IN MARCH 1904 Blanche elatedly wrote to her parents that she and her family were coming home to live for at least a year or two. The move made Rod “wild with joy,” she wrote. They built a house in San Rafael Heights, an out-of-the-way neighborhood in what Burnham, in a letter to his mother, half-sardonically called “lovely, sleepy, sunny Pasadena, a safe nook of the world hid away on the edge of the world.” In late March 1905, his mother, who five years earlier had remarried and found happy companionship, died of cancer. It shook Burnham.
As always, his need for action and money soon made him restless to escape this drowsy refuge. His financial interests in Rhodesia, Alaska, West Africa, and East Africa all were either dormant, kaput, or endlessly pending. So many prospects, so little cash flow. He needed money partly to fund his new plan for Rod: mining engineer. That meant college. The cost of four years at Stanford or Berkeley shocked him, but he told Blanche the sacrifice was necessary so that their son, unlike him, wouldn’t suffer from lack of formal education. “In his blood and strength,” he wrote to Blanche, “I see myself when I was a living volcano and men either loved or hated me, sometimes to their own undoing. Roderick must fit himself for the age of struggle in which we live.”
Burnham was considering various money-making adventures when his friend, the romantic novelist Rider Haggard, delivered one to his doorstep. In April 1905 Haggard and his daughter visited the Burnhams in Pasadena. They arrived in California in the private rail car of Haggard’s old friend, John Hays Hammond. In an era when mining was often in the headlines, Hammond was the most famous and wealthy mining engineer in the world.
As the private car clacked along the tracks toward California, Haggard had told Hammond the strange tale of Montezuma’s “lost city.” The novelist had heard it from a correspondent named J. G. H. Carmichael. Carmichael claimed to have discovered an old Aztec city hidden in the jungles of southwest Mexico, where Montezuma, frightened by the approaching conquistadores, had stored treasure worth £3 million. But after Carmichael stumbled upon it, the local Indians forced him to flee. He was determined to go back. He had learned the Indians’ language, Quecchi, since that might help him retrieve the treasure, if he could find it again. He had sent his account to Haggard with an admiring note about the writer’s novel Montezuma’s Daughter (1893), and a request to fund his search for the lost city.
Haggard was a perfect audience for such a tale, which resembled one of his own. Some of Carmichael’s statements checked out, so Haggard and a friend sent him a small sum. Carmichael plunged back into the jungle. When he came down with fever, his Indian carriers deserted him. He survived by catching catfish with a bent nail, but his health was broken and he died soon after returning to civilization.
That’s the story Haggard told Hammond on the train. The jungle still protected Montezuma’s lost treasure, he added, but if anyone could find it, it was the man he was going to visit in Pasadena. The tale fired Hammond’s imagination. He agreed that Burnham, whom he knew from southern Africa, was the man to pursue it. After leaving Haggard and returning to New York, Hammond wired Burnham to come see him about the Mexican proposition. Burnham was there within a week.
The two men had many things in common. Both were Westerners. Hammond, six years older, was born and raised in San Francisco, where his parents had gone for the gold rush. He had degrees from Yale and Freiberg (a German mining university), while Burnham was self-educated, but both had the optimistic, adventurous temperament of prospectors, and both had come to manhood in roughneck mining camps and boomtowns all over the Southwest and Mexico. Both had left the United States in 1893 to seek their fortune in the new frontier of southern Africa, where they first met. Hammond started there with the Barnato brothers, who owned gold mines in the Transvaal. Cecil Rhodes quickly recognized his abilities and hired him away at a huge salary. Hammond more than earned it by convincing Rhodes to adopt the new technology of deep-level mining in his gold and diamond operations, which substantially multiplied Rhodes’s wealth. It also made Hammond’s reputation and his first fortune. Hammond admired Rhodes, but unlike Burnham stopped short of near-idolatry, partly because he was less prone to such ardors and partly because he had been drawn into Rhodes’s disastrous plot to overthrow the Boer government of the Transvaal. When the Jameson Raid failed, Hammond was imprisoned in Pretoria as a conspirator and sentenced to death. He was released after Rhodes paid Kruger’s extortionate fines.
