DURING THESE YAQUI years Burnham found time and energy for another project that mixed the practical with the quixotic: the importation of African game animals into the United States. He began looking into the possibility in early 1905, corresponding with the world’s foremost supplier of animals to zoos and circuses, a German named Carl Hagenbeck.
After Bruce drowned later that year and Burnham returned to the States, he took up the idea in earnest. His plan was to import animals such as the bushbuck, klipspringer, springbok, dik-dik, and duiker, then release them into the mountains, forests, and deserts that President Roosevelt had started claiming as federal lands. If some of these spaces were declared game preserves, U.S. sportsmen could experience the pleasures of hunting African animals.
Roosevelt liked the idea, and so did his chief of the Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot, who became one of Burnham’s lifelong friends and correspondents. Burnham, Hammond, and a few others raised $50,000 to help fund the plan. In 1906 two California congressmen introduced bills to put it into action, but the idea was attacked as an attempt to use federal funds to set up a hunting reserve for Roosevelt’s wealthy friends. The bills failed to reach the floor.
Burnham, of course, didn’t give up. Around 1908 he and his brothers-in-law John and Judd Blick bought a 5,000-acre ranch near Three Rivers, California, on the edge of Sequoia National Park. He released some imported Mexican deer and javelina there as game animals. The experiment worked, confirming Burnham’s interest in establishing non-native game in the U.S.
In February 1910 he published an essay in The Independent magazine entitled “Transplanting African Animals.” His reasoning echoed the pragmatic conservation of Roosevelt and Pinchot: “Vast tracts of our lonely deserts could be teeming with life,” he wrote, “interesting, beautiful, harmless, very useful for food and leather.” He urged the importation of everything from oryxes (“Its meat is well-flavored and its hide is equal to the best calf”) to Cape buffalo, ostriches, flamingoes, “and certainly the royal bustard.” He envisioned warthogs snuffling in Southern swamps, giraffes browsing treetops on Texas scrubland, camels roaming the desert Southwest. And why not add some zebras “to dot our plains with color”?
Burnham presented the scheme as easy, practical, and profitable. The hard part would be stopping Americans from slaughtering the animals before they became established. “So intent are we on destruction,” he wrote, “that we have become the wonder of the world. . . . Only a national law and a changed public opinion can make it possible to save what animal life we have or introduce new and valuable additions.” But doing so would “add greatly to our national wealth, and furnish a reserve food supply.”
This last point referred to the national worry about a shortage of meat. Supply wasn’t keeping pace with demand as cities swelled with immigrants and rural refugees looking for factory work. The rangelands were showing the first signs of overgrazing, and the country was running out of new territory to exploit. During the heedless westward expansion of the nineteenth century, the supply of land, trees, grass, water, and wildlife seemed unlimited, but those days were gone—so alarmingly gone, in fact, that Roosevelt, Pinchot, John Muir, and others were insisting on conserving what remained. But the country’s population continued to grow, and it was hungry. Burnham was not alone in seeing African wildlife as a sensible and renewable source of meat.
Among his fellow visionaries was Congressman Robert Broussard of Louisiana. The month after Burnham’s essay appeared, Broussard sponsored a bill to investigate the feasibility of importing African animals into the United States. The timing seemed right. On March 24, 1910, at a hearing before the House Committee on Agriculture, he introduced three experts in support of the bill. A scientist named W. N. Irwin represented the Department of Agriculture. A second expert was Frederick “Fritz” Joubert Duquesne, a South African hunter whom Roosevelt had recently consulted before his celebrated hunting safari to East Africa. Broussard probably didn’t know that Duquesne had emigrated to America in 1902 after escaping from a British prison camp in Bermuda. He had refashioned himself in the United States as a reporter, an occasional lecturer about Africa, and a handsome, charming hustler. But before all that he had been a Boer scout who had once vowed to kill Broussard’s third expert: Burnham.
The relationship between Duquesne and Burnham makes this strange episode even stranger. Before the meat scheme, the two men knew each other as shadows. Burnham said that during the Boer War he feared only two men on the veldt: Daniel Theron, the Boers’ best scout, and Duquesne, their second best. He considered Duquesne, nicknamed the Black Panther, far more personally dangerous because he was driven by hate.
