Citation Needed - The American Hippo Project

Episode Date: August 17, 2022

Frederick Russell Burnham DSO (May 11, 1861 – September 1, 1947) was an American scout and world-traveling adventurer. He is known for his service to the British South Africa Company and to the British Army in colonial Africa, and for teaching woodcraft to Robert Baden-Powell in Rhodesia. He helped inspire the founding of the international Scouting Movement. Our theme song was written and performed by Anna Bosnick. If you’d like to support the show on a per episode basis, you can find our Patreon page here.  Be sure to check our website for more details.  

It's like, it's like a short rib. Ooh, I love those, but it's a rattlestick so they're all ribs. Well, but really short, really short, right. Hey guys, hi Eli. What do you, what do you do on outside the studio? Like holding the door closed. Oh, thank you, Jerry. No, I just thought I'd meet my best pals outside, you know.

It's a beautiful night. I thought we could. What did you do, Eli? This week's assay is about the American hippo project. So he probably put a hippo in the studio. Did you put a hippo in the studio? I did not put a hippo in the studio. Well, that's good.

One, isn't enough for a breeding population. Eli, what the, how many are there? A lot of them know, okay, a lot. Why are there all those holes in the walls? Okay, so I figured that they were cranky because they were hungry. So I got like a big bag of marbles to feed them. But now when they poop, it's like a shotgun.

It's just, it's everywhere. I'll call the insurance company, see if it's covered. Wait, it's not. Does that, we are farmers' thing though. Bum, buh, buh, buh, buh, buh, buh, just come, blow, you know? Hello and welcome to Citation Needed, the podcast where we choose a subject for you to single article about it on Wikipedia and pretend we're experts because this is the internet and that's how it works now I'm no I'm gonna be leading this safari tonight, but to do that right I'm gonna need some megafauna first up two guys who are just now learning that hippos in the rye don't really eat marbles

Tom and Eli and also they will kick you right out of the zoo for trying to feed them Jokes on them more marbles for me now for trying to feed him. Fuck it, man. Jokes on them, more models for me now. Ha ha. There you go. Ha ha ha ha. And also joining us are two men who, based on the smell,

thought I was list-ping when I suggested they wear pith hats, heath and sea salt. All right, no. You know the old saying, don't pith on my hat. So, this is really. This is the poop deck all over it. In the poop deckulous. it. Ridiculous. And of course, before we get going, I want to thank the patrons for allowing me to have

a job where I can solve problems by realizing that Pith sounds like piss with a lisp. You'd be surprised how hard a skill that is to monetize. And if you'd like to learn to join their ranks, be sure to stick right to the end of the show. And with that out of the way, tell us what person plays thing concept phenomenon or event we'll be talking about today. We're going to be talking about Frederick Russell Burnham, Frederick Joubert Ducane and hippos. Okay. So who were Frederick Russell Burnham, Frederick Joubert Ducane, and also did you say hippo who what are you said hippos at the end? Yes, I did.

I did say hippos. Hippos will be involved. But let me start with Frederick Burnham and Frederick Duquesne. They were both spies and they were bitter enemies throughout most of their adult lives. Oh, one of them were all white, the other were all black because I might have read about their exploits before. So Burnham was an American military scout who worked for the British Army in South Africa during the Boer War.

And Duquesne had pretty much the same job for the other side, the Boer Republicans. The Boers were Dutch speaking colonizers in the region. So neither side is the good guys. They're both just fighting over who gets to pillage gold and other resources from the indigenous African people in the region. Burn them in Duquesne were both just terrible people in their own way, but they were also both amazing at their jobs. And at one point, they were each assigned to murder each other during that war. But eventually they came together and became allies in the United States of America, thanks to a delightful animal called the hippopotamus.

Do I? Man, if I had a nickel for every time a bitter international dispute was solved by a hippo in America, why I'd have a podcasters 401k. We should, we should personal like a 401 comments. Am I right? See, see, if y'all would become patrons, we would really appreciate it. It's like, it's rough out here. Right.

So let's meet our two main characters other than the hippo. I'll start with Burnham, who's known as the greatest military scout of all time. The scout was positioned in old time warfare. They were spies who would sneak into enemy territory by blending into the natural surroundings. Okay, I can't help but picture like a British guy with a pipe hanging out of his mouth, but dress like a fire hydrant downtown, just whistling and walking casually. Okay, well, Burnham was freakishly good at this. According to journalist Richard Harding Davis, who covered Burnham's military career, quote,

Burnham has trained himself to endure the most appalling fatigues, hunger, thirst, and wounds, has subdued the brain to infinite patience, has learned to force every nerve in his body to absolute obedience obedience to still even the beating of his heart. He reads the face of nature as you read your morning paper and quote, well, pooping. I mean, like everybody can technically stop their heart. It's starting it again afterwards. That's the trick.