By the time Hammond and Burnham met in New York, Hammond was the general manager and consulting engineer for the Guggenheim Exploration Company. His job was to find and evaluate mineral and oil prospects in North America, and he got a piece of any property the company bought on his recommendation. This deal, plus a magnificent salary, reportedly brought him a million dollars a year.
Guggenheim Exploration’s masthead was crowded with five sons of Meyer Guggenheim, a tailor who had emigrated to the United States in 1847 and proceeded to amass one of the country’s great fortunes, mostly through mining and smelting, before his death in 1905. His son Solomon (who later founded the Guggenheim Museum) was one of Guggenheim Exploration’s managing directors. Another was Harry Payne Whitney, who had inherited $24 million from his father in 1904 and was married to the heiress Gertrude Vanderbilt, who later founded the Whitney Museum. For a prospector like Burnham who needed working capital, Guggenheim Exploration was a jackpot.
As an evaluator of mining prospects, Hammond had a reputation for thoroughness and honesty. Rhodes once asked him to assess the mineral wealth of the British South Africa Company’s concession. Rhodes was hoping Hammond would report a second Rand, which would quiet skeptics and raise the company’s stock price. Hammond bluntly noted that the deposits were scattered and unexceptional. Rhodes, to his credit, didn’t attempt to influence the report and accepted it without complaint. When Hammond moved on to work as a consulting engineer in London and then New York, he hired experts to double-check his own appraisals, and often hired other experts to corroborate the experts. His judgments had made him trusted and wealthy. The Guggenheims and Whitney banked on his recommendations.
Hammond had worked in Mexico as a young engineer, and was intrigued by its unexplored possibilities. Carmichael’s story rekindled his enthusiasm. In his youth Burnham too had wandered around Mexico, as a prospector and as a courier for the smuggler McLeod. He had also taken exploratory trips in the years since, and his attentive eye had noted many prospects. In New York he and Hammond no doubt stoked each other as they talked about Mexico.
By the end of April the Guggenheim Exploration Company had offered Burnham $500 a month plus expenses to take a prospecting trip to southwest Mexico. Or, if Burnham preferred a percentage, they would help him form a syndicate. Burnham, always anticipating a big strike, chose the latter option, and decided to offer the opportunity to some of his wealthy contacts in England. Exhilarated by his change in luck, he wrote to Blanche that after a few days in London he would swoop home to pick her up for Mexico, “and a whirl at fortune’s wheel in which you will see me as of old, full of life and schemes and vim and worth your undivided love.” He added that he weighed 138½ and felt healthy.
He and Hammond left for London. Burnham began studying Spanish four hours a day. By early May he had hooked a prominent financier named Arthur M. Grenfell on the Mexican prospects. Grenfell was the son-in-law of Burnham’s friend and African business partner Earl Grey, who was also a director of the BSAC. The Mexican Southern Mining Syndicate was formed as a cooperative syndicate with Guggenheim Exploration.
But within a few days Burnham got tempted by a more exotic prospect dangled by another of his African contacts, Charles H. Villiers, who had ridden on the Jameson Raid and was also one of the directors of the East Africa Syndicate. On May 11, 1905, Burnham informed Blanche that once again there had been a sudden change of plans: they were going to remote China, far up the Yangtze River, almost to India. He would be working for a new gold mining syndicate formed by some of the investors from the East Africa Syndicate. He would get £150 per month plus 5 percent of sales and some deferred shares, and—perhaps most exciting—“it will all be new lands again.” He would pick her up in California and they would keep going to the Far East. He sounded rejuvenated. “Just think how ancient I am—44. But I still am full of schemes and long to hold you in my arms as when I was only 22.”
He was leaving the next day to meet Hammond in Germany to ask for a postponement of the Mexican venture, and to invite him into the China deal. (Hammond graciously agreed to the postponement and declined on China.) Blanche wrote that she was game for anything. “After this we are going to stay together even if we starve,” she wrote. “We will go out into the wild and hunt and fish for a living.”
Burnham assured her that China was certain. He also had been questioning Villiers about the delay in floating a new company for the soda lake, which Burnham expected to be a bonanza for him. The financier pledged it was in the works. “So once again things look bright,” he wrote, “but bear in mind I have not as yet cashed a cent.” They agreed that he needed to stay in London until the deals about China and soda were settled.