It seems that during the war Duquesne had visited his family’s homestead. At first he couldn’t find it; nothing remained but charred rubble. A family servant still living nearby told him that the British had strung up his blind uncle and stabbed him to death with bayonets. They had repeatedly raped Duquesne’s sister, then executed her, and then had raped his mother before dragging her away. Duquesne found his mother and her rape-baby in a nearby concentration camp. Both had syphilis and were near death from starvation. Duquesne blamed Lord Kitchener and vowed to kill him. He spent much of his life seeking vengeance on the British and their allies.
Because of his daughter Nada, Burnham understood Duquesne’s bloodlust and how it could warp a man. Burnham knew he had escaped that fate through a lucky mixture of intrinsic optimism, devotion to an ancestral code, and the love of a supportive woman.
But in 1910 he and Duquesne found themselves allies in the unlikely scheme to bring African animals to the United States. Burnham testified before the Agriculture Committee that most of the meat eaten by Americans came from just a few domestic animals—pigs, chickens, cattle, sheep—none of them native to the continent. Surely Americans were adventurous enough to expand their palates, especially at a time of national need. Duquesne told the committee that many African animals were delicious sources of meat for European settlers there. He was especially rhapsodic about the taste of hippopotamus.
That last bit may have been aimed at the bill’s sponsor, Representative Broussard, who had paid Duquesne to scout the bayous of Louisiana as a habitat for hippos. Among the possible imports, hippos were Broussard’s focus. He envisioned them gorging on the Japanese water hyacinths that were choking his state’s waterways. This invasive species, brought to New Orleans in 1884 as aquatic decoration, had proliferated so quickly and thickly that mats of it were smothering fishing areas and blocking navigation, important economic sectors in Louisiana. The plant had defeated every scheme to eradicate it. But Duquesne assured Broussard that hippos could munch the invader into submission and free the plugged, suffocating waters of Louisiana. And as a bonus, each of these rotund weed-whackers could be converted into a ton of tasty meat. The hippo solution was practical, ecologically pristine, and edible. Who could object?
Many newspapers enthusiastically agreed. “Denizens of Jungle to Come to Our Land,” proclaimed one headline. “Toothsome Rhino, Succulent Koo-doo, Luscious Dik-dik and Tasty Trek-bok May Soon Supplant High Priced Beef on Bill of Fare.” Broussard didn’t get his bill onto that year’s legislative agenda, but the idea had momentum. To keep it going, he, Burnham, and Duquesne formed an advocacy group, the New Food Supply Society. Eliot Lord, Burnham’s sometime literary agent, jumped in and began soliciting money from wealthy supporters. That August, when Burnham met Roosevelt in Cheyenne at the Wild West Show and again in Denver, the former president said to quote him as a whole-hearted supporter.
Burnham did so in September, when he spoke in Pinchot’s stead before the annual meeting of California’s Humane Association. He urged them to seize the opportunity to do something original and significant by backing the importation bill. He asked them to support other innovations as well, such as the catalo—a cross between a cow and a buffalo (bison)—which he presented as a way to save the last specimens of a great Western symbol. “A splendid opportunity is before us,” he said, “to do practical, lasting, sane work.”
In the spring of 1911 Burnham met with Broussard and Duquesne in Washington to discuss introducing the bill that spring. Burnham also made plans to travel to South Africa to investigate animal importation, with help from his old Rhodesian friend Johan Colenbrander. But in the spring of 1911 Mexico combusted with revolution. Burnham had to cancel Africa and rush to Sonora.
President Taft wasn’t as keen on the importation idea as Roosevelt, and Broussard postponed the bill again, perhaps until the fall. Fall became winter, and Broussard told Burnham perhaps in the spring. By then Burnham was busy helping beleaguered settlers in the Yaqui Valley. And so the dream of hippos in the bayous of Louisiana and giraffes on the plains of Texas passed peacefully away.
Years later Burnham came across his speech to the Humane Association. It was written on stationery from that other quixotic plan, the Yaqui Valley. After he reread his practical, optimistic vision of a more adventurous, more picturesque, better-fed America, he wrote on it, in the shaky handwriting of an eighty-three-year-old, “The facts are still unrefuted. F.R.B.—1944.”
