—with manhood originated in his childhood and stamped his entire public career.5 As a young assemblyman in New York he threatened opponents with physical violence and took extended hunting trips. As a rising star in the Republican Party, he developed a vision of effective governance at home and expanded naval power abroad. His flamboyant participation in the Spanish-American War at the head of a troop of Ivy Leaguers and cowboys, his prolific writing and speaking on American history as a struggle between contending forces for mastery of the continent, and his epochal career as a two-term president all attested to the ways in which Roosevelt’s fixation on manly renewal through violence and contact with primitive nature resonated with the American public.6 Turn-of-the-century white middle-class Americans’ preoccupation with manliness reflected a larger cultural project of gender making intertwined with a number of social, economic, and political transformations. Although the important role played by big game hunting in this project has been analyzed in detail by historians, the transnational aspect of American gender ideology in this period has not been studied in detail.7 By placing Roosevelt’s cattle ranching and big game hunting experiences in this context it is possible to see how he performed elite white manhood in ways that were legible to a community that reached literally all over the world. Seen in this perspective, familiar aspects of Roosevelt’s life look different. They start to seem less like the chapters of unique saga and more like the strategies undertaken by other elite men for the recovery of their personal and class identities. In fact, if one can manage to look past the boisterous figure of Roosevelt himself, one sees another Roosevelt, his younger brother Elliott, standing behind

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him in the shadows. Viewed side by side, the stories of these two men lay out two alternatives for elite American manhood during a historical moment rich with contradictory forces. Theodore Roosevelt has been the object of intense scrutiny by historians, and my purpose in what follows is not to provide new information about Roosevelt’s life but to place familiar elements of his personal narrative into a different framework. Like many British men fascinated with the West, Roosevelt was born into a privileged social group at a time when that group was negotiating a new relationship to power. As Sven Beckert has argued, the post–Civil War bourgeoisie of New York comprised a merger of two previously distinct groups, a merchant elite with deep roots in the city’s banking and shipping system, to which the Roosevelt clan belonged, and a manufacturing elite with equally deep roots in the city’s artisanal classes. In the antebellum years these two segments of New York had moved in different social circles and often lived in different neighborhoods. Ideologically, they had much in common; merchants and manufacturers alike viewed American prospects optimistically and emphasized the power of the individual to make his own fortune. However, whereas merchants prized stability and deference, manufacturers saw themselves as producers whose labor and ingenuity contrasted sharply with the parasitical activity of mere bankers and brokers.8 After the political and economic crisis of the Civil War, these two groups essentially merged, a development based on the expansion of finance capital, a common social network based around institutions such as the city’s gentleman’s clubs, and the maintenance of their power against the threats posed by striking workers and unruly immigrants. The resolution of the great question of slavery and the emergence of new forms of industrial wealth changed the political and economic relationship of merchants and manufacturers. The sons of old New York merchant families like the Roosevelts and the Dodges joined the same clubs and attended the same parties as the children of the sugar refiner William Havemeyer and the printing press maker Robert Hoe.

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They were joined by members of newly prominent families such as the Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, and Morgans. Social, political, and economic networks wove together to create a complex web of alliances intended to strengthen the bourgeois hold on power. Yet by the 1890s it was apparent that the hegemony they sought was elusive. In order to secure the goals of liberal industrial capitalism, new forms of bourgeois politics and culture would need to be developed.9 Roosevelt never seems to have questioned the legitimacy of his position at the apex of New York’s interlocked social and economic hierarchies, based as it was on a long family history of prominence in the city. The Roosevelt family navigated the post–Civil War decline in mercantile activity by expanding their economic base, investing their ample capital in banking. Theodore Roosevelt Sr was the youngest son of Cornelius Van Schaak Roosevelt, one of the city’s richest residents, the owner of two Manhattan shipping piers and of real estate throughout lower Manhattan and one of the founders of the National Chemical Bank. Theodore Sr, called Thee by the family, had been sent on extensive tours of the United States and Europe, as was the custom for young New York gentlemen of the era. Widely known for his work on behalf of philanthropic institutions such as the Children’s Aid Society and the American Museum of Natural History, he presided over a family based, first, in the genteel neighborhood around lower Fifth Avenue, at 28 East Twentieth Street, and then, as fashionable addresses shifted uptown, at an immense mansion at 6 West Fifty-Seventh, complete with a gymnasium for his children’s use.10 Twenty-seven when his oldest son, Theodore, was born in 1858, the senior Roosevelt was the sun at the center of the boy’s childhood, the epitome of Christian manliness, a figure of immense vitality and stern love. In his autobiography Roosevelt described his father as “the best man I ever knew. He combined strength and courage with gentleness, tenderness, and great unselfishness.” The younger Roosevelt adored his father, and yet he was steeped in anxiety that he might not prove himself worthy of such a great man. Unlike his “leonine” father,

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he was beset by a variety of ailments that kept the family constantly on alert: asthma, diarrhea, headaches. Illness was something of a way of life in the Roosevelt household, despite the elder Roosevelt’s own vigorous good health. Roosevelt’s mother, Mittie, endured nervous fits and fatigue, his older sister suffered from a spinal defect, and his younger sister Corinne struggled with asthma. Nothing seemed to ease Theodore’s symptoms entirely, and his father seems to have determined that his elder son and namesake needed to master his body through sheer willpower. Thee saw bodily weakness as the weak point in a man’s defense against vice. A supporter of the clergyman Charles Loring Brace, who preached muscular Christianity to working-class youth at organizations like the YMCA and the Newsboys’ Lodging House, Thee believed that if his sickly son could not master his neurasthenia he would falter not only physically but morally as well. Through ferocious exercise and determination the boy gradually built up his endurance and strength; his juvenile letters to his father proudly recount each sparring match, hike, and swim.11 The Roosevelts sought medical advice from many physicians regarding their fragile elder son. Among the doctors to whom they turned was Alphonso D. Rockwell, the partner of the neurologist George M. Beard, who was the leading authority on neurasthenia; in 1881, as noted earlier, Beard published what became the definitive text on the subject, American Nervousness. Rockwell sternly advised young Theodore’s parents that the child was suffering from depleted nerve energy owing to his cosseted life. It must have been a blow to Thee and Mittie to learn that the care and privilege with which they nurtured their son was in fact the origin of his ailments, and family letters give no indication that they embraced Rockwell’s diagnosis to the rejection of all others. They did, however, agree to treatment with a device that would send an electromagnetic charge through the boy’s body to supplement his “vital force” and strengthen his nerves. They also embraced more conventional cures for weak nerves, such as exposure to fresh air, lots of exercise, and frequent changes of scene via travel.12

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Roosevelt’s parents encouraged his love of outdoors activity and his fascination with natural history, hoping it would improve his health. Thee took him riding, swimming, and rowing on summer vacations outside of the city and allowed him to take long hikes through the woods, where he collected various animals and insects.13 He also read voraciously, and his favorite books dealt with hunting and science. Like many of the other subjects of this book, Roosevelt as a child adored Mayne Reid’s novels, particularly The Boy Hunters. Reid himself was a colorful transatlantic character who left his father’s stern Presbyterian home in County Down, Ulster, for Louisiana and Texas, where he drifted from job to job. He fought in the Mexican War and then joined a volunteer force intended to support the revolutionary uprisings in Europe. He changed his mind—apparently Reid’s claims of martial valor in later years were somewhat exaggerated—and settled in London to pursue a career as a novelist.14 Reid’s best-known novel was probably The Boy Hunters, published in 1853. In it, three teenaged brothers travel around Texas in search of a rare white buffalo. They are briefly lost on the prairies, face down various wild animals, and are captured by—and escape from—unfriendly Indians. The two older brothers, Basil and Lucien, represent different aspects of the colonialist encounter with the West: Basil is a hunter, dressed in buckskin, a skilled shot who masterminds the escape from the Indians; Lucien is a naturalist fascinated by plants, animals, and geology. The youngest brother serves as a stand-in for the reader, naively posing questions that his older siblings answer. The historian Gail Bederman has argued that The Boy Hunters traces the heroes’ passage from boyhood to manhood; the novel “draws unmistakably on a wider tradition of Western stories in which . . . white heroes achieve manhood by becoming ‘like’ Indian warriors, while nonetheless remaining unmistakably white. Indeed, the very quest for a white buffalo . . . typifies this tradition: the boys hunt a buffalo, the stereotypical quarry of Indians, yet they hunt a buffalo which is rare and superior because it is white.”15 Such Western adventure stories influenced

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Roosevelt’s understanding of nature throughout his life. The West was a stage on which the white scientist or hunter performed his mastery of nature, a mastery that could be achieved only through violence.16 When Roosevelt was twelve his father presented him with a gift that would change his life, a shotgun suitable for shooting birds and small game. This gift also occasioned the discovery of the youth’s nearsightedness, since he proved incapable of seeing anything clearly enough to hit it. After he acquired glasses Roosevelt became an ardent hunter, killing literally hundreds of birds on his family’s trip to Egypt in 1872. Lessons in taxidermy enabled him to preserve his specimens, which he collected and displayed with carefully prepared labels. From an early age Roosevelt connected the killing of animals with their literal preservation. These activities in turn were linked with the realms of imagination, adventure—and adult masculinity. The whole enterprisegave the anxious child a way of winning fatherly approval. As Roosevelt grew into his teens he poured his energy into boxing, riding, hunting, rowing, and long camping trips in the Adirondacks while continuing his natural history studies. Compared to his siblings Elliott had been a sturdy child, gifted with a lighthearted yet compassionate personality; after a family outing to the circus with Roosevelt cousins Elliott wrote about his fears that the animals were mistreated.17 The two boys were constantly together, along with Corinne, but as they matured their lives diverged. Around the time he turned fourteen Elliott began to suffer baffling symptoms: fainting spells, intense headaches, seizures. He was terrified to be left alone at night, could not concentrate on anything, and struggled with his studies. His “rushes of blood to the head” were so severe he had to leave boarding school after one term, and it was clear he would not follow his brother to Harvard. With each passing year Theodore became less asthmatic, less feeble while Elliott became more distracted, more hopeless. Doctors diagnosed his trouble as nerves; nothing seemed to alleviate his symptoms except travel and outdoors life. Sent to Florida for several weeks of hunting with a family friend, Elliott wrote home

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that he was dirty, disheveled, and well, but his health declined as soon as he got home. By his late teens Elliott appeared to be a textbook example of male neurasthenia.18 “You will have to assume more of the responsibilities of elder brother,” Thee wrote his namesake from London, where he had taken Elliott for a change of scene in 1874. “Ellie is anticipating all sorts of pleasures with you that he will not be able to realize, and it will require much tact on your part not to let him feel his deprivations too much.” Elliott seems to have sensed that his father looked to his namesake to fulfill his hopes for the family. “What will I become when I am a man?” he queried in a plaintive letter of 1873, when he was about thirteen. “Teedie . . . is much quicker and [a] more sure kind of boy, though I will try my best and try to be as good as you if [it] is me, but it is hard.” Elliott idolized his father, calling him “you splendid man, just my ideal,” and, as he matured, his fears that he was not “worthy” of “my own dear Father” sharpened.19 Elliott tried to demonstrate his fitness and strength as well as his ability to be “good.” In 1876 his parents sent him to Fort McKavett in the Texas hill country for his health, with his cousin John as company. From New York, Elliott’s father cautioned him to “be careful always in chance acquaintances” and expressed a wish that the cousins present “a good example to one another and [take] care of each other morally and physically including smoking.” Elliott clearly was expected to maintain the standards of upper-middle-class Christian purity, to be healthful physically and morally. Dutifully, Elliott reported to his father that although it was “hard at first to say ‘I never drink’ or ‘I never smoke’ when asked about every five minutes during the day” by the young soliders who were his companions at the fort, he had managed to do neither. In fact, he was “making the most of his opportunities” to box, ride, and shoot.20 Elliott’s letters indicate how the supposed therapeutic benefits of hunting unfolded within particular social contexts. In the early nineteenth century hunting had seemed dubiously primitive, a marker

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of the nation’s savage past, but as early as the 1820s middle-class men began hunting for pleasure rather than subsistence, as a way of escaping the urbanized routine of their lives and of forging social links. A “new sporting press” emerged to circulate stories of hunting and carry advertisements for guns and other equipment. Sport hunting combined two aspects of national culture. On the one hand it bestowed upon its adherents the rugged glamor of manly backwoodsmen like Daniel Boone. On the other hand it looked toward Great Britain, the source of refinement and gentility. That hunting could reconcile these two cultural impulses suggests its symbolic richness. Sport hunting was “a way to recapture the health, piety, and moral vigor” that belonged to the Jeffersonian yeoman and the frontier hero like Boone, and it also bestowed social rank on those who practiced it, differentiating them from those who could not afford to hunt according to the approved codes of sportsmanship.21 There were, however, elements of mid-nineteenth-century hunting that were embraced both by the elites of Britain and the United States. In both countries hunting generated a whole cultural language: a massive literature of hunting guides, narratives and manuals, exhibitions of prized animal trophies, and even a male interior design aesthetic featuring antlers, skins, and other trophies and demarcating the billiard and smoking rooms of grand Victorian homes as male spaces within the feminized precinct of the home. Middle- and upper-class hunters increasingly saw hunting as a scientific hobby, one that advanced the hunter’s understanding of natural history and improved his store of useful knowledge.22 While the sportsmen’s code has been singled out as the power behind the formation of the twentieth-century environmental conscience, historians have also seen it as an ambivalent instrument that promoted white upper-class social hegemony along with wildlife preservation. The ideals and practices of the sportsman’s code elaborated a style of hunting that would distinguish gentlemanly hunters from racial and social inferiors who, driven by hunger or the demands of the

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market, often killed game in ways frowned on by elites, such as through the use of traps and nets.23 The strengthening of state power over the uses of wildlife defined the way that immigrants, rural folk, and Native Americans hunted as crimes. The hunting code evolved by the transatlantic elite expressed beliefs about the supposedly natural hierarchies among humans by structuring human interactions with animals. To distinguish themselves from those they designated game butchers, that is, people who killed too many animals or killed them in ways that were deemed unsportsmanlike, big game hunters created a whole ideology of hunting designed to make the process as arduous as possible. Female animals with young were to be left alone, shots were to be as accurate as possible in order to secure a relatively quick and painless death, indiscriminate firing into herds of animals was frowned on as wasteful, and if one wounded a creature one was obligated to track it, for miles if necessary, and deliver a humane death. The sporting hunter stalked his prey, seeking the one perfect shot that would produce instant death. Trapping, baiting, and in any way increasing the pain and suffering of the hunted animal were all considered ungentlemanly. The true hunter shot only on foot or, in certain cases, from horseback—never from the window of a train or automobile. Hunters were supposed to know the habitat, life cycle, and anatomy of their prey in order to avoid mistaking a young, sick, or female creature for a healthy male and also to enhance their chances of killing with a single well-placed shot. Hunters were also supposed to learn about firearms, ballistics, and the best equipment.24 Each stage of the hunt demonstrated the hunter’s scientific knowledge of his quarry and his ability to read the landscape for its presence. Before beginning the hunt, the hunter needed to know about the anatomy of the animal he hoped to kill as well as the ballistics and mechanism of his weapon. Mere skill at shooting, however, was, like academic knowledge of the animal’s behavior and preferred habitat, necessary but not sufficient. The hunt truly began when the hunter found himself in a place where the hunted animal was likely to be. This

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required a careful parsing of all the signs—and hunters did refer to the trail and droppings as signs—which the animal might have left. For Theodore and Elliott as well as other Anglo-American big game hunters, one of the elements that set true sport apart from simple slaughter of animals was the ability to stalk an animal at length over whatever ground the animal chose to frequent. Additionally, game could be ranked according to the difficulty of the stalk: the more onerous the terrain and challenging the stalk, the more noble the sport. Bighorn sheep, which had to pursued across the steep, rocky country they frequented, were “the highest among all the species of game,” and to hunt it was “the noblest form of sport with the rifle,” though Theodore added, “always excepting, of course, those kinds of hunting where the quarry is itself dangerous to attack,” such as lions and grizzly bears.25 In one expedition after bighorn, Roosevelt and his companions had “hunted with the most patient and painstaking care” for three days, climbing over steep, uneven ground during harshly cold weather. Roosevelt added, “No other kind of hunting does as much to bring out the good qualities, both moral and physical, of the sportsmen who follow it.” The lean, fit physique developed in such hunting was an external sign of his “hardy and resolute” inner nature; both physical endurance and mental focus were required in such a hunt.26 Other animals were noble quarry because of their attractive appearance. Elk, for instance, were “stately and beautiful,” according to Roosevelt. In a description that employed the word “lordly” twice in as many sentences, he praised its “mighty antlers” and “grand, proud carriage.” The Earl of Dunraven wrote about elk in similarly anthropomorphic terms in The Great Divide. One day as twilight fell Dunraven found a “perfectly magnificent” elk, “a splendid beast” that “stood without betraying the slightest fear or hesitation; but, as if searching with proud disdain for the intruder that had dared to invade his solitude, he slowly swept round the branching spread of his antlers.” Although the lack of light made it difficult to aim, Dunraven fired and by luck hit the stag in the spine, instantaneously dropping it.27 Hunting elk,

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the sportsman often found himself in deep cover, that is, in thickly wooded areas where it was difficult to see the animals and sometimes even to make any progress at all without making noise and alerting the elk to danger. Tracks often disappeared in such terrain, and the hunter had to move forward slowly and carefully, scanning the ground for any broken twigs or footprints that might lead him toward his prey. Getting hopelessly lost was a real possibility in these situations, and hunters had to exercise some skill to remain oriented so as to be able to find their way back to camp. Having found the game, the hunter would have to chase it down on foot. On one such hunt Roosevelt and his companions found themselves “slipping on the wet earth, pitching headlong over charred stumps, leaping on dead logs that broke beneath our weight, more than once measuring our full-length on the ground, halting and firing whenever we got a chance.” They wounded three elk but only one dropped; the other two kept running uphill. Short of breath, Roosevelt “toiled at a shambling trot” after them, managing to fire again at a second elk, only to be surprised by a deer who had the misfortune to literally cross his path at this moment. Startled, he fired at it and killed it. He tried to find the track of the third remaining elk, but he had lost it.28 Roosevelt’s description of his “violent exertion” in hunting elk contains several moments of misreading or misrecognition. The elk that turns out to be a deer, the track that disappears, the slain animal that cannot be found—all of these suggest the ways in which hunting was as much an exercise in finding meaning as anything else. The ultimate moment for the hunter involved a kind of correct identification as well. On this hunt, walking back past the deer to the other two wounded elk, Roosevelt saw that while one was dead, the other was still alive. “When it saw us coming,” recalled Roosevelt, “it sought to hide from us by laying its neck flat on the ground, but when we came up close it raised its head and looked proudly at us, the heavy mane bristling up on the neck, while its eyes glared and its teeth grated together.” Gazing into the eyes of the agitated animal, Roosevelt felt

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a moment of pity, even regret, for the antlers of the elk were “small, twisted, and ill-shaped; in fact, hardly worth preserving, except to call to mind a chase in which during a few minutes I did as much downright hard work as it has often fallen to my lot to do.” Even at this moment of recognition, as Roosevelt met the eyes of the animal he had mortally wounded, there was a kind of misreading; the antlers were not, after all, “worth preserving.” On the other hand, the dead elk’s antlers would serve as a memento of physical prowess, of “hard work” for a man who prided himself on his ability to overcome physical weakness.29 Massive and powerful, bison were especially sought after by American and British big game hunters. However, they presented a set of challenges that exposed some of the conflicts embedded in elite hunters’ relationship to their quarry. Bison were hard to kill. Their massive size, thick coat, and heavy skull protected them against smallcaliber bullets, grazing shots, and faulty aim. Even a shot to the head would not always kill them. After explaining that it was necessary to aim for a small spot behind the animal’s shoulder in order to be sure of dispatching it, one hunter explained, The tenacity of life exhibited by the buffalo is extraordinary and forms perhaps the chief objection to the sport. It is impossible, at least for a novice, to be sure of his aim in the excitement of the chase, with his horse at full speed and having at the same time to be on the watch to guard his own life, as well as to take that of the buffalo. Balls do not always strike in the required spot and I could not but feel sympathy with the great curly headed animal alone as he was in the midst of his native wilderness and attacked by men, assisted by horses and armed with breech-loaders. In the midst of the case . . . I know no sport that combines more elements of excitement. But when the bull, sorely wounded, foiled, bleeding, breathless, furious to the last, his charges tho’ still fierce and frequent, becoming short and feeble, and when at length he can only stagger on a little farther

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and then drop, every real sportsman must wish that the huge animal could be more quickly freed from suffering and must feel satisfaction in thinking that he had not been “done to death” for the mere sake of sport.30 At first, the last phrase of this passage is puzzling; the bison has indeed been killed for the “sake of sport.” The animal’s “tenacity of life” is what makes it worthy prey. What is at issue here is how the bison is killed. The author of this passage could only insist that he had not intended a prolonged and painful death for the bison and that he, as a gentleman, found little pleasure in inflicting such a death. From the bison’s perspective such distinctions meant nothing, but elite hunters clung to them in cases like this, when the ambiguities hidden behind the assertions that hunting was never just killing for killing’s sake came uncomfortably close to the surface.31 Bison fascinated Americans and the British. In 1844, on the basis of votes cast for their favorite images by visitors to George Catlin’s London gallery of western scenes, half of the plates in Catlin’s North American Indian Portfolio (published in Britain) featured bison.32 Nearly every British author of hunting travelogues about the American West represented himself as craving an encounter with the “noblest American game.” As Arthur Pendarves Vivian informed his readers in 1879, “I am not ashamed to confess that my heart jumped at . . . my first sight of a beast of which I had heard so much all my life, but had never dreamed of seeing.”33 To Roosevelt, the creature was the “Lordly Buffalo,” an icon of the American West. Vast bison herds exemplified the abundance of the American continent in the national mythology, and hunting bison was the ultimate way of making oneself into an authentic westerner. Emigrants on overland wagon trains, army officers, and wealthy tourists all sought to kill bison as a way of demonstrating their conquest of western space and, often, of indigenous western people.34 Bison assumed even greater symbolic power as they became increasingly scarce. As Andrew Isenberg has pointed out, the bison

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became the focal point of an American discussion of wildlife preservation that spurred the creation of new game reserves and protective legislation.35 Roosevelt wrote that his bison hunts were tinged with “a certain half melancholy feeling” because of the knowledge that his quarry was “part of the last remnant of a doomed and nearly vanished race.” Yet this knowledge only enhanced his “exulting pride” in his trophy, with its “heavy mane and glossy coat,” because of the rarity of such things.36 The experience of finding, stalking, and killing big game threatened to overwhelm the hunter, exposing him to thirst, extreme temperatures, and arduous labor. Indeed, hunters could themselves become animalistic; their senses were more alert, they moved on all fours or on their bellies across the ground, and they feasted on their kills. Although this intense primitivism was exactly what hunters like Roosevelt located as the source of big game hunting’s renewing powers for the modern man, it also potentially could move him out of the realm of the civilized. Thus the experience of hunting had to be hedged around with all kinds of prohibitions. Dead animals needed to be shifted into the cultural containers of trophy taking, taxidermy, and photography; they became representations of themselves, “whose very inutility signalled their symbolic value and the high social position of their owners.” Displayed prominently in rooms that spoke eloquently of “the juxtaposition of private and public spheres of play and work, of animal and human worlds, and the interpenetration of wilderness and civilization,” such objects testified to their owners’ power to kill and resurrect.37 In 1880, immediately after serving as Theodore’s best man at his marriage to Alice Hathaway Lee, Elliott left on an extended hunting trip to India. He was twenty. He had not done much to fulfill the manly ideal of productive, purposeful activity. A brief stint in banking for one of his Roosevelt uncles had not revealed any talent for finance. He was, however, handsome, charming, an excellent horseman, and a good shot. His family connections and confident bearing opened doors for

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him in London, where he spent a few weeks before embarking to India. Elliott had become friends on the steamship passage with Sir John Rae Reid, a former army captain who was the grandson of a chairman of the East India Company and the son of a governor of the Bank of England. Reid was also an investor in the Anglo-American Cattle Company, along with Charles and Harry Oelrichs, scions of the New York branch of a wealthy shipping and banking family; in fact, Harry was for a time the manager of the Anglo-American, though his main claim to eminence was as an outstanding polo player. Reid gave Elliott “a dozen letters” of introduction to take to India and helped him buy guns and other equipment.38 Elliott’s travels in India lasted over a year and were interrupted by a long illness, probably malaria, in the summer of 1881. Although he did not write a book about his experiences, he did produce numerous letters and two articles describing hunting expeditions. These texts reveal an experience deeply embedded in the rituals and structures of empire. In contrast to the frontier narratives produced by British men in the West—and those written by Theodore only a few years later— writing about hunting in India could not be staged as a solitary sojourn into the wilderness. Hunting in India reinforced the legitimacy of the imperial state by assimilating the British to a centuries-old Mughal practice of hunting lions, cheetahs, and tigers from the back of an elephant. Hunting relieved boredom for those assigned to distant postings, facilitated social interactions between actors in the imperial hierarchy, and eased diplomatic relations between the British and the Indian princes. Elliott’s ability even to move around India depended on the support and guidance he got from British officers and civil servants. They helped him hire servants, secure lodgings and food, select routes, and find medical care when ill. To hunt tigers near Hyderabad, Elliott relied on a chain of introductions that prevailed upon Sir Salar Jung, then the prime minister of the princely state of Hyderabad, to provide Elliott with “a complete outfit” for hunting. In Lahore, en route to Kashmir, Elliott