All right. So I'll start at the trick. All right. So I'll start at the beginning with Burnham. He was born in Minnesota in 1861 and he started learning to be a special ops ninja scout guy at age one, really. 1862, the colonists of the region got into a conflict with the Native American Lakota tribe and there was a raid on the town where Burnham's family was living. Fredericks' dad was gone, and his mom saw a band of Lakota coming toward their house,

so she decided to flee into the woods. But she wouldn't be able to run away fast enough while carrying a baby, so she hid Fredericks under a big pile of corn, hoping it would save him from a fire if the house got burned down. And that's exactly what happened. When she came back the next morning, the cabin was burned down. And that's exactly what happened when she came back the next morning. The cabin was burned down, but Frederick was fine, having stayed completely silent and still for the entire thing. And later in life, Frederick would write, I had faithfully carried out my first orders of silent obedience. Okay. I am sure that there is a non pop corn related reason that corn would

protect him from the fire. I just, I'm damned if I can figure out what it was though. Man, I think it's the popcorn thing. I just, I feel like I have to point out that maybe mom could have run just fine carrying the baby because like, you know, she either had timed her mile time with and without baby to really know this ahead of time. Or she ran a handful of steps and thought, fuck this baby and chuck them in the compost. Yeah. Had to come up with a explanation later. Well, yes, you see I chimed my miles. Okay, well, it worked. Frederick lived then at age 14 while living in Iowa, still technically one big corn pile too.

That's probably right. So at age 14, Burnham ran away from home, stole a canoe and rode down the Mississippi. Eventually he got to Texas where he met an old scout guy who taught him all the ways of the craft. And eventually Burnham could snatch a compass from his hand and the whole thing from there. Burnham got into mining and he actually had a small gold strike at age 22. It made him enough money to go back to Iowa, find his best girl, get married, have a, and moved to California to start a citrus farm.

But he sucked at running a business. And you can't really just rip fully formed oranges out of the ground and then sell them and then leave like when you have a mine. So it's kind of out of his economic comfort zone and the orange grove completely failed. I just want to point out that I like that old timey dudes had and then abandoned their families as a footnote the way we would describe playing a little sports in college today. I had two children, left them motherfuckers alone and then they're all going to rest in his tail. Okay, no, he's still in his family though. In 1893, Bernamude's family to South Africa to

find a, you know, a new frontier to pillage. Yeah, much longer canoe ride though. This time, yeah, way longer. Pretty much as soon as he arrived, a series of military conflicts flared up and he got hired by the British army to be a scout. And by the time the Boer war got started, he was a highly respected veteran and got to use all his weird abilities to great effect. The war stories about him were plentiful. For example, he wants successfully hid from the enemy inside an art var coal for about 48 hours before finishing the submission to disrupt their supply line. Another time, he floated down a river hidden inside the carcass of a dead cow. I guess he killed and he cut out eye holes so he could spy on the

other people. I can't think about that. Tom, Tom seems strange. Seems like a lot of work to waterproof a cow carcass to get a river's current floating time worth of surveillance. On the right. Also, how much loob do you need to fit a man inside an art of arcs hole? War is really hell. It really is. I'm going to talk to wagon.

That was in the game, right? So the game he's talking about is fucking art fart, by the way, kiss anyone. I don't know that one. So in the spring of 1900, Boer War was in full swing and Burnham was captured. The Boer's had an intel about Burnham by this point written on index cards describing him as quote, a godless illiterate rogue from the American West. Burnham saw one of the cards ahead of time, though. So to hide his identity, he started up an argument with one of his captors about whether baptism by sprinkling technically counted as the magic spell.

Did you have to do the full immersion to get into heaven. And then he recited some poetry on top of that. The captors decided he obviously wasn't the godless, the literate rogue from the intel, so they did not execute him. And he was able to sneak away that night. And that, ladies and gentlemen, etc, is the only time poetry was ever used. Interesting side note. So that war ended with the British winning and Burnham got a bunch of honors for all his heroism along the way. In 1905, he moved back to California. And once again, he hated the distinct lack of pillaging indigenous people in the environment and other greedy white guy stuff. He was pissed. None of that was available. So he hatched a new idea

and started writing about it. In 1906, he published an article describing his plan to start importing large exotic animals from Africa to the American Southwest and turn the American Southwest back into a big hunting ground like it used to be. He's got a pillaging based vision board with one huge hippo at the center of what if it is I and not the hippo who hungers. All right. That brings us to our other main human character, Frederick Ducane. Frederick Ducane is the worst Burnham sucks. Burnham was definitely an asshole white guy, but Duquesne was all that stuff. Plus, he's going to be a literal Nazi. We'll

get to it. Yeah, let me start at the beginning. Duquesne was born in Cape Colony, now South Africa, and his parents were part of the Boer community. A big part of their diet was hippo meat, and as a young boy, he was in charge of selling the hippo fat to soap makers. Wait, okay, hold on. Was that a hard job or an easy job? Like, was he in competition with the other kids selling their baskets of hippo fat? Were they hawking the fat like carnival barkers? And they have like trench coats full of pockets of greasy hippo fat. I need a lot more hippo fat selling detail

