SCOUTING FOR MINES AND FOR ROOSEVELT
AS THE YAQUI project was going dormant again, Burnham returned to his fallback pursuit: prospecting. In late 1915 he became a mining scout for A. Kingsley Macomber, a wealthy businessman. As a twenty-year-old, Macomber had pegged land for Burnham in Rhodesia, and had explored with him above the Zambezi River. Back in the United States, Macomber married an heiress connected to the Standard Oil fortune and augmented that with profitable investments in mines, banks, real estate, and thoroughbred horses. He had money and Burnham had a prospector’s eye.
Hammond valued that eye as well. He once noted that only one in six mines paid off, so investors had to be prepared to absorb heavy losses. They might spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to sink shafts several thousand feet deep, as Rhodes did in the Rand, in hopes of finding a payable vein of gold. So investors prized scouts who had what Hammond called “a good nose” for a prospect. This required knowledge of geology and mineralogy, but also a more elusive quality: an instinct for ore.
Burnham had the nose. Unlike many scouts and mining engineers, he also had the integrity to report what he found. Cynicism about mining reports was universal and well-founded. “A collection of mining romances in the shape of reports on mines,” noted one contemporary observer, “if published, would afford entertainment for readers of fiction unequaled by any modern publication.” Burnham also had the prospector’s inclination toward optimism—a necessary trait, but it could bend judgment.
In December 1915 he began looking into abandoned mining properties and was immediately excited by several, especially the old Black Bear mine in the Klamath Mountains of Northern California. After studying the mine’s records, he knew that between 1862 and 1881 it had yielded more than $2 million in bullion. The mine’s owner, John Daggett, was a man obsessed. He bought into the Black Bear in 1862, sold out in 1863, bought it back in 1866, sold out again in 1872. In 1884 its siren song lured him into buying it back. For the last thirty years he had been trying to interest investors, certain that another bonanza awaited just beyond the last shafts. Burnham wanted to believe. His letter to Blanche about Daggett and the Black Bear reads like a wistful parable of the mining life:
All day I have been mulling over flimsy copies of letters of men now gone, and other copies of letters of men who wrote and quarreled and swore and worked but are now tottering wrecks, gray, quiet, waiting calmly for the final act and taps. These letters are filed in big leather books like my father used to have. They tell of the struggles over the snows, the long pack trains, sick horses, broken wagons, holdups, rows over county seats, high taxes, $10,000 for freight for one little mill, etc., of a beautiful woman and her murder and his fate and hers, great finds of gold, over a million in two years from one shoot of ore in the Black Bear Mine. Then of its lost ore body and the long desperate struggle to regain it. Loss after loss, bankruptcy, and final crumbling decay like Kipling’s jungle swallows it all, the creaking pumps can lift no longer, the timbers rot and crash. Finally the last engineer writes his farewell letter to the Co. Then silence save for the birds of the air or the sigh of wind in the gallows frame. One tottering man of 84 still dreams his dreams of another great bonanza, a little deeper. He has spent his all. . . . It lures one on yet I feel an icy chill at times when the thought comes of really asking friends to back my judgment. It may take thousands of feet to find it. Yet I, like the grand old man, believe it is still there.
By the next day, when he wrote his report to King Macomber, he was sober and pragmatic. The mine had once been a bonanza, he said, but as the years passed and the shafts went deeper, it had yielded less and less until mining stopped. Seams of gold might lie waiting somewhere below, but to reach them, if they existed, would take at least $50,000, maybe $75,000. When Macomber passed on it, Burnham was relieved.
He spent the next few years driving, riding, and hiking all over the West, checking out prospects. His letters came from up and down the Sierra Nevadas, from the Riverside Mountains and Death Valley in southeast California, from Skull Valley in Arizona. He found a strong prospect in Arkansas. Sometimes he camped, sometimes stayed in hotels. Blanche got letters on stationery from hotels in Globe, Phoenix, Bakersfield, and Blythe in the Chuckawalla Desert. He wrote while aboard the California Limited from “somewhere in New Mex.”
He was chasing gold, silver, and copper, but also “war baby metals” now in demand to make the steel needed by the modern military: tungsten, manganese, vanadium, chrome, and molybdenum, “a coming metal.” After a year of prospecting he had found enough paying mines that he could write to a friend, “Mexico very near put me on the bread-line, but I am now pulling out in pretty good shape, after all.”