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noted that he had “five good letters for Kashmir and [knew] one or two men going in, so there I am fortunate too.”39 A “complete outfit” for hunting tigers, in Elliott’s case, involved fourteen elephants, forty camels, and enough servants to minister to every need of the white men on the trip, including carrying them at times by palanquin. Even in Kashmir, hunting ibex and markhor, Elliott had a cook, twenty coolies to carry his baggage, gun bearers, and Ajaib, his “right hand,” who translated for him and managed the whole thing on his behalf. When “three useless servants” insisted on being carried over streams by the coolies, Elliott insisted they go back and wade through the cold water three times each; only he had the right to use the backs of the people who were “a very good substitute for horses by the way here, and not nearly so expensive.” Elliott was the sole dispenser of medicines, paternalistically ministering to “these poor chaps,” a “mass of more or less dark flesh,” when their feet were injured. Hunting trips were complex daily dramatizations of racial hierarchies that positioned Elliott as a sahib. The very ease with which Elliott appears to have slipped into this role hints at how his skill at big game hunting and his patrician background facilitated his entry into the workings of empire. Hunting was leisure, but it was serious leisure, a staging of the power of the Raj over the bodies (and lives, as people were killed on tiger and elephant hunts) of India. Moreover, even if Elliott was an American, his presence in India itself marks the power of the members of the American upper class to pass along the same routes of power and privilege the British elite traveled. British empire made Elliott’s exotic sojourn in the “orient” possible, just as American empire in the West made it possible for men like Dunraven, Frewen, and Stewart to live out their fantasies of big game and the wilderness. When Elliott came home he brought boxes and boxes of exotic presents with him: gold bracelets for his sisters, tin- and silverwork, papier-mâché knickknacks, tea sets, and shawls. He presented his mother with a rug made from the skin of a tiger he himself had shot, an animal nine feet long, which she placed in her sitting room. Scattered around the homes

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of various Roosevelt siblings and cousins, these objects spoke of their cosmopolitanism and their familiarity with empire.40 When Elliott returned from India in March 1882 he had been away for sixteen months. He was well aware that Theodore had taken their father’s place as the head of the family. Elliott was all approval, writing, “It delights me beyond bounds to see the way you have ‘gone in’ for everything as a son of the dear old father should.” Elliott assured his brother, using their father’s old nickname, that he would “come back ready and eager to put my shoulder by yours at the wheel, Thee.” He joined his brother-in-law’s real estate firm and lived at home with his adoring mother. He volunteered with the Newsboys’ Lodging House and the New York Orthopedic Hospital, his father’s favorite causes, and began courting the wellborn Anna Hall, one of New York’s most admired debutantes. After their wedding, celebrated by newspapers as the highlight of the social season, the Roosevelt family might easily have thought this formerly troubled young man had corrected course. Travel and hunting had produced the desired effects.41 Elliott’s letters to Hall express his fervent desire that she guide him and redeem him, tolerate his spells of depression, and bring meaning to his life. Elliott, like the rest of his family, viewed marriage as a critical step toward manhood. Devotion to a wife and children served to curb a man’s base desires, providing him with the control necessary to achieve a manly character. Elliott was deeply devoted to his “poor little Mother” and his sisters, who “unselfishly and with thoughts often only for us boys” lavished constant approval and service upon him and his brother. He simply expanded his pantheon of female household saints to include his wife, “a Sweet Hearted, true, loving Earnest Woman. . . . in her true promise to be my wife I find the peace and happiness which God has taken from me for so long.”42 Elliott’s aunt charged him with the necessity of being “very pure and very true now that you have secured the right to guard, love, and cherish so sweet a girl as Anna.” Theodore too spoke of his wife in worshipful terms as his “sweet, laughing, teasing, little queen. . . . just the sweetest,

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prettiest, sunniest little darling that ever lived,” and confided to his diary a few weeks before his wedding that “whatever troubles come upon me—losses or griefs or sickness—I know she will only be more true and loving and tender than ever.” Women in the Roosevelt family, like all middle-class white women of their circle, bore the burden of weighty emotional needs and expectations. The unexpected deaths of Mittie and Alice Lee Roosevelt on the same day—February 14, 1884— left a painful void.43 Later that year Theodore confronted the first major political test of his career when he and other reformers failed to block the nomination of James G. Blaine at the Republican Party convention that summer. Though Roosevelt had opposed Blaine’s nomination, he chose to support him once he was the party’s candidate, alienating himself from the patrician mugwumps of his father’s generation. Uncertain about what to do professionally and personally, Roosevelt turned to the Dakota Badlands, where he had hunted the year before and had invested in a herd of cattle. For the next few years he spent months at a time on his ranch, though he never lived there year-round and continued to maintain a residence in New York.44 Before Roosevelt ever went to the Dakota Territory he had been drawn into the same early-1880s cattle boom that was pumping capital into ventures like the Frewens’ Powder River Cattle Company. Roosevelt had put five thousand dollars into an enterprise called the Cheyenne Beef Company, had invested ten thousand dollars in the cattle ranch of two Harvard classmates, and almost sunk another five thousand in the ranch of the retired naval officer who helped him arrange his hunting trip in 1883.45 Roosevelt was not good at managing his money; his inheritance from his parents supplied him with a steady income, but his expenses often exceeded it. He spent almost half his yearly income on wedding presents for Alice. He even bounced a check for twenty thousand dollars, apparently confused about the difference between invested principal and ready cash. Despite his family’s great wealth, Roosevelt certainly hoped to make money from his cattle

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investments, particularly as his earned income, from book royalties and his assemblyman’s salary, was modest. After that initial trip, Roosevelt’s involvement in the industry deepened. In total Roosevelt would end up investing about eighty-five thousand dollars in western cattle ranching, nearly half the principal of his inheritance. Along with that of other open-range ranch investors, most of this money disappeared in the bad winter of 1886–87 and its aftereffects.46 As in the case of other elite ranchers, the cattle business met other needs for Roosevelt. He fulfilled his father’s expectation for manly self-control in the face of grief and defeat; rather than despairing, he threw himself into meeting the new challenges of physical and intellectual labor. Roosevelt celebrated the physical aspects of ranch life and boasted in letters to his family that he was “well hardened” and “never in better health,” adding, “How sound I do sleep at night!” He worked hard on the ranch, spending hours at a time in the saddle, and he took several lengthy trips away from his base in the Badlands to pursue game, including grizzly bears. Press reports from 1885 described him as “rugged, bronzed, and in the prime of health,” with a “sturdy walk and firm bearing.”47 Roosevelt also employed much of his time in research and writing. He had published The Naval War of 1812 in 1882, and in 1886 he began a biography of the politician Thomas Hart Benton that was published the next year. In addition, he wrote numerous political articles. But the main literary achievement of this period were his two books about western ranch life, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman (1885) and Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail (1888). What Roosevelt loved about his western life was not only the “vigorous, open-air existence it force[d] a man to lead” but also the opportunity to have a “literary life.”48 The combination of ranching and writing satisfied his need for “honest work” that eased his conscience. Thee’s son could not enjoy a leisured existence in New York; the Roosevelt way was “life for an end.” Even if he was uncertain about his political future, he could still make his voice heard in American life as a writer. Unlike Elliott, whose

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plans to write something about his India trip never seemed to materialize in an actual publication, Roosevelt’s output was constant. With regard to his literary productivity, no sharp break appears between the years when he was actively engaged as a rancher and the later years of the 1880s and the 1890s. From Hunting Trips of a Ranchman through the multivolume The Winning of the West (1889, 1894, 1896) up to his account of his volunteer regiment in the Spanish-American War, The Rough Riders (1899), Roosevelt vigorously explored the meaning of the West from personal, historical, and, eventually, political perspectives. His extended study of what it meant to be a westerner necessitated equally sustained reflection on the related questions of what it meant to be an American and what kind of nation the modern United States might be.49 Roosevelt distinguished himself from other gentleman ranchers by writing his ranch experiences into a broader narrative of American history, burnishing his big game hunting and cattle raising with the allure of an epic story: “For we ourselves, and the life that we lead, will shortly pass away from the plains as completely as the red and white hunters who have vanished before our herds. The free, open-air life of the ranchman, the pleasantest and healthiest life in America, is from its very nature ephemeral.” Roosevelt, in other words, cast himself as an actor in an evolutionary process reaching back for centuries whereby the most advanced races conquered the lesser. According to Roosevelt, Americans were primarily Anglo-Saxons, warriors who for centuries had been moving west out of their northern homeland. He informed readers at the beginning of the first volume of The Winning of the West that “the vast movement by which this continent was conquered and peopled cannot be rightly understood if considered solely by itself. It was the crowning and greatest achievement of a series of mighty movements, and it must be taken in connection with them.” Americans had accomplished the greatest conquest of all because they were racially superior, a superiority that, curiously enough, originated from their hybridity. They stemmed from the Anglo-Saxons, but they had absorbed

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the best qualities of other European peoples, such as Roosevelt’s own Dutch forebears. They had done so by means of incessant warfare, struggling against lesser races doomed to displacement. As a superior race they had a responsibility to sustain civilization at home and abroad, having completed the task of conquering the North American continent.50 Roosevelt’s faith in the importance of the frontier to an understanding of American history was not unique. His contemporary Frederick Jackson Turner would argue in 1893 that westward movement was the single most important factor in American history. Turner’s frontier thesis resonated with many Americans because it deployed images and plots that were already deeply familiar to them from decades of popular culture. As Roosevelt put it in a letter to Turner, “You . . . have put into definite shape a good deal of thought which has been floating around rather loosely.” Although Roosevelt located the origins of American character in race and Turner in the frontier environment itself, they both viewed westward expansion as the essential fact of American history. They also believed that as the frontier era ended, the United States was embarking on a new and unknown path.51 According to Richard Slotkin, Roosevelt’s profound belief in the individual frontier hunter as the key agent of racial progress contrasts sharply with Turner’s focus on the farmer. In Roosevelt’s view it was the hunter, necessarily also an Indian fighter, who made the west safe for progress in the form of the cattleman and then, ultimately, in the form of settlers in family groups; each stage of history had its representative type of man, but without such figures as George Rogers Clark and Anthony Wayne and Boone, the “winning of the West” would have been impossible. Men like these achieved victory by adopting the supposed ruthlessness and primitivism of their Indian enemies. The incorporation of Indian ways in order to defeat Indian people meant more than individual military victories. It implied a process of ethnogenesis whereby white Americans progressively developed by drawing upon the savage vigor of the indigenous foe. The result was a chain of

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American leaders forged in the crucible of warfare and embodying all the power of the American wilderness, leading, it was implied, to men such as Roosevelt himself.52 Americans had been able to avoid decadence because they had always had a frontier on which to fight. At the beginning of the twentieth century, however, it seemed to Roosevelt and to many others that America was menaced by the threat of decline in terrifying new ways. Roosevelt diagnosed his society’s problems as symptoms of racial decline and gender disorder. The one went with the other because reproductive failure meant racial failure. One of the most well known passages from his speech “The Strenuous Life” (1899) warns, The man must be glad to do a man’s work, to dare and endure and to labor; to keep himself, and to keep those dependent upon him. The woman must be the housewife, the helpmeet of the homemaker, the wise and fearless mother of many healthy children. . . . When men fear work or fear righteous war, when women fear motherhood, they tremble on the brink of doom; and well it is that they should vanish from the earth, where they are fit subjects of the scorn of all men and women who are themselves strong and brave and high-minded.53 In a letter to his close friend the British diplomat Cecil SpringRice, Roosevelt characterized population decline as “evil” and worried about “the Slavs” defeating “us . . . in the warfare of the cradle.” When women chose not to bear as many children as they humanly could, they were traitors to their country, engaged as it was in a war. As “the highest races” became less and less fecund, they would find themselves outnumbered by their racial inferiors.54 Roosevelt’s obsession with “race suicide” originated in his belief, shared widely by Americans at the time, that the family was the basis of civilization. Because of his investments in racialist thinking, his concern about the family manifested itself as a fear of being outcompeted by other, lesser but more prolific races. Only unshakable commitments to biologically determined gender roles, on

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the part of men and women alike, could stave off national collapse and with it the collapse of the world’s millenial hopes for civilizational advancement.55 Roosevelt did not have to look very far for an example of precisely the kind of degeneracy he feared the most. In the late 1880s and early 1890s, as Roosevelt was integrating his western experiences into his historical writing and political thinking, Elliott drifted downward into alcoholism and scandal. Many members of the Roosevelt family believed that Elliott was his mother’s favorite, and her death in 1884 destabilized him severely. Elliott was nominally employed by a relative’s investment company, but he spent most of his time drinking, playing polo, and riding to hounds. Riding and gymnastics accidents left him in severe pain, which he alleviated with morphine and laudanum. He was, in his own words, a “self-amusing dilettante” with an “idle character,” and as his drinking intensified, his behavior became increasingly erratic. Travel, as always, seemed a likely cure. In 1890 he took his wife and children to Europe for an extended stay.56 Elliott’s trip to India in 1880–82 was his last major hunting excursion, although he joined the Boone and Crockett Club when Theodore organized it in 1887. As Theodore became more closely identified with sport hunting, Elliott turned away from everything associated with it. He preferred foxhunting and polo, sports that Theodore occasionally enjoyed but viewed as inferior to hunting. Foxhunting and polo required Elliott to invest in a string of good horses and to participate in constant socializing. In Theodore’s eyes these pastimes were not intrinsically harmful, but as the main pursuits of a man’s life they were deplorable. Many American hunting clubs did not even kill actual foxes, pursuing a lure instead. “A buffalo is nobler game than an anise seed bag, the Anglomaniacs to the contrary notwithstanding,” commented Theodore.57 Sports were too important to Roosevelt to be considered a matter of mere taste. His express disdain was part of his self-fashioning as a true rugged man of the west. Elliott’s apparent preference for foxhunting and polo over big game hunting

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may have seemed yet another sign of his degeneration as the years went by. “I do hate his Hempstead [Long Island] life; I do’n’t [sic] know whether he could get along without the excitement now, but it is certainly very unhealthy, and it leads to nothing,” Roosevelt observed in 1888. Elliott had become a perfect example of the very thing Roosevelt would later rage against in his speeches: a man living “an existence of restless vacuity and physical, moral and intellectual flabbiness, to which those doom themselves who elect to spend all their years in that vainest of all vain pursuits—the pursuit of mere pleasure as a sufficient end in itself.” His social world, in many ways, “aped the English,” according to Daisy Harriman, another member of the same clique. Elliott and his friends presented themselves as American aristocrats enjoying lives of entitlement and ease. To Roosevelt such pretensions were unpatriotic; his own heritage needed no effete trappings. The “cads” at Newport who had “taken up” the Duke of Marlborough on his engagement to Consuelo Vanderbilt in 1887 seemed ridiculous to him.58 Roosevelt thought Elliott had surrendered his claim to manhood, but one can see that Elliott was, in fact, tacking between various models of masculinity. If his behavior was vile in the eyes of his siblings, it was typical of New York’s wealthy bachelor society. His reckless riding—he was famous as one of his circle’s most daredevil horsemen—his drinking, his extravagance, and his rumored womanizing performed masculinity as a challenge to the ideals of manhood inculcated by his father and celebrated by his brother. At the same time, Elliott delighted in his children and wrote his siblings penitent letters resolving to reform. An unpublished short story, “Was Miss Vedder an Adventuress?,” written some time toward the end of his life, figures some of Elliott’s ambivalence about his lack of accomplishment. The title character muses, “My life has been a gamble, I lived for pleasure only. . . . Poor Sophie, what a frivolous, useless thing you were. . . . and now there will be no one to regret you.” The story ends with the character’s suicide. Elliott could not imagine a future for his heroine or, it seemed, for himself.59

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From 1890 onward Elliott’s condition deteriorated. He drank heavily, became paranoid, and lost control of himself during violent rages. He had an affair with Florence Sherman, an American living in Paris whose divorce had scandalized New York a few years earlier.60 His older sister Bamie traveled to France to intervene. What appalled Roosevelt the most was the “last hideous revelation” that Elliott apparently had impregnated a young woman named Katy Mann who was a servant in his home. Roosevelt had no explanation for this “nightmare” except as a symptom of mental illness; evidently Elliott was a lunatic, a “maniac morally no less than mentally.” By early 1892 Theodore and Bamie had effected an arrangement whereby Elliott signed over most of his property to his estranged wife and agreed to undergo medical treatment for his drinking, as well as a two-year probation period before he was allowed to live with his wife and children again. While his stay in a sanitarium seemed at first to have been effective, Elliott’s tenuous grip on himself faltered after the deaths of his wife in December 1892 and of his young son and namesake in May 1893. He spent his last months in New York “wandering about,” drinking, and living with someone identified in family correspondence only as “the woman, Mrs. Evans.” He frequently sent deranged, plaintive letters to his family. In July 1894 he suffered serious injuries in a carriage accident, and this event, in combination with the effects of years of addiction to alcohol and morphine, led to his death a few weeks later at the age of thirty-four.61 During these last weeks of horror, to use Roosevelt’s word, Elliott wrote his brother regarding some diary entries from India. Could they perhaps be developed into magazine articles? Roosevelt responded that he would look over the material and return it soon, and Elliott “answered by a note that was very painful,” to Roosevelt because “it was so incoherent and so grateful.” Through his alcoholic fog Elliott grasped at the memory of his glamorous days in India, turning to the brother who had dedicated Hunting Trips of a Ranchman to “that keenest of sportsmen and truest of friends, my brother, Elliott Roosevelt.” Although hunting had worked therapeutic magic for

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Theodore, it had failed to save Elliott. In a long letter to his sister, Roosevelt described Elliott as one who had himself become “like some stricken, hunted creature; and indeed he was hunted by the most terrible demons that ever entered into man’s body and soul.” The “gallant, generous” boy they had known in his “sweet, innocent youth” had succumbed to illness and vice, brought shame upon his family, and failed as a husband and father. The hunter had become his own prey.62 Elliott exemplified everything Roosevelt loathed: loss of control, sexual indulgence, idleness, dependence on others, public scandal. To argue that Roosevelt’s obsession with staving off decadence originated solely from the guilty revulsion and guilt he felt regarding his brother would be an oversimplification. Many Americans who did not share his personal family history did share his beliefs about the necessity of the “strenuous life.” What is useful, however, is to analyze Elliott’s life as embedded within the same cultural matrix that shaped Theodore’s. The two sons of Theodore Roosevelt Sr grappled in different ways with the same puzzle of what it meant to be an upper-class man in modern America. By examining how a man so close to Roosevelt failed to emulate his project of iron self-command, one can recover some of the ambivalence that accompanied the project of modern masculinity. For Roosevelt, as for many other Americans of his era, the completion of the enterprise of winning the West raised the possibility that the United States now lacked any particular defining mission of the American nation. Proponents of American imperialism, with Roosevelt at their head, argued that the closure of the continental frontier required an extension of the pioneering spirit to new frontiers in Latin American, the Caribbean, and the Pacific. The instability of empire’s claim to legitimacy necessitated an ultimately successful recourse on the part of its advocates, such as Roosevelt, to the naturalizing language of gender and race in order to make such expansion seem a biological imperative and a historical destiny.63 A full account of Roosevelt’s imperialist ideology is beyond the scope of this book, but I do want to sketch out some of the imperial

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context surrounding his African safari in a way that divulges previously unseen continuities between his ranching life, his making of race, class and gender, and a wider transatlantic community of big game hunters. To help him plan the safari Roosevelt turned to his acquainance Frederick Courtney Selous, who was a mainstay of the Anglo-American hunter-conservationist community. Renowned as a hunter, Selous came from a wealthy, well-connected British family, and he had spent years in South Africa and in Kenya. He was even rumored to be the original of Allan Quatermain in H. Rider Haggard’s novel of African adventure, King Solomon’s Mines (1885). He and Roosevelt corresponded from around 1897 until Selous’s death in 1917, primarily on natural history and hunting. The correspondence began when Edward North Buxton, another famous British hunter who had been to both Wyoming and Africa, put Selous in touch with Roosevelt to get advice because he was planning a hunting trip to the Yellowstone region.64 Through Selous, Roosevelt and his son Kermit obtained hunting licenses allowing them to kill over fifty creatures, including two bull elephants. Roosevelt had initially resisted hiring a guide, but Selous prevailed upon him to hire R. J. Cuninghame, a famous hunter and guide with Newland and Tarleton, a company recently formed to organize safaris for wealthy tourists. The safari included cooks, camp guards, “tent boys” for cleaning and making minor repairs, grooms for the horses, gun bearers, and dozens of porters who would carry the supplies of the entire expedition on their backs. Roosevelt’s tent alone required three porters to be transported.65 Acquiring African specimens for the Smithsonian Institution involved Roosevelt in additional complicated logistics. The three naturalists who accompanied him needed special equipment and supplies, including “four tons of white salt” to preserve skins and skeletons in the field preparatory to making their final mounts of the animals months later in the United States. Extra porters had to be hired to carry this equipment as well as the specimens themselves, while additional labor was needed to assist the naturalists in the skinning of the animals;

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correctly removing an adult elephant’s skin and skeleton, for example, could take a dozen men several days. Roosevelt described his safari as looking like a “small military expedition” with its horses, hundreds of men, and large American flag flying over his tent. Like a military expedition, the safari imposed the will of the leader, personified as a white upper-class man, upon those at the lowest rungs of the chain of command. Roosevelt saw his porters as “strong, patient, good-humored savages, with something childlike about them that makes one really fond of them” and amplified his paternalism by adding, “Of course, like all savages and most children, they have their limitations.” Donna Haraway has pointed out the contradiction in safari organization, noting that “the everyday survival of Euro-Americans in the field depended upon the knowledge, good sense, hard work, and enforced subordination of people the white folks insisted on seeing as perpetual children or as wildlife.” Roosevelt admitted that the porter “alone makes the safari possible” but could only cede so much, relegating native Africans to the role of pack animals who could not, like white men, exercise agency.66 The East Africa that Roosevelt encountered in 1909 was the product of a complex intersection of global and local historical forces, not a primordial wilderness. In the 1880s a series of Anglo-German agreements defined each country’s respective claims in the region. Initially, the British government granted the British East Africa Company administrative and development rights in the area, eventually making East Africa a protectorate in 1895 in response to the company’s financial difficulties. In contrast to British protectorates like Nigeria and Egypt, where established political entities enabled the British to adopt a policy of indirect rule through existing mechanisms of governance, the East African commissioner governed the region directly through its civil service. The British hoped that the completion in 1903 of the Uganda Railway from Mombasa to Lake Victoria would attract white settlers who could make the area profitable via the production and export of cash crops. Despite the efforts of Commissioner

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Sir Charles Eliot and the Planters’ and Farmers’ Association, founded also in 1903 by the settler Lord Delamere, white settlement, hampered by climate, disputes over land rights, and ethnic conflict, grew only incrementally over the following ten years. Hunting in Britain’s African colonies reflected and reinforced social and political hierarchies. In the early nineteenth century British hunting in Africa supplied an international trade in ivory, skins, and horns. Over time, however, game became scarcer, even as colonial authorities extended their power more stringently over the territories claimed. Throughout the 1890s regulations creating a licensing system were imposed in British South Africa, Uganda, and British East Africa, and a few game reserves were created in various locations as well. In 1900 the European powers possessing African colonies met in London and signed a Convention for the Preservation of Wild Birds, Animals, and Fish in Africa. The convention forbade the killing of certain species as well as of juveniles and females with young. The signatories agreed to maintain a standardized system of licenses and were encouraged to create new game reserves as well.67 Ardent conservationists in Britain, as we shall see, hoped to press the Colonial and Foreign Offices (the entities ultimately responsible for governing British territories in Africa) into abiding by the terms of the convention and expanding its scope. Conservationists often envisioned Africa as a pristine environment, one of the last such places on the planet where Europeans could achieve harmony with nature. Intertwined with this belief was dominance over African people, underscored by their exclusion from access to game. Officials justified such restrictions by arguing that Africans lacked “sporting instincts” and a “sense of honour” and that indigenous Africans could be civilized only if they were prevented from engaging in subsistence hunting, compelling them to turn to wage labor and farming, considered more advanced modes of existence. Hunting permits were to be reserved for well-connected sporting tourists and colonial officials, who were entitled to “certain privileges in the matter of sport” as compensation for their service in the cause of empire.68

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Africans were to be prevented from relying on game as a food source, and the skins and horns of game animals became fetishized trophies of manly achievement to be preserved and displayed in the homes, offices, and museums of the colonizing elite.69 Roosevelt strongly approved of these measures as a way of retaining “the charm of wild nature” and providing “a reasonable amount of hunting on fair terms to any hardy and vigorous man fond of the sport.”70 Other American conservationists also looked to British colonial policies as exemplary. In the late nineteenth century knowledge about hunting and game conservation circulated between gentlemanly scientists and statesmen across the Atlantic. For instance, precisely to whom the word “our” in the conservationist William Hornaday’s book Our Vanishing Wild Life (1913) refers is somewhat unclear at times. The book ranges far beyond the borders of the United States, commenting on the extinction of the quagga in South Africa and the threat posed by the international feather trade that was decimating bird populations around the world. Hornaday exhorted his readers to “notice that it is the way of the millinery octopus to reach out to the uttermost ends of the earth, and take everything that it can use. From the trackless jungles of New Guinea, round the world both ways to the snow-capped peaks of the Andes, no unprotected bird is safe.” He then addressed “the people of England” directly, asking them whether they were willing to “clean house by controlling the feather trade?”71 Hornaday encouraged his readers to envision wildlife preservation as a concern spanning national boundaries. The responsibilities of internationally minded conservationists extended beyond the feather trade to the preservation of big game in Africa and Asia. Hornaday applauded the efforts of European colonial officials to establish game preserves in Africa, characterizing such efforts as “an object-lesson to the world at large.” He described a worldwide English-speaking union of preservation that would combat the forces of what he called “the army of destruction”: “Wherever the English language is spoken, from Tasmania to Scotland, and from Porto Rico

