SCOUTING ON TWO Continents was published in 1926 by Doubleday, Page and Company. It was “edited and arranged” by Mary Nixon Everett, an acquaintance of Burnham’s who pushed him to put his life on paper, which he had previously attempted in fits and starts. Judging by Burnham’s letters and essays, Everett contributed little to the book’s agreeable writing and style, which are Burnham’s. John Hays Hammond wrote the foreword. The book carried blurbs by Robert Baden-Powell and H. Rider Haggard, and was dedicated to Blanche, “My dear companion of many a mile.”
It sold very well, and there were editions in Dutch, Danish, Swedish, and German. Reviewers all over the world were agog at Burnham’s life, which spanned an era quickly fading into myth. The review in the New York Times was typical, beginning, “Here is a thrilling book,” and adding that Rider Haggard’s remark about Burnham being more interesting than any of his own romantic heroes “is the stark, simple truth.” The Saturday Review of Literature called it “a series of adventures so varied and thrilling as to be almost incredible.”
After the book appeared, writers sent Burnham screen treatments about his life, seeking his approval. Aside from gross biographical inaccuracies, they reeked with Western dialect and clichés about scouts that Burnham had always deplored. (“ ‘Howdy pardner’, drawled the stranger. ‘Couldn’t help but hear you’re dickerin’ with this hyar pirate. Y’ore plumb right—that there candidate for th’ glue fact’ry never’d even get you off to a good start toward’s [sic] Mashonaland.’ ”) Burnham’s usual comment on such stuff: “Godawful tripe.” (Ernest Hemingway admired Scouting on Two Continents and bought the screen rights in 1958, intending to turn it into a television series for his friend Gary Cooper, but he didn’t write a script before committing suicide in 1961.)
Burnham and Blanche savored their late-life wealth. They bought land atop one of the highest hills in Los Angeles, near the sign that spelled out the new development’s name in huge white letters that would soon become an icon for the movie industry: Hollywoodland. The Burnhams bought two lots, one for themselves and one next door for Rod and his family. Burnham hired a well-known Los Angeles architect who was also a member of the tribe, Blanche’s brother Joseph J. Blick.
While their new homes on Durand Drive were under construction, Burnham, Blanche, Roderick, and his wife Isabel took a memory tour around the world to the places that had shaped the family’s lives: Britain, Rhodesia, South Africa, East Africa. They also visited China, Australia, and places in between.
Burnham and Blanche returned to a palatial home in the Spanish style, a lavish modern version of the casas where Burnham had delivered Western Union telegrams as a boy. Visitors came up the driveway to a parking area, then took an elevator to the main level. They stepped out onto a lawn with paths bordered by roses and other flowers, and on the way to the house passed a putting green. Palms and cypresses framed the sprawling house and its lovely geometry of rooflines and terracotta tiles. There were loggias with thin columns, stone staircases, and a round tower. The land fell away on both sides, affording spectacular views of places where Burnham had a long history: downtown Los Angeles, the San Fernando Valley, the Santa Monica Mountains, the Pacific Ocean, Catalina Island (where the Burnhams had a cabin), and, far to the east, the snowcapped mountains where he had roamed and hunted as a boy.
Inside, in the trophy room, the mounted heads of big-game animals looked down on animal skins, elephant tusks, a rack of rifles, some spears, and a knobkerrie studded with brass, taken off an Ndebele chief killed by Burnham. In his study the walls disappeared behind rows of framed photographs, nearly 150 of them, many inscribed. He called the collection his Walls of Fame. There were family photos of himself, Blanche, Roderick, Howard, and assorted Blicks, but most of the space was devoted to people and scenes from his life. Buffalo Bill in his showman’s fringed buckskin. Fort Victoria in 1893. Rhodes sitting with a pet dog. “Dr. Jim” Jameson and Allan Wilson. A group of scruffy scouts from the First Matabele War. A Gatling gun crew at the siege of Bulawayo. A Zulu medicine man. Klondike gold miners. Lord Roberts, Lord Kitchener, and Baden-Powell. The Britain-bound shipmates from the Dunottar Castle, including Churchill. Rider Haggard and Richard Harding Davis. Theodore Roosevelt as a Rough Rider. John Hays Hammond and E. H. Harriman. Fritz Joubert Duquesne. Such people. Such stories.