In September 1916, while prospecting in the high mountains, he was floored by excruciating pain in his abdomen. He suspected something fatal related to his old stomach wound in South Africa. On the eve of his surgery, he wrote jaunty farewell letters to his brother Howard and other friends. “I who have taken old death by the hand many times,” he wrote to Harris Hammond, “may this time follow him over the border. But whether this be so or not matters little for I have led a concentrated tabloid life, of certainly twenty in one.”
It was only appendicitis. It slowed him briefly, then he was back on the road, sniffing for prospects. In early February 1917 he boarded a train for New York, where he hoped to put together a syndicate for mining those “war baby metals.”
As soon as the World War began in 1914, Burnham itched to go. Blanche must have been appalled. Nevertheless, he wrote to contacts in the British Army, asking them to help him get to the front. But he was fifty-three years old, and the skills of a frontier scout had limited appeal to generals waging a new sort of war with tanks, airplanes, poison gas, and trenches. He was politely ignored.
So he ranted about capons and mollycoddles, and mocked Wilson’s slogans, “Peace with Honor” and “He Kept Us Out of War.” Roosevelt, Burnham, and others saw democracy in urgent peril. The imagery in Burnham’s letters was dire: swords hanging over heads, seeds of disaster ready for harvest. He joined the Preparedness Movement, begun by Roosevelt and others, including two former Secretaries of War, who were alarmed about the dreadful state of the country’s military. Preparedness Day parades around the country drew thousands of supporters. Wilson, always wary of Roosevelt’s presidential ambitions, worked to undermine the group.
Even after the sinking of the Lusitania in May 1915, President Wilson had resisted calls to embroil the United States in Europe’s war. In September 1915, to keep the U.S. out of the conflict, Germany had pledged that its U-boats would stop torpedoing neutral ships. So on February 1, 1917, when the German government announced the resumption of submarine warfare against all vessels, Wilson’s hand was forced. A few days later he broke off relations with Germany and began preparing the country for war.
Burnham, in New York, wrote to Blanche that the Germans’ announcement had probably torpedoed his plans as well. He might be able to sell some manganese and tungsten, but all major financing was on hold. He also mentioned that Roosevelt was considering raising a division of fighters, and had contacted him. The old Rough Rider, now fifty-eight, had once said of Burnham, “He is a scout and a hunter of courage and ability, a man totally without fear, a sure shot, and a fighter. He is the ideal scout, and when enlisted in the military service of any country he is bound to be of the greatest benefit.”
“If war comes,” wrote Burnham to Blanche, “of course I am in it at once.” But he thought President Wilson was all talk. That’s why Roosevelt was exploring the possibility of a new, expanded version of the Rough Riders—for Burnham, an avenue toward combat. He must have known how Blanche would react to the prospect of losing him to another war. He expected to hear from Roosevelt the next day. Meanwhile, he wrote, he was going to watch Madame Butterfly from Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney’s box at the opera.
The next day, February 9, he sent Blanche this run-on wire: “A great chance has come maybe I can serve my own country as effectively as I did England am offered Command under Roosevelt so am not too old . . . keep everything out of papers.”
Blanche tore it into pieces. (Sometime later, probably for the sake of the family archive, she taped most of it back together.) On the same day, Burnham sent her a letter acknowledging that his decision might end their marriage:
My Love
Last night Geraldine Farrar sang at her best the sweet songs of the poor Madam Butterfly. Yet through all the soft cadences of the music ran the thought that on the morrow I must send a message almost as sad to my own sweet Madam Butterfly who for years and years had followed me from arctic snows to burning deserts, who had laid away her dear children, yet loved me as few men are loved by women. I have again like Captain Macklin kissed the sword. But this time in defense of my own land instead of that of strangers. I do not know how you are going to feel about this war . . . But I cannot live in peace with my own soul by any other course. Better death a thousand times. Yet I do not chide you in any way. Each must do according to the inner light.
So if this must change your feelings for me, it will not change mine for you. It is of you I think at the last moment of consciousness, and you I call for first on regaining it. It will be the same if I awoke in the Halls of Valhalla.
I love you above all women in the world.
. . . But no matter what your choice may be I give you as farewell the salutations of my inmost soul and beg of you think of me always at my best and of those countless hours of heaven and bliss in the days gone bye.
A new wine is in my blood. I am again the fighting Rhodesian that held and inspired men in those days. You could not help but admire me even if you turned me away from your heart. Yet mine is always yours if you want it.
My soul is my maker’s and must be returned, my life is my country’s, my heart I give to you.
