From the Archives: A Splendid Savage-An Interview with Steve Kemper
Sometimes life makes it impossible to write blog posts on a dependable basis. This is one of the those times. For the next little while, I’m going to run pieces from September and October in years past. I hope you enjoy them, and I’ll be back as soon as I can.
Next up, a post from September, 2016:
I’m a Steve Kemper fan. Four years ago, I read his A Labyrinth of Kingdoms with the sort of all encompassing fascination I brought to Gone with the Wind when I was thirteen. I’ve been eagerly awaiting his newest book, A Splendid Savage: The Restless Life of Frederick Russell Burnham, for at least two years.* Maybe longer. It did not disappoint.
A Splendid Savage tells the story of Frederick Russell Burnham (1861-1947), sometimes known as “the American scout”–a story with the dash of an H. Rider Haggard novel and a Saturday matinee thriller combined. The story of how he learned his astonishing woodcraft reads like a story from a boy’s magazine of the nineteenth century. His career as a scout and prospector carried him to every frontier and mining boom in the second half of the nineteenth century and first decades of the twentieth–serving as a lens for looking at the larger stories of American expansion westward and Europe’s scramble for Africa.
Kemper successfully pieces together Burnham’s life from limited (and sometimes controversial) resources–a challenge that he never tries to gloss over, but that he handles with such skill that it is easy to forget . He sets his splendid savage firmly in historical contexts that include Indian wars and range feuds in the American Southwest, the Anglo-Boer wars, mining camps in south Africa, the Mexican sierras and the Yukon, Wall Street booms and busts, and London high society.
As Kemper says in the prologue, “Other men of his era had a few such adventures, but Burnham had them all.'” If you like real life historical adventure with a complicated, larger-than-life hero, A Splendid Savage will be your cup of bush tea.
And now, welcome Steve Kemper:
Burnham was a well-known figure in his lifetime, but is largely forgotten today. What led you to Burnham?
I was researching a magazine story about hyenas and came across a remark by the African hunter and explorer Frederick Courteney Selous, who said that he had never met anyone who knew as much woodcraft as the famous American scout Frederick Russell Burnham. I’ve been fascinated by American scouts and frontiersmen since boyhood, but Burnham’s name was new to me. A famous scout? In Africa? And he knew more woodcraft than the celebrated Selous?
Naturally I Googled him, and naturally he had a Wikipedia entry. I couldn’t believe what I was reading. I tracked down his two memoirs. Reading them encouraged me to keep digging, including a visit to the rich Burnham archive at Yale. It seemed incredible that no one had written his biography. I felt a bit like Barbara Tuchman after she stumbled across “Czar Reed” in her research for The Proud Tower. Reed was so “writable,” she said in her essay “Biography as a Prism of History,” that it seemed impossible no one had written about him, and she started worrying that another writer might beat her to the punch. I understood the feeling.
Your titles are always wonderful. Can you tell me where you got the title A Splendid Savage?
It’s from a letter Burnham wrote to his mother in October 1903 as he was about to leave colonial East Africa for Britain. The letter sounds like a farewell both to Africa and to the frontier way of life that he loved. Here’s a portion:
The wildest and sweetest land I have ever seen. It is I fear passing from me forever. Sometimes I wish I had never learned to read or form any conception of duty, civilization, religion, for I would have been and am at heart a splendid savage, nothing more, and now I am to return to London—to swallowtails, the club, soft carpets, soft food, soft life, soft men and women.
One of the things that fascinated me most about the book was Burnham’s relationship with his wife, Blanche. They clearly loved each other, but her life as his wife could not have been easy.** You made the unusual and, to me at least, very appealing decision to include her experiences even when they were apart, instead of simply using her as a source for details about his life. What led you to make this choice?
Blanch was enormously important to Burnham, so their love story became a strong element in the book. Burnham was incapable of resting peacefully in domestic life, yet he depended on Blanche’s support and admiration. She was his partner, his psychological ballast, and his dream-catcher.
She was also an eyewitness to Burnham’s story. Her hundreds of letters to Burnham and other family members gave me invaluable intimate material.
Blanche was also fascinating in her own right. She enthusiastically accompanied Burnham to start new lives in rough places. She was strong, tough, and feminine, as adept with a pistol as with a decorative peacock feather. She was often deeply lonely because of Burnham’s prolonged absences. Her experiences and perspective let me illuminate Burnham from a different angle and illustrate the emotional costs of attaching oneself to a human whirlwind.
It seems like Burnham spent time at every frontier that opened in the second half of the nineteenth century, sometimes as a scout, sometimes as a prospector. What would you say was the driving force in his “restless life”?
No single force can explain his drive, but I think there were three main ones: a desire for risky action, for the possibility of financial fortune, and for the chance to influence the direction of history. Burnham loved frontiers because they offered the prospect of all three.
You deal very well with one of the hardest aspects of writing about nineteenth century travelers, adventurers, etc.: the question of racial attitudes. Could you talk a little bit about the complexity of Burnham’s position on race, and how you decided to deal with it?
As I got deeper into the research and learned more about Burnham, this worried me, not only because many of his racial attitudes now strike us as deplorable, but also because I wasn’t sure I could do justice to both this explosive issue and to Burnham. In other words, I had to figure out a way to be honest about Burnham’s racial attitudes without reducing him to them or having them overshadow everything else about him.
