Chewing the Fat with Jeff Fisher - Ep. 11 | The Plan to Bring Hippopotamus & Camels to America

Episode Date: October 13, 2018

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The Blaze Radio Network On Demand. This is the story I told you about when we got news that they saw hippopotamus swimming in the Rio Grande. It got me thinking about a story I read quite some time ago by John Muellum called American hippopotamus. Now I'll put a link on my social media for the entire story. This is a kind of an edited, redacted version of the story, but I wanted to get it to you because it's fascinating. And some of the story goes into greater detail than what I'm going to give you, but there's quite a bit of detail in this story as well. It's a story about hippopotamus as advertised.

But it's also a story about two very complicated and exceptional men. These men were spies, they were also bitter enemies, each wanted to kill the other and fully accepted. expected to feel really good about himself afterward. Eccentric circumstances, circumstances having to do with hippopotamuses, would join these men together as allies and even dear friends. But then, eventually, they'd be driven into opposition again.

Frederick Russell Burnham, a frontiersman and soldier of fortune who'd spent his life leaping into conflicts with American Indians and colonial wars in Africa. He was only about five foot four. His presence was imposing. He was a compact, strong box of a man. One admirer would describe him as empathetically a man's man,

able, active, alert. The impression he gave was immediately one of force and self-control. Burnham had risen to fame as a scout, an esteemed breed of solitary wayfinder and spy with no exact analog and contemporary warfare. Scouts slinked into enemy territory

to gather intelligence or cut supply lines or roamed the no-man's land around camp to keep watch. They were disciplined, self-sufficient. Their proficiency in wilderness seemed almost supernatural at times, and Burnham, who'd earned the nickname King of Scouts, exemplified their character and prowess. He has trained himself to endure the most appalling fatigues, hunger, thirst, and wounds, as subdued the brain to infinite patience,

and has learned to force every nerve in his body to absolute obesity. to still even the beating of his heart. Richard Harding Davis, a journalist, wrote The Face of Nature as you read your morning paper. Another writer described Burnham's life as an endless chain of impossible achievements. People who met Burnham tended to comment on the same disarming quality of his eyes. The novelist H. Ryder Haggard called them steady, gray-blue eyes, that have them in a far-away look, such as those acquired whose occupation has caused them.

to watch continually at sea or on the Great Plains. He was a man whose senses and abilities approached a wild predator. He could go two and a half days without sleep. He could fix a pistol's broken mainspring with a bit of buffalo bone. It was said he could smell water from afar and very seldom drink alcohol and never smoked, for fear it would dull his senses. Commanding officers described him as half jackrabbit, half wolf, or as a man totally without fear.

The Humane Association had quickly become one of California's most powerful civic organizations, and Burnham, now part of an eccentric brain trust that was getting his own innovative animal project off the ground. Privately, he mocked Humane societies as small-minded and sentimental, full of romantics who'd rushed to save flies from murderous spiders. It was foolish. It was foolish, Burnham felt, to fritter away our money and time on silly emotional things, as proposed by so-called animal lovers. At a time when America roiled with so many substantial opportunities and terrors.

Remember, this is early 1900s. The idea was already making its way through U.S. House of Representatives in a form of a bill introduced by one of Burnham's partners, the Louisiana Congressman Robert Burchard. Theodore Roosevelt, a friend of Burnham's, had been so impressed with the idea a few years earlier that the newspapers reported his hearty approval and promise of cooperation. The New York Times called the idea practical and timely.

Editorials around the country claimed the idea's time had come or it hadn't come soon enough. Apparently, the animals tasted pretty good too, especially the fatty brisket part, which could be cured into a delicacy that a support of New York Times editorial was calling Lake Cow Bacon. Toughness is only skin deep. Broussard's office was receiving laudatory letters from ordinary citizens, commanding his initiative taking the ingenuity,

several volunteer to be part of the expedition to bring the Great Beast back. In other words, in the encroaching malaise of 1910, it was easy to be gripped by brilliance of hippopotamus scheme, to feel hippopotamus's resonating just not as a way of sidestepping

catastrophic famine, but as a symbol of a merit greatness being renewed. Burnham's generation had seen the railroad get sinked across the wild landscape like a bridle and near solid swarms of buffalo. Passenger pigeons get erased. America had dynamited fish out of rivers, dredged waterways, felled and burned forest, peeled silver from the raw wreckage of what had once been mountains.