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to the Philippines, the spirit of wild life protection exists. . . . To all cosmopolitan sportsmen, the British ‘Blue Book’ on game protection, the annual reports of the two great protective societies of London, and the annual ‘Progress’ report of the U.S. Department of Agriculture are reassuring and comforting.”72 Hornaday thus connected the white man’s burden of imperial rule to the wildlife lover’s mission of game protection. American imperialism in the Caribbean and Pacific complemented British rule in Africa, and Hornaday found it “comforting” to know that preservationists were in dialogue via their various reports. “Even the native state of Kashmir,” with such models to follow, was being led gently into the light of preservation with enlightened guidance from imperial officials. One of the “two great protective societies” to which Hornaday was referring in the passage above was the Shikar Club, named for the Urdu word for “hunting.” The Shikar Club was a kind of big game hunters’ honor society founded by Selous, Charles Edward Radclyffe, and P. B. Vanderbyl in 1907 that celebrated the feats of its wealthy upper-class members at annual dinners at the Savoy Hotel. To Hornaday, the existence of the Shikar Club proved that “the flower of British manhood” cared about “big game hunting, and its natural corollary— game protection.”73 The other “great protective society” Hornaday meant was the Society for the Protection of the Wild Fauna of the Empire, founded in 1903 by Buxton, Roosevelt’s friend and an advocate for forest conservation in Britain.74 Roosevelt served as an honorary vice president, and Hornaday was an honorary member. The society’s membership list sparkled with aristocratic names as well as with those of leading colonial administrators and naturalists. Hornaday regarded the society’s social composition as ample evidence of its capacity to effectively advocate game preservation. The society was “composed of the flower of British Chivalry in Devotion to the Thankless Task. Its list of members always reminds me of a book I never saw—Burke’s ‘Peerage.’ Its list of 395 ‘Ordinary’ and ‘Life’ members is a wonderful showing of quality and strength. It looks like a body in every way fit

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to grapple with the thorny and difficult task of defending the endangered fauna of the far-flung British Empire; and what praise can I give beyond that?”75 Hornaday’s language reveals the strain of reconciling his admiration for the “flower of British Chivalry” with his identity as an American and a republican: he’s never actually seen Burke’s Peerage, but if he had seen it, it would have reminded him of a document with which he was familiar, the society membership list. Hornaday wished to imagine a frictionless community of interest between British and American elites. In 1908 Hornaday attempted to unite elite sportsmen around the Anglo-American world by circulating a platform of “fifteen cardinal principles.” The principles upheld ideals of sportsmanship in hunting and condemned market hunting while also stating, “The Indian has no inherent or God-given ownership of the game of North America.” In his prefatory remarks to the inclusion of the “Code of Ethics” in the society’s Journal, Hornaday helpfully added, “For the countries of Asia and Africa, it is easy to substitute for ‘Indian’ the word ‘native.’ ” The society’s endorsement of Hornaday’s code hints at the ways in which elite preservationists on both sides of the Atlantic envisioned themselves as partners in a worldwide enterprise that ranked wildlife conservation based in metropolitan centers over marginalized racial and class inferiors.76 Roosevelt insisted that his African safari was undertaken primarily in the interest of advancing American science, as befitted a famous conservationist, and not as a “game butcher.” He obeyed British game laws and refused the special license that was offered him because of his celebrity. “As you know,” he wrote to the secretary of the Smithsonian, “I am not in the least a game butcher. I like to do a certain amount of hunting, but my real and main interest is the interest of a faunal naturalist.” The New York Times informed its readers that Roosevelt was going to Africa “to study the wildest of wild animals close at hand” and “not only to kill.” Similarly, those perusing Roosevelt’s African Trip, a volume rushed into print in 1909 to capitalize on the

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public fascination with all things safari, would have learned that Roosevelt was not motivated by “bloodthirst pure and simple” but that he wanted to assist “the cause of science.” Despite such statements, not every American delighted in the idea of a long, lavish hunting trip. The Smithsonian had to explain repeatedly that Roosevelt was not traveling at taxpayer expense, and the Michigan Convention of Humane Societies, because its members frowned on sport hunting, rejected a resolution thanking him for his contribution to bird conservation. One grumpy letter writer to the Times simply was tired of so much Roosevelt coverage, pleading, “for pity’s sake give your readers a rest of Roosevelt and his doings.”77 Callous to this reader’s misery, the American press continued to cover Roosevelt’s safari as fully as possible. Newspapers and magazines presented the spectacle of American men bringing science and civilization to a place imagined as simultaneously frightening and exciting in its primitive state. Roosevelt also framed Africa as existing in an earlier time, a primordial state in which survival required fighting wild beasts that roamed the earth. His party’s passage across African space was also a movement from the dawn of civilization to the modern day, a recapitulation that echoed the evolution of humanity itself as well as of individual men as they grew from boyhood to manhood.78 Africa was dangerous: lion maulings, hippo and buffalo charges, gorings by rhinos, tuskings and tossings by elephants, snake bites, hyena and crocodile and ostrich attacks. These animals can be genuinely dangerous, but what is notable about Roosevelt’s text is the way in which it locates these risks within a historical narrative of human development. Introducing a series of anecdotes about run-ins between wild animals and people, Roosevelt comments that these altercations were “of exactly the type which would occur were it possible in North America or Europe suddenly to mix among existing conditions the men and animals that died out some hundred of thousands of years ago.”79 The continual presence of dangerous wild animals marked Africa as a wild place that would never attain civilization without the

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intervention of whites. The savagery of the indigenous inhabitants and that of the animals mirrored one another. At the beginning of the text Roosevelt invites his reader to join him on a train from Mombasa inland, a kind of visitor from the present day who is going back into time to see how people lived in the “late Pleistocene.” Just as early humanity had contended with wild animals, so too did Africans: “The comparison” to the Pleistocene “is not fanciful,” insisted Roosevelt. One crucial way in which whites could establish the ordering power of modernity was by adjusting the relationship between animals and people. Creating game reserves was part of this process, but so too was the management of game populations via hunting and the elimination of “vermin”—that is, wholly undesirable animals such as crocodiles.80 Roosevelt’s itinerary took him from the port of Mombasa across modern-day Kenya and Uganda up the Nile to Khartoum. This route motivated Roosevelt to consider the contrast between Kenya and Uganda. Kenya was “a white man’s country” whereas Uganda was “essentially a black man’s country.” In calling Uganda a black man’s country, Roosevelt did not mean that white men had no place there. His text sets out the respective tasks for white men in regard to each place. In East Africa, “the prime need” was “to build up a large, healthy population of true white settlers, white home-makers, who shall take the land as an inheritance for their children’s children.” In other words, East Africa could be, and should be, settled as the American West was settled, by white people intent on making it into a home. Uganda, on the other hand, would always have a minority white population destined to rule on the basis of their “masterful” traits, which would “bring forward the natives,” who otherwise would remain mired in “gulfs of savagery.” Uganda might be compared implicitly to the Philippines, where much of the population was, to quote Roosevelt in 1899, “utterly unfit for self-government, and show[ed] no signs of becoming fit.”81 As evidence of Kenya’s fitness for white men, Roosevelt carefully noted the signs of cultivation and domestication he encountered. As a guest at the seven-thousand-acre farm of Sir Alfred Pease, Roosevelt

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admired the “clean and comfortable house, with a veranda running round three sides.” The house was not yet completed, in fact, but Roosevelt assured Lady Pease he did not mind since it was so reminiscent of western houses.82 At another farm nearby, Roosevelt similarly noted the “clean and comfortable house,” the flower garden, the cattle sheds and herds of livestock, and all the other appurtenances of “a very good kind of pioneer life.”83 The area’s residents frequently entertained one another and exchanged small gifts of flowers and fruit. Such social rituals, seemingly trivial, indicated to Roosevelt that the white presence in Kenya had taken root and was thriving. Lady Pease and her daughter, moreover, had not “the slightest nervousness” and enjoyed accompanying the men on hunts, though they did not themselves shoot. The wife of Sir Northrup McMillan was “a good rider and good shot, and had killed her lion,” while also being the mistress of a home where “everything was so comfortable that it was hard to realize that we were far in the interior of Africa and almost under the equator.”84 Obsessed as he was with childbearing in the cause of racial strength, Roosevelt keenly noted these signs of physical vitality and courage in the white women he met. Kenya was a place where white people could lead “clean, vigorous, healthy lives.”85 One would think that Roosevelt, being surrounded by zebras and lions, could hardly forget he was in Africa, and yet his text repeatedly locates him within the American West. “As my horse shuffled forward, under the bright, hot sunlight, across the endless flats or gently rolling slopes of brown and withered grass, I might have been on the plains anywhere, from Texas to Montana,” Roosevelt wrote. As a conservationist with knowledge of arid places, he saw “the possibilities of the country,” imagining storage reservoirs built by the government and paid for by users in fees to draw “small farmers,” in a policy similar to that of the Newlands Act subsidizing western irrigation. At the same time, Roosevelt saw in East Africa not the West of 1909 but “Montana and Wyoming thirty years ago,” the West of his youth, a place with “ranches planted down among the hills and on the plains still teeming

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with game, the spirit of daring adventure everywhere visible, the hope and the heart-breaking disappointment, the successes and the failures.”86 Like the West, East Africa had the potential to afford white men and women new opportunities, promising a healthful, prosperous future. As settlers built railroads, farms, and families, they were not merely serving their individual interests. They were part of a vast historic undertaking that had begun when Europeans came to the Americas, argued Roosevelt, part of a civilizing mission that could be undertaken only by whites.87 Specific national affiliations were irrelevant to the settling of a white man’s country. Roosevelt praised what he saw as the cooperation between settlers of English and Boer ancestry as well as the British spirit exemplified by Australians and South Africans who had never been to Britain. He compared it to the way in which Americans had overcome the divisions of the Civil War in the common cause of national strength; former enemies could—indeed, had an obligation to—set aside the past in order to settle new frontiers. Sharing “fundamental virtues, and fundamental characteristics,” they were together “engaged in the great and difficult task of adding East Africa to the domain of civilization” and needed one another’s help.88 The reference to the American Civil War is telling. National reconciliation in the United States was built on the foundations of white supremacy and an elision of the emancipatory narratives of the Civil War; so, too, in East Africa, Roosevelt imagined that unity grounded on white supremacy could overcome the memory of the Boer War in order to fulfill the millennial destiny of imperialism.89 As we have seen, wildlife conservationists at the turn of the century embraced a transnational ideal of racial and class superiority, but this ideal was not confined to conservation. Roosevelt’s confidence in the power of transnational whiteness to tame savage places and people was widely shared; whiteness could serve even as a way of defining the national self for settler colonies such as Australia. Concepts of commonwealth and even imperial federation rested on the belief that racial unity

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could continuously bind former colonies to the British metropole, much in the way that the United States could retain a cultural and racial connection to Great Britain a century after independence.90 Control over land and its resources, even over movement over and through land, was a privilege the white man reserved to himself and forbade indigenous people and other nonwhites. Of special significance were those places where white men marked their ownership of the land by settling: ranches, farms, fences, gardens, and game preserves spoke of intended uses for the land that were defined and determined by white men and enforced by the mechanisms of political power that only they could exercise. Kenya was more western than Roosevelt may have realized. A closer look at the community of Kenyan settlers reveals that they were the sorts of people who have become familiar to us in other contexts. Looking for a setting in which they could live the kind of privileged rural existence that was becoming untenable in Britain, they probably would have sought out the American West a generation earlier. Pease, for instance, came from a wealthy industrial family in the north of England, but he had little taste for the life of a businessman. Educated at Eton and Cambridge, he befriended the sons of landed families who shared his love of hunting and fishing. He feared that the “spoiling industrial hand” would create a landscape of nothing but “ash heaps and chimneys and hideous houses under smoke clouds” and longed for an alternative life of outdoors adventure and rural paternalism. On Kitanga, his farm outside Nairobi, he hunted lions and farmed ostriches for their plumes. This latter venture soon turned out to be a fiasco, subject to the whims and moods of the ostriches, the depredations of hyenas and jackals, and changing fashions that lessened the demand for plumes.91 Kenya abounded with gentleman emigrants. Ewart Grogan, who succeeded Lord Delamere as president of the Colonists’ Association and whose younger brother Quentin hunted in Uganda with Roosevelt, was educated at Winchester and Cambridge and had drifted through

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the study of both the law and art before joining Cecil Rhodes’s Pioneer Column on its invasion of Matabeleland in present-day Zimbabwe. Grogan came to Kenya in 1903, having made himself famous by walking from Capetown to Cairo, a feat he retold in articles and public lectures. He and his brother involved themselves in a wide variety of schemes, including a sisal farm, the development of a timber concession, a trout farm, and various real estate speculations.92 Grogan’s activities paid off, but many of his fellow white settlers were neither so energetic nor so successful, at least not at anything remunerative. The glamorous Denys Finch Hatton, the younger son of the Earl of Winchelsea, attended Eton and Oxford, where he excelled at golf and gambling and garnered a fourth-class degree, the lowest level possible. Except for his service during the First World War Finch Hatton spent most of his adult life in Kenya, where he became a professional guide and hunter with clients such as Marshall Field III, the son of the Chicago department store tycoon. Like Buffalo Bill, Finch Hatton sold not only his knowledge of the region and its animals, but his charisma and storytelling prowess, making clients feel they were experiencing an authentic Africa.93 The gentleman emigrants of the early 1900s went to Kenya seeking quick ways to make money and a setting in which they could take up the hierarchical, leisured life of the landed elite that was no longer tenable in Britain. The economic, political, and social trends that had made the life of the landed elite difficult in the 1870s and 1880s had only intensified by the early twentieth century. As one historian has written, the colony was “a haven for those whose social selfperceptions were not matched by their economic resources.” Underneath the optimism and confidence of the settlers simmered powerful anxieties about displacement, isolation, and the threat of racial violence.94 In 1897 Roosevelt told Selous, “I am rather melancholy to think that my own four small boys will see practically no hunting on this side [of the Atlantic] at all, and indeed no hunting anywhere unless they

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have the adventurous temper that will make them start out into wild regions to find their fortunes. I was just in time to see the last of the real wilderness life and real wilderness hunting.”95 In fact, Roosevelt’s sons were experienced hunters by the time they were in their early twenties. One can’t know if they felt inadequate about their inability to find “the real wilderness life,” but it seems likely, given their father’s emphasis on the importance of hunting as a crucible of masculinity, that they were required to somehow demonstrate that they possessed “the adventurous temper” that would make them frontiersmen in their father’s image. Roosevelt’s third son, Archibald, remembered that his father “taught us to accept the discomforts and hardships that attend sport in the open fields and wilderness, and accept them as a challenge to our manhood.”96 Here the important point is that as Roosevelt’s children grew into maturity he scrutinized them for signs of gender abnormality. Although Roosevelt expected obedient and correct conduct from his daughters, he was particularly invested in his sons’ manliness. Weakness in boys was a fault to be eradicated, by physical punishment if necessary but more often through relentless psychological pressure. Roosevelt preached that children should be brought up “not to shirk difficulties, but to meet them and overcome them; not to strive after a life of ignoble ease, but to strive to do their duty, first to themselves and their families, and then to the whole State.” The question was how this philosophy of child rearing could be put into into practice.97 Many medical and educational experts provided advice to parents who, like Roosevelt, worried about their sons’ manhood. The psychologist G. Stanley Hall recommended that boys be encouraged to be ferocious in their play so that they could learn “courage, endurance, bravery and loyalty” and not grow into neurasthenic men or sexual perverts. The cofounder of the Boy Scouts of America, Daniel Carter Beard, envisioned a program for youth that would actually mimic Roosevelt’s experience “wearing the buckskin clothes . . . imbib[ing] the energy, frankness, and fellowship of the wilderness.” Roosevelt

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expected his children to enjoy rough-and-tumble play outdoors in all weather and took them on long hiking, riding, and canoeing trips. Much of this was enjoyable; the Roosevelt children, as adults, described their father as a warm, imaginative parent who loved their company.98 Yet living up to Roosevelt’s fatherly expectations could be difficult. He taught his children to swim by tossing them into the cold water at Oyster Bay, which his daughter Alice remembered as an experience of terror and tears. He constantly evaluated his oldest son Ted’s academic and athletic progress, pushing him to become “more like me as I am now than as I was when I was his age.” Perhaps remembering himself as the frail child who was coddled by his mother and aunts at various spas, Roosevelt wanted to send Ted to Groton at the earliest age the school would take him (Ted’s mother intervened). By January 1898 Ted was having “dreadful headaches each day,” and, after several doctors were consulted, the medical consensus was that at the age of ten Ted was having a nervous breakdown. Roosevelt was truly chastened and resolved “never [to] press Ted in either body or mind” again. Even being Roosevelt’s nephew required manly diligence. To his sister Bamie’s son, William, homesick during his first year at Groton, Roosevelt wrote, “A gentleman must be educated, must be able to hold his own among other gentlemen; a boy with your ancestry must be worthy of his ancestry.”99 Roosevelt’s dilemma was that the very cures for shattered nerves in which he most believed—hunting and other sports, the company of manly men—could in themselves produce anxiety over not measuring up to the masculine standard. At Groton, Ted played football, boxed, rowed, and wrestled, while maintaining a position near the top of his class. Small for his age, Ted was in such danger of being seriously hurt during football games that players from Harvard and Yale who came to watch Groton games warned Roosevelt against letting his son continue with the sport. Roosevelt’s ambivalence about this issue surfaces in his letters to his son. On the one hand, he warned his son about the risk of a serious injury that would interfere with going on to

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even greater achievements in life. On the other hand, Roosevelt assured his “killer of the buck and shooter of the prairie chicken” that if he really wanted to play, he could. One wonders if Ted felt he really had a choice. He did continue to play football. He certainly was not the only young man being battered on the gridiron; so many students received serious injuries that the president of Harvard, Charles Eliot, warned, to Roosevelt’s publicly expressed scorn, that he would abolish football if the game was not reformed. Ted, however, was known to be the president’s son and in his freshman year at Harvard was singled out by opposing teams and crushed on nearly every play.100 Kermit, Roosevelt’s second son, also became an object of parental concern. A letter from his mother to Spring-Rice described him as “odd and independent,” and a frank letter from his father to the headmaster of Groton classified him as “not as bright as Ted” and, perhaps even more damaging, “not an athlete.” Kermit detested Groton. By his midteens he was drinking, smoking, and using opium. He even showed up drunk for meetings with the headmaster. He was quieter than his brothers and sisters, more like his reserved mother than his father, and one senses that his father wasn’t sure what to do with a boy who was so introverted. Father and son did share a love of the outdoors, and Kermit went on several western hunting trips in his teens. Because Roosevelt was in the White House, Kermit was accompanied on these trips by various family friends, but he reveled in his father’s praise when he returned with trophies and stories of bravery and endurance. It is not clear how much his parents knew about his drinking and drug use, particularly as his father was absorbed with the demands of the presidency, but his mother wrote hopefully in September 1908, “You are too much your father’s son to find any attraction in immoral impurity.” Whether or not Roosevelt was aware of Kermit’s dissolute ways, the prospect of a father–son safari presented the opportunity for him to supervise Kermit’s passage from adolescence to manhood in ideal conditions. Years before, he had read aloud to his children from the works of famed African big game hunters such as Roualeyn

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Gordon-Cumming, and Kermit had long fantasized about African adventure. Characteristically, however, Roosevelt warned Kermit that he would need to prove himself worthy of such a trip by working “doubly hard” in years to come.101 Press reports described Kermit on safari as if he were the hero of a boy’s adventure novel. He was “a tall, loose-jointed youth with clear eyes, but with soft voice and soft tread”; he was looking forward to being “out of touch with civilization for all of a year” and was “used to the handling of magazine rifles and heavy guns.” On safari his shyness gradually diminished. He played the mandolin in moments of leisure, read extensively from his father’s supply of books, and took many of the expedition’s photographs. Kermit possessed a talent for learning languages, and he learned enough Swahili to be able to converse with the porters and gun bearers.102 In the field Kermit became “a really first class hunter, and as tough as whipcord,” according to his father. He killed many animals, including cheetah, lions, buffalo, crocodile, rhino, and various other creatures. Although he was not a particularly good shot, his endurance at tracking game over long distances was extraordinary. He did have a tendency to wander off alone, which worried both his father and Pease, but in every respect he had excelled in the part of a young man testing himself against big game. Exhaustively, African Game Trails details kill after kill. Kermit shoots a “fearless and resolute” charging leopard when it is only six feet away. Kermit shoots a warthog “from the saddle as he galloped nearly alongside, holding his rifle as the old buffalo-runners used to hold theirs, that is, not bringing it to his shoulder.” Together, father and son shoot into a herd of buffalo and acquire “fine trophies.” And on and on. Kermit later remembered the journey as a golden time “when all the world seemed young.”103 At times the safari split into two or more groups in search of different kinds of game. At one point Roosevelt, his guide Cuninghame, and the Smithsonian naturalist Edmund Heller travel toward Mount Kenya in search of elephants. They pass through a “well-peopled

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country” where Kikuyu women cultivate corn, yams, and bananas, “for among the Kikuyus, as among other savages, the woman is the drudge and beast of burden.” The party climbs higher, into a “tangled forest” where parrots and monkeys cry in the treetops. Here, Roosevelt informs his readers, elephants can be found, and “no other animal, not the lion himself,” can compare to the elephant. So it has been for centuries, since “the first dawn of history,” when the kings of “Egypt, Babylon, and Nineveh” celebrated “this great strange beast.” Tracking the elephant, Roosevelt and his companions, with their gun bearers and “a dozen porters and skinners,” weave their way through the jungle. Cuninghame and “the ‘Ndorobo” (the text rarely refers to the trackers by name, although an illustration identifies one of them as Suliman Na Meru) scan the tracks and spoor of the elephants, but every time the group comes close to one, the animals smell them and move away before anyone can even sight them. This goes on for hours, until night falls and they make camp.104 There is more of the same the next day. The trackers interpret the ground for the hunters, sometimes moving ahead as scouts. As Roosevelt nears the elephants that have been found, he walks in “the huge footsteps of the elephant” so that he will not break any sticks and make noise as he approaches: “At last we came in sight of the mighty game. The trail took a twist to one side, and there, thirty yards in front of us, we made out part of the gray and massive head of an elephant resting his tusks on the branches of a young tree. A couple of minutes passed before, by cautious scrutiny, we were able to tell whether the animal was a cow or a bull, and whether, if a bull, it carried heavy enough tusks. Then we saw that it was a big bull with good ivory.” Roosevelt fires twice and is rewarded: “I saw the great lord of the forest come crashing to the ground.” The natives are delighted and, after everyone has sufficiently admired the dead elephant, begin to skin it and cut it up.105 The dismemberment of the elephant cannot be delayed because of the climate. The skin is going to be mounted for museum display,

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and if it is not removed and treated as soon as possible it will decay. The scientific justification for the trip occasions a gory spectacle: “Chattering like monkeys, and as happy as possible, all, porters, gun-bearers, amd ‘Ndorobo alike, began the work of skinning and cutting up the quarry, under the leadership and supervision of Heller and Cuninghame, and soon they were all splashed with blood from head to foot. One of the trackers took off his blanket and squatted stark naked inside the carcass the better to use his knife. Each laborer rewards himself by cutting off strips of meat for his private store, and hung them in red festoons from the branches round about.” The butchering stops only when darkness falls. The men build fires and camp. Roosevelt watches “their sinewy crouching figures, their dark faces, gleaming eyes, and flashing teeth” in the uneven light. There is singing. Roosevelt writes, “I toasted slices of elephant’s heart on a pronged stick before the fire, and found it delicious; for I was hungry, and the night was cold.”106 Roosevelt produces his manly self by consuming Africa. Visually, he takes in the landscape and the people, generically categorizing Kikuyu women as “beasts of burden.” He appropriates the labor of his trackers and guide, who interpret the dense and otherwise enigmatic forest for his benefit, so that he could be led toward and brought face to face with his quarry. Just before the critical moment of the elephant’s death, he has to stop to evaluate whether or not the animal is a suitable candidate to be incorporated into the stories of American science: is it male? is it large? are its tusks undamaged and acceptably massive? To produce the hunter’s triumph, the animal’s body has to fit the script. Roosevelt holds himself apart from the scene of actual dismemberment, almost as if the embodied reality of the elephant’s death is too bloody to be associated with him. It is the Africans who revel in the fleshy cutting and skinning, hunched over naked inside the carcass and feasting animalistically on its flesh. Roosevelt, in contrast, kills the elephant with an intricate and valuable machine, a gift from other noble white men. Technology makes the death relatively clean and efficient, marking the difference between men and animals, white men and black

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men. Yet just as it seems that Roosevelt has distanced himself entirely from the dead elephant, he eats its heart, cooking it like a caveman on a stick over a fire. He alone claims the power of the “lord of the forest,” allowing himself a moment of triumphant savagery. Bodily needs—he is hungry, he is cold—can be met simply, directly, manfully. Unlike the African bearers and trackers, however, he can move forward, into civilization. They cannot, and need white men like himself to guide them. Roosevelt mourned the end of the West’s “free and hardy life,” but he envisioned Africa as another frontier. Kermit, balanced on the border between boyhood and manhood, would embody humanity’s progress from childhood to mastery by experiencing frontier hunting, even as his fellow white men advanced the cause of civilization on that frontier. Yet Roosevelt’s own family stories hinted that decadence could not be easily defeated. There was never one single kind of manhood. Precisely because hegemonic manhood had to be constructed and maintained as the only way to be a real man, it was constantly in tension with other discourses of gender that emerged as men contended with political, economic, and social change during an era of unprecedented global connection. Men like Elliott Roosevelt moved between these different ways of being a man, unable to resolve the conflict between the imperatives of hegemonic masculinity and the anxieties that troubled his mind and body. Frontier nature, romanticized as wilderness and harvested for wealth, appeared to have the power to dispel such conflicts. Through the nineteenth century and early twentieth in Great Britain and the United States spatial expansion across continents and oceans depended in part on the idea that nature itself required the creation of countries for white men, countries where the raw materials of water, earth, plants, and animals could be processed into commodities, including the commodities of scenery and health as purveyed by tourism and entertainments like Cody’s Wild West Show. Formal political relationships turned out to be less significant in this context than the conviction, shared across the Atlantic, that elite manhood needed constant renewal

