ON JANUARY 1, 1894, the day he rode up to his picnicking family in Victoria, Burnham wrote home about the pleasures of returning to children’s laughter and luxuries such as cake and butter. Whatever the coming year had in store, he added, “it cannot by any possibility prove as eventful a year as the one just past.”
At the end of 1893, speculators and land-grabbers had flocked into Matabeleland, eager to snatch up the best gold reefs and farmland as soon as hostilities ended. They howled when Jameson declared that the volunteers who had fought in the war would have four months to roam Matabeleland and peg properties before any outsiders could file a claim.
Burnham and Ingram jumped to it. The promising reefs and ancient diggings they had noted while riding all over Matabeleland could now be claimed. To reach them all within four months, they needed horses, but because of the war, mounts were scarce and mostly worn out. Many others had died from African horse sickness, a disease that wasn’t understood. But everyone did know that “salted” horses—horses that had been infected and had recovered—were unlikely to get sick again, so these precious animals cost double or triple the usual price. Burnham and Ingram paid $500 apiece for salted horses, and got busy. “For Ingram and me,” wrote Burnham, “the year 1894 was one of fast, hard riding, and, when our mounts gave out, of swift marches.” They pegged reefs and farms for themselves, and also hired themselves out, pegging more than a hundred farms for others.
They fixed their own biggest hopes on a place the Ndebeles called iKwelo (“the steep place”). They sunk the first pegs in what became the town of Gwelo (now Gweru). On a map, a straight line put it 100 miles northeast of Bulawayo, but because of the terrain it was 150 by wagon. They filed twenty-seven claims there and named it Scout’s Reef.
Burnham returned to Victoria for Blanche and Roderick. On January 9 they left for Gwelo. The whole family began learning the Ndebele language, Roderick progressing quickly. En route they stopped at a Boer farm, where the bachelor owner joined them for dinner. “He had not sat at the table with a woman for six years,” wrote Blanche. Many of the man’s black workers stared, especially at Blanche’s odd hair, having never seen a white woman.
They reached Scout’s Reef on January 21. Ingram was there with Bob Bain and another white man, plus some black workers who were digging the mine. The Burnhams slept in one of the big wagons, the other men in tents. There was a thatched cook hut. A rough fence of thorn brush ringed it all to discourage predators. A similar fence protected their stock, twenty-six oxen (sixteen belonging to the BSAC), five horses, and three donkeys. They intended to add cows for milk and beef, as well as sheep, goats, and chickens. Their feed corn came from nearby kraals deserted by Ndebele regiments. The native workers had a hut down toward the mine.
Burnham left almost immediately to search for more work and other prospects, a pattern that wouldn’t change for decades. He came and went during the next months as Blanche and Roderick settled into camp life. She learned to deal with the voracious white ants. A saddle left in a tent got eaten. To get at items inside, the ants gnawed through wood or mud-brick. She never put anything on the ground except iron. Everything had to stay in the wagons, and to keep the ants from collapsing them, the wheels had to be raised off the ground with stones. If the colonizing gluttony of the white ants became uncontrollable, you followed them to their hole, dug out their fat white queen, and squashed her. (Blanche missed the imperial metaphor.) Everything stayed damp from the constant summer rain.
In letters home Blanche alternated enthusiasm for their frontier life with plaints of loneliness because Burnham was usually gone and her family was so far away. She read and reread their letters, three months old by the time they arrived, and chided them if the stream of communication faltered. It rarely did. The Burnham–Blicks were prolific letter-writers.
Blanche also missed the company of women. She wouldn’t see another female until they went to Bulawayo after more than three months at Scout’s Reef. She did have plenty of male company, not only Ingram and Bain but nearby men drawn to their camp by the presence of a woman, especially one with Blanche’s pleasing looks and warm nature. She had a gift for putting people at ease. A friend once wrote to Burnham about “Blanche’s quiet voice and strong, restful personality. I never met another person who gave me such a distinct feeling of rest in their presence.” She served these frontier bachelors from her London tea set and offered them biscuits, apologizing that she didn’t have a proper biscuit jar. She must have made them think about home and wives-to-be.