The frontier was now closed. This nation has reached a stage in its development where we should take stock of our assets and make full use of them in an intelligent matter. And if we'd learned to swallow raw oysters and suck the meat out of crabs, the paper argued why couldn't we also embrace the plump beast, which has a smile like an old-fashioned fireplace. In late January 1900, the novelist and war correspondent Richard Harding Davis was sailing from England to Cape Town on a ship called the SS Scott.

The journey lasted 17 days, and every night Davis noticed the men on deck, would gather around the small reserved man with piercing blue eyes. The crowd consisted of big game hunters and career soldiers, many of whom had held command in British wars in India or Sudan. Roughneck, capable survivors, in other words, with their own yarns of to spin and advice to give. But they all sat like school kids, pelting the quiet man with questions. The man explained to them how to tell a column of dust

raised by a cavalry with one kicked up by a wagon train. How to read the speed of a horse from its prints, how to conceal a campfire. The crowd was impressed with the quickness and clarity of the man's answers. But more impressed that in the couple of instances when he wasn't able to answer, he told them so. It was a unique combination of mastery and humility. This man was Frederick Russell Burnham. Of course. On his way back to Africa, seven years after the first impulsive trip.

The Second Boer War was not going well for the British when Burnham received the call. The Boers had surprised colonists shattering their imperial confidence with a string of shocking and decisive victories right after the combat had started the previous fall. Like a lot of freelance adventurers involved in the war and even many British citizens, Burnham felt great respect for the other side. He was awed by the Boers, in fact. He believed that they were uniquely menacing adversaries because, like the best scouts of the American Southwest, they'd somehow retained the instincts and sentences and senses of more primitive men. In a way, Burnham considered himself a bore at heart,

trapped in the wrong nation or time. His entire life he'd felt people nudging him toward a world of soft carpets, soft food, soft life, soft men and women, but sometimes he'd wished he'd never learn to read or form any conception of duty, civilization, or religion. For then,

he might have been outwardly, as he was at heart, a thorough savage. Another man, known as the Black Panther of the Veld. One of the craftiest men I ever met, Burnham told in interview 30 years later. He was a man of extraordinary power. The Black Panther's name, Fritch Duskane. Burnham had heard he'd adopted the name as a boy after watching a wild panther stalk its prey at a watering hole.

Descane noticed how efficient the animal was and had always waited to attack intent and totally untroubled until the other animal was compromised. The boy vowed to emulate the panther and made it his totem. The panther, Burnham wrote, was a wild predator no one had ever succeeded in taming. By the Second Boer War, Descane had become just as cunning and sinister. Descane would spend the conflict trying to kill Burnham, and Burnham was assigned to kill Descane. Burnham called him the humane epitome of sin and deception.

Another writer described him as a walking, living, breathing, searing, killing, destroying, torch of hate. He was only one of countless threats Burnham had to dodge during the war as his commander sent him to infiltrate and sabotage the scurrying deadly remnants of the Boer Army. Burnham's exploits were numerous and bizarre. Once he hit for two days and nights inside an ardvark hole. Another time he floated down a river disguised as a dead cow, drifting under a fresh, fleshy hide with two eye holes cut on. of it to size up an enemy camp downstream. In the spring of 1900, he was captured by Boer Scouts, but managed to conceal his identity. The Boers had given index cards describing the famous Frederick Russell Burnham was supposedly ruthless, godless, illiterate rogue from the American West.

Realizing this, Burnham sparked an erudithological debate with one of his captors. Was baptism by immersion the one true root of salvation, or was it baptism by sprinkling? Then he followed up by reciting some poetry. Eventually he slipped away from the Boers wagon train in the dark as daybreak. He hunkered in a fallow field hidden just barely by four inches of vegetation and resigned himself to lie there in the heat with his hat over his head for camouflage, until the sunset again and it was safe to move on. Stuck in the brush, he became fixated on a thick ear of corn he jammed in his breast pocket

before escaping, worried it was sticking up just enough beneath his shirt to give him away. He was already carrying one whole biscuit and a fragment of a second. The corn suddenly seemed to him like a horrible indulgence. What a fool to be such a glutton for food. I was not living up to the traditions of the American scout. But a boar patrol came and went. Burnham had waited them out, invisibly. After setting out, Burnham encountered a group of boars in the distance and his horse was shot. The animal fell on him. His spine burned. He assumed his back was broken, but he managed to reach his target anyway, a specific point on the railway beside the distillery, traveling the rest of the way on foot, vomiting blood and compressing his abdomen with both hands to lessen the pain

