Prairie Fever: British Aristocrats in the American West, 1830-1890

(NYTBR) It is in names like Victoria, Rugby and Runnymede (a dinky little community long since buried beneath a sea of Kansas wheat) that modern travelers across the great plains of the Midwest can still catch a glimpse of the lost — and deeply weird — world that has been lovingly excavated and brought back to life in “Prairie Fever,” by Peter Pagnamenta, a writer and documentary producer for the BBC. Back in the late 1880s, Runnymede was the spot where a group of English colonists decided to live out the fantasies they had read about in the exotic cowboy tales of Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane. Known derisively as “remittance men” because of the comfortable allowances they regularly received from their daddies back home, these young toffs had been lured to Kansas by Francis Turnley, a wealthy Irish landowner’s son from County Antrim who had gambled his future on the chance that a new railway line would lay its tracks straight through his personal fief: Runnymede. Continued