On February 25 she wrote to Burnham’s mother that she was thirty-two that day, and in five more days would have her tenth wedding anniversary. “In honor of my birthday,” she wrote, “I put on my pretty pink dress trimmed with cream lace . . . and wore my hair waved as I did when first married. Fred liked it so much and does not want me to cut it again.”
Blanche was a sturdy pioneer woman who could trek for months, bake in a reflector oven, and handle a rifle, yet also prattle about pretty dresses. She brought gowns from London and Paris to Africa as well as a sewing machine to make her own clothes. She often devoted long paragraphs to the state of her wardrobe and the details of home decor. She asked Burnham’s mother to ship a tan ostrich feather left in California because she wanted it for hat trimming: “It will get crushed but I can curl it again. Please do not delay as I will need it.”
She also wrote about her carved wooden jars, trays, and bowls, taken by Burnham from Lobengula’s hut, and the gold beads from Great Zimbabwe. She asked her parents to send several specific schoolbooks for Roderick as soon as possible, since the books wouldn’t arrive for four or five months. She also told them that she was pregnant with a baby due in late May or early June, conceived just before Burnham went to war with the Victoria column. Decent paper was still scarce, and she apologized that her letters were so hard to read, with writing on both sides of onionskin paper. Burnham called it “[water] closet paper” and advised recipients to put white cardboard underneath to improve the letters’ readability.
In all her letters Blanche was a booster of Matabeleland, because she hoped to lure her family to Africa. So she didn’t usually mention the hyenas and African wild dogs that came into camp, or the lions that killed oxen not far away, or the big crocodiles and surly hippos in the river, whose hides and skins began decorating their wagon.
She did mention that bands of Ndebeles were drifting back into the region. She wished Gwelo had a fort or at least a patrol, but neither existed for 100 miles in any direction. Lobengula seemed to be defeated, but that wasn’t yet certain. Meanwhile, the men kept their guns oiled. “Well it is a strange exciting and somewhat dangerous life compared with life there,” she continued, “but there is nothing like adapting yourself to circumstances.”
Yet whenever possible, Blanche and the other settlers, like all conquerors, expected circumstances to adapt to them. “I wish there were no blacks in Africa,” wrote Blanche. “It would be a beautiful country. No I have not overcome my fear of them entirely and there are so many in our camp now.” When the white men were away or working on the reef, she kept a revolver handy. “I do not get at all nervous or afraid,” she added, “but you know I always feel better and easier in my mind when I have a six shooter.”
The blacks in camp included servants, mine workers, and mail runners. Gwelo was roughly halfway between Salisbury and Bulawayo. Burnham, always alert for ways to pick up a few dollars, struck a small deal with Jameson to make Scout’s Reef a rest stop for the BSAC’s runners between the towns. Burnham collected a fee for feeding and lodging three or four runners who stayed there every night.
Blanche saw the financial benefit but was ambivalent about its everyday price. She grumbled that the runners were Ndebeles accustomed to having slaves wait on them. They didn’t even want to grind their own corn. Laziness, she complained, referring to men who ran 250 miles in each direction. The Burnhams also had nine natives working at the mine. When they got fever, Blanche dosed them with quinine and castor oil. One morning all but two had disappeared, just a few days after Burnham had taken pity on their shivering and given them blankets, two weeks earlier than agreed.
“Fred and I are too good to them,” wrote Blanche, “and I expect we will be humbugged many a time.” They wished they weren’t temperamentally unable to follow the advice of their colonial neighbors. “All the old Afrikanders and old timers,” wrote Blanche, “say the rougher you treat the blacks the better they are and the more respect they have for you. The old Boers are the best masters. Civilize and educate them and they are spoiled, think they are as good as white men and become saucy, cunning and thieving.” She did like her servant Longboy, a Zulu around forty years old, who stayed with them, he told her, because they didn’t yell at him and paid promptly. No one wanted workers who had been ruined by missionaries.