slightly, as though he were holding his guts together manually. At one point a commander sat on horseback less than 20 yards away from where Burnham was hiding, chastising his men for their ineptitude. Eventually, the troops gave up and moved on. Slowly, Burnham's injuries healed the darkness of his daughter's death, dissipating. His wife, Blanche, had given birth to another child, a son named Bruce. They joined Fred in England. Fred is their oldest son. By 1905, the couple were hatching a plan to return their family to Rhodesia and restart their lives.

The Burnham's oldest child, Roderick, was now 19. 18 years old and in school back in California, living with his grandmother. One night that October he woke and ran to her, shrieking from a nightmare, he claimed he had watched his little brother chase a toy boat into the deep water and sink to his death. The next day, a telegram arrived from England. It was from Blanche and Fred. And it read, Bruce drowned. It was during this time that Burnham started to think seriously and ambitiously about an idea he

had many years earlier. Maybe it was because Bruce's death had made the horror of starvation feel fresh again, or maybe it was because Burnham was marooned at home, glaring at the arid and relatively lifeless landscape around him. A place he knew that had already been drained of so much of its wild, edible game by short-sighted hunters. Eventually he sat down to write an article about this idea of his. Hoping one of the major magazines back east might be talked into publishing it. There is in Africa a wonderfully varied range of interesting animals. Most of the desirable ones could easily be introduced into our own southwest. This is when he started thinking about bringing in hippopotamuses. And these two guys, make no mistake, are, I mean, what we would

consider to be man's man. No question. So transplanting African animals by Major Frederick Russell Barnum was published in New York's independent magazine in January of 1910. It was March 24th, 1910. Under discussion was H.R. 23261, a bill to appropriate $250,000 for the importation of useful new animals into the United States. The hippo bill, as the public would come to understand it, had been introduced by Louisiana Congressman Robert Bouchard, who had limited himself to a very short statement at the start of the hearing, not wanting to detroit. from the impressive roster of experts he had assembled three gentlemen, who probably have devoted more time than almost anyone else to this matter. But the proposition had eventually

broken apart in the churning, acidic stomach of Washington politics. An enemy of Roosevelt's in Congress had lumped the president's support for the plan into a broader petty attack. Importing antelopes and giraffes suddenly became politically impossible. The experience had left Burnham angry, mostly at himself. He'd been naive enough to believe that America made decisions about its future in a more common sense of woe. Bouchard, for his part, had locked onto the potential of African animals for his own idocratic reasons, and they did not initially have anything to do with food. Cousin Bob had actually set out to solve a different crisis for his constituents. The crisis was a flower. The water high since had been brought to New Orleans in 1984.

distributed as gifts by the Japanese delegation to an international cotton exposition. The pale lavender flowers had gradually planted them as decorations around the city and garden ponds. They multiplied rapidly. The plant reproduces asexually. Soon they were spreading through local waterways, clotting into impenipateral maps, then drifting toward the mouth of the Mississippi like big menacing hairballs toward a drain. By 1910, when Broussaut introduced the bill, the flowers had been, plaguing his state for at least a decade.

They'd clogged up streams, made shipping routes that had previously moved millions of tons of freight, innavigable. They'd blanketed rivers and wetlands, hogging the oxygen and killing resources, into a chain of dead zones. They clean a stream today, and the mouth of it is covered all over again

with the same plant. They'd even tried throwing oil. But the plant would just sink to the bottom, wait for the disturbance to end, and then send out another bulb, and rise again. When it occurred to Bershard that perhaps some animal could be brought to Louisiana to swallow this particular problem up, and he seems to have hit on the hippopotamus. After encountering the curious aging bureaucrat, he'd now called to the brief House Agricultural Committee just before Burnham, William Newton, Irwin. Irwin was a veteran researcher of the promological branch of the Bureau of Plant Industry at the U.S. Department of Agricultural, one of the foremost fruit experts in the country.

