A Splendid Savage

I’ve dug in hard on Steve Kemper’s new biography of Frederick Russell Burnham. He’s done the old scout right.

Burnham is a key man for Frontier Partisans. That’s him in the upper left corner, drawn by Robert Baden-Powell. If that name rings familiar, it’s because he founded the Boy Scouts — and time spent riding the veld with Burnham was a major inspiration for that.

I remember first reading about Burnham as a stripling, in a book edited by shooting guru Jeff Cooper called “America: The Men and Guns That Made Her Great.” Here was guy who was just as much a frontiersman as my early heroes like Simon Kenton or Jim Bridger — but in Africa as well as Arizona and all the way into the 20th Century. That was an exciting eye-opener for me and it led me down paths previously unexplored. You could say that Burnham personifies the theme of Frontier Partisans: the idea of the frontier as an international phenomenon that persisted well into the modern era, and the idea that frontier scouts and rangers set the template for modern-day special operations forces.

This from the prologue of “A Splendid Savage” resonates:

Burnham believed deeply in certain values that he found among frontiersmen, soldiers, and certain native tribes — courage, sacrifice, self-discipline, self-reliance, physical and mental toughness. For him these weren’t clichés or abstractions but daily practices that could determine the fate of individuals and nations. He lamented what he saw as their decay in the twentieth century. 

So does this excerpt from a letter to his mother, which gave Kemper his vivid title:

“Sometimes I wish I had never learned to read or form any conception of duty, civilization, religion,” he once wrote to his mother, “for I would have been and am at heart a splendid savage, nothing more.”

Yeah, I think Fred would appreciate being included in my post “Rewilding — Searching For The Sweet Spot.”

Of course, he’s one of the 12 men I profile in the forthcoming “Warriors of the Wild Lands.”

Burnham wrote a memoir, “Scouting On Two Continents,”(S2C) and a collection of magazine articles and essays titled “Taking Chances.” In addition, his and his family’s voluminous correspondence has been preserved and much of it published in “An American Family on the African Frontier.” But there are a lot of frustrating dark spaces, especially in Burnham’s early years.

Kemper does a nice job of fleshing out Burnham’s involvement — such as it may have been — in the Tonto Basin Feud in north-central Arizona, also known as the Pleasant Valley War. That was perhaps the darkest, most violent feud in the history of the West.

Burnham’s memoir is maddeningly vague in the details and it looks like Kemper’s account, while still full of dark spaces and unresolved questions, is about as good as we’re going to get. It allows me to confirm some things in my own Burnham profile, instead of qualifying them. There’s still a lot we don’t know and never will. 

Burnham deliberately obfuscated a number of points, especially identities, because the 1880s feud was still fresh when he wrote S2C and he did not want to hurt or incriminate people. Zane Grey ran into the same attitude when he sojourned beneath the Mogollon Rim and determined to write a novel on the subject. Interestingly, Kemper has examined Burnham’s draft of S2C, which includes names and identities that were redacted from the published version.

Timelines are murky, and Kemper — I think rightly — concludes that Burnham’s involvement was in the years before the feud proper really got going.

Kemper also does a nice job of correcting errors Burnham made in S2C that are mostly attributable to writing decades after events, evidently entirely from memory. And that memory was probably affected by years of sharing oral history and written accounts of various events with a bunch of old-timers. And some war stories may have grown in the telling. (I know. That never happens).

Burnham learned a lot of his fieldcraft scouting and carrying messages in Arizona and northern Mexico during the last part of the Apache Wars — both for the U.S. military and in working for one of the region’s noted smugglers. Kemper sorts out a good deal of where and when and identifies errors about names and personalities.

Clearly, S2C ain’t the gospel — but overall, it’s remarkably reliable for the kind of work it is — an old man’s reminiscences about his adventurous life and times on the frontier. Time gets compressed; some events are conflated; some names are garbled (spelled like Burnham remembers them sounding, much like Lewis & Clark never got the name of their great scout George Drouillard right).

I really appreciate Kemper’s handling of the inescapable and ever-thorny issue of race, especially as it applies to the conquest and pioneering of Rhodesia. And he does a nice job of depicting and sorting out Burnham’s complex and sometimes contradictory political and social views. Burnham was a thoughtful man as well as a man of action, living in a time of change every bit as mind-boggling and unsettling as our own era. He was an agent of empire, and he considered himself a progressive (which sat uneasily with his splendid-savage heart). In other words, he was complex human being in a complex time — and Kemper handles all this very well.

Kemper squarely takes on the controversies surrounding Burnham’s part in The Shangani Patrol in the First Matabele War of 1893 and the targeted killing of the M’limo in the second war in 1896. His assessment of various accounts is judicious and his conclusions fair and, I believe, right in the x-ring.

I’m really glad this book was published — Burnham deserved a good biography. And I’m personally happy to have it, simply because I never tire of reading these tales. I’ll use some info here for a few last minute tweaks on my Burnham profile — but I’m happy to say that nothing I’ve read here requires me to undertake any major revisions. Since our conclusions jibe, Kemper’s obviously got it right. Right?

Anyone with interest in frontier history, outdoor adventure and/or the origins of special operations warfare will find this book a great read by the wood stove — and an excellent addition to their Frontier Partisan library.