Farewell dear,
F.
He wrote to her again the next day. “Everything seems to be crumbling to ashes in a way,” he said, “—democracy, Christianity, the old family ties—all are breaking down. Why should I flatter myself I could retain the love of even one woman forever? Especially if I live as my soul dictates. So I am hardening it with fire day by day, making ready for the news that I have lost the woman as well.”
On February 16 he got her reply by Western Union: “Two letters of 9th recd. I knew in my heart what you would do and love and honor you as always but it would have been easier for me if you had not wired.”
He replied immediately, flooded with relief. Now he felt he could face whatever happened. “I am doubly armed you still love me.” Roosevelt had chosen him as one of eighteen commanders for two divisions. For Burnham, it was a chance to salve his regret at being in the Klondike when Roosevelt had called him for his original Rough Riders. He had been meeting with Roosevelt and others about logistics and recruitment.
“Well it is all in keeping with my life,” he wrote to Blanche, “from the desert to a palace, back to the clods, then sought by the mighty men of the world again. Why should all these strange things come to me again and again.” He hadn’t been able to shake any money loose for a syndicate. If nothing changed in two weeks, he planned to come home and go into the desert to look for prospects.
A few days later he got Blanche’s follow-up letter to her wire. It is lost, but Burnham’s fervent reply suggests its contents:
Sweetheart
Your beautiful letter now read and I feel at once that perfect understanding of each other, without which it is almost impossible for either of us to live. Full well I recall all your terrible losses—the death of Nada, your brothers in the firing line, your husband just escaping from a thousand dangers and now about to go on what seemed another desperate venture while dozens of unmarried men stayed safely in laager. I knew your despair. But I had promised; Col. Napier depended on me. I had saved his command once. If I yielded to my heart’s love and her despairing cry the column might all perish and Bulawayo itself fall. It was a terrible hour for both of us, where Great Love and High Duty were at cross purposes. . . .
But now it is different loved one. I can proceed along lines of high endeavor and still have your love. It is not just what you would wish. Yet dear a month of life is more than years of just living, and you must know, ere this, to see me at my best there must always be impending danger and constant action. Even you then say I am worth loving.
Now we are old and grey. Only a few years can be left to us at most. Let us concentrate years into months and months into moments . . . Dream of my heart. Even war can never cloud it. You shall be with me forever.
F.
But Blanche didn’t offer her support unconditionally. One of her next letters was scissored as if by a war censor. She had reconsidered some wounding words, she explained, and cut them out. Burnham replied that he knew she didn’t like war, but time was running out, Wilson was a coward, and the Germans and Japanese were infiltrating Mexico with plans to attack the United States. This last anxiety stemmed from the Zimmerman telegram, made public at the end of February. The German government had sent a coded cable to the Mexican government asking it to become an ally if the U.S. entered the war. In return Germany promised to help Mexico regain territories lost to the United States. Mexico’s President Carranza considered the offer but rejected it as too risky. To Burnham and others, it was another reason to occupy Mexico.
He left New York for the West. He had agreed to raise four companies for Roosevelt, about 22,000 men. He expected it to take three months of travel. But first he had to see King Macomber, to ask if working for Roosevelt would cost him his job as a mining scout. In any case, there was no pay in recruiting for Roosevelt, so he hoped to sell the Riverbend ranch on the San Joaquin River to ease their finances.
Blanche seemed ready to sell the La Cuesta ranch near Three Rivers too. “I have had to economize now for three years,” she wrote, “and think it would be pretty fine to be able to buy pretty things as I used to do.” As for Roosevelt and the war, she wrote, “We understand each other thoroughly now, and all is peace.” But she would not write to him about these things anymore, she added, because they upset her too much.
The recruitment went splendidly. Burnham did newspaper interviews and wrote dozens of letters to friends asking them to join and to publicize the effort. Within a month hundreds of men applied, and a month after the United States declared war on Germany in early April 1917, he had 20,000 volunteers pledged to go. Roderick, now almost twenty-one, signed up and so did many of Burnham’s friends.
The other recruiters had done just as well. In just over three months, many thousands of men had enlisted as volunteers and were waiting for the call. Congress authorized Roosevelt to take his divisions to fight in France. Burnham was sure he would soon be back at war, this time fighting for his own country. But on May 18 when Roosevelt asked Wilson for permission to activate his volunteers, the president said no. Roosevelt was expected to be the Republicans’ presidential nominee in 1920, and Wilson, a Democrat, had no intention of giving the rival party’s leading man a starring role in the war.
