Gentlemen eccentrics who looked west for adventure
By Miranda Seymour |
July 1, 2012, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
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.
Turnley worked hard to recreate upon the prairie a perfectly pukka England. Runnymede offered not only polo matches, tennis tournaments and cricket, but a splendid opportunity for aspiring cowboys to don their buckskins and fire off six-shooters as they swaggered down Main Street. The new arrivals from England loved Runnymede. Established locals, especially the pious German-American settlers at nearby Harper, didn't think much of the antics of these grandee colonists.
Yet all went well - until the Kansas Pacific Railroad line finally did come through, two miles away. With no transport link to the cities, the Runnymede project was literally train-wrecked. Poor Turnley and many of his chums slunk back home, none the wiser for their Midwest adventure, and certainly none the richer. Runnymede's model had been a previous and equally unusual community. The Close brothers, sons of a wealthy London banker, had discovered their ambitions in 1876 when they were tempted by the Western agricultural displays at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia and bought vast tracts of cheap farmland around the town of Le Mars. This soon became overlaid with cosily English place names like Gypsy Hill Farm and Carlton Farm. Le Mars itself was garnished with a sprinkling of English-style hotels and pubs (Albion House, the House of Lords).
This delightfully absurd community (thwarted by a lack of Iowa foxes, the colonists chased prairie chickens) was also led to inexorable failure based on a fundamental miscalculation. The land proved useless for wheat; swine cholera decimated the colonists' herds of hogs; settlers faced hailstones the size of cricket balls and tornadoes were "a regular terror."
Readers may, nevertheless, feel a sneaking admiration for Pagnamenta's crew of intrepid – if arguably somewhat inconsequential – gentlemen adventurers.
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.
Turnley worked hard to recreate upon the prairie a perfectly pukka England. Runnymede offered not only polo matches, tennis tournaments and cricket, but a splendid opportunity for aspiring cowboys to don their buckskins and fire off six-shooters as they swaggered down Main Street. The new arrivals from England loved Runnymede. Established locals, especially the pious German-American settlers at nearby Harper, didn't think much of the antics of these grandee colonists.
Yet all went well - until the Kansas Pacific Railroad line finally did come through, two miles away. With no transport link to the cities, the Runnymede project was literally train-wrecked. Poor Turnley and many of his chums slunk back home, none the wiser for their Midwest adventure, and certainly none the richer. Runnymede's model had been a previous and equally unusual community. The Close brothers, sons of a wealthy London banker, had discovered their ambitions in 1876 when they were tempted by the Western agricultural displays at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia and bought vast tracts of cheap farmland around the town of Le Mars. This soon became overlaid with cosily English place names like Gypsy Hill Farm and Carlton Farm. Le Mars itself was garnished with a sprinkling of English-style hotels and pubs (Albion House, the House of Lords).
This delightfully absurd community (thwarted by a lack of Iowa foxes, the colonists chased prairie chickens) was also led to inexorable failure based on a fundamental miscalculation. The land proved useless for wheat; swine cholera decimated the colonists' herds of hogs; settlers faced hailstones the size of cricket balls and tornadoes were "a regular terror."
Readers may, nevertheless, feel a sneaking admiration for Pagnamenta's crew of intrepid – if arguably somewhat inconsequential – gentlemen adventurers.
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