As he aged, Burnham intensified his efforts for conservation. He lobbied for state parks and preserves in California. He became a vigorous member of the Save the Redwoods League and also worked on the issue as an appointed member of the California Park Commission. He felt a personal connection to these majestic trees since his beloved ranch, La Cuesta, abutted Sequoia National Forest. He also served for years on the executive committee and the board of trustees of the Southwest Museum of the American Indian in Los Angeles, now part of the Autry National Center.
In the 1930s his disgust at hunters who drove cars to desert waterholes to shoot bighorn sheep spurred him to take action. He convinced some prominent citizens of Arizona and the leaders of Arizona’s Boy Scouts to help him lobby for protection of the desert bighorn, whose numbers had dwindled toward extinction. They began a “Save the Bighorn” campaign in schools and on radio. As a result, in 1939 Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed legislation creating the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge and the Kofa Wildlife Refuge. These encompassed more than a million and a half acres, bigger than Delaware, in the rugged, mountainous deserts of southwest Arizona, where Burnham had once prospected and matched wits with Apaches. In March 1941 he gave the dedication speech that opened the refuges.
He also campaigned to stop fishermen from killing sea lions and to limit the purse seiners raking the seas to make fish fertilizer. In 1941 he wrote to FDR, asking him to stop the army from building a shooting range near Henry’s Lake, just west of Yellowstone, because it was a resting place of trumpeter swans, the largest waterfowl in North America and highly endangered. “If I thought that the destruction of these birds would interfere by even one hour with our national defense,” he added, “this letter would not be written.”
Wildlife and wilderness were no longer resources to be exploited without limit, but treasured inheritances to be salvaged, preserved, and passed on.
These same progressive values about conservation shaped his conservative views about race and immigration, which narrowed and hardened as he aged. Neither he nor other progressives such as Roosevelt saw any contradiction in these perspectives. Rather, they seemed complementary attempts to halt decline and preserve American essences in danger of vanishing.
Burnham’s friend and fellow member of the Boone and Crockett Club, Madison Grant, epitomized this conflation. His views about conservation and race dovetailed with Burnham’s. Grant was one of the pioneering conservationists of the early twentieth century. He led campaigns to save California’s redwoods and the American bison, and was instrumental in outlawing plume hunting, which had decimated many bird species. He helped start the Bronx Zoo. He fought for legislation to protect wildlife and to create many national parks and refuges, including Glacier and Denali.
Yet he also wrote The Passing of the Great Race; or, The Racial Basis of European History (1916), an influential justification of “scientific racism” and eugenics. The book put a scholarly halo around bigotry by presenting historical and scientific “proof” of the white race’s superiority. Grant warned that “the Master Race” was being diluted and degraded by immigration and miscegenation. Contemporary reviewers, almost without exception, praised the book. Roosevelt admired it. So did Burnham.
Grant based his theories partly on the new science of wildlife management. To preserve valuable superior species, lesser species as well as the weak and diseased had to be sacrificed—culled, sequestered, castrated. Grant recommended similar policies to preserve “the great race.” He wanted to exclude non-Nordic peoples from the United States, especially immigrants from Asia and southern or eastern Europe. He also advocated the sterilization of criminals, “imbeciles,” the insane, and “worthless race types” such as blacks and Jews.
Grant’s book helped to inspire the Immigration Act of 1924, which severely restricted the number of immigrants and banned any from Asia or India. The book also was used to justify state laws allowing “mental defectives” to be sterilized, laws upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1927. Sterilization, wrote Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, enabled society to “prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.” Grant got a gushing letter about his book from a German admirer named Hitler. (During World War II Burnham would denounce the architects of the Third Reich and imperial Japan as “strange monsters of evil.”)
