Chewing the Fat with Jeff Fisher - Jeffy's Corner: American Hippopotamus

Episode Date: February 21, 2015

Jeff Fisher is live from 6am to 8am ET, Saturday. Listen for free on TheBlaze Radio Network.Follow Jeff at twitter.com/JeffyMRAAmerican Hippopotamus is available here: http://www.amazon.com/American-Hippopotamus-Jon-Mooallem-ebook/dp/B00HEWJTF4 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to the Jeff Fisher Show. This last week, I have tried to finish a book that I can't finish. I haven't finished. I haven't found the time to finish you. But where I'm at is amazing. This story is, it's fascinating. It's called American Hippoponimus. It's by John Muellem.

And it's on atavis.com. It's like, I don't know, three or four bucks or whatever for the book. But now I haven't finished it yet. And I mean, I know how it ends, right? I mean, we all know how it ends. But getting there is the story. Now, the story, well, the story intertwines the lives of two men. One was Frederick Russell Burnham and Fritz Duques, Dukes, D-U-K-E-S-N-E.

Now, Fritz is kind of a bad guy. He's known as the Black Panther of the Veld. And at one point, Frederick and Fritz were both commissioned to kill each other. But at one point in their lives, they come together. And Burnham, you know, he was a patriot. He was American, integrity, and Duquesne was this bad guy. Just, you know, pathological liar, megalomaniac, bad guy.

But they came together for this one cause. Now, Burnham was this guy. I mean, I'm going to read you a little bit from the book on Burnham. This guy was amazing. Frontier's Tiersman, soldier of fortune, spent his life leaping into conflicts with American Indians, and colonial wars in Africa. he was a scout, you know, kind of like a military war scout, spy, they slinked into enemy territory to gather intelligence or cut supply lines.

And he, I mean, he knew how to live on his own out in the woods, right, out in the wilderness. He, in this, from the book, he has trained himself to endure the most appalling fatigues, hunger, thirst, and wounds, has subdued the brain, infant patients, have learned to force every nerve in his body to absolute obedience to still even the beating of his heart. He reads the face of nature as you read your morning paper. That's what, this was a story on him from this newspaper guy, Richard Harding Davis. Now, I'm starting to have, reading this story makes me have. a little bit of optimism for the country. Because this country has been in turmoil, you know, for, well, forever. And we've come through it, right?

So one of my favorite lines, one of my acquaintance, called him the most complete human being who ever lived. And the cool thing, this guy, this is how amazing this guy was. He was the inspiration for the Boy Scouts and Indiana. Jones. I know. I mean, this guy was unbelievable. And it started, his family moved out west. They were somewhere in the middle of the country.

I don't know. Iowa, some Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin, somewhere in there. And his dad had an accident and screwed up his breathing. So they moved out west to California with the wife and he had a brother and a sister. And I don't know how many, I don't know how many were in his brood.

And they went to California. And then the dad died and he was 14. So the mom packed up and went back to wherever they came from or to her family in the Midwest. And he was like, you know what? No, I'm going to stay here. And so at 14, he's riding the Pony Express delivering mail in California. And he was like one of the best.

He would ride and ride and ride. and he did that for a while and then some of his family in the back in the Midwest were worried about him. They were worried for his soul. He talked about how religious they were. So they sent for him and he was like, okay, I'll go back. Fine.

I'll go back. So he goes back. And he's there for a short period of time and he's like, I have got to get out of here. These people are driving me insane. So he sneaks away. And he ends up in the great state of Texas. And he gets in with these old cowboys and old warmen who had fought the Indians and fought all over the country.

And they were old now, right? And most of the wars were over for them. And they had learned how to live on their own and out of the woods. And he just stayed with them. He stayed with one particular old guy. I forget his name. And this old guy just took him under his wing and talked. him everything and showed him, you know, showed him how to live on his own and sent him out

and made him do things and suffer and learn how to take care of himself. And then, and so in the, after all of this, I guess we later find out too that while he was back in the Midwest from after California, he, I guess he met some girl and fell in love. and then when he snuck away, later on in, I don't know how many years, he sent for her. And they were, you know, together for forever. But in the late 1800s and the early 1900s, the U.S. was changing so fast and growing, and the population was growing that we had a huge meat shortage. Did you know that?

I didn't. And so they were struggling. The government and the people were trying to figure out what to do. Restaurants were setting the prices were going through the roof. The country was thinking about considering dogs to eat. They didn't know what to do, right? And he thought of the idea of breeding hippopotamuses in the United States. Import hippopotamuses from Africa, set them in the swamp lanes along the Gulf

Coast, raise them for food, and turn America into a nation of hippo ranchers. Now, in fact, during this time, a congressman, this, what was his name, Congressman Bruce Sard, I think, or something like that, he dispatched an agent who was raised in Africa down to the south of the United States to study the feasibility of hippos in the swamps. and he wrote a big report titled Why and How to Place Hippoponimuses in the Louisiana Lowlands and he concluded that it would be perfect. I mean, they started calling it Lake Cow Bacon.

Right? How cool is that? Now, like I said, right? I mean, we know how it turned out. One of the fascinating stories inside of this is that, and we little bit of it from David Barton yesterday on Glenn's show when he talked about how Islam was woven into the fabric

of the U.S. the way President Obama had said. And we found out that, well, they were really woven into the fabric of the U.S. because they were the slave traders and got the slaves. Yeah. But we did know that there were some Muslims, and this would be

in the 1800s sometime, I'm not sure of the year, when they brought in camels from Africa to fight the Indians and do some battles in the desert, which this Burnham saw and was a little bit a part of, because Jefferson Davis, who later fought for the South, was a battle warrior and was up in Alaska and came back to the deserts to fight, and he was a part of bringing the camels to the U.S., or at least they were there and he was going to use them.

And in the book, David talked about how they were too slow and they were called nicknames and stuff. But in the book on American hippopotamus, they talk about how the soldiers laughed at the guys that were ordered to ride the camels in the desert that the guys wouldn't ride them. They were like, I'm not riding that. These guys are all making fun of me. I'm just riding the slow hippo in the middle of the desert. I'm not riding that. So they were left to wander, right? And we found out from David Barton that that's where some of the Muslims came into the U.S.

because they were commissioned to take care of the camel since they knew how to raise them and train them, feed them, that kind of thing. So later on in the book, it talks about Burnham going out because they were just, they were left to wander, left to Rome in the desert of the U.S. So he later went with, I don't know if it was him or the other, or Fritz. Anyway, they ended up getting some money because they went back out and rounded up as many of the camels as they could find that were left wandering around. Anyway, that's, I mean, that's where I'm at. Yeah, I still have a little ways to go. I'm not sure how far I've got to go in this book.

I just keep, I start reading it and if something comes up or I have to put it down. I mean, I'll let you know how it ends. I mean, you know how it ends. We are, you know, the commercial, commercial doesn't say hympo, it's what's for dinner. So, I mean, we know how it ends. But it's fascinating. And this, John Muebill has done a great job with American hippopotamus.

So if you have an opportunity, it's, you know, short, good read. You may actually have some time in your life, Snowdy. purchase American hippopotamus. Take the time and read it in front of the fireplace and say to yourself, wow, the commercial actually could have said, Hippo, it's what's for dinner.