The image of British aristocrats dressed in buckskins while hunting bison or wrangling cattle in the American West in the final decades of the nineteenth century never fails to amuse and intrigue. But at the same time, their appearance on the American frontier had serious implications, as Monica Rico adeptly reminds us, for the construction of contemporary masculinities and for the creation of a shared imperial identity for Britain, at the time at its apex of global power, and the United States, which was rapidly emerging as a powerful ally and equally powerful rival. Rico tackles both aspects in five relatively self-contained chapters that rely largely on a biographical approach to tell the fascinating story.

Her tales certainly have their tragi-comic components. Moreton Frewen, the younger son of a gentry family with substantial landholdings in Sussex and Leicestershire, attempted to get rich from cattle ranching in Wyoming in the 1880s, only to find that his ill-conceived plan, and his investors' confidence, foundered after the onset of the bitter Western winter, which killed most of his stock. More seriously, however, Frewen was representative of the downward mobility of the British elite at a time when agricultural imports, increasing taxes on land, and growing political democracy were beginning to loosen the vise grip they had held on wealth, status, and power for centuries. Rico's description of Frewen's efforts to regain a sense of authority, class privilege, and masculinity through “his claim to heroic status as a pathfinder through the wilderness” (46) prevents us from dismissing him as yet another incompetent adventurer who fell victim to the promise of the purportedly limitless natural resources of the American West.

Men like Frewen have been written about before, beginning as early as the 1950s, when Robert Athearn published his Westward the Briton. But Rico is able to use newer approaches, in particular gender history and the recognition of masculinity as a category of gender of equal significance to femininity, to bring a depth and richness to her analyses of her case studies. Particularly strong is her third chapter, which juxtaposes the examples of the Earl of Dunraven and Isabella Bird, two Britons who ended up entangled in the violent death of another of their countrymen, James Nugent, in Colorado in 1874. Rico's work is not without flaws. The first chapter, which details the experiences of the Scotsman William Drummond Stewart in the 1830s and 1840s, is set too early to make her argument that Stewart, like his compatriots who followed him a half century later, was seeking a remedy for a sense of declining elite privilege. The last two chapters, one on the visit of Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show to London in 1887 and the other on Theodore Roosevelt's career as a big-game hunter in America and abroad, occupy well-trodden scholarly ground without sufficient historiographical discussion and are somewhat tangential to her main focus. The biographies of her main subjects, which are essential to her arguments, are sometimes lacking in fundamental details about their origins and backgrounds, requiring the reader to accept too many broad assumptions about their motivations and reasons for being drawn to the American West.

But if this is in places a slightly frustrating book, it is also a fascinating one, primarily for the way in which it begins to outline the emergence of a shared sense of imperial destiny on the part of both Britain and the United States in the late nineteenth century. The Britons who went West often saw it as a frontier to be tamed in a similar manner to India or Africa. Their alliance with their American counterparts around the idea that imperial conquest and expansion were essential proving grounds for masculinity illuminates a new dimension in transnational imperial history and Anglo-American relations that has heretofore been little considered, beyond discussions of Kipling's “The White Man's Burden,” with its espousal of a shared Anglo-Saxon imperial vision. Rico might have pushed this aspect of her book even more to the forefront, but what she does offer opens a rich lode that future scholars will undoubtedly mine. In a letter of condolence to Frewen's family in 1924, Kipling labeled him as “wholly a Sahib,” thereby locating him, as Rico writes, “within a broader imperial world of racial and class hierarchy” (82). Rico has helped to locate an entire subset of British adventurers in the American West in that “broader imperial world” and to give her readers a brightly lit window into the American setting of that world. As we continue to live with the legacy of the British and American visions of empire that were developed a little over a century ago, an account of how those visions developed jointly and came to mutually reinforce each other is most welcome. Rico has done a superb job of providing such an account.