The next day Burnham wrote to Blanche, “I am too sad to write. The political crime overwhelms me.” He saw only one bright spot—that she would be happy. He was going to Oyster Bay on Long Island the next day to commiserate with Roosevelt. “I wish I could take defeat as well as R. does,” wrote Burnham. “I do fairly well and rebound in time, but it is harder as the years go by and one’s star is sinking year by year to oblivion and great issues being decided with no chance to take a hand in the decision.”
The second blow that month was the death of his only sibling, Howard, not quite forty-seven, on May 4 in Cannes, France. Burnham didn’t hear about it immediately because of the war. The cause was Howard’s old enemy, tuberculosis. While dying slowly in Cannes, not long after returning from Germany, where he had been spying for the Allies, he had tried to settle his affairs. He wrote long instructions about how his sons should be brought up and educated. He made his wife Constance swear to repay a $5,000 loan from his brother. It had been given without hesitation a few years earlier when, unknown to Howard, Burnham himself was scrambling for money.
There were some emotional debts as well. Howard thanked his older brother for indulging his youthful urges to roam deserts and take risks. Unlike Fred, Howard was sometimes moody and snappish. In his gruff way, he thanked Burnham for watching over him and tolerating his prickles. “The one person,” he wrote to Burnham, “who has never failed me, or others.”
Burnham had borrowed $1,800 that year from Hammond because he “sorely needed it.” But he wrote to Constance that he would never accept the loan repayment from her unless it didn’t affect her finances or her boys’ educations. Despite his own recent financial reverses, he told her, “so long as there is an acre of ground or a dollar left, we in California are always willing to share it with you and to help you and the children in any way.” A tribe never abandons its members.
Like his father, Roderick Burnham was eager for battle. He enlisted in the U.S. Army and was ranked an officer because of his college degree (from the University of Arizona, where he was also captain of the football team). When he was assigned to train soldiers in the States and not fight in Europe, he vehemently protested. The army obliged by demoting him to private and shipping him to the western front.
It was a different war from those in his father’s stories. Roderick was poisoned by chemical gas and lost all his teeth from trench mouth. But he fought and survived, and by the end of the war had made sergeant. The army wanted to send him to officer training school, but after experiencing the horrors of the front, he chose civilian life and became a successful mining scout and engineer.
One wonders how Roderick’s father, always gung-ho about war, would have felt if he had gone into the fetid, muddy trenches with Roosevelt’s division and seen the bodies piled high in no man’s land, and the blistered, writhing victims of poison gas. Would the disillusioning nightmare later described by so many writers have diminished his enthusiasm for battle? It’s doubtful. In the most famous poem to come out of the war, Wilfred Owen scorned Horace’s celebrated lines, “dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” (“it is sweet and right to die for one’s country”) as “the old lie.” But Burnham believed whole-heartedly in Horace’s lines, without irony.
Burnham did find a way to fight Germany. To make steel for armaments, the U.S. military suddenly needed large quantities of little-known metals such as tungsten and manganese. But where to find these crucial war metals, formerly disregarded? Old geological surveys offered scattered clues, but Burnham had a better source: old prospectors. He knew many, and had renewed their acquaintance in the last two years while crisscrossing the West as a mining scout. These men had wandered over every inch of the desert searching for gold and silver, and Burnham thought they might remember patches of the strange black metals now in need. “I urged them to recall to memory some long-forgotten cañon with stained walls,” he wrote in Scouting on Two Continents, “or some crags and peaks streaked brown and black, crumbling in the blaze of the desert sun.”
One half-crippled prospector, seventy-four, remembered finding a vein of manganese thirty years earlier in the Chuckawalla Desert. He was sure, as prospectors always are, that he could find it again. For days Burnham followed him across sand dunes, through cactus, up steep mountains strewn with baking rocks. They wore damp handkerchiefs over their mouths and noses to protect their lungs from temperatures well above 100 degrees. The peaks in the distance quivered like candle flames, and the crystalline air trembled. “I could sit here and gaze on these mountains forever,” said the prospector happily.
He and others like him led Burnham to neglected veins and forgotten mines near Tombstone, Mount Diablo, and other old camps. Loads of tungsten and manganese began rolling to eastern smelters to become steel, then weapons and munitions used against Germany. “It was certainly the desert people’s best tribute to the nation,” wrote Burnham. “It was the last fine rally of the long-beards.”