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through contact with nature. Nature’s noblemen turned to the West because they believed that wilderness would confirm their superiority and prove that their dominance over others was no mere social artifact. They told their story in travel writing and in trophies. What often got left out of the story were the men who left the West with solid evidence of their uselessness. It is, however, by juxtaposing the intertwined stories of success and failure that one can appreciate the full dimensions of the investment that wellborn men, both British and American, made in nature’s promise.107

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Sir William Drummond Stewart lived until 1871. He outlived his only child, George Drummond Stewart, who died in 1868. Although he never lived with his son’s mother, Christina, he did marry her and recognize their son as his heir. The Murthly estate passed to a distant cousin, but Sir William left his personal property, including most of his paintings and his collection of western artifacts, to an American he had adopted as his son, Frank Nichols Stewart. No one seems to know very much about Frank Nichols Stewart, except for two things: he was from Texas, and he took his inheritance to Edinburgh, where it was auctioned off. Several of Alfred Jacob Miller’s paintings for Sir William survived this maneuver to hang at Murthly Castle, which today is in the hands of another branch of the family. They have managed to retain the property through adroit management and rental of the house and its gardens for weddings and other events. As the twentieth century unfolded, the forces of economic, political, and social change continued to remake the world of the British upper classes. Taxes on wealth—inherited, landed, invested—continued to rise steeply. Many families sold off their estates in part or in whole. Gender played a role in family decision making. The lack of a male heir in the direct line could lead to a dismantling of whatever parts of the estate were not encumbered by entailments. Often, such selling-off was

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in the best interests of whatever distant relative was to inherit, since taxes on inherited estates reached 50 percent after 1918.1 Taxes were high because the entire landscape of British life had begun to change starting in the early 1900s, when Liberal and Labour politicians pushed for an expansion of the welfare state. After the First World War, politicians, labor unions, and industry competed for control of the shape of the future. Many envisioned a vastly enlarged role for the state in providing education, retirement security, housing, and other benefits to the entire British population. A population that had suffered unspeakably for four grueling years demanded as much. That suffering had not left the elite untouched. “Not since the Wars of the Roses had so many patricians died so suddenly and so violently,” observes the historian David Cannadine. Moreover, they died in disproportionate numbers. One in eight British soldiers was killed, but for the British and Irish peers and their sons who served in the war, the number was one in five. Elites tended to be soldiers by profession or among the first to volunteer, and they usually served as junior officers who were expected to go to the front and lead their men into battle.2 Most of the men discussed in this book were too old to fight in the war, but they found other ways, sometimes minor, sometimes great, of contributing to a cause of which they all at least publicly approved. The Earl of Dunraven placed his yacht at the service of the British government, which used it as a transport for convalescent soldiers. His cousin Richard Wyndham-Quin, who would eventually succeed to the Dunraven title, was awarded the Military Cross for his bravery during the war. Moreton and Clara Frewen’s sons also served and survived. Their daughter lost her husband at the Battle of Loos in 1915. Clara’s sister Leonie Jerome, who married an Anglo-Irish baronet, Sir John Leslie, lost her son Norman at the Battle of Armentières in 1918. In 1914, just before the war began, Norman wrote, “Future generations cannot be allowed to read the decline of the British Empire and attribute it to us. . . . Some will live and many will die but count

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the loss not. It is far better to got out with honour than to survive with shame.” The quotation was inscribed on a portrait of Norman that hangs at Castle Leslie, the family home in Northern Ireland, run today by the Leslies as a luxury hotel.3 Sir Alfred Pease, whose house was the home base for the Roosevelts on part of their safari, lost his youngest son to the war in 1918. At the age of sixty-four Frederick Courtney Selous managed to talk his way into the British army, fought against German soldiers in East Africa, and was killed by a sniper in 1917. In the United States, Theodore Roosevelt furiously opposed President Woodrow Wilson’s policy of neutrality, a position that made him the standard-bearer for the militaristic posturing of the Preparedness campaigns of 1915. His criticism of Wilson created a permanent break with his niece Eleanor, Elliott’s daughter, now married to her cousin Franklin, who was Wilson’s assistant secretary of the navy. Later, Roosevelt chafed miserably at being told by Wilson he was too old to reconstitute the Rough Riders and head into battle, but all four of his sons fought in the war. Theodore Jr. and Archie were wounded on the western front. Kermit used personal connections to join the British forces in the Middle East and began his war experiences there before transferring to the American Expeditionary Forces in the spring of 1918. The youngest Roosevelt child, Quentin, died when his plane was shot down in a dogfight over France in July 1918. Theodore Roosevelt himself died on January 6, 1919, at the age of sixty. Archie cabled his surviving brothers, “The old lion is dead.”4 Kermit edited a memorial volume celebrating Quentin’s life and patriotic death, published in 1921. He eventually wrote several more books. War in the Garden of Eden described his wartime experiences in the Middle East, while The Happy Hunting Grounds and Trailing the Giant Panda recounted his hunting exploits in Africa, the Americas and China. Cleared for Strange Ports, cowritten with his mother, described their trip around the world. Troubled by recurring episodes of depression, Kermit began drinking more and more heavily as he aged. His marriage faltered, and his brothers despaired of him. By the

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fall of 1941, he was alternating periods of hospitalization with intense drinking binges. In 1942, Kermit’s brother Archibald and cousin Franklin Roosevelt agreed that the best thing for Kermit would be to get back into uniform again, and he was posted to Alaska. On paper, there was some military purpose to this venture. Japanese forces had occupied small islands in the region and American forces were needed to defend the Aleutians. However, in practice, there was little for Kermit to do, and the cycle of drinking and hospitalizations resumed. On June 4, 1943, in Fort Richardson, Alaska, he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. The Earl of Dunraven had a souvenir of his western travels: an enormous painting of Estes Park by Albert Bierstadt. Dunraven and Bierstadt traveled to Estes Park around Christmas, 1876, and the earl showed Bierstadt where he planned to build a hotel. He asked Bierstadt to paint the scene for him and paid what was at that time the extraordinary sum of fifteen thousand dollars for the painting when it was completed in 1878. After being exhibited at the Royal Academy Estes Park, Long’s Peak was hung at Adare Manor. Dunraven’s daughter, the Countess of Meath, inherited it, and it passed down through the family until 1955, when it was sold to pay for the education of Dunraven’s great-grandson Desmond Fitzgerald. Roger Mead, an architect in Denver, bought the painting and gave it to the Denver Public Library (fig. 5). As a child, Fitzgerald spent hours sitting in front of the painting “daydreaming about cowboys and Indians and Buffalo Bill.” Today, the painting hangs at the Denver Art Museum in a room with two other works by Bierstadt and landscape painting and photography by Thomas Moran, Carleton Watkins, and other well-known artists of the American sublime.5 To encourage visitors to engage with the art the museum’s curators have installed iPods with music meant to complement the visual experience. Choices range from the “Contemplative” (Alison Krauss and Yo-Yo Ma collaborating on the Shaker hymn “Simple

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Fig. 5. Albert Bierstadt, Estes Park, Long’s Peak, 1878. The Denver Public Library, Western History Collection, C-56-1.

Gifts”) to the “Epic” (Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man”) to the “Happy” (John Denver, “Rocky Mountain High”). The curators have also provided attractive blank journals bound in dark blue in which visitors can record their responses. Some people respond lyrically if somewhat incoherently: “vibrant, peaceful/beautiful as a butterfly/the misty mountains.” Others take a more critical turn: “ ’Merica/hell yeah . . . Mountain Waterfalls for Coors.” One Francophone observer simply notes, “Au Colorado tout est beau,” while Charlotte, age seven, declares, “The snowy mountains are really pointy.” People bring their own assumptions about what western nature can tell them. Is this a story about purity or corruption? about the serenity or commodification of nature? can there be one without the other? Estes Park depicts Longs Peak bathed in glowing light, with an aquamarine lake in the middle distance. The painting’s detailed brushwork and attention to detail suggest that the scene depicts Estes Park exactly, but in fact this is a composite view that combines several vantage points

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in the valley into a coherent yet imaginary whole. Estes Park contains no settlers, no Indians, not even Dunraven himself—no people at all. It is a visual realization of a fantasy of the primitive wilderness, and, like other fantasies of the primitive, it conceals the social realities that put men like Dunraven into places like Estes Park and paintings like this one into Dunraven’s hands. Clouds swirl around the mountains sweeping toward the upper edge of the painting, but in the foreground softly curving slopes of grass draw the eye toward the water, toward a river flowing deep into a space of reverie. A bighorn sheep in the left foreground has lifted its head as if startled by the viewer’s presence; it gazes at the viewer, but it doesn’t run away. Two other sheep continue to graze, unaware, as if perfectly positioned for the viewer’s rifle. You could take a shot. The bighorn looks and waits to see what you will do.

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NOTES

Introduction 1. On Roosevelt’s obsession with buckskin suits, see G. Edward White, The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience: The West of Frederick Remington, Theodore Roosevelt, and Owen Wister (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 83–84, and Sarah Watts, Rough Rider in the White House: Theodore Roosevelt and the Politics of Desire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 129. 2. David Wrobel, “Global West, American Frontier,” Pacific Historical Review 78, no. 1 (Feb. 2009): 1–2. 3. I have based my account of aristocratic anxiety and deterioration on David Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). See particularly chapters 2–4, 6. 4. Cannadine, 382, 385–86. 5. On British investment in the post–Civil War American West, in addition to the works cited below, see W. Turrentine Jackson, The Enterprising Scot: Investors in the American West after 1873 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1968); W. G. Kerr, Scottish Capital on the American Credit Frontier (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976); R. V. Clements, “British Investment in the Trans-Mississippi West,” Pacific Historical Review 29 (Feb. 1960): 35–60; Michael Edelstein, “Foreign Investment and Accumulation, 1860–1914,” in Roderick Floud and Donald McCloskey, eds., The Economic History of Britain since 1700, 2d ed., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 2:173–96. There are also numerous studies of various individual companies. No one interested in the topic can do without the annotated bibliography of Anne T. 219

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Ostrye, Foreign Investment in the American and Canadian West, 1870–1914 (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1986). 6. Anne Hyde, An American Vision: Far Western Landscape and National Culture , 1820–1920 (New York: New York University Press, 1990), 153. 7. Robert G. Athearn, Westward the Briton (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1953; New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953). 8. Foster Barham Zincke, Last Winter in the United States (London: John Murray, 1869), 249–53. 9. For instance, in “Sport, Travel, and Scenery on the S.W. Colorado Frontier,” The Field, May 4, 1878, 540–41, the anonymous author described himself in a “virgin field” for hunters, equipped only with his gun and supplies on a pack burro hired for the equivalent of ten shillings a week. 10. Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 1996), 59, 135–36; E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic, 1993), chapters 10, 11; Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Recent work by historians of the West on masculinities has examined the ways in which “the real West emerges as a pluralistic region where competing notions of manhood played out in encounters among ethnic and racial cultures, classes, and genders,” while recognizing the “dialectical process” that unfolded “as actual residents of the American West encountered notions of iconic western masculinity.” Laura McCall, “Introduction,” in Matthew Basso, Laura McCall, and Dee Garceau, eds., Across the Great Divide: Cultures of Manhood in the American West, ed. (New York: Routledge, 2001), 6–7. 11. G. Edward White, The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience: The West of Frederic Remington, Theodore Roosevelt, and Owen Wister (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968). 12. Wister diary entry for July 3, 1885, as quoted in Gene Gressley, Bankers and Cattlemen (1966; repr., Lincoln: University of Nebraska, Bison Books, 1973), 69; “The Cheyenne Club,” typescript by Agnes Wright Spring, box 195, folder 9, Wyoming Stock Growers’ Association Papers, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming. Values computed using the Consumer Price Index indicator at www.measuringworth.com (accessed Dec. 31, 2011). 13. Minutes of the Cheyenne Club for Sept. 16, Sept. 21, Oct. 8, 1882; Nov. 7, Nov. 8, 1884, box 196, folder 2, Wyoming Stock Growers’ Association Papers, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie,

NOTES TO PAGES 10–13

Wyoming; Cheyenne Club Members’ Book and Visitors’ Register, boxes 197–98, Wyoming Stock Growers’ Association Papers. 14. William G. Robbins, Colony and Empire: The Capitalist Transformation of the American West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994), xii. 15. Richard Phillips, Mapping Men and Empire: A Geography of Adventure (London: Routledge, 1997), 3, 13, 18, 57. My thinking about the concept of adventure has also been influenced by Sherry Ortner, Life and Death on Mount Everest: Sherpas and Himalayan Mountaineering (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 35, 36–41. My thanks to Catherine Hollis for suggesting that I read Ortner’s compelling study. 16. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999), 24–25. Tim Carrigan, Bob Connell, John Lee, “Toward a New Sociology of Masculinity,” in Rachel Adams and David Savran, eds., The Masculinity Studies Reader (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002), 112. 17. Michael Roper and John Tosh, “Introduction,” in Roper and Tosh, eds., Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800 (London: Routledge, 1991), 18. 18. Connell, Masculinities, 76; Judith Kegan Gardiner, “Introduction,” in Gardiner, ed., Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory: New Directions (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 10–11. 19. Athearn, 9; Ray Allen Billington, Land of Savagery, Land of Promise: The European Image of the American Frontier (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981); Earl Pomeroy, In Search of the Golden West: The Tourist in Western America (1957; repr., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990). For an insightful critique of Billington’s book, see Patricia Nelson Limerick, “Persistent Traits and the Persistent Historian: The American Frontier and Ray Allen Billington,” in Richard W. Etulain, ed., Writing Western History: Essays on Major Western Historians (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991), 277–310; Ian Tyrrell, “American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History,” American Historical Review 96, no. 4 (Oct. 1991): 1031–55. 20. Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), chapter 2, “The American Exceptionalist Vision”; Joyce Appleby, “Recovering America’s Historic Diversity: Beyond Exceptionalism,” Journal of American History 79, no. 2 (Sept. 1992): 419–31, and David Thelan, “Making History and Making the United States,” Journal of American Studies 32 (1998): 373–97. The literature on exceptionalism is immense and beyond the scope of this introduction, but see, in addition to

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the works cited above, the essays in Thomas Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 21. Ian Tyrell, “Making Nations/Making States: American Historians in the Context of Empire,” Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (1999) www. historycooperative.org/journals/jah/86.3/tyrell.html (accessed Jan. 1, 2003): paragraphs 38–41; Bender, “Historians, the Nation, and the Plenitude of Narratives,” in Rethinking American History, 2–4; Ross, 272–73; Kerwin Klein, Frontiers of Historical Imagination: Narrating the European Conquest of America, 1890–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 65–66. 22. Michael Adas, “From Settler Society to Global Hegemon: Integrating the Exceptionalist Narrative of the American Experience into World History,” American Historical Review 106, no. 5 (Dec. 2001): 1712. 23. See Paul A. Kramer, “Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the United States in the World”: “post-exceptionalist histories need not dispense with a sense of uniqueness.” American Historical Review 116, no. 5 (Dec. 2011): 1362. 24. On transnational history, see Kramer, 1384–85; C. A. Bayly, Sven Beckert, Matthew Connelly, Isabel Hofmeyr, Wendy Kozol, and Patricia Seed, “Conversation: On Transnational History,” American Historical Review 111, no. 5 (Dec. 2006): 1440–64; Marcus Gräser, “World History in a Nation-State: The Transnational Disposition in Historical Writing in the United States,” Journal of American History 95, no. 4 (March 2009): 1038–52; and the essays by Bender and Tyrell cited above. 25. The phrase is that of Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, in “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” in Cooper and Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 13. On transnational history and the West, see Patricia Nelson Limerick, “Going West and Ending Up Global,” Western Historical Quarterly 32, no. 1 (Spring 2001), www.historycooperative. org/journals/whq/32.1/limerick.html (accessed Jan. 9, 2003), and Samuel Truett and Elliot Young, eds. Continental Crossroads: Remapping U.S.–Mexico Borderlands History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).

Chapter 1. Sir William Drummond Stewart and Aristocratic Masculinity 1. Washington Irving, The Adventures of Captain Bonneville, in James P. Ronda, ed., Three Western Narratives (New York: Library of America, 2004),

NOTES TO PAGES 19–20

776. On Irving’s western texts, see Peter Antelyes, Tales of Adventurous Enterprise: Washington Irving and the Poetics of Western Expansion (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). 2. As quoted in Bernard DeVoto, Across the Wide Missouri (1947; repr., New York: Mariner, 1998), 19–20. 3. On Stewart, see DeVoto, Across the Wide Missouri; Mae Reed Porter and Odessa Davenport, Scotsman in Buckskin: Sir William Drummond Stewart and the Rocky Mountain Fur Trade (New York: Hastings, 1963); Marshall Sprague, A Gallery of Dudes (Boston: Little, Brown, 1966), 2–32; John I. Merritt, Baronets and Buffalo: The British Sportsman in the American West (Missoula, Mont.: Mountain Press, 1985), 1–15, 26–49, and Lisa Strong, “American Indians and Scottish Identity in Sir William Drummond Stewart’s Collection,” Winterthur Portfolio 35 (Summer/Autumn 2000): 127–56. PDF, InfoTrac Onefile (accessed March 15, 2004). See also William H. Goetzmann, Army Exploration in the American West, 1803–1863 (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1991), 26, 52, 87–88, 413, and Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1993), 196–97, 246, and Hal K. Rothman, Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 35–36, on Stewart as a “prototourist.” Stewart’s novels are William Drummond Stewart [“An Amateur Traveler”], Altowan, introduction by J. Watson Webb (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1846), and Edward Warren, ed. Bart Barbour with an introduction by Winfred Blevins (1854; repr., Missoula, Mont.: Copper Mountain Books/Mountain Press, 1986). Altowan was published only in the United States, and Edward Warren only in Great Britain. The only review of either novel that I have been able to find appeared in United States Democratic Review 19 (Nov. 1846), 410. “The Nineteenth Century in Print: Periodicals,” Library of Congress, http:// memory.loc.gov/ammem/ndlpcoop/moahtml/snchome.html (accessed January 10, 2006). For additional information on Stewart’s novels, see Barbour, “Publishing History,” in Edward Warren, viii. Portions of this chapter appeared previously in Monica Rico, “Sir William Drummond Stewart: Aristocratic Masculinity in the American West,” Pacific Historical Review 76, no. 2 (May 2007): 163–91. 4. Miller, like George Catlin and Karl Bodmer, was one of the few early nineteenth-century artists to depict the West based on firsthand experience. On Miller, see Joan Carpenter Troccoli, Alfred Jacob Miller: Watercolors of the

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American West; Ron Tyler, ed., Alfred Jacob Miller, Artist on the Oregon Trail (Fort Worth: Amon Carter Museum, 1982); Jules David Prown et al., Discovered Lands, Invented Pasts: Transforming Visions of the American West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Jennifer McClerran, “Trappers’ Brides and Country Wives: Native American Women in the Paintings of Alfred Jacob Miller,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 18 (Spring 1994): 1–41; Lisa Strong, “Images of Indigenous Aristocracy in Alfred Jacob Miller,” American Art 13 (Spring 1999): 63–83; Strong, “Images of Indian– White Contact in the Watercolors of Alfred Jacob Miller” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2000), 167–68, and Strong, Sentimental Journey: The Art of Alfred Jacob Miller (Fort Worth: Amon Carter Museum, 2008). See also Ann McGrath, “White Brides: Images of Marriage Across Colonizing Boundaries,” Frontiers 23, no. 3 (2002): 76–108, for a comparative perspective on Miller and Australian artist Arthur Boyd. Many of Miller’s notes regarding his journey are reprinted in Marvin C. Ross, ed., The West of Alfred Jacob Miller (1837): From the Notes and Water Colors in the Walters Art Gallery (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968). 5. On middle-class manhood in the early nineteenth century, see Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 27, 110, 215, 229. 6. Strong, Sentimental Journey, 104; T. M. Devine, The Scottish Nation: A History, 1700–2000 (New York: Penguin, 1999), 229, 273–74; T. C. Smout, A Century of the Scottish People, 1830–1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 7–8. 7. Harry Liebersohn, Aristocratic Encounters: European Travelers and North American Indians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 5–6. 8. Edward Warren, 68. Subsequent references in the text. 9. William Nairne to George Stewart, Jan. 28, 1839, 101/21/93; [illegible] Cabondie to Drummond Stewart, Feb. 16, 1839, 101/21/95; Stewart to Drummond Stewart, Feb. 21, 1839, 101/21/96, Murthly Castle Muniments, Scottish Record Office (SRO), Edinburgh. On the rural textile industry in western Lowland Scotland, see Smout, 16. 10. Stewart, Altowan, 58. Subsequent references in the text. 11. William Drummond Stewart to J. Watson Webb, Oct. 9, 1832, Webb Papers, Manuscripts Division, Yale University Library.

NOTES TO PAGES 24–28

12. David J. Wishart, The Fur Trade of the American West, 1807–1840: A Geographical Synthesis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), 14. 13. In addition to Wishart, I have relied on the following for information about the fur trading systems of the trans-Mississippi West: Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1–19; “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 18–29; Elliott West, “American Frontier,” in Clyde A. Milner II, Carol O’Connor, and Martha A. Sandweiss, eds., The Oxford History of the American West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 114–49; Richard M. Clokey, William Ashley: Enterprise and Politics in the Trans-Mississippi West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980), 58–206; Jay Buckley, “Rocky Mountain Entrepreneur: Robert Campbell as a Fur Trade Capitalist,” Annals of Wyoming 75 (Summer 2003), 20–22. 14. William Clark Kennerly, Persimmon Hill, a narrative of old St. Louis and the far West by William Clark Kennerly as told to Elizabeth Russell (Norman, Okla., 1948), 148; DeVoto, Across the Wide Missouri, 170, 424. 15. Carol Clark, “A Romantic Painter in the American West,” in Tyler, ed., Alfred Jacob Miller, 11–12; quotation in Ross, The West of Alfred Jacob Miller, xvi; Miller, “Antoine Clement,” Rough Draught 37, in ibid. 16. Tyler, ed., Alfred Jacob Miller, catalogue raisonné numbers 120B and 157. 17. Catherine Bastide to William Drummond Stewart (hereafter WDS), Sept. 28, 1839, 121/101/21/130, Murthly Castle Muniments. 18. On Scottish romanticism, see Strong, “American Indians and Scottish Identity,” Strong, Sentimental Journey, 66–67; A. J. Miller to Decatur Miller, Oct. 31, 1840, typescript in Bernard Augustine DeVoto Papers, M0001, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, Calif. 19. Wishart, 30–31, 67–69, 161–66; Richard White, “Animals and Enterprise,” in Clyde A. Milner II, Carol O’Connor, and Martha A. Sandweiss, eds., The Oxford History of the American West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 247. 20. Stewart, Edward Warren, 1–2. 21. Whereas Stewart might have chosen to imagine himself as an explorer who made the region accessible to settlers, it is telling that he did not; he had no commitment to a progressive narrative of American expansion.

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22. DeVoto, 363; Matthew C. Field, Prairie and Mountain Sketches, collected by Clyde and Mae Reed Porter; Kate L. Gregg, and John Francis McDermott, eds., (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1957), xxiii. 23. As quoted in Alvin M. Josephy Jr., “First ‘Dude Ranch’ Trip to the Untamed West,” American Heritage 7 (Feb. 1956), 9. 24. Kennerly, Persimmon Hill, 257–58. Kennerly includes only those participants with whom he was personally acquainted. Other sources for the trip’s roster include the letters and diaries of Matthew Field and the papers of William Sublette. As John McDermott points out, these various sources contradict one another at some points, and none of them can be taken as definitive lists of the expedition’s participants. Gregg and McDermott, eds., xxxi. 25. John James Audubon to “My Dearest Friends,” April 2, 1843, in Audubon in the West, ed. John Francis McDermott (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1965), 47. Stewart apparently tried to persuade Audubon to accompany the expedition, but he declined. See Audubon to “My Dearest Friends,” April 8, April 17, April 23, 1843, in McDermott, ed., Audubon in the West, 53, 57, 66. Kennerly, 144, 149, 159; Field, “Diary Entry for July 8, 1843,” in Gregg and McDermott, eds., 85, 26. The identification of the particular lake is from Merritt, 47; Field, “Diary Entry for Aug. 14, 1843,” in Gregg and McDermott, eds., 149. 27. Kennerly, n. 2, 166. 28. “Diary Entry for Aug. 21, 1843,” in Gregg and McDermott, eds., 163. 29. Kennerly, 164. 30. Robert Campbell to Drummond Stewart, April 22, 1844, 121/101/22/95, Murthly Castle Muniments. 31. Campbell to Drummond Stewart, Aug. 15, 1844, 121/101/22/112, ibid. 32. Robert Campbell to WDS, Aug. 29, 1839, 121/101/21/122; William Sublette to WDS, June 16, 1841, 121/101/22/4, Jan. 6, 1843, 121/101/22/31, Nov. 221843, 121/101/22/77; Alfred Jacob Miller to WDS, March 27, 1839, 121/101/21/99; John Crawford to WDS, April 4, 1839, 121/101/21/100, Murthly Castle Muniments. 33. William Sublette to WDS, Jan. 13, 1842121/101/22/33, Jan. 6, 1843121/101/22/31; Catherine Bastide to WDS, Aug. 15, 1839, 121/101/21/118, Murthly Castle Muniments. 34. Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 206, 210–13; Yi-Fu Tuan, Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets (New Haven: Yale

NOTES TO PAGES 33–37

University Press, 1984), 76; Robert W. Jones, “ ‘The Sight of Creatures Strange to our Clime’: London Zoo and the Consumption of the Exotic,” Journal of Victorian Culture 2, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 1–26; Strong, “Images of Indian– White Contact in the Watercolors of Alfred Jacob Miller,” 181–82. 35. Alfred J. Miller to Decatur Miller, Dec. 25, 1840, DeVoto Papers. 36. Stewart, Altowan, 117. 37. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 148. For further discussion of Stewart’s collecting, see Strong, “Images of White–Indian Contact,” 176–85, and Strong, Sentimental Journey, 52–58. 38. Strong, “American Indians and Scottish Identity,” 1–2. 39. “A Romantic Painter in the American West,” in Tyler, ed., Alfred Jacob Miller, 62; Strong, “American Indians and Scottish Identity,” 4. 40. See Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 41. See Strong, “Images of Indigenous Aristocracy.” 42. Elizabeth Bohls, Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716–1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 83–85, 88; Anne Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Elizabeth K. Helsinger, Rural Scenes and National Representation: Britain, 1815–1850 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 43. Stewart’s renovations at Murthly also represented his performance of Scottishness at a time when Scotland was being constructed as Britain’s own romantic frontier. See Strong, “American Indians and Scottish Identity”; on Scotland more generally, see Bohls, 199–201; Helsinger, 24; Malcolm Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989). 44. On the acquaintance between Stewart and the more scientifically oriented Prince Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied, see Ron Tyler, “Alfred Jacob Miller and Sir William Drummond Stewart,” in Tyler, ed., Alfred Jacob Miller, n. 5, 20; Barton H. Barbour, Fort Union and the Upper Missouri Fur Trade (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001), 74–82; Liebersohn, 138. 45. On the berdache, see Will Roscoe, Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998). Roscoe briefly mentions Stewart’s use of the term, 173.

