Good old primogeniture. Not only did it preserve the integrity of Britain’s landed estates and stiffen its clergy and armed forces with relatively deprived younger sons, it also sent those same sons fanning out across the world in search of opportunity and adventure. As we learn from Peter Pagnamenta’s delightful and illuminating Prairie Fever, some of them wound up not in the Subcontinent or Africa but on the American frontier, where they forded mighty rivers, hobnobbed with Indians, jounced along in covered wagons, and, above all, decimated wildlife to their hearts’ content.

There was, for instance, William Drummond Stewart, second son of the Laird of Grandtully. Possessed of, as Pagnamenta puts it, “a Byronic streak,” Stewart made his way to St. Louis in 1832 and proceeded to spend most of the next six years west of the Mississippi. When his older brother died in 1838, Stewart went home to assume his baronetcy and the estate that came with it, but he hardly forgot the Wild West. Before leaving he’d had a grizzly bear and several buffalo shipped to Scotland, along with two Indians to care for them. He planted part of his domain with Rocky Mountain Douglas firs and filled the walls of Murthly Castle with vast documentary canvases like Hunting the Grizzly Bear and Butchering a Wounded Buffalo—these being the work of Alfred Jacob Miller, a painter Stewart had hired to tag along and record his exploits. He even wrote two frontier novels.

Stewart