here. I feel like it's a heart like like you can't afford not to buy this. Hippo fat seems like a hard sell to me. That's it. I got hip. So But now it's become meaningless. Now it's meaningless. Hippo, hippo, hippo. I don't know what it means anymore. So as teenager, you got sent to a military school in Belgium. Hippo, hippo. And then in 1899, his father called him back to South Africa to fight in the Boer War. And by the time he got home, his father had been killed by the British forces and they had sent the rest of his family to really shitty labor camps. So Ducane became at that moment a murder robot with a blood feud against England and any

of their allies. And most of that was spent tracking around the woods, hiding himself in mud like hunger games and trying to murder the legendary scout, Frederick Burnham, who was probably just hiding in the next mud pit over waiting to murder Ducane in the exact same way. This one on for about two years, but they were both way too good at the mud hiding stuff. So another one got killed. Just two cow carcasses floating down the river with ice slits staring directly at each other.

They probably happened. They're party observers like guys, it doesn't work if you both lie and wait for the other guy. That's nothing now. It's nothing now. So you're the end of that conflict. After both fucking and hard for that's even part of the game. You're both fucking and hard for. So you're the end of that conflict.

After the bowerside was almost completely wiped out, Duquesne got captured by the British and sent to a prison camp in Bermuda, but he managed to escape by tapping out a plan in Morse code to the other prisoners who were going to help with the escape. From there, he made it to the port town of Hamilton and he came the Pimp for a sex worker named Vera. I'm not sure how you just do that, but he just did that. Well, it is he snuck up on her wearing her old pimps, hollowed out skin. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, why didn't you just put those were the eyes were, man, it's so fucking weird. Here's the

thing though, he wasn't interested in the field of sex work. The plan was to use Vera to get information about her clients so he could get off the island and pretty soon that worked. One client was a crew member on a yacht about to sail to Baltimore. So while Vera was doing her thing, Duquesne stole that guy's uniform, snuck onto the yacht and made it to America. I think if your stowaway plan uses sex trafficking as a means, you're a weird problem solver. Thank you. Thank you. There are far more direct ways to answer the question, which of these people works on a plan? Somehow that worked. Actually, I don't realize on, I hope she fucks somebody useful to my plan at some point. Yes. This is going to take place.

So it's a game got a big cow in your room where you have second. How much to put it in the art? This is crazy. I keep walking across the room and the cows eyes following it. It's so creepy. It's like a Scooby-Doo painting in here. So to gain minute to Baltimore and then settled down in New York City where he became a writer and established himself as a big game expert who specialized in stories about hunting in

Africa. And he got himself enough notoriety to get hired by Teddy Roosevelt to be a hunting consultant ahead of Roosevelt's post presidency trip to Africa. Duquesne also started performing a live lecture called East Africa, the Wonderland of Roosevelt's hunt. And as it turned out in 1910, he gave that lecture in Washington, D.C. The same week that a U.S. congressman from Louisiana named Robert Brussard was in town gathering experts to support his big upcoming proposal for some hippo-based legislation.

And that brings us to the first ever hippo-themed hearing on the floor of US Congress. So on March 24th, 1910, Representative Brussard officially proposed HR 23261, a bill that would give $250,000 in funding for importing African hippos and installing a large breeding population in the marshlands of the American South. The idea was meant to solve a problem called the meat question. There was a major meat shortage at the time. Beef prices were soaring. The population was growing quickly and we had not invented like salad yet or like vegetable

sides or you know, not like the seven. Me was the only food in 1910. And according to the law here, his experts were estimating that a giant population of free range hippos in the biyos of Florida, Mississippi and Louisiana would easily yield over a million tons of meat every year. God, I am genuinely sad that this is not a thing. Like not only would I eat a hippo right now if I could, but I would love nothing more than for Florida to be full of angry, angry hippos knocking over fan boats full of Trump voters. This sounds like, yeah, if citation

needed has a through line owning animals, you know nothing about is a strong container. It's fit. Well, but so it's silly as this idea sounds though, you have to compare it to what we actually did with that area. And this is not worse. Also, side note, Richard was actually trying to solve two problems at once with the hippos. The meat shortage was the obvious one that was turning into a national panic, but he also

wanted to fix a local problem with a plant called the water hyacinth. The flowers had overrun the waterways of Louisiana, clogging up shipping routes and killing large populations of fish. The war department had already tried to get rid of the plants, but they kept growing back. In one attempt by the war department, they tried dousing the plants with oil in those water ways to protect the environment. But the high synth plants would just sink to the bottom and then weight it out and then

rise back up and keep growing. And the origin of the high synth makes the story even dumber. They were imported from a completely different habitat in Japan, and they multiplied way too rapidly, leading to an extremely problematic imbalance in the ecosystem. And the proposed solution was to import hippos from a completely different habitat, get them to multiply rapidly, and have the hippos eat all the hyacinth plants. thereby fixing the imbalance in the ecosystem. End of consequences were done.