The only way forward, Irwin concluded, was to find ways of wringing nourishment out the land that now seemed barren or worthless. Vast marshes along the Gulf Coast extracting energy embedded there would require assembling a new set of tools, new technologies. The hippopotamus was one such technology. Like Burnham, he saw the meat question as a test of the American ingenuity and resolve. To defend our freedom, way of life, some generations of Americans are called to go to war. This generation is being called to import hippopotamuses and eat them. When it was Burnham's term to testify, he echoed Irwin's arguments. Burnham challenged the committee to consider how bizarre it is that we eat only cows, pigs, sheep, and poultry,

just four types of animals, basically all of which had themselves been imported by European centuries ago. Why, somewhere along the line, had we stopped feeling entitled to improve our country's food stocks by infusing them with animals from the great global pantry abroad? I think we're allowing one of our greatest assets to lie idle. It was only the passage of time that had made a pork chop or a bowl of chicken soup feel American,

not their actual origins. Time would make hippo roasts, just as familiar. Burnham also noted that hippopotamuses would be the only a few-shades stranger than other animals recently brought into the country. It was an impassioned, impressive testimony, but Congressman Bouchard had invited another speaker that afternoon

who would wind up being the star attraction. Breschard introduced the lecturing on an African continent's wild animals. I now desire to present to the committee Captain Fritz disgain. It was him. the black penter of the veld. Descaine took the floor and sought immediately to establish his singular credibility on the subject at hand. I am much one of the African animals as hippopotamus as he began.

So he's Mr. Big Shot and wants to continue to be a big shot forever. These two men are absolutely fascinating to me. Now at this time, the momentum felt unstoppable. It was a question according to the Washington Post, of only a few years now when large shipments of hippos will be made to America. Now, it wasn't likely that Congress would be able to act on Breschard's appropriation bill before the end of its session, but Bressard, Burtum, and Descaine believed that with the right legwork, a reintroduced version would breeze through the next one.

So they hired a lobbying firm, essentially that they would call the new food supply society and shortly after hearing the congressman invited to Skane and Burnham down to his plantation in Louisiana to hash out some of the preliminary plans. Time had passed and it was the beginning of World War I. The new technological mode of warfare, the gassing machine guns and trenches, had turned us all into military robots, Burnham wrote. He argued that the traditional skills and ethos of self-reliance that those old scouts had taught him as a boy remained as important as ever, and he worried that they were being lost.

Self-reliance was becoming an obsession of Burnham's, the only sensible response to the growing disorder of the world. So he called it the preparedness movement of America. Sound familiar? Yeah, it does, doesn't it? Now, Descaine, still at it. He had worked hard to cobble together a small amount of notary of an influence by the time he appeared at Brousard's hippopotamus hearing. And as the new food supply society bumped along, he was determined to not let any of it go.

He branched off on his own, marshalling all his entrepreneurial energy to stay in the limelight. He wound up spiraling into darkness. By 1917, disgame was a suspected murderer, a fugitive. a fake film producer, a formerly dead botanist, and likely still a German spy. But it was taking American authorities time to piece this altogether. The summer, he resurfaced in Washington, D.C., and was very quietly puttering around under his own name, trying desperately to latch onto some kind of living. He was arrested in New York in December of 1917, charged with insurance fraud.

Investigators allege that, aside from orchestrating a skisketing, to claim the insurance money for a film he blew up on. He was running a similar parallel fraud, one that accounted for Inspector Tunney's original arson case in Brooklyn. I mean, it's amazing. He's in jail. He goes in front of the judge, and he, in court one day, collapses and claims to have been suddenly paralyzed from the waist down.

Nobody really believed him, but they stuck him with pins. They stuck things under his toenails. they tortured him, and he never wriggled once. The nurses loved him. They would lift his slack body up wherever it needed to go. He got lighter and lighter, the nurses said. And then... So he talked them into letting him be by the window,

and the bird started eating out of his hand. He wasn't an old man, but he seemed like one. Then one night, he escaped. He had managed to acquire two small hacksaw blades and had been quietly going at the window bars day after day as he sat in his wheelchair. Eventually, he got all the way through two of them and just past midnight, Tuesday, May 27, 1919,

four days before he would finally have been extradited to England, he squeezed out. He'd been faking paralysis for seven months. He later claimed to have been extradited to England. been vigorously massaging his legs to keep his muscles conditioned during his twice daily visits to the bathroom. After wiggling through the window, he leaps six feet onto the roof of a neighboring ice house, or perhaps shimmied down using a blanket as a rope, then he leaped again from there to the ground and still even to display his agility, did not even give him his liberty.