The Burnhams employed natives on the same terms as their neighbors. “Help is cheap in this country,” wrote Blanche. Her personal boy, aged ten, was contracted by his father to stay with the Burnhams for a year in return for a cow and a calf. Two other workers fetched wood and water, cooked and did dishes, and washed the laundry. They were paid about ten shillings per month, plus room and board of bush meat, beef, and salt. The mine workers made ten shillings per month, and their board included cornmeal, rice, “Kaffir beans,” meat, and coffee. The ox driver got £3 a month. The head man, Longboy, drew £10 per month.
The mines and farms of Matabeleland could not develop quickly without native labor. So the BSAC, like the Cape Colony and Natal, instituted a hut tax. It was paid to the BSAC, not to the British government, and could be satisfied in currency or in contracted labor. Since few natives had currency, they essentially had to indenture themselves to whites for several months a year.
Burnham had forsaken the United States partly because banks and robber barons were bleeding the country and creating a gulf between economic classes. He arrived in Africa strongly opposed to cheap black labor, complaining that it made white colonists lazy. He deplored the way Boers treated blacks. (The Boers made the British and Americans feel relatively virtuous about racial matters.) But after less than a month at Scout’s Reef, as his mine workers kept disappearing, Burnham began adapting to circumstances. A letter to his uncle illustrates the twisting rationalizations required of colonists in southern Africa:
And the one great stumbling block to this country is the presence of the nigger whose labor is to be had for a pinch of salt per day. True he only does a pinch of salt’s work, but it enfeebles the white race just the same and servants are a curse to a strong race. Nevertheless I am already surrounding myself with them . . . It is remarkable how quickly one’s ideas of the black change after being among them. When they get saucy and clear out or do some act of a worthless race you mentally reason it out about thus. He did not object to being my servant, and practically slave, for any love of country pride or independence. Far from it. It was simply to run off from your work, to lounge around his own dirty kraal and force the women to slave for him without pay save sundry thrashings. So you say the lazy worthless wretch, he is fat and stout. I pay him what to him is a priceless luxury. He shall not desert me to beat even black women. I will gradually civilize the brute and incidentally he shall have my corn and get my wage. So you find yourself voting for the law that compels each black to work 3 months per year at a certain wage or pay a tax to the state, and your final views are diametrically opposite from those entertained when landing on these sunny shores.
Not everyone applauded the addition of Matabeleland to the British Empire. It was opposed by “Exeter Hall,” the collective name given to various British religious and philanthropic groups such as the Aborigines’ Protection Society and the Anti-Slavery Society. The most virulent critic was Henry Labouchere, editor and publisher of the anti-imperialist weekly Truth, and also a parliamentary leader of the “Little Englanders” who opposed British expansion. He excoriated Rhodes as a pirate and the British South Africa Company as “a ring of financing adventurers, who would violate every commandant of God and man, in order to send up the shares of their Company, or to make profits for themselves . . .” He accused the government of practicing imperialism by proxy for allowing a commercial enterprise to invade a foreign land under the British flag. Labouchere’s hostility was ecumenical. In addition to imperialists, he also reviled Jews, foreigners, suffragettes, and homosexuals.
His criticisms of Rhodes and the British government, though sometimes overblown, held truth. Burnham sometimes said much the same things about the BSAC and British imperialism. But it stung Burnham that Labouchere also sprayed the settlers with his machine-gun rhetoric. “Truth stigmatized us as land pirates, hired assassins and murderers of the deepest dye,” wrote Burnham soon after the Matabele War, “vile drunken loafers and everything else a subtle master of the English language can command.” He would like to remind Labouchere, he said, that the men who fought the Ndebeles were not hired soldiers but pioneers who left their homes and livelihoods in Mashonaland to volunteer. He noted that these same horrible vandals had built hospitals and churches in the country they were creating. He wondered why Labouchere called the pioneers murderers while disregarding the savagery of Lobengula’s men, who slaughtered the Shonas, including women and children, and cut out their tongues. Could it really be true, he asked, that 1,000 intrepid pioneers had suddenly, en masse, turned into “scavengers of the earth and plunderers of the innocent”?
