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A Splendid Savage: The Restless Life of Frederick Russell Burnham, by Steve Kemper
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A life of adventure and military daring on violent frontiers across the American West, Africa, Mexico, and the Klondike.
Frederick Russell Burnham’s (1861–1947) amazing story resembles a newsreel fused with a Saturday matinee thriller. One of the few people who could turn his garrulous friend Theodore Roosevelt into a listener, Burnham was once world-famous as “the American scout.” His expertise in woodcraft, learned from frontiersmen and Indians, helped inspire another friend, Robert Baden-Powell, to found the Boy Scouts. His adventures encompassed Apache wars and range feuds, booms and busts in mining camps around the globe, explorations in remote regions of Africa, and death-defying military feats that brought him renown and high honors. His skills led to his unusual appointment, as an American, to be Chief of Scouts for the British during the Boer War, where his daring exploits earned him the Distinguished Service Order from King Edward VII.
After a lifetime pursuing golden prospects from the deserts of Mexico and Africa to the tundra of the Klondike, Burnham found wealth, in his sixties, near his childhood home in southern California. Other men of his era had a few such adventures, but Burnham had them all. His friend H. Rider Haggard, author of many best-selling exotic tales, remarked, “In real life he is more interesting than any of my heroes of romance.”
Among other well-known individuals who figure in Burnham’s story are Cecil Rhodes and William Howard Taft, as well as some of the wealthiest men of the day, including John Hays Hammond, E. H. Harriman, Henry Payne Whitney, and the Guggenheim brothers.
Failure and tragedy streaked his life as well, but he was endlessly willing to set off into the unknown, where the future felt up for grabs and values worth dying for were at stake. Steve Kemper brings a quintessential American story to vivid life in this gripping biography.
8 pages of illustrations
- Sales Rank: #35577 in Books
- Published on: 2016-01-25
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.60" h x 1.50" w x 6.50" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 448 pages
Review
“There’s almost too much for one book, let alone one life. . . . Mr. Kemper’s narrative is rich, detailed, and pitch-perfect, with the witty and wonderful skipping off every page.” (Maxwell Carter - Wall Street Journal)
“Burnham lived a life of astonishing adventure. . . . In Kemper’s sure and enthusiastic hands, Burnham storms through the pages of this rousing volume, outwitting determined foes and collecting mining and ranching interests on two continents that never seemed to pay off as expected. . . . Thrilling adventures presented with the flair they deserve.” (Kirkus Reviews)
“Journalist Kemper (A Labyrinth of Kingdoms) admirably resurrects the larger-than-life figure of Frederick Russell Burnham (1861–1947) in an account chockfull of adventures that feel ripped from dime-store novels.” (Publishers Weekly)
“Here is a splendid book about an amazing life. If this work were not history, it might seem an overly ambitious adventure novel whose hero deserved a multi-volume series.” (Clyde A. Milner - The History Book Club)
“A rollicking, gripping portrait of Frederick Russell Burnham (1861–1947), a highly skilled military scout, outdoorsman, marksman, and prospector, whose legendary survival skills helped inspire the creation of the Boy Scouts.” (Library Journal)
“Frederick Russell Burnham, whose life was so full of derring-do and fearless exploits that, lacking historical record, one would assume him to be myth.” (Jonah Ogles - Outside magazine)
“A brilliant biography of a Westering man whose life would have been remembered by all who have studied and written about the West, except for the fact that the arc of his life, which reads like a Jack London adventure, stretched well beyond the borders of the American West in time and scope.” (Stuart Rosebrook - True West)
“Monumental biography on Frederick Russell Burnham, every chapter of which could inspire a thrilling novel on its own.” (Historical Novel Society)
About the Author
Steve Kemper is the author of A Labyrinth of Kingdoms: 10,000 Miles Through Islamic Africa and Code Name Ginger, as well as many articles for national magazines. He lives in West Hartford, Connecticut.
Most helpful customer reviews
20 of 21 people found the following review helpful.
Well-done life of a pioneer in special operations
By J. Cornelius
A well-researched, highly readable life of one of the most remarkable frontiersmen of the late 19th-early 20th Century. Kemper does a nice job of fleshing out Burnham's involvement in the Tonto Basin Feud, also known as the Pleasant Valley War. Burnham's own 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.
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 (a shaman) 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.