All right, well, I'm pretty sure that inquiring about their viability and health in that environment would constitute a hippo violation so instead we'll pause for a little apropos of nothing. I'd like to thank my top advisors for coming so quickly. Thank you so much. Of course, Senator. I'm sure, sure, sure. Anything we can do to help sure. We need a few legislative ideas for this next season. Absolutely, sir. How about tax cuts for the middle and lower classes and tax increases on the wealthy? Perhaps comprehensive immigration reform. That sounds pretty boring to me.

I don't know. We productive rights for religion and the government the government's possibly I think in bigger how, how about we submit a bill to get funding to import packs of tigers to patrol the streets of our most dangerous cities to help out with the police shortages. But Sir Tigers don't live in packs. Tribes, whatever they're called, I'm an amologist. But Sir, tigers won't be able to tell the difference between criminals and citizens, don't just attack people and discriminate.

How exactly is that different from regular police officers? I'm fair point, sir, but I just don't think this is gonna work. Okay, all right, different idea. How about we're dealing with the worker shortage But I just don't think this is going to work. Okay. All right. Different idea. How about we're dealing with the worker shortage during the winter and we import polar bears to eat all the snow up here. Polar bears don't eat snow, sir.

Well, and how are they white? I have no idea how to answer that, sir. So if I'm made, perhaps we can discuss the teacher shortage, right? Maybe we open up the discussion and how to cope with that, right? Pretty easy solutions. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Teachers have been leaving the profession and drove since COVID and at their pay cause. Perhaps we invest in education.

We ease the requirements. Maybe we wave the student teaching hours. I like how you think. I once saw a commercial with an owl that had glasses in a graduation cap. How about we import owls as teachers? Well, admittedly, that's probably better than the veterans they're allowing the teaching floor to so okay, okay. And we're back on the front of how to do that essay. He teased us with hippos and then

expected us to give a shit about literally anything else for the last 15 minutes. Thank you. But now we're the hippo part. So he tells how this hippo hearing goes. Finally. Okay. So Brusar. Oh god. Damn experts. Three big experts to give testimony at the hippo hearing. Burnham, Duquesne, and one other guy named William Newton, Erwin. Erwin was an expert on apples, which are a lot like your both. So he was perfect.

Both will keep the doctor away. Yeah, okay. Everyone was first up at the hearing and he tried to explain to the United States House of Representatives that the only reason we don't eat hippo meat is because it's not considered cool. All we had to do was adjust our attitude in a scientific paper on the subject. Erwin compared himself to Christopher Columbus on this topic. And that's not a good sign when someone wants to start importing stuff from Africa. Anyway, according to Erwin, quote, I'm being laughed at just like Columbus being laughed at as he sailed toward what looked like the edge of the earth, but was in reality, a new and nutritionally superior world of hippo brisket. Okay. Hippo brisket sounds amazing.

Oh God, doesn't it though? Also, you can repurpose the smoker as like a six person sauna. So, I'm really disappointed. We're not in this timeline. He's really disappointed. Me too, man. Me too. So next up at the hearing was Frederick Burnham. He expounded on the argument that any aversion to hippo meat is just an arbitrary line about which animals are cool. He explained that we mostly eat cows, pigs, sheep, and poultry, but those were also originally imported to America. And then we stopped adding new animals for no good reason. He also mentioned how we imported African camels to be pack animals in the southwest. And the camels were clearly better than horses on that terrain. But again, the problem

was coolness, which has had to change the attitude because soldiers on horseback would make fun of the soldiers on camels. So everyone started refusing to ride camels and we had to give up the idea. Actually, everyone was just sick of private Smith who every time he mounted a camel was like, hump day, am I right? Am I right guys? Hump day. I feel like we spend way too much of our time travel fiction on like, what if you could

kill Hitler and not nearly enough on what if we were camelboys riding the Southwest territory with a pack full of hippo jerky. Yes. Well, and now we know that all it would have taken was, he's like a little bit of claymation hippos and sunglasses singing Marvin Gaye songs. Right. We know how to tackle this problem. All right.

Well, that brings us to the testimony from Frederick Duquesne, who was a hippo. Burnham finishes talking and sat down and then representative Broussard introduced his final speaker and onto the stage walks Burnham's mortal enemy who he spent two years literally trying to murder in the woods. He was in a hippo out like a whole hippo carcass. He just cut eyes and so how do you recognize him? They didn't see like it just was he covered in mud and fucking in our fire.

So at this point, I'm guessing there was about 10, 20 minutes of death staring between the two guys in complete silence and then, you know, a bunch of peeing to establish dominance. And then Ducaine finally started talking. He explained to the US house exactly how easy it is to domesticate a hippo. Well, according to Frederick Ducaine, hippos are absolutely not dangerous, except, yes, they are very, very dangerous. They're literally the most dangerous, large land animal in the world.

He also added that you can feed milk to a baby hippo from a bottle, just like a baby human. And you can lead it around on a leash, like a pudgy hound. Okay. There is a 100% chance Eli would have one of these as a pet and it would shit unearnous pee pads in his living room. Yeah, one and I named him Sylvester and he would wear a little bow pack and a little tiny head. Nice Sylvester.