“Can it be,” he continued, “that the English colonist, noted the world over for carrying the solid virtues of his race into every clime, has in this instance carried unanimously only faults and vices?” The settlers had come looking for opportunity, not war. They were pioneers, not villains. But ultimately, wrote Burnham, Labouchere failed to see the bigger picture—that the volunteer soldiers who conquered Matabeleland were the instruments of history and fate: “They have taken this king’s country as a result of the inevitable war that must always come between barbarism and civilization when the two come together.”
Burnham’s criticisms of Labouchere, like Labouchere’s of Rhodes and the BSAC, also held truth. But like Labouchere’s accusations, they were partial and ignored many things. During his first year in Africa, Burnham saw the BSAC and British policy clearly, as instruments of imperialism. But once the white settlers were attacked, and once he became a vested landowner, his perspective changed. He seemed to believe, at first, that he could be both independent and an integral part of the BSAC’s plan to colonize Matabeleland. He criticized the BSAC as land-grabbers and imperialists without accepting responsibility for helping them do what he was criticizing. He thought he was adapting to circumstances, or sometimes bending circumstances to his will, but he was often bent by those circumstances himself.
By March 1894 the workers on Scout’s Reef had dug three shafts. They unearthed enough “free gold”—loose crumbs and nuggets—to foster hopes of a big vein.
Burnham planned to be off prospecting for most of the winter, and Blanche didn’t want to stay at Scout’s Reef for so long without him. On April 1 the family packed their wagons and went to Bulawayo. En route they stopped at the battlefield at Bembezi, where Lobengula’s finest regiments had been mowed down by Maxims. They camped amid the bones and skulls. Burnham searched in the tall grass to show his wife and son the remains of an Ndebele chief he had killed. Roderick played with the chief’s skull and picked out some teeth, which Blanche sent home as souvenirs. “All this may seem strange and unnatural,” wrote Burnham in Scouting on Two Continents, “but perfectly normal children become accustomed to war as a common thing and will amuse themselves by very gruesome imitations, as we did in Minnesota by scalp dances and the like.”
At Bulawayo, the new town was going up a few miles from Lobengula’s burnt capital. The pegs that marked the lines and boundaries had been cut from spears surrendered by the Ndebeles. There were no houses yet—the first public sale of lots had been held in March—but the pegs outlined Rhodes’s vision of a city whose boulevards would be shaded by fast-growing trees, and wide enough for a span of sixteen oxen to turn around. Rhodes and Jameson instituted zoning regulations. To discourage speculators and shack-builders, anyone who bought a lot was required to make £200 of improvements or forfeit the property. All houses had to be brick, with iron roofs. Rhodes, with blunt symbolism, would soon build Government House, his residence in Bulawayo, atop the ruins of Lobengula’s royal kraal.
Jameson gave Burnham his pick of the lots reserved by the BSAC and charged him the base price of £30, another sign of the scout’s standing. Burnham chose a corner lot not far from the square designated as the center of town. Blanche immediately began planning a four-room house. Burnham hired a carpenter to build it, since he expected to be gone for most of the next month. Meanwhile, they camped in their wagon. The colony’s most important men often sat under the Burnhams’ tarpaulin, talking to the American about business prospects. “Strange how well known he has become in such a short time,” wrote Blanche. “His deeds of daring in the campaign have fairly made him, and we are doing well in this country.”