Both issues became more frustrating. Every few days Villiers swore that the soda lake syndicate would be floated in just a few more days. This loop played over and over throughout June. Likewise, Villiers and Edmund Davis, another principal in both the China syndicate and the East Africa Syndicate, constantly tantalized Burnham with the fragrance of China, but the blossom never produced fruit. In early July he wrote to Blanche that the financiers now expected to need two more weeks to collect the capital for China, and two more months to float the soda scheme. He was expecting to realize a small fortune—at least £10,000 from the soda company and between £10,000 and £40,000 from his shares in the East Africa Syndicate. “So you can see there is money in the air,” he wrote, “but none in my pocket.”
In fact, after paying expenses in New York and London for two and a half months, he was broke. He told Blanche to borrow $500 for him in Pasadena and wire it right away. “I can get it here but it would be fatal to let them know I was hard up.” If things weren’t settled soon, he wanted her to come to London with Bruce. “Life is too short to be apart so awful long,” he wrote, “. . . we can’t take our money into the grave and every week’s loss of your love is lost forever.” He signed it, “With unmeasured love, I am ever, your erratic lode star.”
In September Blanche and Bruce joined Burnham in London. They had been separated for four months. They rented the same house at Bourne End where they had stayed after the Boer War, a comfortable place on the Thames. Bruce, now seven, still loved boats and was enthralled to be near water. He and his nurse often walked along the river.
Burnham and Blanche mulled over plans and possibilities. The soda lake loop kept repeating. The financing for the China syndicate never seemed to reach critical mass. Meanwhile, Burnham wasn’t working and their expenses had increased with the obligations of London social life.
Sometime on October 1, Bruce went missing. Hours of frantic searching ended the next morning with a horrible discovery: Bruce’s body floating in the Thames. He had slipped away to explore the riverside by himself. When Burnham saw his dead son, recounted Haggard, “he fell to the ground senseless as though he had been shot.” Once again Burnham sent a terse cablegram to their family in California: “Bruce drowned. Coming soon.”
The loss of another child plummeted Blanche into depression. Burnham dealt with his heartbreak characteristically, by forcing himself back into motion. He had responded similarly after his mother’s death earlier that year. In a note of thanks to her doctor, he had written, “All my life I had so woven mother into my innermost thoughts that her loss seems at this writing beyond repair. This is of course contrary to nature and I shall plunge away into the wilds of Mexico very soon where nature and time will adjust all things anew.” For Burnham, the antidote to defeat, sorrow, or despair was action.
Once again, the Burnhams had to adjust. Bruce was gone. The soda lake scheme kept receding into the future. China was a vanishing mirage. Blanche needed the comfort of her remaining child, and Burnham needed to lose himself in activity. The Mexican offer from Hammond and Grenfell remained on the table. Burnham grabbed it. He and Blanche reached Pasadena on November 20. He left almost immediately for the border.
Porfirio Díaz, president and virtual dictator of Mexico between 1876 and 1911, was determined to force his backward, impoverished country out of the eighteenth century and into the twentieth. To Díaz that meant modern industry and modern agriculture, which required huge infusions of capital. Like many poor countries, Mexico lacked money but was rich in resources. Díaz began taking his nation’s assets from the poor and redistributing them to people who could exploit them. He awarded huge estates to cronies and threw open Mexico’s doors to foreign investors. Torrents of money poured in, sweeping up minerals and land, depositing new towns and railroads, enriching a small group of Mexicans and Americans while pushing the great majority farther into poverty.
Díaz prepared the way for modernization and the flow of capital by removing possible impediments, such as indigenous people and the traditional rights of campesinos. For instance, in Sonora, Burnham’s main area of activity for the next several years, Díaz’s army cleared the fertile Yaqui Valley for development by decimating the Yaqui Indians who hunted and farmed there. Thousands were killed and thousands more were deported to work as slaves in the tropical Yucatán, where most of the desert Indians soon died.
By 1908, when Burnham’s life and finances became entwined with the Yaqui Valley, the population of Yaqui Indians there had dropped from 20,000 to 3,000. That turned out to be more than enough to cause mayhem. Burnham would soon judge Yaquis the equals of Apaches as guerrilla fighters.