Sylvester is a good name for a hip-hop. Can I be honest with you guys? Can I be straight? Yes. His feet from my heart. The joke I spent the most time on for this episode was the hip-hop's name. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, a complete cash. Also with a list, do we do lists? So also he gentlemen. Okay. He hippo.

So importing hippos across continents to a brand new ecosystem. That's a terrible idea. But the word ecosystem had just recently been coined by, you know, some nerd. So nobody cared and their response to the hearing was very positive. One headline said, Hippopotamai for Dixie. The Chicago Tribune ran a story about the hippo plan right above a headline about Del Manico's steakhouse raising prices on steak because the supply of cows was dwindling. And a New York Times editorial praised the delicious flavor of Lake Cow bacon. Oh, God. This is what they call it. Cow bacon. If this doesn't end with all of us getting together for surprise hippo sandwiches, he I am going to be pissed, right? I got a hand

grin for some hippo. And talk to the public and they'll get some hippo stuff. I love a good HLT. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,T. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, we're going out for hippo after this, right guys? Absolutely. Yeah. So the hippo hearing definitely seemed like a big success, but there wasn't enough time to get the money from Congress before the session was over. So they're like, damn it, I knew that staring contest was too long. Presard Burnham and Duquesne set up a group called the new food supply society to lobby for the plan in the next session. But despite their best efforts, in the end, we did not sadly get the American hippo.

The Department of Agriculture eventually decided that, and this is almost their exact words. Okay, we're just doing more beef instead. Have all means weird stop being weird. That was like almost exactly like said. They did not mention anything about the potential downside of a transplanted population of enormous murder cows. They just kind of got lucky with the right answer being no. That being said, some people still argue that diversifying our meat supply with hippos might have been helpful and could have prevented some of the problems that arose with our modern cattle industry like unethical conditions for the livestock, the assumption being that hippos

just wouldn't allow that. Wait a minute, like they literally would just not put up with our shit. Yeah. Our solution to treating cows badly is to just get cows that kick our ass if we try that. What? I mean, again, I'm on board with a lot of this. I'm just saying. Hip hop run is a very different movie than chicken run. So what other problem cited by critics of the cow dominated meat industry is something called blue baby syndrome, which can be caused when infants drink

well water that's contaminated with fertilizer runoff from feed lots. Apparently the baby literally turns blue. Now I'm not sure if hippos are the best way to prevent dead children, but that's the theory. They might need feed lots too. Look, our track record of importing African natives to the American South is so bad that I feel like we just toss all those plans out without bothering to debate them in the houses of Congress.

Right. That's a fair rule of thumb. Just scratch all of that. Yeah. That's fair. Now it's time for the extended animal house clothes. Here's what happened with Frederick Burnham. Pretty soon after the hippo project fizzled out, World War I started happening and Burnham

got all amped up about the preparedness movement. That was the belief that America would need to enter the war at any minute and that President Woodrow Wilson was a cock who was refusing to build a big enough army. So Burnham organized the San Francisco Preparedness Parade. He lined up 200 nurses in uniform, 500 surgeons, 200 optometrists for a lot of stuff. One Vodvillean actress dressed as the goddess of preparedness like you do. And something called the division of six footers. That was literally just a few rows of tall. This is 1916. So that was a grand spectacle. You were born to late. Heath. We all could have had your own parade. So he set up that parade, but then some anti-war protesters set off a

suitcase bomb to shut down the war hawk parade. So didn't really happen. Come to the preparedness, freak show, see the towering 5 11 brigade, the enormous 180 pound man, and don't miss the woman that works outside the home. A suit. Okay, the only way to stop a bad guy preparing for bombs is a good guy with a suitcase bomb. Yeah, America. Yeah, bombs for peace. That's so fucking weird. We've been in a war.

I'm going to blow you up. I got to cut that or Ted Cruz is going to use that later this week. So from there, Frederick Burnham just kind of faded into obscurity, except for one other detail. He ended up being the prototype person who inspired the boy scouts of America. The group's founder, Robert Baden Powell, was one of Burnham's commanders in Africa. And Baden Powell's vision was to create a generation of young boys who would become, you know, old, timey special ops ninjas, just like Burnham. The signature necker chiff on the Boy Scout uniform is actually based on Burnham.

He would always wear those. And their motto, the prepared, is an homage to his philosophy. Also the very long history of bigotry in the postcards. He, I appreciate what you're doing there, but bad as he was, I feel like that was before his time. That's a grand old tradition. He was setting up other bigotries that are that maybe led to that. it wouldn't surprise me. So that brings us to one of the best extended animal house closes of all time. The story of Frederick Ducane, it is far from over. After being forced to give up the hippo idea, he decided to pursue a different exotic animal plan.

In 1911, he organized a publicity stunt for a matchstick company. Ducane would bring a band of indigenous Peruvian people and have them drive a large herd of imported llamas from New York City to the match stick companies headquarters in Ohio. You might be wondering, how is that even remotely related to match sticks? How would that sell match sticks? No fucking idea. Go fuck yourself. It was 1911. So it was a big public spectacle, like, you know, tall people walking.