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Chapter 2. “What Shall I Do with My Son?” 1. Moreton Frewen, Melton Mowbray and Other Memories (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1924), 159. See also Richard Frewen (hereafter RF) to Edward Frewen (hereafter EF), Jan. 20, 1879, FRE 4178/5, Frewen MS, East Sussex Record Office (hereafter ESRO), Lewes, England, and Moreton Frewen (hereafter MF) to EF, Dec. 20, 1878, 4178/6, Frewen MS, ESRO. There are three biographies of Moreton Frewen: Anita Leslie’s Mr. Frewen of England: A Victorian Adventurer (London: Hutchinson, 1966), written by a grandniece of Frewen’s, covers Frewen’s entire life but in its treatment of the Powder River years is generally inferior to L. Milton Wood’s Moreton Frewen’s Western Adventures (Boulder: American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, in cooperation with Roberts Rinehart, 1986). See also Allen Andrews, The Splendid Pauper (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1968). 2. Frewen, 159. 3. Frewen, 155. 4. RF to EF, Jan. 20, 1879, FRE 4178/5, Frewen MS, ESRO. 5. Frewen, 166. 6. Frewen, 165. See also MF to EF, Feb. 19, 1879, 4178/8, Frewen MS, ESRO. 7. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 60–61; Angela Miller, The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and Cultural Politics, 1825–1875 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 148–49. 8. The ranching boom was not confined to British-owned companies. Many cattle ranchers were funded primarily with capital from Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and other eastern cities. See Gene Gressley, Bankers and Cattlemen (1966; repr., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1973). The rapid expansion of the range cattle industry and its subsequent troubles have been analyzed in numerous books. Among these see Terry G. Jordan, North American CattleRanching Frontiers: Origins, Diffusion, and Differentiation (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993) as well as Ernest Staples Osgood, The Day of the Cattleman (1929; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); Louis Pelzer, The Cattleman’s Frontier (1936; repr., New York: Russell and Russell, 1969); Lewis Atherton, The Cattle Kings (1961; repr., Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972); and Don Walker, ed., Clio’s Cowboys: Studies in the Historiography of the Cattle Trade (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981). W. Turrentine Jackson, “British Interests in the Range Cattle Industry,”

NOTES TO PAGES 49–54

in Maurice Frink, W. Turrentine Jackson, and Agnes Wright Spring, When Grass Was King: Contributions to the Western Range Cattle Industry Study (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 1956), and Jackson, The Enterprising Scot: Investors in the American West after 1873 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1968) specifically discuss the British role in the range cattle industry. 9. Frewen, 119. 10. MF to Clara Jerome (hereafter CJ), May 13, 1880, Frewen Papers, acc. no. 9529, box 1, folder 7, AHC. 11. RF to EF, March 25, 1879, FRE 4178/10, Frewen MS, ESRO; RF to EF, Nov. 25, 1879, FRE 4178/23, Frewen MS, ESRO. These are only two of a series of letters sounding the same theme. See also RF to EF, May 29, 1879, FRE 4178/13, Frewen MS, ESRO; RF to EF, July 7, 1879, FRE 4178/16, Frewen MS, ESRO; RF to EF, Sept. 17, 1879, FRE 4178/19, Frewen MS, ESRO. 12. Nd., FRE 4179/16, Frewen MS, ESRO. 13. F. M. L. Thompson, English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), 303, 308–9. 14. Windham Thomas Wyndham-Quin, Earl of Dunraven, “The Future ‘Constitutional Party’ ” Nineteenth Century 13(April 1883): 697–98. 15. Frink, Jackson, and Spring, When Grass Was King, 223. This is about 27 percent of total capitalization of the cattle industry ($168,972,000) based on figures for companies registered in Wyoming, Montana, New Mexico, and Colorado between 1882 and 1886. See Gressley, 109. 16. W. H. A. Feilding, “What Shall I Do with My Son?” Nineteenth Century 14 (April 1883): 578–86. 17. Cannadine, Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, 296; Patrick A. Dunae, Gentleman Emigrants: From the British Public Schools to the Canadian Frontier (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1981), 48–57. 18. John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 116. 19. Feilding, 579. 20. Tosh, 116, chapter 8. 21. Frewen, 129. 22. MF to Clara Frewen (hereafter CF), May 20, 1885, Frewen Papers, acc. no. 9529, box 3, folder 16, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming (hereafter AHC); Cornelia Adair, My Diary: Aug. 30th to Nov. 5th, 1874, ed. Montagu K. Brown (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965), 66.

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23. “Notes from America,” Field, June 291878, 776–77 24. See, for example, G. Keith Gordon, “Life in Texas,” The Field, March 1, 1884, 279 25. Jackson, “British Interests in the Range Cattle Industry,” in Frank, Jackson, and Spring, 146–47. 26. John Clay, My Life on the Range (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962), 128. 27. Cattle Raising in the Far West,” Anglo-American Times, April 30, 1880, 7–8. 28. “Cattle Ranching in America, The Field, Jan. 12, 1884, 47. 29. “Cattle Raising in the Far West,” Anglo-American Times, April 30, 1880, 7–8. 30. Arthur Pendarves Vivian, Wanderings in the Western Land (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1879), 175. 31. Mary Duffus Hardy, Through Cities and Prairie Lands: Sketches of an American Tour (London: Chapman and Hall, 1881), 127. 32. On the destruction of the bison, see Andrew Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 33. A Lady’s Ranche Life in Montana (London: W. H. Allen, 1887), 119–21. 34. William Saunders, Through the Light Continent; or, The United States in 1877–78, 2d ed. (London: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, 1879), 44. 35. For instance, a former cavalry officer wrote a letter asking if his military experience on the South African veldt would serve him well in the American West. “Travel Notes and Queries,” The Field, Jan. 26, 1884, 117 36. Anglo-American Times, May 14, 1880, 13. 37. G. A. Henty, A Tale of the Western Plains (Lake Wales, Fla.: Lost Classics, 1997; originally published as Redskin and Cowboy: A Tale of the Western Plains (New York: Scribners, 1891; London: Blackie, 1892). Numerous down-ontheir-luck gentlemen labored as writers in the boys’ literature industry. See Patrick Dunae, “New Grub Street for Boys,” in Jeffrey Richards, ed., Imperialism and Juvenile Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 29–30. 38. “Cattle Ranching in the West, The Field, May 3, 1884, 606; “Some Personal Experiences in Cattle-Ranching in America,” The Field, May 31, 1884, 761–62. 39. MF to Anne Frewen, Sept. 27, 1878, Frewen MS, ESRO, 4178/3.

NOTES TO PAGES 61–68

40. Woods, 31–33. 41. On Clara Jerome, see Elisabeth Kehoe, The Titled Americans: Three American Sisters and the British Aristocratic World into Which They Married (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2004). 42. Kehoe, 44–61. 43. Maureen E. Montgomery, Gilded Prostitution: Status, Money, and Transatlantic Marriages, 1870–1914 (London: Routledge, 1989). 44. As quoted in Kathleen Burk, “Anglo-American Marital Relations, 1870–1945,” www.gresham.ac.uk/printtranscript.asp?EventId=211(accessed Nov. 21, 2006). 45. Jennie’s marriage settlement had been two thousand pounds a year. This was a respectable sum but not a fortune, and the Churchills had expected she would bring more. See Kehoe, 57–59. On Moreton Frewen on matrimony as a means to wealth, see MF to Anne Frewen, Sept. 27, 1878, Frewen MS, ESRO, 4178/3. 46. Undated, MF to CJ, Frewen papers, AHC. 47. MF to CJ, June 30, 1880, acc. no. 9529, box 1, folder 7, AHC. 48. MF to CJ, May 29, 1880, acc. no. 9529, box 1, folder 6, AHC. 49. MF to CJ, Nov. 4, 1880, acc. no. 9529, box 1, folder 12, AHC. 50. MF to CJ,, July 17, 1880, acc. no. 9529, box 1, folder 8; letter to CJ, July 25 1880, acc. no. 9529, box 1, folder 8, AHC. 51. Kehoe, 105–6; Woods, 55. 52. To CF, June 22, 1883, Frewen Papers, acc. no. 9529, box 2, folder 11, AHC. 53. Woods, 1, 13–14, 37. 54. For an insightful discussion of masculinity and hunting in Canada, see Tina Loo, “Of Moose and Men: Hunting for Masculinities in British Columbia, 1880–1939,” Western Historical Quarterly 32 (Autumn 2001): 296–319. 55. MF to EF, Sept. 13, 1879, FRE 4178/18, Frewen MS, ESRO; MF to EF, June 1, 1879, FRE 4178/14, Frewen MS, ESRO; Maurice de Bunsen to MF, Nov. 23, 1883, Frewen Papers, acc. no. 9529, box 2, folder 12, AHC. 56. To CJ, Oct. 8, 1880, Frewen Papers, acc. no. 9529, box 1, folder 11, AHC; to CJ, Oct. 9, 1880, Frewen Papers, acc. no. 9529, box 1, folder 11, AHC 57. To CJ, Sept. 21, 1880, Frewen Papers, acc. no. 9529, box 1, folder 10, AHC. 58. To CJ, Sept. 17, 1880, Frewen Papers, acc. no. 9529, box 1, folder 10, AHC; to CJ, Aug. 3, 1880, Frewen Papers, acc. no. 9529, box 1, folder 9, AHC.

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59. To CJ, July 25, 1880, Frewen Papers, acc. no. 9529, box 1, folder 8, AHC 60. To CJ, May 2, 1881, Frewen Papers, acc. no. 9529, box 1, folder 17, AHC. 61. To CF, Oct. 25, 1881, Frewen Papers, acc. no. 9529, box 2 folder 1, AHC; Richard Frewen to CF, Dec. 24[?] 1881, Frewen Papers, acc. no. 9529, box 2 folder 3, AHC. 62. To CF, July 15, 1882, Frewen Papers, acc. no. 9529, box 2, folder 7, AHC, and others in the same folder. 63. As Lawrence Woods has observed, the company’s structure reveals Frewen’s excessively optimistic projection of the company’s future. The Powder River Cattle Company, Limited, issued ten thousand preferred shares at ten pounds each and forty thousand common shares at five pounds each, for a total initial capital of three hundred thousand pounds. The agreement between Frewen and the company stated that Frewen was to sell the ranch for twelve thousand pounds in cash and a fifth of the company’s common shares. He was to be manager of the company in America for five years and to receive a third of surplus profits as a salary, but only if a 10 percent dividend had been paid to the company’s preferred shareholders. In 1887 the ranch assets were to be independently appraised, and Frewen was to be paid one-third of all increase in value. Frewen seems not to have considered the possibility that there would be no surplus available to pay the dividend, let alone his salary. Woods, 67–70. 64. W. Beckett Denison to MF, Aug. 6, 1882, Frewen Papers, acc. no. 9529, box 2, folder 8, AHC. 65. Jordan, 232. 66. Osgood, 216. 67. Osgood, 104–5. 68. Gressley, 119–21, 112. 69. Atherton, 154–61. 70. Richard said as much in a long letter dated May 18, 1882, just before the buyout: “I tell you plainly, you can’t run this I can’t see how you can possibly see your way in the future and you can make more money by floating such things at the Bat caves . . . than you will ever make by running them yourself. They are all good schemes, but you can’t run them.” RF to MF, acc. no. 9529, box 2, folder 6, AHC. 71. MF to CF, Oct. 20, 1882, Frewen Papers, acc. no. 9529, box 2, folder 9, AHC; C. F. Kemp to MF, Oct. 24, 1882, Frewen Papers, acc. no. 9529, box 2, folder 10, AHC.

NOTES TO PAGES 72–75

72. See MF to CF, Sept. 12, 1883, Frewen Papers, acc. no. 9529, box 2, folder 18, AHC. 73. MF to the Earl of Wharncliffe, Nov. 16, 1884, Frewen Papers, acc. no. 9529, box 2, folder 11, AHC. 74. MF to CF, Sept. 22, 1883, Frewen Papers, acc. no. 9529, box 2, folder 18, AHC; MF to CF, Oct. 2, 4, 7, 15, 24, 1883, Frewen Papers, acc. no. 9529, box 2, folder 19, AHC. 75. Charles Murphy to MF, Dec. 8, 1883, Frewen Papers, acc. no. 9529, box 2, folder 12, AHC. 76. RF to MF, June 28, 1885, Frewen Papers, acc. no. 9529, box 3, folder 18, AHC. 77. See Charley Carter to MF, Dec. 9, 1885, Frewen Papers, acc. no. 9529, box 3, folder 26, AHC. 78. RF to EF, Nov. 16, 1885, FRE 4179/4, Frewen MS, ESRO. See also Horace Plunkett to C. F. Kemp, Sept. 30, 1886, copy, FRE 4209/33, Frewen MS, ESRO 79. MF to C. F. Kemp, Sept. 29, 1886, copy, FRE 4209/33, Frewen MS, ESRO; MF to EF, Nov. 18, 1886, FRE 4179/70, Frewen MS, ESRO 80. Rosslyn to MF, Aug. 24, 1885, Frewen Papers, acc. no. 9529, box 3, folder 21, AHC. 81. See MF to Rosslyn, Sept. 18, 1887, Frewen Papers, acc. no. 9529, box 5, folder 9, AHC; Charley Carter to MF, Nov. 12, 1887, Frewen Papers, acc. no. 9529, box 5, folder 12, AHC. In the 1930s Louis Pelzer was able to find the Powder River cattle book in the Cheyenne offices of J. M. Carey and Sons. According to it, the herds purchased in 1882 brought the company’s cattle to 28, 488 head in January 1883; in the fall of the same year the herds were at nearly 50,000. In 1885 the company owned 57,917 head and had a calf crop of 6,655. But as Pelzer puts it, “The record of the [Company’s] purchases and sales became mute for 1886. The last entry in its records is that of a meager list of cattle sold in 1886 to firms in Chicago, Superior, Omaha, and at Newman in Nebraska. No inventory was made for the thousands of its cattle lost, frozen, or starved during the Wyoming blizzards of 1886 and 1887.” Pelzer, 124. See also Woods, 202. 82. See Beckett-Denison to MF, April 25, 1886, Mackenzie to Rosslyn, April 26, 1886, Mackenzie to MF, April 26, 1886, Alfred Sartoris to MF, April 26, 1886, Frewen Papers, acc. no. 9529, box 4, folder 4, AHC. 83. See Mackenzie to MF, Dec. 31, 1886, Frewen Papers, acc. no. 9529, box 4, folder 23, AHC; Mackenzie to MF, Jan. 4, 1887; Stibbard, Gibson, and

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Sykes to MF, Jan. 5, 1887; Mackenzie to MF, Jan. 6, 1887, all in Frewen Papers, acc. no. 9529, box 5, folder 1, AHC. 84. Woods, 172. 85. Rosslyn to MF, April 2, 1887, Frewen Papers, acc. no. 9529, box 5, folder 5, AHC. 86. Gressley, 243–46. 87. Morton E. Post to Amelia Post, May 23, 1887 as quoted in Gressley, 144 88. MF to EF, nd, FRE 4179/122, Frewen MS, ESRO. Se also Woods, 198. 89. On elite emigration to Australia, Canada, and Africa, see Cannadine, 429–36. On remittance men in Canada, see Patrick A. Dunae, Gentlemen Emigrants: From the British Public Schools to the Canadian Frontier (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1981), and Mark Zuehlke, Scoundrels, Dreams, and Second Sons: British Remittance Men in the Canadian West (Vancouver: Whitecap Books, 1994). On remittance men in the United States, see Lawrence M. Woods, British Gentlemen in the Wild West: The Era of the Intensely English Cowboy (New York: Free Press, 1989), and Lee Olson, Marmalade and Whiskey: British Gentlemen in the West (Golden, Col.: Fulcrum, 1993). 90. For example, see the follow-up article to “ ‘What Shall I Do with My Son?” ’ W. H. A. Feilding, ‘ “Whither Shall I Send My Son?” ’ Nineteenth Century 14 (July 1883): 65–77, and “The Importance of Anglo-American Settlement,” Anglo-American Times, Aug. 27, 1880, 7–8 91. Anglo-American Times, Jan. 2, 1885, 20. 92. Hardy, 216–17; Mary Carbutt, Five Months Fine Weather in Canada, Western U.S., and Mexico (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1889), 105, 107, 118. 93. Anglo-American Times, April 27, 1895, 1. 94. Beatrice Harraden, Hilda Strafford and The Remittance Man: Two California Stories (London: George Newnes, 1915), 65, 180–81. For another example of remittance man fiction, set in Canada, see W. H. P. Jarvis, Letters of a Remittance Man to His Mother (London: John Murray, 1908). 95. As quoted in Leslie, 202.

Chapter 3. Gender and Empire 1. Windham Thomas Wyndham-Quin, fourth Earl of Dunraven, Past Times and Pastimes (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1922), 140–41; George Kingsley, Notes on Sport and Travel (London: Macmillan, 1900), 175–78. James H. Pickering has ably reconstructed the history of Nugent’s death in “This

NOTES TO PAGES 85–88

Blue Hollow”: Estes Park, the Early Years, 1859–1915 (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 1999), 69–76. 2. My understanding of Bird’s travel writing has been influenced strongly by the work of Karen M. Morin. See Frontiers of Femininity: A New Historical Geography of the Nineteenth-Century American West (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2008), 52–54, and “Peak Practices: Englishwomen’s ‘Heroic’ Adventures in the Nineteenth-Century American West,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 89 (Sept. 1999): 489–514. In recent years, a substantive historiography analyzing European women and empire has flourished. As a starting point, see Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel, eds., Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), and Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). For general biographical information about Isabella Bird, I have drawn upon Dorothy Middleton, “Bishop [Bird], Isabella Lucy (1831–1904),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition, May 2005, http://www. oxforddnb.com/view/article/31904 (accessed July 8, 2010); Middleton, Victorian Lady Travellers (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1963), 19–53. 3. On selfhood and the movement from home to away, see Karen M. Lawrence, Penelope Voyages: Women and Travel in the British Literary Tradition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); Simon Gikandi, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). 4. Dunraven, Past Times, 1:4, 7–9, 33, 165. 5. My main source of biographical information about Dunraven, in addition to his memoir, Past Times and Pastimes, is the entry for him in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. S. L. Gwynn, “Quin, Windham Thomas Wyndham-, fourth earl of Dunraven and Mount Earl (1841–1926),” rev. Peter Gray, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004, online ed., January 2008, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/ article/35644 (accessed Jan. 19, 2009). See also the obituary for Dunraven in the Times, June 15, 1926. 6. Burke’s Peerage and Baronetage, 106th ed., s.v. “Dunraven and Mount-Earl.” 7. David Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 57, 64–65, 103–6, 472–87.

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8. Lawrence Woods, British Gentlemen in the Wild West: The Era of the Intensely English Cowboy (New York: Free Press, 1989), 46, 51; Lee Olson, Marmalade and Whiskey: British Remittance Men in the West (Golden, Colo.: Fulcrum, 1993), 157. Plunkett, atypically for this cohort, went on to have a distinguished career as an agricultural reformer. See Trevor West, Horace Plunkett: Cooperation and Politics (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press; Gerrards Cross, UK: Colin Smythe, 1986). 9. Anna M. Stoddart, The Life of Isabella Bird (Mrs. Bishop) (London: John Murray, 1906), 2–6. 10. Kay Chubbock, “Introduction,” in Isabella Bird, Letters to Henrietta, ed. Kay Chubbock (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003), 4–6; Janet Oppenheim, “Shattered Nerves”: Doctors, Patients, and Depression in Victorian England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 7–9, 94. See also Tracey Loughran, “Hysteria and Neurasthenia in pre-1914 British Medical Discourse and in Histories of Shell-shock,” History of Psychiatry 19 (2008): 29–30. http:// hpy.sagepub.com (accessed July 10, 2011). 11. Robert Barnes, “Lumleian Lectures on the Convulsive Diseases of Women,” The Lancet, April 12, 1873, in Pat Jalland and John Hooper, eds., Women from Birth to Death: The Female Life Cycle in Britain 1830–1914 (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1986), 13–16; J. M. Allan, ‘On the Differences in the Minds of Men and Women,” Journal of the Anthropological Society of London 7 (1869), in Jalland and Hooper, 34; Oppenheim, 187–93, 203–4. Some physicians contested the view of women as perpetual invalids. See E. B. Duffey, “Women’s Health and Natural Law,” in Oppenheim, 35–36. 12. Nancy M. Theriot, “Women’s Voices in Nineteenth-Century Medical Discourse: A Step Towards Deconstructing Science,” Signs 19, no. 1 (Autumn 1993), 7, 10. 13. Theriot, “Negotiating Illness: Doctors, Patients, and Families in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 37, no. 4 (Fall 2001), 350, 355. 14. Isabella Bird to Henrietta Bird, Nov. 8, 1872, as quoted in Chubbock, “Introduction,” Letters to Henrietta, 5n. 8; Theriot, “Negotiating Illness,” 363; Stoddart, 57. Note that Oppenheim challenges this sort of analysis, which she terms the “rebellion hypothesis,” 225–29. I agree with some points of Oppenheim’s critique, in that surely she is correct that not all cases of hysteria and illness can be interpreted as rebellion, and yet I still would argue that in

NOTES TO PAGES 93–98

Bird’s case the dynamics of her illness suggest she was in some way articulating, through disease, emotions she could not otherwise express. 15. Pat Jalland, Women, Marriage, and Politics: 1860–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 254–55; A. James Hammerton, Emigrant Gentlewomen: Genteel Poverty and Female Emigration, 1830–1914 (London: Croom Helm, 1979), 30; Margaret Bryan, The Unexpected Revolution: A Study in the History of Education and Girls in the Nineteenth Century (London: University of London Institute of Education, 1979), 35; Joyce Senders Pedersen, “The Reform of Women’s Secondary and Higher Education in Nineteenth-Century England: A Study in Elite Groups” (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Berkeley, 1974), 76–79. 16. W. R. Greg, “Why Are Women Redundant?” (London: N. Trübner, 1869), 8, 37, 30; Rita Kranidis, The Victorian Spinster and Colonial Emigration: Contested Subjects (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 3, 41. 17. Greg, 15–19; Hammerton, “Feminism and Female Emigration, 1861– 1886,” in Martha Vicinus, ed., A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), 52–71, and Emigrant Gentlewomen, 54–55; Kranidis, 32; Frances Power Cobbe, “What Shall We Do with Our Old Maids?” in Essays on the Pursuits of Women (London: Faithfull, 1863), 58–101. 18. Oppenheim, 124–31. 19. Dunraven, Past Times and Pasimes, 1:65. 20. Dunraven, Past Times and Pastimes, 1:76. For other examples of British travel writers who explained their desire to travel West by referring to boyhood reading, see Anonymous, A Holiday Skip to the Far West (London: E. Marlborough, 1884), 25–26, and William Archer, America To-Day (London: William Heinemann, 1900), 9–10. 21. Fifteen Years’ Sport and Life in the Hunting Grounds of Western America (London: Horace Cox, 1900), 11; “A Notable Hunting Party,” Rocky Mountain News, July 22, 1874. 22. Joy S. Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), 13. 23. Thadd Turner, “ ‘Texas Jack’ Omohundro,” Buffalo Bill Historical Center, http://www.bbhc.org/bbm/biographyTJ.cfm (accessed September 7, 2007); Handbook of Texas Online, s.v. http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/ online/articles/OO/fom1.html (accessed Jan. 9, 2009); Nellie Snyder Yost, Buffalo Bill: His Family, Friends, Fame, Failures, and Fortunes (Chicago: Sage,

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1979), 33–34, 41. See also Herschel C. Logan, Buckskin and Satin: The Life of Texas Jack (Harrisburg, Penn.: Stackpole, 1954). 24. D. Jean Smith, Medicine Creek Journals: Ena and the Plainsmen (North Platte, Neb.: Old One Hundred Press, 2003), 50, 80, 112. 25. Windham Thomas Wyndham-Quin, fourth earl of Dunraven, The Great Divide: Travels in the Upper Yellowstone in the Summer of 1874 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1876), 36; Kingsley, 137–38. 26. Dunraven, Great Divide, 57. 27. Dunraven, Great Divide, 147. 28. Oppenheim, 84–85, 141, 144, 150–52, 155, 158; Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 86–88; T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 47–58; E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic, 1993), 185–93. 29. On antimodernism and masculinity in Canada, see Tina Loo, “Of Moose and Men: Hunting for Masculinities in British Columbia, 1880–1939,” Western Historical Quarterly 32 (Autumn 2001), 299–300, and Loo, States of Nature: Conserving Canada’s Wildlife in the Twentieth Century (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2006), 29. For the British case, see Oppenheim, 100–103, 150–51, and, for the period 1900–1914, Loughran, “Hysteria and Neurasthenia.” 30. Almond, Christ the Protestant (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1899), 151, quoted in J. A. Mangan, The Games Ethic and Imperialism (New York: Viking, 1985), 26; Mangan, “Social Darwinism and Upper-Class Education in Late Victorian and Edwardian England,” in Mangan and Walvin, eds., Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and American, 1800–1940 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1987), 135–59; Loughran, 39–40. 31. Oppenheim, 120: “No one in Victorian and Edwardian Britain doubted that fresh air and sunshine were potent curative forces.” Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 1996), 135–37; Rotundo, 239–44; Roberta J. Park, “Biological Thought, Athletics, and the Formation of a ‘Man of Character’: 1830–1900,” in Mangan and Walvin, eds., Manliness and Morality, 7–34. 32. Rotundo, 251–62. 33. Alfred M. Mayer, Sport with Rod and Gun in American Woods and Waters (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1884), 11.