But that violence lay a few years ahead. In late 1905, as he entered Mexico for Guggenheim Exploration, the country’s resources were ripe for picking. He met up with Blanche’s brothers, John and Judd, and began prospecting. Testing ore with a horn spoon always made him buoyant. “Lovely weather, fine camp, good food, and I feel full of life and spirits again,” he wrote to Blanche, adding, “I am hungry every day and hard as iron.”
Blanche lacked his psychological resilience and his male avenues for recovery. In late December she told her sister Madge that she couldn’t stop crying. “It seems as though two tragedies and three wars were enough for any poor woman to bear.” Perhaps depression drained her energy; perhaps she found it impossible to reciprocate her husband’s unsinkable optimism. At any rate she stopped answering his letters. On December 21 he mentioned that he hadn’t gotten any replies. On December 22 he began, “Tomorrow will surely bring me a line.” On December 23 he wrote, “Say, this is strange, not one whisper from you . . . What has happened. This is my fourth to you.”
He kept writing, describing his prospects and the beautiful Sonoran landscape of oak, juniper, cactus, mountains, streams. As he sensed the reasons for her silence, his tone gentled. On December 28 he wrote that his Christmas had been lousy and he guessed hers was too. He added that he wouldn’t expect many letters in Mexico, and that he was carrying her picture in his pocket. By January 4 he still hadn’t heard from her, but furnished the excuse that the mails were irregular and she shouldn’t worry about it. He signed off, “Lots and lots of love and several good hard hugs and pray we find our lost bonanza.”
A week later everything looked brighter. “We are just sampling the biggest copper mine in the world we believe,” he wrote. Equally wonderful, he had received her wire and they were linked again. “Take for yourself boundless love and continuous admiration,” he wrote, “even after twenty two years of tempest and calm, obscurity and fame, poverty and plenty.”
The copper mine was about ninety miles due south of Douglas, Arizona, and was called La Caridad (Charity). Over the next few days, the combination of his rich prospects and Blanche’s letters swelled Burnham’s exhilaration. He called the mine “the bonanza of the world” and wrote, “We are feeling pretty cock-a-whoop!” He had secured an option and Hammond was sending an engineer to examine it. It was the “biggest surface show of copper in Mexico,” and Burnham was certain Hammond would want it. As a bonus, four letters had just arrived from Blanche and one from Rod. Top of the world.
The mining engineer visited and reported favorably. That convinced Hammond to form a new subsidiary of Guggenheim Exploration called the Western Mexico Syndicate, still in cooperation with Grenfell’s Mexican Southern Mining Syndicate. Burnham went to New York in April 1906 to sign the contract. The initial funding was $25,000, with Guggenheim Exploration owning 51 percent and Hammond 49 percent. Other documents suggest that Hammond had a silent partner, the railroad baron Edward H. Harriman, president of the Union Pacific and Southern Pacific Railroads, among others. The contract gave Burnham $500 per month and his brother Howard $250 per month to scout mining properties for the syndicate in Mexico. If the syndicate took up any of the properties found by Burnham, he would get a 10 percent interest.
A few days later Hammond’s hometown was shattered by one of the worst natural disasters in the country’s history. The San Francisco earthquake destroyed most of the city and killed 3,000 people. Hammond immediately sent $10,000 to the relief fund and, according to Burnham, sent another $40,000 anonymously.
By late May Burnham was back in Sonora, scouting mines and waiting for a second expert sent by Hammond to evaluate La Caridad, where test shafts had been dug. “So very much is at stake in next 15 days,” he wrote to Blanche, who was about to join him with Rod. If La Caridad was the bonanza he expected, his 10 percent would be worth a fortune.
The second engineer “very highly approved” of La Caridad, which stirred Hammond to send a third expert, a sign that he was getting serious about full-scale development. Word had gotten out about Sonora, and prospectors were swarming in. In Nacozari de García, the closest town to La Caridad, Burnham complained that he almost had to sleep on a cot in the hall at the Hotel de Nacozari, where the grub “ought to poison a sewer rat.” But at least the floor wasn’t encrusted with consumptive spittle as in his previous hotel there, and in the railroad’s Pullman cars.