In 1930 Grant coedited a book entitled The Alien in Our Midst; or, “Selling Our Birthright for a Mess of Pottage”; the Written Views of a Number of Americans (Present and Former) on Immigration and Its Results. Burnham contributed an essay, “The Howl for Cheap Mexican Labor,” which called for an Exclusion Act against Mexicans similar to the one prohibiting immigration by Asians, in order to protect America’s racial bloodlines. When Grant died in 1937, Burnham eulogized him in the Boone and Crockett Club’s newsletter as a visionary conservationist and racial theorist.
In 1936 Burnham and Blanche visited Alaska. They marveled at the trains that had tamed fierce rivers and mountains. But memories couldn’t stop the subtractions of old age, and the rest of that year was less happy. Burnham’s great friend and supporter John Hays Hammond died in June. A few months later, as Burnham rounded a hairpin turn on one of Hollywood’s narrow canyon roads, a speeding car in his lane forced him to swerve off and down the hillside. His car tumbled many times, pancaking the seventy-five-year-old Burnham inside. Once again he proved unkillable. Rescue workers pried him out. For several excruciating months he wore a steel-and-leather body harness.
On December 22, 1939, two months shy of her seventy-eighth birthday, Blanche died. Burnham, a prolific letter-writer, goes silent about this loss, which suggests how crushing it was. In the mid-1920s he had written to a friend,
In boyhood it was my greatest good fortune to meet a girl who truly believed in me and that I would carry out the wild schemes and plans I confided to her. Fantastic as those dreams were, nearly every one has come true. The vision of all she would be called upon to endure amid appalling circumstances was mercifully hidden from her young eye, nor could she foresee how tragedy and sorrow would some day test her soul as by fire; yet, throughout all the hard experiences of our years together, no resentment of destiny ever showed in her manner or crossed her lips. A gentle heart, a pleasant voice, a loyal nature, with a wide understanding of life as it is—she has indeed met every situation with supreme courage and continues to be a clear fountain of inspiration to me and to all who know her.
In their last years, after so many separations, they had finally managed to spend almost every night together. Their love story spanned sixty years.
In May 1941, shortly after Burnham dedicated the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, the Boy Scouts held an eightieth birthday celebration for him in Carlsbad Caverns. More than 1,000 people came. (Burnham was a devoted supporter of the Boy Scout movement in America. Late in Robert Baden-Powell’s life, Burnham arranged for a peak in California’s San Gabriel Mountains to be named Mount Baden-Powell. After Burnham’s death, the peak next to it was christened Mount Burnham.) In a photo taken at the birthday party, Burnham looks fit and dapper in a three-piece suit, high starched collar, and white fedora, surrounded by Boy Scouts and stalactites.
He began organizing materials and memories for another book. Scouting on Two Continents had been conceived as two volumes, but the publisher decided one was enough. That probably explains the miscellaneous nature of this second book, Taking Chances, which seems to consist mostly of leftovers from the earlier one. This suspicion is strengthened by letters indicating that Burnham and Mary Nixon Everett fell out over money when he decided to publish Taking Chances privately. The title page says Everett “elicited and arranged” it, but Burnham’s main assistant on the book was his new secretary, Ilo Willits.
They sent the last pages to the publisher on October 25, 1943. “By that time I was hopelessly in love with him,” wrote Ilo, “and he had found out he couldn’t get along without me.” He was eighty-two. She claimed to be forty-five but was probably forty-nine. He asked her to marry him. She agreed, but to forestall the suspicions of Roderick or anyone else that she was a gold-digger, she insisted on a prenuptial agreement that excluded her from Burnham’s estate, most of which had already been given to Rod. Burnham agreed to this stipulation. Both he and Ilo would regret this, Burnham because he had failed to provide for her, and Ilo because of future financial struggles.
They were married on October 28. By that time Roderick was divorced from Isabel and had married his former secretary, Gayle Cranney, twenty-three years his junior. He seems to have looked askance at his father’s new marriage, or at least that’s what the overly protective Ilo thought, which caused some strain. She devoted her life to Burnham, answering letters, caring for him during his periods of illness, and sometimes insulating him even from family. She also started organizing his extensive papers.
Seven hundred copies of Taking Chances were privately published in early 1944 and distributed by Burnham to friends and acquaintances. “I only wish he were younger so that we might write a book from the mass of data which he has accumulated,” wrote Ilo to a correspondent. “It would dim both his other books, I think. He hasn’t told the half of it.”