NOTES TO PAGES 105–109

34. Julius George Medley, An Autumn Tour in the U.S. and Canada (London: Henry S. King, 1873), 21. 35. For an excellent analysis of the way in which Anglo-Saxonism shaped American conceptions of racial identity and empire, see Paul A. Kramer, “Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons: Race and Rule between the British and United States Empires, 1880–1910,” Journal of American History 88, no. 4 (March 2002), www.historycooperative.org/journals/jah/88.4/kramer. html (accessed Sept. 9, 2002). 36. William Abraham Bell, New Tracks in North America (London: Chapman and Hall, 1869), 2–3, viii, 131–32, 156, 162–63. 37. Anne Windholz has argued that such racialized interpretations of American growth effectively recolonized the United States rhetorically and ideologically. Travel writers’ efforts to relate the United States not only to Britain but also to other British colonies suggests that British commentators were not so much attempting to recolonize the United States as grappling with the problem of how to resituate it within the broader context of imperial devolution. They were doing so during the period of a major debate on how other so-called Anglo-Saxon colonies could be separated from the formal imperial structure yet remain linked to the colonizing metropolis. Anne Windholz, “An Emigrant and a Gentleman: Imperial Masculinity, British Magazines, and the Colony that Got Away,” Victorian Studies 42 (Summer 1999/2000): 631–58. 38. Feb. 19, 1876, 191. See also Mangan’s comments on the United States as a setting for boys’ adventure fiction, in J. A. Mangan, “Noble Specimens of Manhood: Schoolboy Literature and the Creation of a Colonial Chivalric Code,” in Jeffrey Richards, ed., Imperialism and Juvenile Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 173–94. 39. Dunraven, Great Divide, 53–54. 40. William Baillie-Grohman [“Stalker”], “ ‘At Home’ in the Rockies,” The Field, Jan. 14, 1882, 50–51. 41. Vivian, Wanderings in the Western Land (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1879), 29–33. 42. “A Member of the Aristocracy,” Manners and Tone of Good Society; Or, Solecisms to be Avoided, 15th ed. (London: Frederick Warne, 1888), 95, 104–18 passim. On the central role that women played in society, see Leonore Davidoff, The Best Circles: Society, Etiquette, and the Season (London: Croom Helm, 1973). My notion of outdoors masculinity has been influenced by Susan Lee Johnson, “‘Domestic’ Life in the Diggings: The Southern Mines in the California Gold Rush,” in Valerie J. Matsumoto and Blake Allmendinger, eds.,

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NOTES TO PAGES 109–119

Over the Edge: Remapping the American West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 107–132. 43. Kimmel, 137. See also John F. Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 202. By the turn of the century, however, the consumption of game meat was far less central to the recreational hunting experience. See Loo, States of Nature, 307. 44. Dunraven, Past Times and Pastimes, 164. 45. On the early history of Estes Park, see Lloyd K. Musselman, Rocky Mountain National Park Administrative History 1915–1965, http://www.nps. gov/history/history/online_books/romo/adhi.htm (accessed Oct. 15, 2009); C. W. Buchholtz, Rocky Mountain National Park: A History (Boulder: Colorado Associated University Press, 1983). 46. Canadian Nights: Being Sketches and Reminiscences of Life and Sport in the Rockies, the Prairies, and the Canadian Woods (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1914), 42–43, 90. 47. Dunraven, Past Times and Pastimes, 142; Enos A. Mills, Early Estes Park (Estes Park: Redbird Bookshop, 1959), 28–29; Buchholtz, 68; Pickering 35–38. 48. Rocky Mountain News, July 29, 1874; Pickering, 39–40. 49. Buchholtz, 80–83; Pickering 36, 252n. 2, 139. 50. Bird, 80. No evidence exists to corroborate the biographical information that Bird offers about Nugent, but my purpose here is to explore the meanings of her representation of him rather than to assess the factual validity of her description. For a discussion of Nugent’s background, see Pickering, 257n. 10. 51. See the brief mention of Bird in the Rocky Mountain News, Oct. 23, 1873. 52. See Morin, Frontiers of Femininity, 62–69. 53. Isabella Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879; repr., Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960), 39, 45, 42–43. 54. Bird, 65–67, 51–52, 47. 55. Bird, 45, 62, 68–69. 56. Bird, 102. 57. Bird, 78. 58. Bird, 78–80. 59. Bird, 81–82. 60. Bird, 204–6.

NOTES TO PAGES 119–122

61. Bird, 79, 206. 62. Bird, 83–101. 63. Bird, 101. See also: “Essentially an actor, was he, I wonder, posing on the previous day in the attitude of desperate remorse, to impose on my credulity and frighten me; or was it a genuine and unpremeditated outburst of passionate regret for the life which he had thrown away? I cannot tell, but I think it was the last.” Bird, 211. 64. Peter Hansen, “Albert Smith, the Alpine Club, and the Invention of Mountaineering in Mid-Victorian Britain,” Journal of British Studies 34, no. 3 (July 1995): 300–324; see particularly 309, 312–13. It is not that middle-class men avoided hunting—far from it. They enjoyed fox hunting and shooting for birds in England, deer hunting in Scotland; middle-class officers stationed in India and Africa frequently pursued hunting as a hobby. However, despite the paeans to the simple life, big game hunting in the West required a significant outlay of money for transportation, horses, guides, and equipment. If middle-class professionals like George Kingsley took such trips, they usually went as the guests of a wealthier friend or in the course of business travel as they managed a client’s investments. Hunting itself, as an activity, retained a patina of aristocratic association. In Britain the right to hunt went along with the ownership of land, the traditional prerogative of the nobility. As the English economy fundamentally shifted away from agriculture in the early nineteenth century, anxious gentlemen became all the more committed to their monopoly on game—not so much for the sport or the meat itself, but for what the privilege symbolized. See Matt Cartmill, A View to a Death in the Morning: Hunting and Nature Through History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 29–31, 61, 70–71; P. B. Munsche, Gentlemen and Poachers: The English Game Laws 1671–1831 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 7, 27, 52–55, 76–77, 105, 130, 164–65, 166–68. 65. Bird, 94–99. Women mountaineers were unusual in the 1870s, but Bird was not unique. Griff Evans had guided a group including at least one woman up Longs Peak in September 1873, the month before Bird’s ascent. Pickering, 28. For an extensive analysis of gender in the early history of American climbing, see Susan R. Schrepfer, Nature’s Altars: Mountains, Gender, and American Environmentalism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005). Schrepfer briefly comments on Bird’s climb, 69–71. 66. Bird, 198. 67. Bird, 207, 247.

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68. To Henrietta Bird, Nov. 18, 1873, in Letters to Henrietta, 175. 69. Bird, 247. 70. Bird, 248–49. 71. Oppenheim, 145–51; John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). On the emergence of this ideal, see Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Bird was born in 1831 and raised by parents who, in their piety and devotion to the family circle, seem to have conformed well to the expectations Davidoff and Hall describe. 72. Elkanah J. Lamb, Miscellaneous Mediations, as quoted in Dave Hicks, Estes Park: From the Beginning (Denver: Egan Printing Co./A-T-P Publishers, 1976), 24. 73. Mills, 37. 74. Hicks, 24; Pickering, 69–75; Rocky Mountain News, Sept. 1, 1874. 75. Letter to Fort Collins Standard, as quoted in Hicks, 24. It is interesting that references to Dunraven’s nationality insisted on his Englishness, ignoring entirely the Irish side of the peer’s ancestry. 76. Bird, 104–5; Morin reads this passage differently, as a statement of “mastering of the self rather than Estes Park” (Frontiers of Femininity, 78). Estes Park offers Bird an opportunity to confront and overcome her own failing body, in Morin’s interpretation. I find this analysis insightful but believe Bird’s text also to be an intervention in the political tensions over control over Estes Park and a broader claim about how legitimate claims to space could be grounded in an alternative to male violence. 77. Dunraven’s involvement in Estes Park, from the mid-1870s to the early 1900s, occurred at a time when Colorado’s tourist industry grew rapidly. See Anne Hyde, An American Vision: Far Western Landscape and National Culture, 1820–1920 (New York: New York University Press, 1990), 147–61, 174–83, 187–90, and Earl Pomeroy, In Search of the Golden West: The Tourist in Western America (1957; repr., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 20–23. For a different perspective, see Thomas G. Andrews, “ ‘Made by Toile’? Tourism, Labor, and the Construction of the Colorado Landscape, 1858–1917,” Journal of American History 92, no. 3 (Dec. 2005): 837–63. In the years to come Estes Park retained its reputation as a beautiful place abounding with game, and Dunraven’s company attracted British sportsmen particularly, as personal correspondence from the era indicates. Donald Macnabb to Jane

NOTES TO PAGES 127–133

Macnabb, Oct. 30[?], 1881, 143, bundle 141. MSS Eur F 206, Macnabb Papers, Oriental and India Office Collection, British Library; George Wrey to C. E. Stuart, Aug. 24, 1876, GD 21/484/2/23x, Cuninghame of Thorntoun MS, Scottish Record Office. 78. Dunraven, Past Times and Pastimes, 143. 79. Great Divide, 4, 107; Bridges, 405; Vivian, 218. 80. Bird, 176. 81. Middleton, Victorian Lady Travellers, 39, 53; Middleton, “Bishop [Bird], Isabella Lucy (1831–1904).” See the passages from her later travel books, quoted in Middleton, 40, 47. The quotation is from David M. Wrobel, “Global West, American Frontier” Pacific Historical Review 78, no. 1 (2009): 19.

Chapter 4. “The Latest Fad of These Silly Days” 1. Joy Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), 82; Louis Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America: William Cody and the Wild West Show (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 293, 298. See also Don Russell, The Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960); Nellie Snyder Yost, Buffalo Bill: His Family, Friends, Fame, Failures and Fortunes (Chicago: Sage, 1979); Joseph G. Rosa and Robin May, Buffalo Bill and His Wild West: A Pictorial Biography (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989). 2. “The American Exhibition” Illustrated London News, undated clipping, Johnny Baker Scrapbook, Denver Public Library (hereafter DPL). 3. “The bodies get up and walk out, and the ring is clear for the next performance.” “The Prince of Wales at the Wild West Show,” Globe, May 6, 1887, Baker scrapbook, DPL. 4. “Buffalo Bill’s ‘Wild West’ and the Mythologization of the American Empire,” in Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, eds., Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 166. 5. Jonathan D. Martin, “‘The Grandest and Most Cosmopolitan Object Teacher’: Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and the Politics of American Identity,” Radical History Review 96, no. 66 (Fall 1996), 94. 6. Russell, 328–36; Robert W. Rydell and Rob Kroes, Buffalo Bill in Bologna: The Americanization of the World, 1869–1922 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 109. T. C. Crawford, “Late London Gossip,” New York World, microfilm, MS6, series VI-D, box 1, folder 9, Buffalo Bill Historical Center (hereafter BBHC).

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7. The triumphalism of the Wild West show, however, could raise as well as assuage British anxieties about race decline. See Warren’s discussion of the connections between Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Cody’s Wild West in Buffalo Bill’s America, 302–39 and in “Buffalo Bill Meets Dracula: William F. Cody, Bram Stoker, and the Frontiers of Racial Decay,” American Historical Review 107, no. 4 (Oct. 2002): 1124–57. 8. See Rydell and Kroes, 105–17. 9. “Famous Hunting Parties of the Plains,” Cosmopolitan, June 1894, 137. Photocopy from digital file in MS692, Don Russell Collection, BBHC; Paul Andrew Hutton, “Introduction,” in Henry Davies, Ten Days on the Plains (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1985), 16; Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 141–42. 10. Davies, 78–79, 83; Kasson, 14–20. 11. On this trip, however, he had to content himself with being in the shadow of George Custer, who held a higher military rank and who had been charged with orchestrating the entire event. Yost, 177–80; Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 146–49. 12. “Famous Hunting Parties of the Plains,” Cosmopolitan June 1894, 131–43. 13. Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 167–171. 14. Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 141–42. 15. “Buffalo Bill” and “Texas Jack,” clippings in microfilmed scrapbook, BBHC; Kasson, 23–24. 16. See Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 69–76, 84, 93, 191–92, 230, 262–63. Many circus proprietors sought to overcome the disreputable associations of their product. P. T. Barnum, for instance, described his ardent commitment to temperance in his autobiography, while James A. Bailey dreamed of creating a tasteful “New Circus,” and the Ringling Brothers prided themselves on their image as a family business. See Janet M. Davis, The Circus Age: Culture and Society under the American Big Top (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2002), 52–62. 17. Kasson, 7; Richard White, “Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill,” in James Grossman, ed., The Frontier in American Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 9–12. 18. Roy Porter, London: A Social History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 205–38, 267–72. 19. Porter, 253–54; Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago

NOTES TO PAGES 140–146

Press, 1992); Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). 20. On the American Exhibition, see Robert W. Rydell, “London’s American Exhibition of 1887: How a Cultural Farce Became a Political Force,” European Contributions to American Studies 50 (2005): 57–68. 21. Rydell, “London’s American Exhibition,” 60. 22. The American Exhibition: London, 1886 (London: Waterlow and Sons, 1884). This initial listing of exhibitors carried the initial date of the planned exposition. 23. Rydell, “Cultural Farce,” 61, 63, 66; “The American Exhibition,” Illustrated London News, undated clipping, Johnny Baker Scrapbooks, DPL. The quotation about Uncle Tom’s cabin appears in the Morning Post, April 12, 1887, Baker scrapbook, DPL. 24. “America in London” The Sportsman, May 18, 1887, Baker scrapbook, DPL. 25. Illustrated London News, April 16, 1887, 438–39. 26. “The Wild West,” Globe, May 10, 1887, Baker scrapbook, DPL. 27. November 1, 1887, 9, as quoted in Rydell, “Cultural Farce,” 67. 28. Sarah J. Blackstone, Buckskins, Bullets, and Business: A History of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 21, 54–55; Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: America’s National Entertainment, program, 1887, BBHC. 29. The bison were a valuable asset to the show. Nate Salsbury valued each one at $1,750 in 1892. Blackstone, 48. 30. Yost, 186; for a photograph of the boots, which were indeed spectacular, see Rosa and May, 106; Crawford, “The Queen at the Wild West,” New York World, microfilm, MS6, series VI-D, box 1, folder 9, BBHC. 31. Jessie Morant interview with Agnes Killen, quoted in Yost, 195; Blackstone, 108–9; Eastern Daily Press, April 25, 1887; “The American Exhibition and the Wild West Show,” Observer, April 24, 1887, both in Baker scrapbook, DPL; Warren, 224–26.“The American Exhibition,” Illustrated London News, undated clipping, Baker scrapbook, DPL. 32. “The Rifle as an Aid to Civilization,” Buffalo Bill’s Wild West (London: Allen, Scott, 1887), 38, in BBHC. This text appeared repeatedly in Cody’s programs for years. Martin, 104; Warren, 223. 33. Warren, 243; John Sears, “Bierstadt, Buffalo Bill, and the Wild West in Europe,” in R. Kroes, R. W. Rydell, and D. F. J. Bosscher, eds., Cultural

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NOTES TO PAGES 146–150

Transmissions and Receptions: American Mass Culture in Europe (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1993), 7–9. 34. William F. Cody, The Life of Hon. William F. Cody, Known as Buffalo Bill (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1978), 141–42; “Little Irma Cody,” Buffalo Bill’s Wild West (1887), 30; Paul Reddin, Wild West Shows (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 61; Kasson, 119; Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 249–53. In fact, Cody’s marriage was deeply troubled. Cody would sue unsuccessfully for divorce in 1904, a decision that tarnished his public image for years. See Russell, 420–33, and Warren, 494–519. 35. Russell, 329; T. C. Crawford, “Wind-Up of the Wild West,” New York World, microfilm, MS6, series VI-D, box 1, folder 9, BBHC; Rita G. Napier, “Across the Big Water: American Indians’ Perceptions of Europe and Europeans, 1887–1906,” in Christian F. Feest, ed., Indians and Europe: An Interdisciplinary Collection of Essays (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1999), 395. 36. Ed Goodman to Julia Goodman, May 1, 1887, EFC series Vi-H, box 1, BBHC; Russell, 331. 37. John Burke, Buffalo Bill from Prairie to Palace (New York: Rand, McNally, 1893), 221. 38. My thanks to Faith Barrett for pointing out the theological implications of Burke’s language. As Louis Warren has pointed out, contemporary press reports at the time suggest that this incident never took place in the way Burke described it. Victoria herself had little to say about the event in her day, though what she said was positive enough: “an immense deal of firing . . . most exciting”. Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 283–87. 39. The Graphic, May 21, 1887, 544; clipping in MS6, series VI:D, box 1, folder 4, BBHC; Warren, 321–24. 40. “Colonel Wm. F Cody” Courier of London May 9, 1887, Baker scrapbook, DPL. See also Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in American History (New York: Atheneum, 1992), 170. 41. “Colonel Wm F Cody” Courier of London, May 9, 1887, Baker scrapbook, DPL. 42. Yost, 188–89; Helen Cody Wetmore and Zane Grey, Buffalo Bill: Hero of the Wild West (New York: Zebra Books, 1976; originally published as Buffalo Bill: Last of the Great Scouts [Duluth: Duluth Press, 1899]), 248–49. 43. Crawford, “Late London Gossip,” New York World, microfilm, MS6, series VI-D, box 1, folder 9, BBHC; on Beresford, see Lawrence M. Woods, British Gentlemen in the Wild West: The Era of the Intensely English Cowboy

NOTES TO PAGES 153–164

(New York: Free Press, 1989), 116–17; V. W. Baddeley, “Beresford, Charles William de la Poer, Baron Beresford (1846–1919),” rev. Paul G. Halpern, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004), online ed., May 2008, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/30723 (accessed Aug. 4, 2011). 44. Marshall P. Wilder, The People I’ve Smiled With: Recollections of a Merry Little Life (New York: Cassell, 1889), 108–12. See also Martin, 101–2; Crawford, “Late London Gossip” and “Buffalo Bill’s Wild Life,” New York World, microfilm, MS6, series VI-D, box 1, folder 9, BBHC. 45. June 23, 1887, 521. 46. “The Rajah sees Britannia’s Bill,” in Truth: Christmas Number, Dec. 26, 1887, BBHC. 47. Unidentified clipping, Salsbury scrapbook, quoted in Russell, 334. 48. Harry Starr, “Buffalo Bill, or the Wild West Show” (London: R. R. Bignell, n.d.), BBHC; “Buffalo Bill,” The Globe, April 26, 1887; “The Wild West Show,” The Era, April 23, 1887, Baker scrapbooks, DPL; George Horncastle, “The Wild Wild West of London” (London: Hopwood and Crew, n.d.), BBHC. 49. Leonore Davidoff, The Best Circles: Women and Society in Victorian England (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1973), 59, 62, 64, 65, 67; Windham Thomas Wyndham-Quin, fourth Earl of Dunraven, Past Times and Pastimes (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1922), 196–97. 50. The Lady, Feb. 1893, as quoted in Davidoff, 66–67; Lady Dorothy Nevill as quoted in Pamela Horn, High Society: The English Social Elite, 1880–1914 (Wolfeboro Falls, N.H.: Alan Sutton, 1992), 5. 51. Dunraven, Past Times and Pastimes, 197. 52. Illustrated London News, March 5, 1887. 53. Walkowitz, 20–21; Koven, 25–87. 54. See Walkowitz, 206–8, for a discussion of such rumors; see also Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 316, 318–19. 55. Cody to General Nelson Miles, June 15, 1880, in Blackstone, ed., Business of Being Buffalo Bill; Cody to Al Goodman, July 7, 1887, in Stella Adelyne Foote, ed., Letters from Buffalo Bill (Billings, Mont.: Foote Publishing, 1954), 3.

Chapter 5. A White Man’s Country 1. There is a vast body of scholarship on Roosevelt. For biographical information and background to this chapter, I have relied upon the following works: Carleton Putnam, Theodore Roosevelt: Volume 1, The Formative Years (New

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NOTES TO PAGES 164–169

York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958); G. Edward White, The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience: The West of Frederic Remington, Theodore Roosevelt, and Owen Wister (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968); Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, 1979); David McCullough, Mornings on Horseback (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981); H. W. Brands, T.R.: The Last Romantic (New York: Basic, 1997); Kathleen Dalton, Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life (New York: Knopf, 2002); Patricia O’Toole, When Trumpets Call: Theodore Roosevelt after the White House (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006). 2. Theodore Roosevelt, African Game Trails (1910; repr., New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), 28–20; on Roosevelt’s preference for this weapon when shooting heavy game such as elephants and rhinoceros, 213. 3. Roosevelt, 4–5. Roosevelt did not think much of the poem’s literary quality, but he agreed with its sentiment. See Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 187. 4. Paul Kramer and John Plotz, “Pairing Empires: Britain and the United States, 1857–1947,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 2, no. 1 (2001): par. 3, http://muse.jhiu.edu/jouranls/cch/v002/2.1kramer.html (accessed Sept. 3, 2003). 5. Roosevelt’s obsession with masculinity and race has been analyzed by Bederman, 170–215, and Kristin Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 138–39, 143–45, 159. 6. See Sarah Watts, Rough Rider in the White House: Theodore Roosevelt and the Politics of Desire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 7. Exceptions exist and are multiplying with the recent trend toward transnational histories. For instance, see Paul Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 8. Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeosie, 1850–1896 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 66–77. 9. See Beckert, 3, 237–72. 10. Beckert, 43, 57, 155; Morris, 24, 34–35, 60; Dalton, 16–17. 11. Theodore Roosevelt, An Autobiography (New York: Macmillan, 1913), Theodore Roosevelt to Theodore Roosevelt Senior, Dresden, June 15, 1873;

NOTES TO PAGES 169–174

Dresden, June 22, 1873, in Elting E. Morison, ed., The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951), 8–10, 11; Dalton 19, 38–39. 12. Dalton, 35–36. 13. Roosevelt, Autobiography, 17–18, 21–22. 14. Joan D. Steele, “The Image of America in the Novels of Mayne Reid” (Ph.D. diss., UCLA, 1970); Thomas Cutrer, “Thomas Mayne Reid,” Handbook of Texas Online http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/RR/ fre24.html (accessed Nov. 24, 2008). Cutrer mentions that some sources have Reid joining William Drummond Stewart’s expedition in 1843, but I have been unable to find any record of this. 15. Bederman, 175. 16. Bederman, 172–75. 17. Detailed accounts of Elliott Roosevelt’s life can be found in biographies of his daughter Eleanor. See Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin (New York: Norton, 1971), and Blanche Wiesen Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume 1, 1884–1933 (New York: Viking, 1992). 18. McCullough, 145–46; Family members described Elliott’s seizures as being caused by epilepsy. Morris, 430, 811n. 3. Roosevelt’s biographer Kathleen Dalton has speculated that Elliott may have been suffering from a traumatic brain injury, probably incurred sometime in 1873 during intense bouts of boxing with his brother and cousins. Elliott’s symptoms—dizziness, fainting, impaired concentration, irritability, mood swings, confusion, and agitation—are characteristic of the long-term effects of such injuries. See Dalton, 59. If this was the case, Elliott suffered the tragedy of being permanently disabled by his family’s insistence on aggressive behavior in young men. 19. McCullough, 144–47. 20. Theodore Roosevelt Senior to Elliott Roosevelt, New York, Jan. 6, 1876, in Elliott Roosevelt, Hunting Big Game in the Eighties: The Letters of Elliott Roosevelt, Sportsman, ed. Anna Eleanor Roosevelt (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1933), 13–15; Elliott Roosevelt to Theodore Roosevelt Senior, Fort McKavett, Feb. 26, 1876, in Hunting, 26. 21. Daniel Justin Herman, Hunting and the American Imagination (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), esp. chapters 10, 11. 22. Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), chapter 6. 23. John F. Reiger, American Sportsmen and the Origins of Conservation (New York: Winchester Press, 1975); Dunlap, 9, n. 11, 178; Ritvo, 276–88;

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John Mackenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and the British Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 121–22, 163–64. 24. On the elite hunting code and its nuances of meaning, see John M. MacKenzie, “The Imperial Pioneer and Hunter and the British Masculine Stereotype in Late Victorian and Edwardian Times,” in J. A. Mangan and James Walvin, eds., Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America 1800–1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), 180–81; Mackenzie, 28–31; Ritvo, 267–69. On American conservation and hunting, see Reiger; Louis S. Warren, The Hunter’s Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-Century America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), and Karl Jacoby, Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 25. Roosevelt, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman (New York: Modern Library, 2004), 221. 26. Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, 234. 27. Windham Thomas Wyndham-Quin, fourth Earl of Dunraven, The Great Divide: Travels in the Upper Yellowstone in the Summer of 1874 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1876), xiv, 153. 28. Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, 267, 273, 275, 280–81. As Harriet Ritvo has pointed out, hunting books frequently made a point of describing the author’s “failures and frustrations.” She argues that such language was meant to convey the hunter’s ability to resist “braggadocio and hysteria” and, in addition, to magnify his cheerfulness under strain and his calm confidence, valued traits for elite men. I do not disagree with this interpretation, but think it might be expanded as I have done here. Ritvo, 258–59. 29. Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, 281–82. 30. R. Tait Murray, “The Central Prairie: A Hunting Expedition,” manuscript c. 1873, East Lothian Antiquarian and Field Naturalists Society Papers, Scottish Record Office, Edinburgh (SRO). 31. For similar examples, see Parker Gillmore, Gun, Rod, and Saddle (London: Chapman and Hall, 1869), v; Windham Thomas Wyndham-Quin, fourth Earl of Dunraven, Past Times and Pastimes (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1922), 2:65. 32. Reddin, 43. 33. Anglo-American Times, March 16, 1883, 15; Vivian, 284; see also William Abraham Bell, New Tracks in North America (London: Chapman and Hall, 1869), 37–40.

