"Prairie Fever," by Peter Pagnamenta Illustration from "Prairie Fever" Using a light English saddle to hunt bison, from Grantley F. Berkeley's "English Sportsman in the Western Prairies" (1861). 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, a fatal 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. But making their fortunes had not been a priority. After all, as one of these patrician Quixotes casually admitted, with all the blitheness of a rich man's son, "None of us had any financial sense." 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. William Close, persuaded by an American businessman (whose daughter he conveniently married) that Iowa would offer the best territory for his American Oz, bought vast tracts of cheap farmland around the town of Le Mars, which 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). The punters arrived in droves, urged on by the zealous correspondent of that über-English magazine, The Field, an exuberant chap ever ready to gasp at the absolute Englishness of every last fence and yard he saw on his visit. Briefly unnerved by the shocking spectacle of a bronzed Lord Hobart out mowing a field, aided in such lowly labor by a pair of pink-faced young aristocrats, he swiftly placed such drudgery within a soothing perspective. How "sensible and useful" the lives of these elegant noblemen must be, here in a town of "English ladies and English gentlemen, of English children and English babies." And what was more (in case any readers of The Field had missed the point), these gentlemanly households were tended by "English servants," nourished by "English cooking" and cared for - of course - with "thorough English neatness." Harbored in such a reassuring context, Lord Hobart's manly engagement with a mowing machine became, to the eyes of an admiring English reader, downright heroic. This delightfully absurd community (thwarted by a lack of Iowa foxes, the sporting colonists chased after prairie chickens) was also led to inexorable failure based on a fundamental miscalculation. The land around Le Mars proved as useless for fields of wheat as for pastureland. Swine cholera decimated the colonists" herds of hogs; hailstones the size of cricket balls could kill a cow or even injure a gentleman's leg. And as for tornadoes: definitely not one's cup of tea. "English people can have no idea what storms are like out here," one of the forlorn young settlers wrote. They are a regular terror. The Close brothers, shrewdly expanding into Kansas and Minnesota, accrued a fortune from their personal land investments. Their aristocratic followers fared less well. A few survived by moving into states like Wyoming (cheaper to ranch in and less subject to "these beastly storms"). The rest reverted to convention, returning home to less grueling lives. While such sagebrush sagas occupy the culminating chapters of "Prairie Fever," earlier episodes chart the adventures of a previous and more daring generation of Englishmen. Refugees from staid tradition, they were lured by the thought of virgin territory - America's magnificent scenery had been portrayed on vast canvas panoramas that were paraded around Europe for the wonderment of awed beholders - and above all, by the prospect of magnificent buffalo to hunt. These would-be woodsmen had devoured Natty Bumppo's fictional adventures among the Indians and trappers and longed to emulate them. Chief among the characters in these earlier chapters is William Drummond Stewart, a hooknosed military man whose odd appearance - he donned tartan trousers and a white leather jacket for journeys through the Rocky Mountains - became the hallmark of an indomitable eccentric. Stewart may not be the most admirable of the brave (or harebrained) sportsmen who trek through Pagnamenta's pages in search of all the splendid bison they can slaughter. He is, however, the most lively and eloquent in a remarkable gathering of men whose attitude was best summed up by a female traveler in the Rockies, Isabella Bird: "An American is nationally assumptive; an Englishman personally so." Miss Bird was putting the English down. Readers may, nevertheless, feel a sneaking admiration for Pagnamenta's crew of intrepid - if arguably somewhat inconsequential - gentlemen ­adventurers. Miranda Seymour is the author, most recently, of "Chaplin's Girl: The Life and Loves of Virginia Cherrill" and a memoir, "Thrumpton Hall."