Duskane was then forced to climb a brick wall about six feet high and an iron fence with menacing spikes, about eight feet high. Then after he'd done all that, he lurched down 27th Street toward Hudson River, hopped the ferry. to Hoboken and disappeared. A month later, he messaged a letter to a friend in New York proposing to lay out the dramatic mechanics of his escape. The operation involved two swashbuckling fictitious accomplices and a foreign sports car zooming away in the night. The letter was kind of a press release. He wanted his friend to get the story published and keep as many clippings as you can get. Now, there are no herds of hippopotamuses in Louisiana. No one ever set foot in the

bayous of the Gulf Coast. The idea seems merely to have evaporated unspectacularly over a very long period of time. Richard, meanwhile, made one set of meticulous political calculations after another about society's next move, postponing the introduction of his bill from one upcoming session of Congress to the next. But he'd soon leave the House for the Senate. Then in 1918, he passed away. Irwin, the Agricultural Department bureaucrat, the old man who had told the Washington Post I hope to live long enough to see herds of these broad-backed beast wallowing in the southern marshes and rivers, fattening on the millions of tons of food with the weights their arrival, died within a year of his appearance at the congressional hearing.

Eventually, officials at the Department of Agriculture contradicted Irwin's reasoning in the press, insisting that hippos were a terrible idea, and that America ought to work instead to turn those useless seeming marshes into grassy pastures and give the South Bens. beef cattle to raise on that reclaimed land. Because people ate beef, because beef was a normal meat to eat. This was a story by a John Muellum, American hippopotamus. And that is how we almost had hippopotamuses. In 1836, Major George H. Crosman, United States Army, who

was convinced from his experiences in the Indian Wars in Florida that camels would be useful as beasts of burden. He encouraged the War Department to use camels for transportation. In his annual report for 1854, Jefferson Davis wrote, I again invite attention to the advantages to be anticipated from the use of camels for military and other purposes. They appropriated 30, thousand dollars for the project. They attempted breeding program for the camels, but plans were put aside when Secretary Davis wrote that the animals were to be tested to determine if they could be used to accomplish a military objective.

Early in the Civil War, an attempt was made to use camels to carry mail between Fort Mohave, New Mexico, territory on the Colorado River to San Pedro, California. But the attempt was unsuccessful after the commanders of both posts objected. Later in the war, the army had no further interest in the animals, and they were sold at auction in 1864. The last of the animals from California were reportedly seen in Arizona in 1891. In the spring of 1861, Camp Verde fell in a Confederate hands until recaptured in 1865. The Confederate commander issued a receipt to the United States for 19 mules, 80 camels, and two Egyptian camel drivers.

There were reports of the animals being used to transport baggage, but there was no evidence of their being assigned to Confederate unions. There were estimated to be more than 100 camels at the camp, but there may have been others roaming the countryside. Government was able to round up 66 camels, which it sold in 1866. Among the reasons the camel experiment failed was that it was supported by Jefferson Davis, who left the United States to become the president of the Confederate United States of America. The U.S. Army was a horse and mule organization whose soldiers did not have the skills to control a foreign asset.

One of the male animals at one fort was killed by another male during rutting season. The lieutenant, Sylvester Maui, forwarded the dead animal's bones to the Smithsonian, where they were pleased to put it on display. One of the few camel drivers, whose name, survives was High Jolly. He lived out his life in the United States after his death in 1902. He was buried in Quartzite, Arizona. His grave is marked by a pyramid topped with a metal profile of a camel.

Now, High Jolly was an Ottoman subject of Syrian and Greek parentage, and in 1856, became one of the first camel drivers ever hired by the U.S. Army to lead the camel driver experiment in the southwest. and he became a living legend, once insulted because he had not been invited to a German picnic in Los Angeles. He broke up the gathering by driving into it on a yellow cart pulled by two of his pet camels. And that pretty much ends the camels in America. So I'll put links up to everything that I talked about so you can go in depth if you want to. I just find these stories so fascinating. the attempt to get them here, and then camels, and the attempt to actually make camels a useful animal here in the U.S., fascinate me, and both failed.

Thanks for listening, and this is a Chewing the Fat Saturday edition.