NOTES TO PAGES 178–183

34. On the iconic status of the bison, see Louis Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America: William Cody and the Wild West Show (New York: Knopf, 2005), 131; Herman, 200–205. 35. The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 164–92. 36. The Wilderness Hunter (New York: Modern Library, 2004), 571–72; Loo, States of Nature, 307, 296; Watts, 176–78. 37. See Alexander Nemerov, “Vanishing Americans: Abbott Thayer, Theodore Roosevelt, and the Attraction of Camouflage,” American Art 11 (Summer 1997), 77; Loo, States of Nature, 307; Watts, 176–78; Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989), 26–58. 38. McCullough, 227, 238; Lash, 11; Elliott Roosevelt to Martha Bulloch Roosevelt, Nov. 16, 1880, in Hunting, 35; “Harry Oelrichs,” obituary in the New York Times, May 29, 1902; Lawrence M. Woods, British Gentlemen in the Wild West: The Era of the Intensely English Cowboy (New York: Free Press, 1989), 145. 39. Mackenzie, 168–73, 175–77, 193–95; Roosevelt, “The Description of the Ceylon Hunting,” in Hunting, 126; Elliott Roosevelt to Mittie Bulloch Roosevelt, Lahore, April 6, 1881, in Hunting, 81. 40. Roosevelt, “The Description of the Ceylon Hunting,” in Hunting, 126; Elliott Roosevelt to Mittie Bulloch Roosevelt, Pir Panjal Mountains, April 24, 1881, in Hunting, 83–86; Srinagar, May 17, 1881, in Hunting, 87–88, 92; Bombay, Oct. 18, 1881, in Hunting, 107–8. 41. McCullough, 241, 244–49; Lash, 18–19; Wiesen Cook, 42–45. 42. Elliott Roosevelt, “My Love,” Feb. 1883, as quoted in Wiesen Cook, 42–43. 43. McCullough, 249; Theodore Roosevelt to Corinne Roosevelt, Cambridge, April 27, 1880, in Letters, 1:45; Theodore Roosevelt, Diary, July 4, 1880, Theodore Roosevelt Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, available at http://memory. loc.gov/ammem/trhtml/trdiary2.html (accessed Dec. 27, 2011). 44. Roosevelt’s Dakota experiences and their impact on his career have been the subject of extensive description and analysis. In addition to Roosevelt’s own works, see also Hermann Hagedorn, Roosevelt in the Bad Lands (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1921); White, chapter 4; Bederman, 175–84; Slotkin, chapter 1; and Watts. 45. Commander H. H. Gorringe’s Little Missouri Land and Stock Company may also have been intended as an early sort of dude ranch. Three brothers

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had established a ranch that accepted hunting tourists as guests in 1880 in the same region. 46. Sylvia Jukes Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt: Portrait of a First Lady (New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, 1980; paperback New York: Modern Library, 2001), 143–44. 77; Morris, Rise, 222–23; McCullough, 278; Putnam, 334, 337. Today, $85,000 translates to approximately $1,950,000. Values computed using the CPI indicator on www.measuringworth.com (accessed Dec. 29, 2011). On losses, see Roosevelt to Anna Roosevelt, Medora, Dakota, April 16, 1887, in Letters, 126; Roosevelt to Henry Cabot Lodge, Medora, Dakota, April 20, 1887, in Letters, 127. 47. Roosevelt to Anna Roosevelt, Little Missouri, Dakota, June 17, 1884, in Letters, 1:73; to Henry Cabot Lodge, Medora, Dakota, June 23, 1885, in Letters, 1:91; Putnam, 529–30. 48. Roosevelt to Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, Medora, Dakota, May 12, 1886, in Letters, 1:99. 49. Morris, 462–67. 50. Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, 26, 137–38; Bederman, 176, 178–84; Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in American History (New York: Atheneum, 1992), 36–42; Roosevelt, The Winning of the West (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1889), 1:24; Morris, 463–65. Gary Gerstle has argued that Roosevelt’s thinking about nationalism from the late 1890s onward included a strain of civic, as opposed to racial, nationalism that was at odds with his own historical conclusions. “Theodore Roosevelt and the Divided Character of American Nationalism,” Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (Dec. 1999): 1280–1307. 51. Richard White, “Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill,” in James R. Grossman, ed., The Frontier in American Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 26; Roosevelt to Frederick Jackson Turner, Washington, Feb. 10, 1894, in Letters, 363; Morris, 465–66; Slotkin, 30–32. 52. Slotkin, 33–35, 37–38, 41, 44–54. 53. “The Strenuous Life,” in Letters and Speeches, 756. 54. Roosevelt to Cecil Spring-Rice, Washington, May 29, 1897, in Letters, 621; Aug. 13, 1897, in Letters, 647. 55. Bederman, 183–90, 192–204; Watts, 83–86. 56. Dalton, 86; Morris, Rise, 430; Letter from Theodore Roosevelt to Anna Roosevelt. 1889–07–24, Theodore Roosevelt Collection. MS Am 1834 (264), Houghton Library, Harvard University. http://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.

NOTES TO PAGES 188–194

org/Research/Digital-Library/Record.aspx?libID=o280644. Theodore Roosevelt Digital Library. Dickinson State University (accessed Dec. 29, 2011). 57. Roosevelt to Henry Cabot Lodge, Little Missouri, Dakota, Aug. 12, 1884, in Letters, 77. Years later, the sculptor Frederick MacMonnies, commissioned to make an equestrian statue of Roosevelt, proposed a design of the president in uniform, wearing sidearms, and jumping a horse over a fence. Roosevelt pointed out that when riding cross country he wore ordinary riding clothes and never carried a sword or gun; but he urged the sculptor to depict him in uniform anyway. Watts, 171. 58. Roosevelt to Anna Roosevelt, Oyster Bay, June 24, 1888, in Letters, 141; “National Duties,” in Letters and Speeches, 798; as quoted in Lash, 23; Roosevelt to Henry Cabot Lodge, Oyster Bay, Sept. 11, 1887, in Letters, 132. 59. Quoted in Wiesen Cooke, 74–75. 60. Wiesen Cook, 63–64; “Mr. Sherman’s Suit for Divorce,” New York Times, March 29, 1884; Mrs. Sherman Gets a Divorce,” New York Times, May 18, 1884. 61. Letter from Theodore Roosevelt to Anna Roosevelt, 1891–01–25, Theodore Roosevelt Collection, MS Am 1834 (299), Houghton Library, Harvard University. http://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/Research/DigitalLibrary/Record.aspx?libID=o280916. Theodore Roosevelt Digital Library. Dickinson State University (accessed Dec. 29, 2011); Morris, Rise, 440; Jukes Morris, 134–35, 140–43; Dalton, 140–41. 62. Letter from Theodore Roosevelt to Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, 1894–08–12, Theodore Roosevelt Collection, MS Am 1540 (56), Houghton Library, Harvard University. http://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/ Research/Digital-Library/Record.aspx?libID=o278632. Theodore Roosevelt Digital Library. Dickinson State University (accessed Dec. 29, 2011); Jukes Morris, 143–44. 63. Bederman, 175–83; White, “Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill,” 46–49. 64. Emily Hahn, “My Dear Selous,” American Heritage 14, no. 3 (April 1963). 65. O’Toole, 44–46. 66. African Game Trails, 20–22, 294, 300–301, 94–95; Haraway, 52. 67. MacKenzie, Empire of Nature, 116, 121–22, 163–64; MacKenzie, “Chivalry, Social Darwinism and Ritualized Killing: The Hunting Ethos in

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Central Africa up to 1914,” in David Anderson and Richard Grove, eds., Conservation in Africa: People, Policies and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 41–61; David K. Prendergast and William K. Adams, “Colonial Wildlife Conservation and the Origins of the Society for the Preservation of the Wild Fauna of the Empire (1903–1914),” Oryx 37, no. 2 (April 2003): 252; Simon Lyster, International Wildlife Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 112–13. 68. J[ames] Stevenson-Hamilton, “Game Preservation in the Transvaal,” Journal of the Society for the Protection of the Wild Fauna of the Empire 2 (1905), 20–24, 34; “Extract from Lord Cromer’s Report for Egypt and the Sudan for the Year 1902,” Journal of the Society for the Protection of the Wild Fauna of the Empire 1 (1904), 65. 69. I have drawn my discussion of conservation in East Africa from the following works, in addition to those cited above: Edward I. Steinhart, Black Poachers, White Hunters: A Social History of Hunting in Colonial Kenya (Oxford: James Currey; Nairobi: E.A.E.P.; Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2006), and David Anderson and Richard Grove, “The Scramble for Eden: Past, Present and Future in African Conservation,” in Anderson and Grove, eds., Conservation in Africa, 4–5. 70. African Game Trails, 13–14. 71. William T. Hornaday, Our Vanishing Wild Life: Its Extermination and Preservation (1913; repr., New York: Arno, 1970), 117, 134–35. 72. Hornaday, Vanishing Wild Life, 364, 54, 247. 73. Hornaday, Thirty Years War for Wild Life (1938; repr., New York: Arno Press, 1970), 270–71. See Callum McKenzie, “The British Big-Game Hunting Tradition, Masculinity and Fraternalism with Particular Reference to ‘The Shikar Club,”’ Sports Historian 20, no. 1 (May 2000): 70–96. In later life, Kermit Roosevelt was elected an honorary member of the Shikar Club. 74. Roderick P. Neumann, “Dukes, Earls, and Ersatz Edens: Aristocratic Nature Preservationists in Colonial Africa,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 14 (1996): 90; on the history of the society, see Prendergast and Adams, 254; MacKenzie, Empire of Nature, 211–16; Edward North Buxton, Short Stalks (London: Edward Stanford, 1893). Buxton, unlike many of his associates, believed that the hunting rights of indigenous Africans should be upheld. See Prendergast and Adams, 258. 75. Hornaday, Thirty Years War for Wild Life, 217.

NOTES TO PAGES 197–202

76. “Mr. Hornaday’s Letter and Fifteen Cardinal Principles,” Journal of the Society for the Protection of the Wild Fauna of the Empire 5 (1909): 56–58; Hornaday, Vanishing Wild Life, 385. 77. “Big Game Aplenty Awaits Roosevelt,” New York Times, March 11, 1909; Roosevelt to Charles Doolittle Walcott, Oyster Bay, June 20, 1908, in Letters, 1093; “The Trip to Africa,” New York Times, June 7, 1908; Frederick William Unger, Roosevelt’s African Trip (n.p.: William Scull, 1909), 22; “Roosevelt Hunt No Cost to Country,” New York Times, Dec. 8, 1908; “Roosevelt Hunt Disapproved,” New York Times, May 27, 1909. Roosevelt paid his and Kermit’s expenses partly from gifts made by friends in his honor and partly from an advance paid by Charles Scribner’s Sons for African Game Trails. The grumpy letter writer was one R. A. Dix, whose letter appeared under the title, “Would Forget About Him in Africa,” on June 24, 1908. 78. Bederman, 92–94, 207–13; see also Haraway, 28, on the display of African mammals in the American Museum of Natural History: “The African Hall was meant to be a time machine, and it is.” 79. African Game Trails, 71, 379, 418. 80. African Game Trails, 2, 18, 500. See also Wilderness Hunter: “It is always lawful to kill dangerous or noxious animals, like the bear, cougar, or wolf,” 759. 81. African Game Trails, 431–32; Roosevelt, “The Strenuous Life,” in Letters and Speeches, 764. 82. O’Toole, 47–50. 83. African Game Trails, 38, 49. 84. African Game Trails, 46, 47–48, 52, 81, 124. 85. Bederman, 201–6; Roosevelt, “The Strenuous Life,” 756. 86. African Game Trails, 39–40, 42. 87. African Game Trails, 1, 49. 88. African Game Trails, 48–49, 26. Similarly, Germans and British needed to develop friendly relations in Africa because they were all “first-class men” who were “doing in East Africa a work of worth for the whole world,”4–5. 89. David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). 90. Marilyn Lake, “White Man’s Country: The Trans-National History of a National Project,” Australian Historical Studies 34, no. 122 (2003): 346–63.

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91. O’Toole, 47–48; Errole Trzebinski, The Kenya Pioneers (New York: Norton, 1986), 119–20; MacKenzie, “The British Big-Game Hunting Tradition,” 8–9, 12. Pease’s rejection of industrial capitalism despite his family’s bourgeois origins was not unique among the second, third, and fourth generations of manufacturing families. See Martin Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 92. Trzebinski, 96–97; Steinhart, 101–2. 93. Sara Wheeler, Too Close to the Sun: The Audacious Life and Times of Denys Finch-Hatton (New York: Random House, 2006), 38–42, 47, 239; Steinhart, 106–7, 132–33. 94. Dane Kennedy, Islands of White: Settler Society and Culture in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987), 14–15, 30–31, 39, 44–47, 72; David Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 436–43; Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 39–40. 95. Abel Chapman, Retrospect: Reminiscences and Impressions of a HunterNaturalist in Three Continents, 1851–1928 (London: Gurney and Jackson, 1928), 94; Theodore Roosevelt to Frederick Courtney Selous, Nov. 30, 1897, in Hahn, 42. 96. Archibald Roosevelt, typescript memoir, as quoted in Edward J. Renehan Jr., The Lion’s Pride: Theodore Roosevelt and His Family in Peace and War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 22. 97. “National Duties,” in Letters and Speeches, 768. 98. As quoted in Watts, 46, and as quoted in Rotundo, 228. A selection of Roosevelt’s affectionate and playful letters to his children can be found in Roosevelt, A Bully Father: Theodore Roosevelt’s Letters to His Children (New York: Random House, 1995). See also Dalton, 133–34. 99. As quoted in Dalton, 161; Roosevelt to Anna Roosevelt Cowles, Washington, Jan. 17, 1898, in Letters, 765; Dalton 169–70; Watts, 47; Roosevelt to William Sheffield Cowles Jr., Dec. 3, 1911, as quoted in Renehan, 13. 100. Watts, 48–50; Dalton, 290. Concern over deliberate violence in collegiate football led to rule changes and the formation, in 1906, of the National College Athletic Association, a development in which Roosevelt was involved. 101. Quoted in Jukes Morris, 233, 330–31; Letter from Theodore Roosevelt to Endicott Peabody, 1902–06–07, Theodore Roosevelt Papers, Manuscripts

NOTES TO PAGES 207–215

Division, Library of Congress. http://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/ Research/Digital-Library/Record.aspx?libID=o182485. Theodore Roosevelt Digital Library, Dickinson State University (accessed Dec. 29, 2011); Kermit Roosevelt to Michael Jessup, June 27, 1926, as quoted in Renehan, 73; Dalton, 290, 326, 349; Kermit Roosevelt, The Long Trail (New York: Review of Reviews/Metropolitan Magazine, 1921), 24, 28–29. 102. “Kermit Roosevelt Tells of Big Hunt,” New York Times, July 2, 1908; Letter from Theodore Roosevelt to Ethel Roosevelt, 1909–06–24, Theodore Roosevelt Collection, MS Am 1541.2 (31), Houghton Library, Harvard University. http://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/Research/DigitalLibrary/Record.aspx?libID=o283297. Theodore Roosevelt Digital Library. Dickinson State University (accessed Dec. 29, 2011). 103. Letter from Theodore Roosevelt to Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, 1910–01–21, Theodore Roosevelt Collection, MS Am 1540 (165), Houghton Library, Harvard University. http://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/Research/ Digital-Library/Record.aspx?libID=o279048. Theodore Roosevelt Digital Library. Dickinson State University (accessed Dec. 29, 2011); African Game Trails, 341, 312–33, 152, 160–62; O’Toole, 150; Roosevelt, Long Trail, 42. 104. African Game Trails, 281–84, 295–96. 105. African Game Trails, 296–99. 106. African Game Trails, 299–300. 107. Roosevelt, Autobiography, 103–4.

Epilogue 1. Peter Mandler, The Rise and Fall of the Stately Home (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), esp. chapters 4–6. 2. Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 83. 3. Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, “Introduction: Leslie Papers,” Nov. 2007, 74. www.proni.gov.uk/introduction_leslie_papers.pdf (accessed Feb. 10, 2012). 4. Sylvia Jukes Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt: Portrait of a First Lady (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 434–36; Edward J. Renehan Jr., The Lion’s Pride: Theodore Roosevelt and His Family in Peace and War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 5. Dorothy Dengler, “The Earl, the Artist and Estes Park,” in Charles S. Ryland, ed., 1956 Westerners Brand Book (Denver: Denver Westerners, 1957),

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357–66; “Last Knight,” New Yorker, May 1, 1995; Desmond Fitzgerald to Elizabeth Martinson, Glin Castle, Feb. 18, 1986, Denver Public Library, Denver, Colorado; Elizabeth Martinson, “Estes Park, Long’s Peak: A Painting by Albert Bierstadt,” Western History Department, Denver Public Library, Denver, Colorado.

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Manuscript Collections Baker, Johnny. Scrapbooks. Denver Public Library. Bell, William Abraham. Papers. Colorado Historical Society. Cody, William F. Papers. Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody, Wyoming. Cuninghame of Thorntoun MS. Scottish Record Office, Edinburgh. DeVoto, Bernard. Papers, Special Collections, Stanford University Library. East Lothian Antiquarian and Field Naturalists Society Papers. Scottish Record Office, Edinburgh. Frewen, Moreton. Papers. American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming. Frewen, Moreton. Papers. Microfilm copy, Colorado Historical Society. Frewen MSS. East Sussex Record Office, Lewes, England. Macnabb Papers. Oriental and Indian Office Collections. British Library. Murthly Castle Muniments. Scottish Record Office, Edinburgh, Scotland. Russell, Don. Papers. Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody, Wyoming. Webb, J. Watson. Papers. Manuscript Division, Yale University Library. Western Range Cattle Industry Study Papers. Colorado Historical Society.

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INDEX

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Act of Union (1800), 87 Adair, Lord and Lady, 53, 60–61 Adas, Michael, 15 The Adventures of Captain Bonneville (Irving), 19 Africa, 8, 15, 18, 77, 128, 164–67, 192–94, 197–209, 241n64, 255n88 African Game Trails (Roosevelt), 165, 207, 255n77 alcohol, 30–31, 77, 119, 121–22, 127, 187–91, 214–15 Alexis, Grand Duke (Alexei Alexandrovich Romanov), 136, 149 Almond, Hely Hutchinson, 103 Alpine Club, 120 Altowan (Stewart), 20, 23, 33, 36 American Exhibition (in London), 133–34, 140–43 American Expeditionary Forces, 214 American Fur Company, 26–27 American Museum of Natural History, 168 American Nervousness (Beard), 102, 169 American West: African resonances with, 197–209; Bierstadt and, 215, 216, 223n4; boyhood adventure and, 8–9, 46–47, 59–60, 70, 95–96; British class concerns and, 6–7, 14, 20, 35,

45–47, 49–50, 57–59, 64–65, 69–72, 74–76, 81, 88–89, 95, 112, 140–41, 152–58, 244n7; Buffalo Bill’s performances and, 1–3, 18, 132–33, 143–47, 150–62, 244n7; cattle ranching in, 17, 49–50, 53–56, 68–77, 88–89, 182–85; class concerns and, 9, 28, 120–21, 125; colonial fantasies and, 8, 15, 17–18, 77–78, 88–89, 95, 98–100, 105–11, 121–22, 128, 131, 133, 143, 145, 158–59, 166, 225n21; frontier thesis and, 13–14, 46, 186; fur trade in, 24–27, 29–31, 34, 36, 40; gender performances and, 30–32, 42–44, 118–19, 123–24, 220n10; hunting and, 8–9, 22, 39, 84, 88–89; literary depictions of, 8, 11, 14, 17–18, 20–21, 28, 36–44, 57, 59–60, 79–81, 84, 95–97, 99–101, 107–9, 113–24, 140–41, 143–44, 147–48, 158–59, 162, 165–67, 170, 182–85, 237n20; missionaries in, 27–29; modernity’s relation to, 6, 20–22, 106–7; nostalgia and, 12, 28, 32; primitivism and, 24, 33–34, 39; as romanticized wilderness, 3–4, 10–11, 13–15, 46–48, 67–68, 76–77, 88–89, 107–8, 129, 174–79, 186–87, 216–17; surplus gentleman

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American West (Continued) trope and, 17, 60, 64–65, 67, 74, 77–80; tourism industry in, 7–10, 12–13, 96–97; transnational capital and, 4, 7, 9–10, 13–14, 16–17, 28, 46–49, 51, 53–55, 57–60, 69, 74–76, 79–81, 85, 112–13, 126, 228n8; treatment of neurasthenia and, 89–93, 103–5, 109, 169–72, 188 Anglo-American Times, 55, 57, 59, 78 Anglo-Saxonism, 77–78, 99–110, 128, 133, 148–55, 162–66, 196–202 Arapaho Indians, 46 Army, U.S., 28–29, 54, 135, 185 Athearn, Robert, 12–16 “At Home in the Rockies” (BaillieGrohman), 107–8 Audubon, John James, 29 Australia, 15, 75, 77, 95, 113, 201 Bailey, James A., 244n16 Baillie-Grohman, William, 97, 107–8 Bain, George Grantham, 2 Barnum, P. T., 244n16 Barrett, Faith, 246n38 Battle of Little Bighorn, 55 bear (as game), 25, 35, 41, 45, 184 Beard, Daniel Carter, 204 Beard, George M., 102, 169 Beckert, Sven, 167 Bederman, Gail, 170 Beef Bonanza (Tait), 60 Bell, William, 105–6 Benton, Thomas Hart, 184 berdache, 37 Beresford, Charles, 150 Bernhardt, Sarah, 133 Bierstadt, Albert, 215, 216, 216–17 Big Horn Mountains, 61, 65, 73 Billington, Ray Allen, 12–16 Bird, Edward, 89, 92 Bird, Henrietta, 89, 92 Bird, Isabella: colonial narratives and, 17, 118, 125–26, 129; gender’s fluidity and, 118–20, 241n65; health of, 89–92, 94; Nugent and, 113, 118–25; writings of, 84, 94, 113–24, 129

Bird, Robert, 89 “The Bitter Cry of Outcast London” (article), 140, 160 Blackfoot Indians, 36 Blaine, James G., 149, 183 Bodmer, Karl, 223n4 Boone, Daniel, 100, 137, 173, 186 Boone and Crockett Club, 188 The Boy Hunters (Reid), 170 Boy Scouts of America, 204 Brace, Charles Loring, 169 Bread, George Miller, 102 Breadalbane, Marquess of, 33 Britain: Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show and, 18, 132–33, 143–47, 150–62, 244n7; class concerns within, 4, 5, 6–7, 20–21, 25, 31–32, 35, 38, 49–53, 58–59, 61–63, 79–81, 84–85, 89–92, 95, 103–5, 134, 140, 150, 156, 173, 212, 214, 224n6, 227n43, 231n45, 256n91; colonialism and, 4, 6, 8, 13, 69, 77–78, 82, 86–89, 105, 110–11, 128–30, 133, 142–43, 145, 158–59, 162–66, 173–80, 192–95, 198, 227n43; financial investments in the American West, 17, 27, 45, 47–50, 53–57, 59–60, 64–65, 68–72, 74–76, 81, 85, 111–12, 228n8; gender anxiety and, 31–32, 35, 38–39, 59–60, 103–5, 134, 140, 212–13; land policies of, 20–21, 35, 49–50, 129–30, 212, 224n6, 236n8; modernization and industrialization in, 20–23, 35, 51–52, 84–85, 103, 152–55, 212–14; representations of the American West and, 12–13, 22–24, 132–34, 137–53, 155–62, 180; tourism industry and, 7–10, 14, 103–8; travel writing and, 8, 14, 79–81, 113–24, 237n20, 239n37; women’s health and, 89–93, 103–9, 204 buckskin, 1, 3, 4, 5, 88, 96, 99–100, 143–44, 204. See also American West; Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show; performativity buffalo: cattle ranching’s effect on, 58, 67; as noble game, 25, 40, 45,

INDEX

97, 132, 134, 170–71, 178–79, 188, 245n29 “Buffalo Bill, or The Wild West Show” (song), 156 Buffalo Bill: From Prairie to Palace (Burke), 147 Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, 1, 18, 132, 137–39, 143–47, 150–62, 244n7. See also Britain; colonialism; performativity Buntline, Ned, 135 Burke, John, 147–48, 196–97, 246n38 Burke’s Peerage, 196–97 Butler, Judith, 11. See also gender; performativity Buxton, Edward North, 192, 196 Byron, Oliver Doud, 137 Calvinism, 114 Campbell, Robert, 31–32 Camp Brown, 54 Canada, 7, 73–74, 77, 102–3 Cannadine, David, 213 Carson, Kit, 137 Castle Leslie, 214 Catholicism, 86–89, 131 Catlin, George, 178, 223n4 Catlin’s North American Indian Portfolio (Catlin), 178 cattle ranching: blizzards and, 75–76, 183–84, 233n81; British investments in, 7, 17, 46–50, 53–56, 68–71, 74–76, 81, 228n8; class requirements of, 58, 72–74; global capital’s attraction to, 50–51, 57–60, 69–72, 75–77, 81, 85, 183–84, 228n8; masculine performance and, 66–67; overstocking and, 73–77; as response to British class anxieties, 48–49, 74, 77, 111–12; Roosevelt and, 183–84. See also American West; Frewen, Moreton; Powder River Cattle Company Chalmers family, 114–16, 119 Charbonneau, Baptiste, 29 Charles Stewart and Co., 78 Cheyenne Beef Company, 183 Cheyenne Club, 9