It’s irresistible to add a postscript about Duquesne. After the New Food Supply Society faded away, he and Burnham lost touch. Burnham had hoped that the constructive dream of animal importation would untwist Duquesne, but the nature of the Black Panther was fixed. When World War I began in 1914, he became a German spy in the United States. Using multiple aliases and disguises, he loitered in dockside bars and bribed British sailors to smuggle out what they thought were rare orchid bulbs. Aboard ship, the bulbs exploded. Using this ruse and others, he sank twenty-two ships.
Or so he said. Like much else about him, this may be true, or partly true, or as fictitious as his many identities. His biggest claim has been disproven—that in 1916 he fulfilled his vow by directing a German U-boat to the HMS Hampshire, which went down with more than 600 on board, including Lord Kitchener. But later investigators did confirm the general accuracy of most of Duquesne’s claims. He did sink ships, set fires, and kill Britons.
Consequently, the British authorities wanted him for murder, and the New York City bomb squad was investigating him for an arson in a Brooklyn warehouse. Clues and an informant led the bomb squad to a former British officer named Captain Claude Stoughton, who gave paid lectures about his dashing military career. In Stoughton’s apartment they found photos of a handsome man in various uniforms, suspicious paperwork concerning insurance claims, and lots of newspaper clippings about unsolved explosions.
Stoughton was Duquesne. The New York police arrested him in December 1917. When the British heard about it, they wanted him for prosecution. Duquesne suddenly became deranged. His behavior was so alarming that he was sent to a mental hospital. Next came sudden paralysis below the waist. Skeptical doctors jabbed Duquesne’s legs and toes with pins, but the crazy paraplegic didn’t flinch. He ended up in the prison ward of New York’s Bellevue Hospital, where he sat pitifully in his wheelchair, gazing through iron bars—that is, when he wasn’t cutting through them with a smuggled hacksaw. One night, after seven months of paralysis, he miraculously recovered, jumped out the window, and disappeared.
In 1926 a certain Major Frank de Trafford Craven took a job in New York with a publisher of movie magazines. Four years later the city’s police arrested Craven as the fugitive Duquesne. He denied his identity, futilely. But the British no longer wanted him and a judge threw out the charge of escape. He was free again.
For years, Burnham had covered the walls of his study with photos of people he admired. One of them showed Duquesne in his Boer uniform. Perhaps Burnham heard about his arrest in 1932 and wrote to his old foe, because in 1933 he received a note that he afterward kept at hand in his desk:
To my friendly enemy, the greatest scout in the world, whose eyes were the vision of an empire. I craved the honour of killing him, but failing that I extend my heartiest admiration.
Major Frederick Russell Burnham from Fritz Joubert Duquesne. 1933. One warrior to another.
In the mid-1930s, during Hitler’s rise in Germany, Duquesne joined an American pro-Nazi group and resumed spying. He passed valuable information to the Reich about bombs, weaponry, gas masks, radio devices, ship movements, and other military secrets. A double agent betrayed him to the FBI. In June 1941 he and thirty-two others—known as the Duquesne Spy Ring—were arrested for espionage, still the biggest such bust in the country’s history. Duquesne was sentenced to eighteen years in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary.
“His doom fills me with sadness,” wrote Burnham soon after, in a chapter about him in Taking Chances. Duquesne was “one of the most remarkable men I had ever met,” he wrote, “regardless of the thousand rumors and irrefutable proofs of his black deeds—acts which could not be defended by any civilized code.” Burnham hoped that someday a writer or historian “with an understanding heart, will show that this human epitome of sin and deception was but a product of the extreme hate to which we have all contributed, and for which we continue to pay the price.” When Taking Chances was published in 1944, he pulled strings at the FBI to put a copy into Duquesne’s hands. The spy’s response, if any, is lost.
Three years into his sentence, Duquesne’s failing mental and physical health, real this time, got him transferred to a prison medical center in Missouri. Worsening health led to his early release in 1954. Two years later, in City Hospital on New York’s Welfare Island (now Roosevelt Island), the indigent seventy-eight-year-old Black Panther slipped away forever.