Meanwhile, Real Soldiers of Fortune (1906) had just been published, Richard Harding Davis’s book of profiles about six modern adventurers, including Winston Churchill and William Walker. It opened with a frontispiece showing Burnham and Armstrong escaping after the Mlimo episode, and Davis gave the book’s climactic chapter to Burnham.
In Mexico he was feeling more like a frustrated panhandler than a swashbuckler. La Caridad still wasn’t settled. In December he went back to New York, hoping to raise another $250,000 to further explore his Sonoran prospects. Hammond had become his champion at Guggenheim Exploration and was going to recommend the purchase of La Caridad. “It will be success or failure in a few hours,” he wrote to Blanche on December 7, “so just offer a short prayer to God for me, for you know I never pray to him except through your pure and dear heart. You are all that stands between me and perdition.” Hammond also wanted him to meet with Harriman, the railroad magnate.
On December 11 the Guggenheims turned down all of his Sonoran prospects—La Caridad (copper), Lampazos (silver), and Mina de Mexico (silver). But the next day he wrote, “The wheel of fortune has turned again.” Hammond—“his blood is up,” wrote Burnham—intended to raise money for Mexico through other wealthy friends. Hammond was entertaining the idea of giving him $100,000 on his own. The day after that, the wheel took another sharp turn—Hammond now hoped to raise $250,000 right away for a million-dollar company.
Burnham tempered his excitement. “Am awfully afraid the boom is near its crest,” he wrote to Blanche. A series of articles in Ridgway’s, a muckraking weekly that was also serializing Joseph Conrad’s new novel, The Secret Agent, warned against the wildcatters and speculators who were selling dud Western mines to gullible Easterners. The magazine described most buyers as suckers who were gambling, not investing. “I want to make good before crash,” wrote Burnham, who had experienced several.
Further, Burnham and Hammond had a meeting with some brothers named Richardson, who owned nearly half a million acres in Sonora’s Yaqui Valley. The Richardsons wanted investment partners for their huge agricultural development.
Money was hanging everywhere, just out of reach. “I do hope to God I get enough to last our tribe more than six months,” wrote Burnham to Blanche, “but I don’t suppose I will. Our wants expand so much faster than the power to get the money that it looks hopeless.” All these pending deals meant that once again he wouldn’t be home for Christmas.
Harry Payne Whitney joined the syndicate, as did the banker Darius Ogden Mills. Harriman seemed interested but was distracted by a new government investigation into charges that his Western railroad monopoly was restraining trade for smaller railroads, and further allegations that he was providing oil tanker space to John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil and shutting out other oil companies. Henry Clay Frick also joined the syndicate. Frick, a partner of Andrew Carnegie in steel and coke, was notorious for hiring Pinkerton agents in 1892 to assault striking workers at the Homestead Works of the Carnegie Steel Company. Ten men were killed. The incident had helped sour Burnham on Gilded Age America before he left for Africa in 1893. But Frick had money, which Burnham needed to fund his own dreams of wealth.
The days ticked on. Nothing kept happening. Meetings, negotiations, requests for documents, cancelled meetings, conditional acceptances, withdrawals, requests for more documents followed by more delays—standard business practices, but they chafed Burnham’s restless temperament as well as his latent class resentment. “It does make me hot,” he wrote to Blanche, “to see all these swaggering rich around one who got nearly all by crooked work and they have everything on earth. . . . Probably tomorrow will upset every plan of today. Yet if I give up, everything in Mexico and everyone dependent on me go to hell at once. So I must hang on.”
New York prices were staggering him. The maître d’ at a first-class restaurant expected $10 to reserve a table. A fancy dinner might cost $50, and waiters now expected tips in dollar bills, not silver change. “This is the maddest ever,” he wrote to Blanche. “Will it last is the question. $12,000 per front foot for vacant lots facing [Central] Park on 5th Ave and only 80 feet deep.”
He noticed that constant proximity to wealth produced ugly yearnings. “It shakes one’s resolution for integrity and accounts for a lot of this awful graft,” he told Blanche. “Tis so human to want to be as good as the next one in appearance.” He was heartily sick of being separated, and felt adrift without her. “There are very many kisses long overdue,” he wrote in early January, “and the worst of it is that I feel they cannot all be made up. It would wear you out. Though as you are going in for athletics with Isabel [Isabel Harrah, Rod’s girlfriend and future wife], it might be done.”