Children’s Aid Society, 168 Churchill, Jennie. See Jerome, Jennie Churchill, Randolph, 62, 149–50, 231n45 Civil War (U.S.), 201 Clark, George Rogers, 186 Clark, Jefferson, 28 Clark, William, 25, 28 class: British gentry and, 4, 5, 6, 17, 20–21, 36–45, 50–52, 74–76, 78–81, 86–89, 138–40, 150, 152–56, 173, 212, 224n6, 256n91; Buffalo Bill and, 148–51, 161, 246n34; decline theories and, 51–53, 60–62, 64, 77, 79–80, 93, 102–5, 134, 150, 157–58, 162–65, 169–72, 174–79, 187–89, 191, 196–97, 244n7; domesticity and, 23, 146–47; gender’s relation to, 9, 17–18, 22–23, 28, 31–32, 34, 44, 46, 50–51, 84, 89–92, 103–5, 134, 155–61, 220n10; hunting and, 6, 10, 18, 20, 22, 65, 67–68, 120–21, 150–52, 173–78, 185, 188–89, 191–97, 199, 207–10, 241n64, 255n77; intersections of race with, 9–10, 16, 18, 203; Isabella Bird and, 84–85; literary representations of, 59–60, 166; marriage and, 7, 61–62, 93, 231n45; modernization and industrialization’s effects on, 20–21, 167–68; performativity and, 10–11, 15, 25, 28, 30, 68, 158–60 Cleared for Strange Ports (K. Roosevelt), 214 Clement, Antoine, 25–26, 27, 30–31 Cobbe, Frances Power, 94 Cody, William F. “Buffalo Bill”: class concerns of, 155–61, 246n34; Dunraven and, 96–102; images of, 1–2, 2; London society and, 148–51, 155–56; performative masculinity and, 9, 119, 136–53, 158–60, 246n34; publicity for, 135–36; Wild West show of, 132, 137–62, 244n7 colonialism: American West and, 4, 15–17, 69, 88–89, 106–7, 121–22, 125–27, 133, 148, 197–201, 225n21; Britain and, 4, 6–8, 82, 85–89,

279

280

INDEX

colonialism (Continued) 125–28, 143, 157–64, 179–80, 202–3, 210–11, 227n43; gender performances and, 88–89, 93–94, 118, 166; hunting and, 4, 105–11, 180, 184–85, 191–94, 196–99, 201–2, 207–10, 241n64; missionaries and, 27–29; primitivism and, 207–9; race discourses and, 21, 98–101, 105–6, 109–10, 128, 143, 164–65, 185–87, 196–202, 210–11, 239n37; ruling-class decline and, 51–53, 60, 77, 79–80, 102–5, 134, 150, 152–55, 157–58, 162–65, 169–72, 174–79, 187–89, 191, 196–97, 244n7; transnational capital and, 4, 8–10, 12–14, 214; U.S. territorial imperialism, 106–7, 165, 184–91 Colorado, 8–10, 55, 82–83, 94, 111, 113–26, 215, 242n77. See also Bird, Isabella; Dunraven, Earl of; Estes Park; Nugent, James Comanche Indians, 101 Connell, Robert, 11 conservationism, 194–97 Convention for the Preservation of Wild Birds, Animals, and Fish in Africa, 194 Cooper, James Fenimore, 98 Cosmopolitan, 137 Courier of London, 149 Court and Society Review, 62 cowboys, 48–49, 56, 81 Crawford, T. C., 149 Cuninghame, R. J., 192, 207–8 Cupid (slave), 29 Custer, George Armstrong, 9 Daily Telegraph, 86–87 Dalton, Kathleen, 249n18 Davies, Henry, 135–37 deBillier, Frederick, 9 Delamere, Lord, 194, 202 Denver, John, 216 Denver Art Museum, 215 Denver Public Library, 215 DeSmet, Pierre, 29 Devine, T. M., 224n6

Dickens, Charles, 158 domesticity, 23, 43, 65–66, 146–47, 182–83 Domestic Manners of the Americans (F. Trollope), 158 Douglas, Sholto George, 79 Dunmore, Earl of, 56 Dunraven, Earl of: boyhood adventure stories and, 95–96, 237n20; cattle enterprises of, 56–57, 85–86, 88–89, 111–12; class and gender selffashioning of, 84–89, 109–11, 119, 121, 125; Estes Park and, 83–84, 111–13, 126–27, 131, 215, 242n77; First World War and, 213; hunting expeditions of, 96–101, 120, 136–37, 149, 175, 181; Irish political life of, 129–31, 157; landowner class politics and, 50, 124, 126–27; travel writing of, 17, 106–7, 124, 175 East Africa, 18, 193, 255n88. See also Africa; colonialism; hunting; Kenya; Uganda Easter Rising (1916), 88 East India Company, 89 Edwards, Amelia, 129 Edward Warren (Stewart), 20, 28, 36, 40–44 Egypt, 171, 193 Eliot, Charles, 194 elk, 45, 109, 175–76 The Englishwoman in America (Bird), 94 Era, 156 Estes, Joel, 111 Estes Park (Colorado), 83–85, 94, 111, 116, 120–22, 124, 131, 215 Estes Park, Long’s Peak (Bierstadt), 215–16, 216, 217 Estes Park Company, 112 Evans, Griff, 83, 111, 116–17, 122–26, 241n65 “Famous Hunting Parties of the Plains” (Cosmopolitan), 137 Feilding, W. H. A., 52

INDEX

Fenians, 87 Field (publication), 8, 54, 59–60, 67, 97, 106 Field, Matthew C., 29–30, 226n24 Finch Hatton, Denys, 203 First World War, 213 Fitzgerald, Desmond, 215 football, 205–6, 256n100 Fort Keogh, 54 Fort Laramie, 29 Fort McPherson, 98 Fort Vancouver, 24 Franco-Prussian War, 87 French, William, 88–89 Frewen, Clara. See Jerome, Clara Frewen, Edward, 49 Frewen, Moreton: articles of, 67; birth of, 49; class and gender performances of, 72, 74–75, 81–82, 109, 181; Home Ranche of, 65–66, 81–82; images of, 4, 5; marriage of, 61–66, 135; masculine performances of, 10, 85; Powder River Cattle Company and, 44, 47–48, 65–66, 69–77, 183, 232n63, 233n81; surplus man trope and, 17, 58, 150; travels of, 53–54, 60 Frewen, Richard, 45, 48–49, 61, 69, 73, 232n70 frontier thesis, 13–14, 186 fur trade, 24–27, 29–31, 34, 36, 40 Gardiner, Judith Kegan, 12 gender: alcohol and, 30–31, 119, 122, 127, 187–88, 190–91, 214–15; colonialist fantasies and, 8, 77–78, 86–89, 93–94, 98–111, 121–22, 128–33, 143–45, 166, 225n21; domesticity and, 23, 43, 65–66, 93, 146–47, 182–83; fluidity of, 22–23, 36–44, 115–16, 118–20, 124, 189; homosocial relations and, 37–38, 40–41, 66, 88–89, 106, 203–4; intersections of class with, 4, 5, 9, 18, 22–24, 28, 31–32, 34, 44, 47–53, 60, 81, 84, 89–92, 103–5, 134; intersections of race with, 9–11, 16, 18, 30; Isabella Bird and, 84–85;

nerves and, 89–93, 102–5, 107, 109, 169–72, 178–82, 204, 242n76, 249n18; performativity and, 1–4, 10–11, 22, 25, 28, 93–94, 120, 137–53, 158–60, 166, 198–99; primitivism and, 207–9. See also class; colonialism; masculinity; race; women George III, King, 148 Gladstone, William, 132–33, 149 Goodman, Al, 147 Goodnight, Charles, 54 Gordon-Cumming, Roualeyn, 206–7 Gorringe, H. H., 251n45 Graphic, 148 Gray, William H., 19 The Great Divide (Dunraven), 99, 101, 106, 124, 127, 175 Greg, W. R., 93–94 Grogan, Ewart, 202–3 guides and guiding (of hunting trips), 89–102, 118–19, 122, 135–36, 149, 151. See also Cody, William F. “Buffalo Bill”; hunting; masculinity; Omohundro, John “Texas Jack”; Omohundro; performativity Haggard, H. Rider, 192 Haigh, William, 124–25 Hall, Anna, 182 Hall, G. Stanley, 204 The Happy Hunting Grounds (K. Roosevelt), 214 Haraway, Donna, 193 Hardy, Mary Duffus, 57–58, 69 Harraden, Beatrice, 79–80 Harriman, Daisy, 189 Havemeyer, William, 167 Heller, Edmund, 207 Henty, George, 59–60 Hickok, James Butler “Wild Bill,” 97–98 Hilda Strafford (Harraden), 79–80 Hoe, Robert, 167 Home Rule (policy), 87–88 Homestead Act, 112 homosocial relations, 37–41 Hornaday, William, 195–97

281

282

INDEX

Hudson’s Bay Company, 27 Hughes family, 114–16, 119 hunting: colonialism and, 4, 105–11, 128–29, 180, 191–92, 194, 196–99, 201–2, 241n64; ethics of, 173–78, 194, 196–97, 207–10; fur trade and, 24–27; homosocial values and, 37–41, 66, 88–89, 96–100, 120, 172–73, 203–4; intersections of class with, 6, 10, 18, 22, 45, 57, 65, 67–68, 107, 120, 128–29, 173–78, 185, 188–89, 191–99, 241n64, 255n77; literary depictions of, 8, 68–70, 107–8, 214–15; masculinity and, 2–6, 10, 25, 39–40, 45, 54, 65–67, 84, 106–7, 109, 171, 173–81, 188–89, 191–92, 203–4, 206–8; Roosevelt and, 18, 164–66, 171, 174–82, 255n77; tourism and, 7–9, 29, 35–36, 84, 96–98, 102, 150–52. See also guides and guiding (of hunting trips) Hunting Trips of a Ranchman (Roosevelt), 2–3, 184–85, 190, 250n28 hysteria, 89–92. See also nerves and nerve force; neurasthenia Illustrated London News, 142, 145 India, 7–8, 82, 89, 105, 128, 164, 179–90, 241n64 Indian and Colonial Exhibition (1886), 141 industrialization. See Britain; modernization In Search of the Golden West (Pomeroy), 12–13 Ireland, 17, 59, 86–89, 110, 128–30 Irish Free State, 88 Irving, Washington, 19 Isenberg, Andrew, 178–79 Jack the Ripper, 161 Jefferson, Thomas, 173 Jerome, Clara, 61–64, 67–68, 69–70, 72–73, 81, 149–50, 157 Jerome, Jennie, 62, 149, 157, 231n45 Jerome, Leonard, 61–62, 135

Jerome, Leonie, 62, 150, 213 Johnson County, 66 Jung, Salar, 180 Kasson, Joy, 98 Kennerly, William Clark, 25, 28, 30, 226n24 Kenya, 167, 192, 199–202 Kikuyu people, 208–9 Kingsley, George, 83–84, 241n64 Kingsley, Mary, 129 King Solomon’s Mines (Haggard), 192 Kipling, Rudyard, 81–82, 165, 167 Klein, Kerwin, 14 Kramer, Paul, 165 Krauss, Alison, 215 A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains (Bird), 84, 114–24 Land of Savagery, Land of Promise (Billington), 14 Lee, Alice Hathaway, 179 Leslie, John, 213 Liebersohn, Harry, 20 literature: boyhood adventure stories, 8–9, 30–34, 60, 70, 95–96, 109, 134, 170, 207, 237n20; Native Americans and, 20–21, 30–36, 40–42, 95–96, 121, 128; travel writing and, 8, 14, 53–60, 99–101, 106–9, 113–24, 134, 239n37. See also Bird, Isabella; Reid, Mayne; Roosevelt, Theodore; Stewart, William Drummond Little Missouri Land and Stock Company, 251n45 London, 132–34, 139–43, 147, 150–51, 157–61; Times, 143, 162 Long’s Peak, 111, 120 Loo, Tina, 7 Ma, Yo-Yo, 215 Mackenzie, John, 7 MacMonnies, Frederick, 253n57 “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” (article), 140, 160–61 Mangan, J. A., 103 Mann, Katy, 190

INDEX

Manners and Tone of Good Society (book), 109 Marlborough House set, 150, 157, 189 marriage, 7, 61–63, 93, 231n45 masculinity: boyhood adventure narratives and, 8–9, 30–34, 60, 109, 134, 207; Buffalo Bill and, 1–2, 2, 9, 18, 134, 137–53; capitalism and, 7, 49–55, 57, 60, 69, 72–73; class concerns and, 4, 5, 9, 11, 15, 17, 23, 44–49, 52–53, 56, 60, 155–61, 220n10; cowboys and, 48–49, 56, 81; drinking and, 30–31, 77, 119, 121–22, 127, 187–88, 190–91, 214–15; emotional displays and, 182–84; gender fluidity and, 21–22, 36, 40–44; “hegemonic,” 11–12, 17, 84, 102–3, 162–63, 210; homosocial reinforcement and, 37–41, 66, 88–89, 96–97, 99–100, 120, 172–73, 204–5; hunting and, 2–4, 10, 18, 22, 25, 39, 45, 54, 65, 96–97, 109, 128–29, 171, 173–81, 203–4, 206–8; intersections of race with, 11, 152–55, 164–65, 220n10; literary representations of, 7–9, 36–44, 115–24; military service and, 28–29; Native Americans and, 11; neurasthenia and, 102–5, 107, 109, 169, 171–72, 178–82, 204, 242n76, 249n18; nostalgia and, 12, 33–34; performative elements of, 1–3, 10–11, 28, 30–32, 34, 44, 66–67, 96–99, 106, 118–19, 122, 135–53, 182–84, 189–90, 210–11; power and, 4–6, 30–32, 67–68, 82, 198–99; Roosevelt and, 164–65, 168–69; self-sufficiency and, 8, 17, 60, 64–65, 134–35; surplus gentleman trope and, 64–65, 67, 74, 77–80, 93; Victorian expectations of, 121–23 masquerades, 157–61 Matabeleland, 203 McCall, Laura, 220n10 McDermott, John, 226n24 McKay, Donald, 137 McMillan, Northrup, 200 Mead, Roger, 215

Meagher, Thomas, 14 medicine and medical knowledge, 89–92, 102, 107, 109, 169–72, 204, 242n76, 249n18 Mexican-American War, 28 Miles, Nelson, 161 Miller, Alfred Jacob, 17, 20, 25–26, 27, 30, 32–34, 223n4 Mills, Enos, 124 modernization: celebrity and, 152–56; class structures and, 20–23, 35, 51–52, 212–14; gender and, 22–24, 35, 84; health concerns and, 89–93, 102, 204, 242n76; neurasthenia and, 102–5, 107, 109, 169–72, 178–82, 204; racial concerns and, 9; threats to masculinity of, 6–7. See also Britain; class; masculinity; United States Montana, 56, 58, 74 Moran, Thomas, 215 mountaineering, 58, 120–21, 241n65 Murray, John, 94 Murthly Castle, 26, 30–31, 33–36, 212–13, 227n43 Nation, 153 National Collegiate Athletic Association, 256n100 nationalism, 9, 14, 88. See also Britain; colonialism; Ireland; race; Scotland; United States Native Americans: fur trade and, 24, 27, 29–30, 34; literary depictions and elisions of, 34–36, 40–42, 95–96, 121, 128; racialization of, 30, 33–34, 46, 48, 55, 98, 100, 107, 128, 134, 143–46, 186–87; romanticization of, 20–21, 30, 34–36, 40–42; wars against, 55, 135 The Naval War of 1812 (Roosevelt), 184 nerves and nerve force, 89–93, 102–5, 107, 109, 169, 204, 249n18 neurasthenia, 102–5, 107, 109, 169–72, 204, 242n76, 249n18 Nevill, Dorothy, 157–58 Newlands Act, 200 New Mexico, 55

283

284

INDEX

New Orleans Daily Picayune, 29 Newsboys’ Lodging House, 169, 182 New Women, 160 New York Orthopedic Hospital, 182 New York Times, 197 New York World, 149 New Zealand, 15, 77, 113 Nigeria, 193 Nineteenth Century (publication), 50 North American Indian Portfolio (Catlin), 178 nostalgia, 12, 28, 32, 34 Nugent, James, 83, 113, 116–17, 119–24, 126–27, 240n50 Oakley, Annie, 146 Oelrichs, Charles and Henry, 180 Omohundro, John “Texas Jack,” 85, 96, 98–102, 119, 131, 136–38 Our Vanishing Wild Life (Hornaday), 195–97 Paul of Würtemmberg, Prince, 29 Paxson, Frederic L., 14 Pease, Alfred and Lady, 199–200, 202, 214, 256n91 Peerage (Burke), 196–97 Pelzer, Louis, 233n81 performativity: buckskin costuming and, 1–3, 88, 96, 99–100, 204; Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show and, 18, 143–53, 157–60; class and, 29–34, 68, 85, 158–59, 166; gender and, 1–4, 7–12, 31–32, 34, 66–67, 85, 122, 135–37, 182–84, 189–90, 210–11; guides and, 96–101, 135, 149, 151; hunting and, 1–11, 22, 25, 39–40, 45, 54, 65–67, 84, 106–9, 171–81, 188–92, 203–4; masquerades and, 157–61; race and, 10–11, 16–17, 166, 227n43 Philippines, 165, 196, 199 Planters’ and Farmers’ Association, 194 Plotz, John, 165 Plunkett, Horace, 59, 88–89, 236n8 Pomeroy, Earl, 12–16 Post, Morton, 76

Powder River Cattle Company, 17, 46–47, 65–66, 69–70, 72–76, 81–82, 183, 232n63, 233n81 Prairie Cattle Company, 55 primitivism, 24, 33–34, 39, 186 primogeniture, 6, 52. See also surplus gentleman trope problem of the younger son, 52. See also surplus gentleman trope Protestantism, 27, 86–89, 114, 131 Puerto Rico, 165 Queensbury, Marquess of, 79 race: Anglo-Saxon (trans)nationalisms and, 77–78, 99–101, 105–6, 109–10, 128, 133, 148, 152–55, 162–63, 165–66, 174–79, 196–202, 210–11, 239n37; colonialism and, 21, 98, 101–3, 106–7, 109–10, 143, 197–203, 210–11, 239n37; decline anxieties and, 51–53, 60, 77–80, 102–5, 134, 150–65, 169–79, 187–91, 196–97, 244n7; fluidity of, 21–22, 36, 40–44; hunting expedition dynamics and, 173–74, 180–82, 192–93, 207–10; intersections of class with, 9–10, 16, 18, 102–3, 198–99, 203; intersections of gender with, 9–11, 16, 18, 30; literary representations of, 34–36, 40–42, 95–96, 121, 128, 166, 170–71; performativity and, 10–11, 17, 166, 227n43; primitivism and, 207–9; Roosevelt on, 164–65, 185–87, 198–200 “The Rajah Sees Britannia’s Bill” (poem), 154–55 Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail (Roosevelt), 184 Randall, Isabelle, 58 Raymonde, Ena, 99 Red Shirt, 146 Redskin and Cowboy (Henty), 59–60 redundant woman trope, 93. See also Bird, Isabella Reform Act of 1832 (Scotland), 20 Reid, John Rae, 180 Reid, Mayne, 95–96, 170, 249n14

INDEX

religion, 9, 11, 27–29, 84, 86–89, 110, 114, 131, 168 The Remittance Man (Harraden), 79–80 remittance man trope, 17, 49–50, 58–59, 77–80. See also surplus gentleman trope Rhodes, Cecil, 203 Ritvo, Harriet, 250n28 Robbins, William, 10 Roche, Alexis, 59, 88–89 Roche, Edmund, 88–89 Rockwell, Alphonse D., 169 Rocky Mountain Fur Company, 31 Rocky Mountain Jim. See Nugent, James Rocky Mountain National Park, 84–85 Rocky Mountain News, 97, 112 Romanov, Alexei Alexandrovich (Grand Duke Alexis), 136, 149 Roosevelt, Alice, 205 Roosevelt, Alice Lee, 179, 183 Roosevelt, Anna “Bamie,” 169, 190, 205 Roosevelt, Archibald, 204, 214–15 Roosevelt, Corinne, 171 Roosevelt, Cornelius Van Schaak, 168 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 214 Roosevelt, Elliott, 166, 171–72, 175, 180–82, 184, 188–91, 210, 249n18 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 214 Roosevelt, Kermit, 18, 206–10, 214 Roosevelt, Mittie, 183 Roosevelt, Quentin, 214 Roosevelt, Ted, 205–6, 214 Roosevelt, Theodore: Anglo-Saxonism and, 164–65, 185–86, 188–89, 196–202; class issues and, 9; as father, 204–7; First World War and, 214; health and masculinity effects of nature and, 170–71, 174–76, 178–82, 184, 186–88, 194–96, 203–4, 209; hunting and, 2–4, 18, 164–66, 171, 175–82, 197–204, 255n77; images of, 1, 3; ranching career of, 164, 183; writings of, 2–3, 165, 184–85, 187, 190, 207, 250n28, 255n77

Roosevelt, Theodore, Sr., 168, 182, 184, 191 Roosevelt’s African Trip (Roosevelt), 197–98 Rosslyn, Earl of, 74–75 The Rough Riders (Roosevelt), 185 Royal Geographic Society, 129 Salsbury, Nate, 141, 245n29 Scotland, 8, 17, 20, 26, 30–34, 65, 227n43 Scott, Walter, 26 self-fashioning. See American West; class; gender; performativity; race; Roosevelt, Theodore Selous, Frederick Courtney, 192, 203, 214 Sheridan, Philip, 54–55, 61, 135–36, 149 Sherman, Florence, 190 Shikar Club, 196 Shoshone Indians, 46 The Significance of the Frontier in American History (Turner), 13–14 Sioux Indians, 55 slavery, 29 Slotkin, Richard, 133, 186 Smithsonian Institution, 192, 197, 207 Society for the Protection of the Wild Fauna of the Empire, 196 South Africa, 157, 192, 194 Spanish-American War, 166, 185 sportsmen’s code, 173–77, 188–89, 194–97, 207–9 Spring-Rice, Cecil, 187, 206 “The Star Spangled Banner,” 143 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 161 Stewart, Frank Nichols, 212 Stewart, George Drummond, 212 Stewart, Susan, 33 Stewart, William Drummond, 17–25, 28–44, 85, 181, 212, 225n21, 227n43, 249n14 St. Kames (writer), 54 St. Louis, 30–31 The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Stevenson), 161 “The Strenuous Life” (Roosevelt), 187

285

286

INDEX

Strong, Lisa, 34 Sublette, William, 28, 31–32, 226n24 surplus gentleman trope, 17, 60, 64–65, 67, 74, 77–80, 93. See also problem of the younger son Tait, J. S., 60 Terrail, Pierre, 145 Teschemacher, Hubert, 9 Texas, 54, 56, 98–99 “Texas Jack” Omohundro. See Omohundro, John “Texas Jack” Theriot, Nancy, 91 Tilley, Vesta, 148 Times (London), 143, 162 tourism: British investments in, 7, 12–13, 111, 134, 210; hunting trips and, 16–17, 29, 96–98, 172–73; neurasthenia and, 89–93, 103–4, 169–72, 178–82, 204; travel writing and, 89–101. See also American West; Britain; hunting; travel writing Trailing the Giant Panda (K. Roosevelt), 214 travel writing: American West’s exoticness and, 11, 57, 69–70, 99–101, 106–9, 134, 237n20, 239n37; British audiences of, 8, 14, 113–24, 239n37; colonialism and, 125–27, 207–11, 214; financial boosterism and, 53–55, 58–60, 69; Native Americans and, 20–21; neurasthenia and, 103–4; remittance man trope and, 78–79; women and, 92–94. See also Bird, Isabella Trollope, Anthony, 158–59 Trollope, Frances, 158 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 13–14, 186 Uganda, 193–94, 199–202 United States: Anglo-Saxonism and, 13–15, 106, 109–10, 128, 133, 148, 162–63, 185–86; aristocratic intermarriages and, 61–63; Civil War of, 201; class concerns in, 167–68, 187; colonial projects of, 4–5, 69,

103–6, 133, 145, 165, 184–91, 239n37; masculinity and, 9; MexicanAmerican War and, 28; modernization and industrialization in, 31, 51, 102, 152–55; slavery in, 29; U.S. Army and, 28–29, 54, 98, 135, 185. See also American West Vanderbyl, P. B., 196 Victoria, Queen, 133–34, 147–48, 246n38 Vivian, Arthur Pendarves, 57, 108 Wanderings in the Western Land (Vivian), 57, 108 Wales, Prince of (Albert Edward), 62, 150, 157, 161 War in the Garden of Eden (K. Roosevelt), 214 War of the Roses, 213 Warren, Louis, 96–98, 246n38 “Was Miss Vedder an Adventuress?” (E. Roosevelt), 189 Watkins, Carleton, 215 Wayne, Anthony, 186 The Way We Live Now (A. Trollope), 158–59 Westward the Briton (Athearn), 14 “What Shall I Do with My Son?” (article), 17, 51–52 white man’s burden, 164–65 whiteness. See Anglo-Saxonism; class; gender; masculinity; race Whitley, John R., 140–42 “Why Are Women Redundant?” (Greg), 93–94 Whyte, Theodore, 112–13 Wilde, Oscar, 62 Wilder, Marshall, 150, 152–53 Wilson, Woodrow, 214 Windholz, Anne, 239n37 Wind River Mountains, 29 The Winning of the West (Roosevelt), 185 Wister, Owen, 9 women: gender performances and, 11, 115–16; medical science and, 89–92;

INDEX

professional options for, 93–94. See also Bird, Isabella; Jerome, Clara; specific women Woods, Lawrence, 232n63 World War I, 213 Wyndham, George, 130 Wyndham Land Act (1903), 130 Wyndham-Quin, Richard, 213

Wyoming, 29–30, 55–56, 64–69, 74, 76, 183, 233n81 Wyoming Stock Growers’ Association, 66 Yellowstone River, 46, 67 Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), 169 Zimbabwe, 203

287