The Most Interesting Men in the World

Abstract

The Most Interesting Men in the World Jon Coleman (bio) Monica Rico. Nature’s Noblemen: Transatlantic Masculinities and the Nineteenth-Century American West. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1213. ix + 287 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $40.00. A trapper and guide memorable for the scars given him by a perturbed grizzly bear, James Nugent lived a wild but circumscribed life. He routinely wandered in search of game and of mountains to scale, yet he stayed close to his home in Estes Park, Colorado. So intensely local that his identity fused with the landscape, “Rocky Mountain Jim” nevertheless stepped on the world stage when he consumed too much whiskey, threatened Griff Evans with a pistol, and got blasted with a shotgun. He died from his wounds three months later, while Evans pleaded self-defense and was absolved of any wrongdoing. Neither Evans nor Nugent were “foreign,” and no consulates or ambassadors intervened in the legal proceedings. The incident, however, was international because Estes Park was not completely national. The place and its residents belonged both to the United States and to a global network of circulating elite metropolitan men. In Nature’s Noblemen, Monica Rico reconstructs a transnational conspiracy of identity creation through a series of cold case studies. Her roster of dead white people will be familiar to specialists in nineteenth-century Western American history as well as to heritage-inclined television viewers zapping between the History Channel and PBS. “Buffalo Bill” Cody and Theodore Roosevelt could support their own boutique cable networks; lesser known, William Drummond Stewart, Moreton Frewen, Isabella Bird, and the Earl of Dunraven still have long track records as historical subjects. The connection between the British elite and the American West is old news too. As Rico explains in her introduction, Ray Allen Billington, Robert Athearn, and Earl Pomeroy rifled through these sources decades ago. Rico’s training in the history of gender and race gives her a fresh pair of eyes to see new clues in this worked-over material. Previous investigators were so busy looking for outside confirmation of America’s exceptionalism that they missed the obvious transnational significance of the foreign correspondence. Western American historians wanted British expatriates to explain [End Page 651] Rocky Mountain Jim to them. They wanted disinterested third parties to report that the American frontier was truly a breeding ground for a unique national character. Face and torso mauled into a novel arrangement, Jim embodied the genesis of American freedom, democracy, and toughness. He had tangled with an agent of the primitive wilderness and clawed back to serve as a wrangler of tourists. His fight with Evans—an American settler known to be friendly with the Englishmen who dawdled “around in those parts on the pretence of hunting”—was a strike for national independence and egalitarianism (p. 83). He would not be deprived of his liberty in a “deep-laid scheme” motivated by “English gold” (p. 125). For Rocky Mountain Jim, and Western historians, Estes Park—and by extension all of the West—belonged to Americans because they paid an elemental price for it. Reverse the perspective, however, and the landscape looks different. Instead of asking what the West or the frontier meant to Americans, Rico ponders why wealthy Brits invested their time, their money, and their identities in places like Estes Park. Why was the spectacle of American colonization intriguing to them? British aristocrats were not suffering for colonial outposts where they could enact their great-white-hunter fantasies. Why go west for elk and bighorns when Africa and India offered lions, rhinos, elephants, and tigers? Then again, why not visit them all and bag the lot? By downplaying Western uniqueness, Rico highlights the linkages that radiated out of the region. Wealthy seekers of masculine trophies—big game, ranches, paintings, resorts, or autobiographies—didn’t let national borders limit their collections. They fanned out across the globe and, in the process, knit together colonial regions through race, gender, and violence. They portrayed the American West as an episode in the planetary saga of Anglo-Saxon expansion. Race linked them to American colonization in a delightfully theoretical fashion. They possessed a grandparent’s stake in the proceedings...