At the last second, someone pointed out, okay, but how does that sell any matchsticks? And the whole thing got canceled, I guess. Well, a week before one of the Peruvians posted a picture of a plus, I had modeled on their Twitter, called their ugly. That's why it was canceled. That's why it was canceled. All right, he's, but if I were in the market for matchsticks and one brand went through all the effort to drive a herd of llamas from New York, Ohio with a team of Peruvian llama herders, right. And the other guy's fucking didn't. I know who's matchsticks side by by wait, you'd buy the ones that did that.

Or did you do that? You earned my business. Absolutely. Okay. All right. So I don't mind saying it. He this whole essay has a things that very nearly happened to feel to it so far. Thank you. I was promised hippo facts. So from there to Kane tried to cash in on his relationship with Teddy Roosevelt again. This time, Roosevelt was doing a tour of South America. So Ducaine made a plan to produce a documentary featuring himself as the star doing all the stuff that Roosevelt would be doing. He got funding from Goodyear Tires by promising to also pillage some rubber from South America

along the way. So with that money, Ducaine bought 20,000 feet of film for $80,000 and he ensured it pin in that and he got ready to leave. But the documentary never happened because World War One broke out right as Ducaine set sale for South America. So instead of doing the documentary, he got to Brazil and he found a German consulate and he became a spy because that's the other thing he knows how to do. I feel like Duquesne's friends like stopped making plans with him because you knew he was

always going to cancel to be a spy. So like I'm going to see this movie by myself. So as a spy, Duquesne's main focus was bombing British cargo ships. He would pose as a Dutch botanist and he'd trick British sailors into carrying rare orchid bulbs to his relatives abroad on the ship. But the packages would actually contain slow fused time bombs that would blow up the ship in the middle of the ocean. So Dukane had a blood feud with England, but more specifically, he had a blood feud with Lord Kitchener of England, who was in charge of the British army that killed his father and burned down all the Boer villages in Africa. So here's the revenge plot, at least according to Duquesne. This is what he told a biographer.

In 1916, he claimed he snuck his way onto the HMS Hampshire by pretending to be a Russian count. Lord Kitchener was on the same boat. When they got close to Scotland, Ducaine signaled a German new boat to fire a torpedo at the Hampshire, and then he snuck away in a lifeboat at the last second before the Hampshire got destroyed, killing Kitchener and about 600 other people on board. This whole thing is entirely made up. We know now. Duquesne was still in Brazil doing spy stuff and insurance fraud. Yeah, he also punched

all his grade school bullies in the nose while everyone in the lunchroom slowly clapped man. Duquesne. Duquesne. That's what they said. That's what they said. They're genuine But the gentleman named also in his own revenge fantasy, he murders 600 innocent people. Right. This is it. If you're lying about it, can't you make up a story where you aren't an indiscriminate mass murderer when you're a literal Nazi Tom? No, no. Fair point.

Yeah. All right. That case. I asked to answer it. So here's the point. Yeah. All right. That case. I'll announce it. So here's the insurance fraud plan. While still in Brazil, Duquesne packed his $80,000 worth of unused film into a trunk and put it on a British ship headed to New York. And he set up another time bomb to sink the ship and collect the insurance money.

But then a co-conspirator got caught by British intelligence and eventually narked, so Duquesne was wanted for murder in the UK. And then right after that happened, just by complete chance, the New York Times got a wire from a source in Argentina that said Duquesne was dead. The wire said he was traveling through the frontier of Bolivia and got attacked by raiders and killed. But then two weeks after that, the Times got another wire that said Duquesne was actually still alive after he had heroically fought off the Bolivian Raiders in his game. What actually happened was Frederick Duquesne very obviously sent both wires, but the New York Times was dumb at this point. You know, it was later found that both of those wires came from Frederick, Frederick, no one of his very clever aliases.

So he decided to fake his own death to allude the British authorities, but then he decided no, I'm going to be a fucking hero at the end of this. I'm still alive because of me here. I'll figure it out later. And that's a true story. Or my name isn't Tom Tommy, Tom, Tom, Tom. Yeah. It's because you got to imagine his dilemma was like, all right.

He says, lay in there at night going, okay, it does get me out of an international murder charge. But also kind of makes me look like a sissy. I mean, believe in Raiders come on. Right. Right. And so he went with like, okay, international murder charge fine, but I'm goingiders come on. Right. Right. And so he went with like, okay, international murder charge. Fine, but I'm going to fix this. Yeah.