On January 9, 1907, the Western Mexican Syndicate finally closed, with initial capital of $250,000. Burnham left immediately for California, and from there for Mexico. He was elated. Maybe, finally, this would be his bonanza year.
During the next months he traveled all over Mexico. The members of his tribal payroll—brother Howard, brothers-in-law John and Judd Blick and Pearl Ingram—also were scouting with their horn spoons. Between them they found prospects in Jalisco, Guadalajara, and Baja as well as Sonora. Burnham wrote to Blanche that he was in the saddle nine hours per day, riding over steep mountains, feeling fine, happy to be in rough country again.
Hammond sent yet another engineer, the fourth, to evaluate La Caridad. This expert’s report in September 1907 noted that so far the syndicate had spent $31,000 on the option and on test shafts, and that a final payment of $21,000 was due January 1 to buy the mine. The engineer was skeptical of its worth. He recommended cutting a few more test shafts before the deadline. His conclusion: if rich veins are found, make the final payment. “If not, abandon it.”
Burnham strongly disagreed, but in November, Grenfell wrote to Burnham that he would not make his share of the final payment, and Hammond evidently agreed. The mine closed down. Decades later, others began collecting Burnham’s bonanza: La Caridad became one of the world’s largest copper mines and remains in operation.
Far from the wilds of Mexico, financial structures in the United States were wobbling. In 1906, in keeping with Roosevelt’s promise to bust the monopolies, Congress passed the Hepburn Act, which gave the Interstate Commerce Commission power over railroad rates. This shook railroad stocks, which for years had been highly speculative and inflated, yet were used as collateral by banks and trusts. In March 1907, for instance, the price of Harriman’s seemingly rock-solid Union Pacific dropped $50 per share. Smaller railroads felt the shock. Then in August the government fined John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company $29 million for antitrust violations. Trading on the New York Stock Exchange slipped by double digits. The financial system shuddered but didn’t collapse.
That happened two months later. The cause was a scheme by F. Augustus Heinze. He had made his pile as owner of the United Copper Company in Butte, Montana, then bought his way into many local and national banks. Still avaricious, he, his brother Otto, and several bankers attempted to corner the copper market in October 1907. They failed, and the price of United Copper crashed. Heinze was ruined. That set off a run on banks affiliated with him, and several declared insolvency. The panic spread quickly. Millions were withdrawn from the Knickerbocker Trust Company in New York within a few hours, forcing it to close. That set off another cascade of bank runs. The Panic of 1907 (sometimes called the Knickerbocker Crisis) whirled across the country, causing mayhem at regional and local banks. A complete national collapse was averted at the end of the month when the financier J. P. Morgan propped up several banks with his own money and then shook cash from other financiers whom he forced to follow his lead. This crisis eventually led to the creation of the Federal Reserve System, to give the government more control over banks.
Copper’s central role in the panic probably helped sour Burnham’s syndicates on La Caridad. More broadly, the meltdown unnerved investors, who shied away from speculative ventures such as mining prospects in Mexico. The panic damaged the wealthy, but it crippled or wiped out smaller players such as Burnham. He called it “the financial tornado of 1907.” Once again, just as he was about to grasp his bonanza, it had turned into smoke. An illustration: he owned 750 shares in Grenfell’s Mexican syndicate. A few months after the panic, the handsome stock certificate was defaced by an inscription written in red ink: “First & Final Dividend of 0% per share paid June 15/08.” Signed, “F. Roche, Liquidator.” On the back, Burnham wryly scribbled, “First Class Wall Paper, Keep Carefully.”
The news from Africa was also bad. He had expected to make a fortune from his interests in East Africa, especially the soda lake. A few years after he left, a railroad reached the lake. The company reorganized and became the African Lands and Development Company, Ltd. Burnham tried to collect his commission for a decade, but the new company always claimed there was no profit. Eventually he got a small settlement, made smaller when he kept his promise to share his portion with several men who had served under him in East Africa. Once again, his bonanza had turned into a pittance.
But there were always other prospects to explore.