A week after arriving in Bulawayo, Burnham was itchy to make some money. He took Blanche and Roderick to the farm of two male friends, five miles out of town, where they set up quarters in a cozy hut. There were no ants, but rats did scrabble around the floor and drop from the thatch roof. Roderick sometimes stayed up to throw a knobkerrie at them so Blanche could sleep. Burnham left for a week to peg farms at £10 per job. He came home for three days, left for two more weeks, came home for another three days, then was gone again. He was also pegging mines, and was more financially flush than he had been in years.
Blanche appreciated the income, but when her husband was away life felt dull and lonely. Her chatty letters to family about their great prospects always contained several sentences of lament. “It is a lonesome life out here,” she wrote. “I shall be glad when we are settled in town if Fred has to be away so much. I ought to be getting used to it but I am not.” She hoped Bulawayo would be more lively, once her house was ready.
Some of this was surely related to being more than eight months pregnant. Bulawayo had two doctors, Jameson and Dr. Hans Sauer, another confidant of Rhodes, so she wasn’t worried about the delivery. But since Burnham was usually gone, she longed for the presence of another woman. She complained that she had seen only one woman in the last five months, a sixteen-year-old Boer bride who didn’t speak English. If only her mother or her mother-in-law could be with her. “Oh why can’t I get to you and talk,” she wrote. “That is the hard thing.” She was hoping for a girl, and hoping that a baby would lessen the loneliness she and Roderick felt during Burnham’s absences.
Just before his thirty-third birthday on May 11, Burnham left again for three weeks. The baby was due in late May or early June. On May 31, less than twenty-four hours after Blanche and Roderick moved into the new house, the birth pangs began. Blanche lay on bedding supported by woven rawhide, held up by bedposts made of fifty-pound cases of dynamite. Both of the town’s doctors were away, so her attendants were Roderick, not quite eight, and Andrew Main, the carpenter who built the house. Blanche later said that despite her own pain, she felt sorry for Main, a shy bachelor, whose face drained of color as the big moment approached and he fully understood his task. She could hear him pacing and murmuring, “My God! My God!”
Soon after, Burnham sent a telegram to his mother from Bulawayo: you are the grandmother of a healthy baby girl. He added, “I as usual was off.” The baby was the first white child born in Bulawayo. Her eyes, like her father’s, were piercing blue. They eventually named her after the heroine of the novel Blanche had been reading, H. Rider Haggard’s Nada the Lily (1892), the romantic tale of a beautiful South African Zulu woman loved by Umslopogaas, son of the Zulu king Chaka. All of the book’s characters were black. (In Haggard’s most famous book, King Solomon’s Mines, Allan Quatermain refuses to use the word “nigger,” noting that many Africans are more worthy of the title of “gentleman” than the Europeans who live or travel in the country.)
The house in Bulawayo—just two rooms to start—had glass windows and nice curtains, a cloth ceiling, and smooth mud walls (there was no wallpaper in Matabeleland). The floorboards were salvaged from whiskey cases, the main source of planks in Matabeleland, and were padded with goatskins. A corner cupboard held china; dishes and books sat on shelves. Most of the furniture was homemade. Above the fireplace hung battle trophies—an Ndebele shield, assegai, and battle axe, as well as Lobengula’s knobkerrie made of white rhino horn.
Bulawayo was booming, with prices to match. Butter was a dollar a pound, milk a dollar a gallon. Potatoes were so rare that a sack of them was sold at auction in lots of five, netting the owner $215. The days rang with the sounds of saws, hammers, and pickaxes, and red dust hung in the air. Burnham made sure to be home for the auction of house lots in early August. Each parcel was 100 feet by 140. On market square, where Burnham’s house stood, lots sold for up to £1,000. Burnham bought five more lots as investments. He used the cash from selling one of his two 6,000-acre farms—he and Ingram were partners—for £1,500. He knew from booms in the American West that this one couldn’t last, but he wasn’t worried. Africa was vast. Another frontier was just a trek away.