I'm alive still. Yep. So in 1917, Duquesne gave up on the spying operation in South America and went back to the US to collect his insurance money. But pretty quickly, he got arrested by the NYPD for insurance fraud and put in jail. In order to escape jail, he spent the next two years pretending to be mentally ill. When that wasn't enough to get him a minimum security spot that was easy to escape, he started pretending to be suddenly paralyzed

from the waist down just out of nowhere that day. And of course, authorities were skeptical. So they tested him. The way they did that was by stabbing him in the legs and under his toenails with sharp objects. And somehow he never once winced or wriggled when they were doing that. So they believed him. I feel like we should have a non stabbing based way to test for paralysis. Right? It seems like a lock of go wrong with that system. Maybe a tickle. Maybe you start with tickling. Tickling would be so much better. Exactly. Thank you. The fake paralysis got him transferred from jail to Bellevue hospital in Manhattan. At the hospital, he was still confined to a room with bars on the windows though, but he

managed to acquire a hacksaw blade at some point, and he spent the next seven months slowly filing down the bars. During that time, he successfully faked being paraplegic for the entire medical staff, successfully. But then four days before he was going to be extradited to England and almost certainly executed, he escaped out the window. And with legs that were barely ever used for the last seven months, he jumped across the gap to the next building, climbed down their brick wall to the ground, scaled a gate and walked off down 27th Street in Manhattan. No problem. Then he got on a ferry to New Jersey and disappeared for a while.

But that whole story, I guess it wasn't impressive enough for Duquesne's ego. So a month later, he sent a letter to a friend in New York with a much better story on top of all that stuff. She's included a swashbuckling fight on the way out and a high speed chase at the very end in a sports car. And at the end of the letter, it said, PS as many papers as possible, keep clipping. And then I turned into a Native American and I ripped a sink out of the wall and turned into the window. She's story, man. I had to break it to you, Duquesne, but you're kind of fucking your own legacy here, right? James Bond never turned around and went holy shit. Did you see me blow up that jitsky? Fuck. Tell me you got that on video.

That fucking ruled. So cool. So after the escape, Ducane laid low for a while, but then World War Two broke out and he really wanted to be a Nazi. So he got in touch with Germany again and started up a Nazi spiring in the United States. That included a Gestapo operative who organized labor strikes to disrupt American manufacturing, an old librarian guy who did book spy stuff and a figure skater named Lily Stein who ran honey pot operations. Eventually, he had a team of 33 Nazi spies working under him.

But after a few tips, the FBI started investigating, but DuCane was a master of the spy craft, at least by the standards of the 1930s, so it was hard to get them. According to the agent assigned to do surveillance on DuCane, quote, he used all the tricks in the book. He'd take a local train, change to an express, change back to a local, go through a revolving door and keep going on right around, take an elevator up a floor, get off, walk back to the ground, and take off in a different entrance to the building. And sometimes the white spy that was following him would get blown up by a bomb disguised as more kids. It was a whole thing. Yeah, I feel like the book would have had more tricks than that. And it's a pamphlet. We're just waiting outside, man. You can go up. He's going around the revolving door again. Despite all those amazing Scooby-Doo

bugs, bunny spy moves and all the dive roles behind pillars, whatever the fuck he was doing. The FBI finally arrested Ducane in 1941, along with his spiring. Jay Edgar Hoover called it the greatest counter espionage operation in US history. Of course, that would get bumped way down that list when Hoover started going after the real enemies of America. Of course, I'm talking about communists and black people, but Duquesne was a big deal at the time. His FBI file called him, quote, excellent talker with captivating personality, in veteran liar, sexual pervert. And when I read that last part, I tried really hard to find any stories about the sex life of Frederick Duquesane, but very sadly, that was probably

just J. Edgar Hoover adding that to every file to make people look. Right. Yes. Another guy who wears no women's underwear in his spare time degenerate to gender mark that one down to. So before we close it out, I want to circle back to the animal called the hippopotamus. Yeah. We're going to talk about the hippo a little bit more.

Hippo facts. Yeah, both facts. The hippo pie, which I was a crowd of people, the name comes from the ancient Greek for river horse, and they're the third largest land animal in the world, only the elephant and the rhino are bigger. Side note, both Burnham and Duquesne looked into the importation of elephants and rhinos too. But the hippo was their favorite. The hippo grows up to 18 feet long, up to 5,800 pounds. Jesus Christ. It lives up to 50 years. And the adults have exactly zero natural predators. And

they can run up to 30 miles an hour. God damn. See, maybe I'm just bulk it up to run super fast. You guys have been giving me a shot super fast. I'm going to have a lot of things, but perhaps none more than living in a world where adult hippos have no natural predators. Jesus. Me. So also worth noting, the hippo is extremely territorial and also very bad with eyesight,

which is not a good combination for something you want to import. In their mind, they control a big stretch of water, wherever they are, where they live in a group of up to 30 or 40 other hippos called a bloat, which is an awesome name. That's pretty good. Yeah. And if any kind of vague blurry object, because they can't fucking see, goes near their water or near their bloat, the adult males fly off the handle and they charge at up to 30 miles an hour with extremely sharp teeth that grow up to 15 inches long inside of a mouth that hinges opened 180 degrees. Jesus Christ.

Their bite force is about 1,800 pounds per square inch, which is about triple that of a lion. They can easily chop a person in half with a single bite with that force. And they definitely attack people killing about 500 a year. That includes a 2014 incident when a hippo attacked a boat, capsized it and killed 13 people. Jesus. They all waiting around trying to get selfies with it. What the fuck? How does he get all 13? I mean, the first guy I blame him, the 12th guy though, yeah.