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 library.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
A fascinating, multi-level exploration of the life and adventures of the man known as “the American scout”
By Nancy Christie
A Splendid Savage: The Restless Life of Frederick Russell Burnham by Steve Kemper is a fascinating, multi-level exploration of the life and adventures of Frederick Burnham, who rose to fame as “the American scout” during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
One might say that Burnham was destined for a life of excitement, beginning with his survival of a Sioux raid at the tender age of 15 months. By 12, he was working as a Western Union mounted messenger and two years later as a hunter providing meat to remote camps in California. Along the way, he learned the skills of scouting and woodcraft from old frontiersmen that would serve him well in future exploits, saving his life on more than one occasion.
Burnham’s thirst for adventure took him from the western regions of North America to Africa, Mexico and Alaska, before finally returning to California, where, in 1947, he died at the age of eighty-six, eight years after the death of his beloved wife, Blanche in 1939.
And while Burnham had remarried in 1943, it is the six-decade-long relationship between Burnham and Blanche that runs like a silver thread throughout the fabric of his life. It’s a love story between a man driven by his unyielding desire for adventure and a woman whose steadfast loyalty and devotion provided him with the strength and courage to pursue his dreams.
Regardless of where Burnham decided to travel or what dangers he would be facing—from Apaches on the western continent to natives in Africa, the unforgiving heat of the desert to the unyielding cold of Alaska—Blanche encouraged and supported him, often accompanying him on his adventures. As he wrote more than a decade prior to her death, “In my boyhood it was my greatest good fortunate to meet a girl who truly believed in me and that I would carry out the wild schemes and plans I confided in her… she has indeed met every situation with supreme courage….”
And what adventures they were—superbly detailed by Kemper, with a wealth of personal elements and background information that add a texture and context to the narrative, giving the reader a deeper insight not only into the man but also the circumstances of the time. A Splendid Savage sets Burnham squarely in the culture and politics of the era, showing a full picture of the natives (even the bloodthirsty ones) that is both balanced and sympathetic.
The portrayal of Burnham is equally well-rounded. Thanks to Kemper’s extensive research, review of materials in the Burnham archives at Yale and Stanford, and travels to locations such the American southwest, Zimbabwe, and South Africa, coupled by his incredible skill as a writer and biographer, Burnham is brought clearly to life—not a mythic hero but a man. Burnham’s numerous letters show him willing to express his fears as well as his passion for the surroundings in which he found himself.
During one African trek, when death from heat and lack of water seemed imminent, he carved on his gunstock, “No water. Boys exhausted. My mule dead… I am suffering. The thorns will end all of us soon.” Yet in other letters during the same period he wrote, “The beating of tom toms and the low soft music of the Kaffir piano, the gleam of fires through the reed huts and the circles of naked savages make an impression not easily forgotten.” Later, while making camp near Victoria Falls, he wrote, “If I was asked what impressed me the most of all the various sights… I should say above all the sense of energy and irresistible force… One’s own utter nothingness is brought home….”
It is this combination of confidence and humility, commitment to the task at hand and recognition that man is but one of many players on the stage of the world, that characterizes Burnham. It perhaps also serves to explain why his wife’s love never wavered, even when his adventures separated them for months at a time and took the family to inhospitable places and dangerous situations, such as Bulawayo in Rhodesia, where, like so many other children, their young daughter Nada died during the siege.
As the world changed, Burnham changed with it, and in his later years, his dedication to conservation led him to engage in a new battle—this time to protect the treasures, both cultural and natural—that existed in America’s West.
But one thing never changed: his optimism and belief that, despite what travails civilization may undergo, whether caused by nature or man’s own choice, the world can ultimately survive and become a better place. As he wrote during World War II, “not even the world-wide harvest of death need dismay us… [it is] the dark dawn of a great New Era… certain to be brighter than all the ages past….”
Reading A Splendid Savage not only provides a very personal depiction of the events of the time but also provides hope for the future. While the enemies the civilized world faces may change in appearance, Burnham’s experiences illustrate that strength of commitment and confidence for a better future can triumph.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
Essential reading for students of this period
By Robert Chaplin
What a research project! This is quite the ‘can’t put it down’ book. Kemper displays excellent skills directing the ebb and flow of information about an extraordinary larger than life character. Just when you thought Burnham was settling down, off he goes on some other crazy scheme. What an understanding wife. And it's amazing he survived! Throughout the book Kemper succeeds in giving a balanced over-view of the complexities of race, nation building, colonialization and other issues of the time together with its future implications. This makes for an insight-ful historical perspective of a complex era seen through a contemporary prism. This should be essential reading for students of this period
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