A Splendid Savage

Very few individuals have led lives so remarkable that they are beyond anything a novelist might invent: Frederick Russell Burnham being one of them.
 
During the 1862 Dakota War, a mother hides her baby in a basket in a corn field to keep him safe from marauding Sioux. They burn down the family home but don’t find the sleeping Fred. This fortuitous start in life sets the tone for this monumental biography, nearly every chapter of which could inspire a movie or TV adventure series.
 
As a teenager living on his wits in California and Arizona, Burnham hooks up with famous scouts who pass on their tracking and survival skills. He runs messages, rides shotgun, hunts down Apaches, mines and transports silver or generally rubs shoulders with infamous gang members and lawmen alike in towns like Tombstone.
 
As the West is subdued and civilized, he seeks fresh horizons. With wife Blanche and son Roderick in tow, he embarks on some of his greatest derring-do in Southern Africa. His daughter Nada is the first white child born in Bulawayo and he is one of only three survivors of the Shangani Patrol, the legendary last-stand battle of white men against King Lobengula’s Matabele impis. Later, he is appointed by Lord Roberts as Britain’s Official Scout during the Boer War when again he puts his life on the line as spy and saboteur. His reputation is further enhanced world-wide after his friendship with Lord Baden-Powell inspires the creation of the youth scouting movement. Although an American, he is awarded Britain’s Distinguished Service Order for gallantry by King Edward VII.
 
When not spying or scouting, Burnham is a prospector and investor who suffers interminable booms and busts. Ever hopeful of the lucky strike, he pegs rich copper resources beyond the Zambezi River, gold in Alaska and the Klondike, as well as in the Ashanti kingdoms of West Africa. He discovers other valuable natural resources on the plains of East Africa. In Mexico, he again has to juggle business interests with politics and just happens to be in the right place at the right time to save the American and Mexican Presidents from an assassination attempt.
 
He is well into middle age when he finally hits pay-dirt with oil in familiar California territory he rode across as a child. At last he is financially secure and, like his friend Teddy Roosevelt, Burnham turns from hunter to conservationist, establishing early wild-life protection bodies.
 
One of the more bizarre episodes is Burnham’s dream of populating the rivers and plains of America with African wildlife, including hippos and giraffes, in order to provide hunting opportunities as well as food for the nation. In this crazy but ill-fated enterprise, he is joined by a notorious conman and German spy, a former Afrikaner scout who was his opposite during the Boer War when the two men had contracts out on each other. (As of writing this, apparently there are plans to make a movie about this venture starring Edward Norton.) 
 
In a down-to-earth style that befits his subject, Steve Kemper gives us a meticulous investigation of Burnham’s life and times, including his relationships with the exalted and the humble, also his family. His spirited wife Blanche (who really deserves a biography of her own) endures hardships and tragedies that would crush most other women yet she remains Burnham’s loyal soulmate for nearly sixty years.
 
For those interested in the history of the Matabele Wars, in the Appendices the author takes a good hard look at the evidence both for and against the accusations of cowardice and lies in regard to Burnham’s participation in the Shangani Patrol and his assassination of the Matabele prophet, the M’limo, in a cave near Bulawayo.
 
Although some of Burnham’s attitudes may not sit easily with modern readers, he was an exemplar of his age and must not be judged from a 21st Century perspective. Yet he also had a surprisingly romantic side as evidenced in some of his letters to Blanche and his other musings are still interesting either for their prescience or reflective nature.

Capable of unbridled optimism and almost superhuman physical resilience, Burnham remains a contradictory but ever-magnetic figure. Congratulations to Steve Kemper for giving him the superb biography he deserves.

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