Right. Right. Admittedly, it was a blood bath and that is the downside. The upside is they use the disnify insta filter. So the pics were adorable. So cute. Okay. You ever see a baby hippo there? They are super beautiful. Isn't a fi insta filter. So the pics were adorable. So cute. Okay.

You ever see a baby hippo there? They are so beautiful. I want you. So bad. What do you name it? Just just a couple more details about hippos. Thank you. This first one, I actually just learned this.

Apparently hippos cannot swim. They spend a lot of time in the water, but instead of swimming, the extremely high density of their bodies makes them sink straight down. And they just run along the bottom, which is amazing. And they can hold their breath for about five minutes, if needed, so they can run along the bottom for a while. Also, this is the most important part. He post do something called muck spreading in order to mark their territory, they take enormous medium

wet shits and they spin their tail really fast while they're doing it. So it acts like a fan and it spreads the feces over a much bigger area. So it's like Tucker Carlson that said, I mean, say what you will, but that'll mark your fucking territory. Sure. All right. So with all that being said, just in case somehow you're still wondering, if it would have been a good idea to transplant a really big breeding population of angry river horses, the size of a Chevy suburban, they're half blind and run 30 months now or and defecate like a sort of shit bazooka.

There is a real example to inform the answer to that question. Sometime in the early 1980s, Pablo Escobar did a fucking giant line of coke, and he decided to import hippos from Africa to be his pets. But then he got arrested and he left as a state. And now there's a group of about a hundred hippos that's just been fucking shit up along the Magdalene River in Columbia for the last 40 years. They don't fit the ecosystem. They're enormous bazooka shits, kill fish and plants. And biologists are worried that the population could quickly reach a thousand. And the Colombian government is having serious trouble figuring out what to do with the so-called cocaine hippos. As far as we know, the hippos aren't using any cocaine.

But their behavior is pretty much the same when they're sober. So I guess that's really that. All right. So if you had to summarize what you've learned in one sentence, what would it be? cocaine is a hell of a drug. Bad it is. Okay. Sorry, are you ready for the quiz? Ready for the quiz. All right, Heath, what was the name of Duquesne's book of Naturecraft? Hey, how to make sure your enemies can not see you. Not see.

Not see. He was a Nazi to yeah be To lip sync ships nice. Oh, because the bot They get worse here we go. I had to see See how not to scream when someone jumps something sharp under your toe now Or D straight from the hip. Well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, I got to go with a how to make sure enemies can not see you.

Correct. Very good. Excellent. All right, heath. Obviously importing hippos to Florida is a very bad idea. We don't want to upset the delicate Floridian balance of nature, which of the invasive species below is currently doing the most damage to the native ecosystem. Oh, I have a guess you go first. Hey, Burmese pythons, which are now an established apex predator in Florida swamps. Really? Yeah, oh, yeah, absolutely. They're fucking they eat alligators and shit. It's fucking crazy. It's a day you just

confirmed it was. There's more options. Stop helping Tom. Silver Springs State Park in Florida is full of Reese's monkeys that have herpes. What is that? That's also true? There's a lot of sea lionfish, which are covered in poisonous barbs and are flourishing among the coral reefs after someone forgot to find their Nemo, or D, the Margaritaville retirement community in Daytona Beach. All right. I'm going to add E. Ron DeSantis and then answer F all of you about how did you get that? I was too embedded secret. Oh, man, you're good at this. You're good at the scape room. Hey, if you were talking about a parade being

canceled earlier, they got me on the Jordan Peterson? Reddit. Okay. Species. A. Body. Shameoootter. I'm gonna say B and C. E and B. Oh, I'm sorry. It was anti-sensorship apodomus. I'm sorry. Yeah, he's always very clever like that. Well, see, so I believe you won even before you started listing your answers just based on the question.

All right, well, no, why don't you write an essay next week? All right, well, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Yeah, he's always very clever like that. Well, see, so I believe you won even before you started listing your answers just based on the question. All right. Well, Noah, why don't you write an essay next week? All right. Well, for Cecil, Tom, Eli and Heath, I know what thank you for hanging out with us today. We'll back next week and by then I'll be an expert on something else. Between now and then you can hear more from us on one in every 14 podcasts that exist. And if you don't need this show, go on, you can make a per episode donation at patreon.com. So I take you to the pod or leave us a five star review everywhere you can. And you don't need this show. The one you can make a per episode donation at patreon.com slash citation pod or leave us

a five star review everywhere you can. And if you like to get in touch with us, check out past episodes, connect with us on social media or check the show notes. Be sure to check out citation pod dot com. Yes, Johnson, come on in. You said there's others were concerned about something. What were you saying? Oh, yes. Johnson come on in. You said there's others were concerned about something. What were you saying?

Yes, it appears that your solution to all our government problems are importing wild animals from the jungle. Well, that is in so I am insulted. What an insult? Get out of my office. No, I'm sorry. I'm going. Secretary, take note to see that Johnson isn't up for a promotion anytime soon. Or just throw your poop, that's good too, you could do that.