By then he had lived in the Hollywood Hills mansion for fourteen years, by far his longest steady residence, but now it was too large and also was haunted by memories of Blanche. He and Ilo moved to a smaller house not far from Griffith Park in Los Angeles. By early 1946 smog and crowds pushed them fifty miles northwest to Fillmore, in the Santa Clara Valley. Neither of them liked it, so they moved to a small house in Santa Barbara. Ilo was content, but Burnham, restless as ever at eighty-five, wanted to build another house on a bigger piece of land.
They found one on a hillcrest in Santa Barbara, with views of the Santa Ynez Mountains on one side and the Pacific Ocean on the other. Leveling and clearing the lot took weeks. Burnham insisted on building the garage first, so he and Ilo could move into it and enjoy their new panorama while the house went up. As soon as they did, he began a slow fade.
The house was still unfinished on September 1, 1947, when, after a lifetime of risk and adventure, he died at four o’clock in the morning in his sleep. He was eighty-six. His life had followed the sharp curve of history from scalps on the frontier to the atomic bomb. He was buried next to Blanche among their tribe of Burnhams and Blicks in the small cemetery at Three Rivers, near the La Cuesta ranch and the majestic sequoias he loved.
Burnham bristles with contradictions. Robber barons infuriated him, yet he worked for several. As a young man he advocated the socialist ideals of Edward Bellamy, but always acted like a capitalist entrepreneur. He left the United States in disgust, vowing never to return, but always did. Though irritated by meddlesome government, he became an eager tool of imperialism. He was happiest in wilderness and described himself as a savage at heart, yet mingled easily with high society in New York and London. He enjoyed his fame as “the American scout,” but groaned when writers reduced him and his rigorous craft to melodramatic Western clichés. He proudly displayed the heads and skins of trophy animals, yet became an ardent conservationist. He was devoted to one woman for more than sixty years, but found normal domesticity almost unbearable.
War and its camaraderie excited him, yet his chosen means of waging it, as a scout, was done in solitude, preferably without firing a shot. He revered his ancestors for risking everything to seek freedom and opportunity in the New World, and he did the same thing by going to Africa, yet he opposed most immigration. His hot-blooded patriotism scorned less martial views, yet he called Rhodes’s peace mission into the Matopos the finest moment in history. He detested unfairness and injustice, but helped take lands from their inhabitants. He studied native peoples closely on two continents and admired many of their traits, but couldn’t escape the deforming racial attitudes of his era. Despite his insights into power and politics, he remained blind to some of their consequences, and with his amazing powers of observation he sometimes failed to notice what was right in front of him.
Burnham wouldn’t see these as contradictions, since he contained them all. They fit together like shards of a mosaic that reflects its era and shadows ours. Burnham and many like him took the risks, endured the hardships, and spilled the blood that, for good and ill, formed our world. He noted that all decent people deplore war and violence, though usually after being cushioned by law and peace, and he remarked that those who followed the pioneers never complained about benefiting from their sacrifices and ferocities. Burnham surely identified with Roosevelt’s well-known “man in the arena”:
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
Burnham’s most fundamental trait was his optimism. Like him, it was nearly indestructible. Despite his many setbacks and sorrows, it always rekindled his energy for chasing dreams to the next place, the next possibility. Near the end of his life, as he witnessed another terrible war pitting democratic civilization against modern savagery, he wrote, “not even the world-wide harvest of death need dismay us.” It was, after all, only “the dark dawn of a great New Era,” “certain to be brighter than all the ages past. . . . Old fears are mostly groundless.”
But he wasn’t starry-eyed. He wouldn’t have been surprised by all the subsequent wars, genocides, and fresh sources of barbarism, because he didn’t expect evil to disappear, in himself or in others. But he rejected apathy and had little patience for self-pity or knee-jerk cynicism. He believed that every individual can help shape our shared history, and that if we can overcome our fears and stay alert and improvise intelligently, we will survive the territory ahead. He never lost confidence in that unknown frontier, the future, where a new present can be forged by bold action, and prospects abound.