Burnham’s letters to Blanche’s family, like hers, often urged them to come to Africa and help shape a new country. His brother Howard had already done so and was working as an assayer in Johannesburg. Burnham sweetened the lure for the younger Blicks by offering to advance two of them $500 each to cover the cost of transportation to Bulawayo. To Blanche’s joy, her nineteen-year-old brother John and twenty-four-year-old sister Grace accepted. Once they repaid the loans, Burnham would fund the immigration of more Blicks. Over here, he wrote to John, “any path is open to you and you can feel yourself more than a fly on a bull’s horn in building up and uniting this great country . . .”
On August 10 he left with Ingram for a two-month prospecting trip into the tsetse-fly country near the Zambezi. The new baby kept Blanche busy, and the town’s growing number of women offered more social opportunities, though many of the women, she wrote, “are of the shady sort.” She enjoyed the heavy traffic of male visitors when Fred was home, but that dropped off during his absences, “for you know I am not a flirting woman.” So she was doubly eager for her lively sister Grace to arrive, both for her companionship and because she would attract male visitors and handle all the flirting herself.
Burnham returned from the Zambezi two weeks earlier than expected. Three days later he left for business in Johannesburg. From there he wrote to his uncle that he was brimming with prospects and schemes. “If the country proves good,” he wrote, “I must win.” He added that he remained a firm believer in the socialist utopia imagined by Edward Bellamy, and hoped this new country would develop along those lines, “as soon as we can cut loose from the imperial leading strings, but the golden milk of the mother country is hard to refuse, however we will get weaned ere long.”
He met John and Grace Blick in Johannesburg and put them on the carriage to Bulawayo. They brought Blanche a gust of youth and family. They all lived without privacy in the two-room house, soon to be four. John, with a teenager’s relish of adventure, immediately took to Bulawayo’s energy and promise. Burnham put him to work pegging claims with Ingram, and then left him in charge of the mining operation at Scout’s Reef at a salary of $100 per month plus board.
Grace, bubbly and frank, also enjoyed the adventure and the big pool of attentive males. But unlike Blanche, she wasn’t obliged to see Rhodesia through Burnham-tinted spectacles. “Oh I can tell you this is no paradise,” she wrote not long after arriving. “I shall never spend all my life here by any means.” Bulawayo was booming, all right—lots of excitement and bustle, houses sprouting everywhere, three newspapers, dances and socials where cavalier men spent eight dollars on a bottle of champagne. But it was also windy and dusty and raw, and she quickly tired of the monotonous food. “Not a potato since we came and no fruit and vegetables,” she wrote to her parents. “You people are in clover and if I were you I’d remain there.”
Both John and Grace were impressed by Burnham’s reputation. “Fred is pretty hot stuff out here,” wrote John. “He is known all over the country.” Grace wrote, “He has the biggest men in the country asking his advice about things. He is very much liked here and is as full of business as ever. He is just the same dear old Fred though, always thinking of someone besides himself.” John mentioned an old American miner who came to Bulawayo after completing a contract to dig 120 feet of tunnel. The miner was dead broke but the owner refused to pay until his partner returned from England at some unknown date. Burnham heard about it, changed his clothes, “and is going down to kill the boss if he don’t pay up,” wrote John. “Fred is one of the most popular men in Matabeleland.”
Burnham and Ingram decided to go to London to try to float some mines while the boom was still on. Burnham also wanted investors for an irrigation proposal. They expected to be away for several months. Blanche, Grace, and the children would spend the time in Cape Town. After two months in Bulawayo, Grace was ready for a change. “Bulawayo is no heaven I can tell you,” she wrote to her parents in late November, “and I am more glad than I can tell that we are going to leave it.” Fred, she added, was gone as usual, pegging mines, including diamond claims for Rhodes and De Beers. In the last two months he had been home only two weeks. “Isn’t that fine for [Blanche]? I wonder that she hasn’t quite died of lonesomeness. I know I should have in her place.”
Before leaving in mid-December, Burnham and Ingram decided to abandon Scout’s Reef. The crumbs of free gold hadn’t led anywhere.