Wrestling with this forced me to expand my views and my understanding of the past, and to acknowledge the deep connections between Burnham’s time and ours. We’re still arguing about how to do this—witness the recent demonstrations at various universities about Cecil Rhodes, Woodrow Wilson, and John C. Calhoun.
I found a quotation from the historical novelist Hillary Mantel that helped: ”Learn to tolerate strange worldviews. Don’t pervert the values of the past. Women in former eras were downtrodden and frequently assented to it. Generally speaking, our ancestors were not tolerant, liberal or democratic. Your characters probably did not read The Guardian, and very likely believed in hellfire, beating children and hanging malefactors. Can you live with that?”
I could. My solution was to describe the forces that shaped Burnham within his historical context, while always keeping in mind that those forces had consequences for both good and ill, often simultaneously. I wrote an op-ed about this dilemma that might interest your readers: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/162159.
*One of the benefits of knowing other writers is that you learn about books long before they come out. Of course, then you have to wait.
** In her own words: “It seems as though two tragedies and three wars were enough for any poor woman to bear.”
Steve Kemper is also the author of A Labyrinth of Kingdoms: 10,000 Miles Through Islamic Africa and Code Name Ginger. He lives in West Hartford, Connecticut.
From the Archives: Dorothy Sayers, Black Cat Cigarettes, and WWI
Sometimes life makes it impossible to write blog posts on a dependable basis. This is one of the those times. For the next little while, I’m going to run pieces from September and October in years past. I hope you enjoy them, and I’ll be back as soon as I can.
Next up, a post from September, 2017:
My second favorite novel by British mystery author Dorothy Sayers is Murder Must Advertise,* in which her dashing sleuth Lord Peter Whimsey goes undercover as an entry level copy writer at an advertising agency where evil is afoot. He solves the murder of course, because that’s the way these things happen. But he also gets caught up in the advertising business and creates the idea for an advertising campaign for a cigarette company called Whifflets that takes off in a big way: people collected coupons and used them first to travel and later to collect all manner of worldly goods. Except coffins, it not being “admitted that any Whiffler could ever require such an article.”
The campaign, and the clever language in which Sayers describes it, always amuses me. So imagine my amazement when I discovered something similar on a smaller scale in the form of Black Cat cigarettes while tracking down a factoid for my latest article for MHQ:The Journal of Military History.
Black Cat cigarettes were first introduced in 1904. The company began to use their cigarette packages as a vehicle for promotion almost immediately. At various points in the years prior to World War I they offered a program similar to S & H Green Stamps,** the Black Cat Library of Short Stories (a series of forty adventure tales), and a popular coupon program not unlike Whimsey’s Whifflet promotion.
If that was all Black Cat did, I would have just enjoyed the moment when fiction and history collided, but in the First World War, Black Cat stepped up. The company sent gift packages to British troops, with French phrase books inside the Black Cat cigarette packs. In 1914, they offered miniature cardboard Allied flags. And in 1916 they produced the first cigarette cards–similar to baseball cards in bubblegum packs.*** These cards didn’t celebrate anything as innocent as the national pastime–they were produced in alliance with the British wartime propaganda effort. The first set of cards was a series of 140 political cartoons by Dutch cartoonist Louis Raemaekers, with the motto “Lest we forget” on the reverse. But it was the second set that caught my fancy: a series of fifty cards illustrating “Women on War Work.” Each card showed a smiling woman doing a job that women would not have done before the war, including ambulance driver, postal carrier, tram conductor, and furnace stoker. The reverse of each card described the work involved.
A small and engaging illustration (literally) of women’s history.
*My absolute favorite is Gaudy Night. This does not make me unique.
**For those of you too young to remember Green Stamps, you can look it up here: http://www.al.com/living/index.ssf/2016/04/whatever_happened_to_sh_green.html
***I assume those of you who are too young to remember this can figure it out.
From the Archives – Blown Away: The (Attempted) Mongol Invasion of Japan
Sometimes life makes it impossible to write blog posts on a dependable basis. This is one of the those times. For the next little while, I’m going to run pieces from September and October five or six years past. I hope you enjoy them, and I’ll be back as soon as I can.
From September, 2015:
Japan had expected the Mongol invasion for years.
In 1266, Kublai Khan, the new Mongol emperor of China, sent envoys to Japan with a letter addressed to the “King of Japan”–a title guaranteed to offend the Japanese emperor. The letter itself was equally unpalatable. The Great Khan “invited” Japan to send envoys to the Mongol court in order to establish friendly relations between the two states–code for the tributary relationship China habitually imposed on its neighbors. The letter ended with an implicit threat: “Nobody would wish to resort to arms.” Both the largely symbolic imperial court at Kyoto and the military government at Kamakura, which had controlled Japan since the late twelfth century, chose to ignore the khan’s overtures.
For several years Kublai Khan was distracted by more immediate concerns: subduing the newly conquered province of Korea and his war against the Song dynasty of southern China. It was 1274 before the Mongol emperor turned his attention to Japan once more. On November 2, a fleet of 900 ships sailed from Korea with over 40,000 men, including Chinese, Jurchen, and Korean soldiers and a corps of 5,000 Mongolian horsemen. The invasion forces landed first at the islands of Tsushima and Iki, where the local samurai were overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of their attackers.
With the intervening islands secured, the Mongols moved on to the Japanese mainland, landing at Hakata Bay on November 19. The Japanese were waiting for them, alerted by the news from Tsushima and Iki. When the Mongols landed, the twelve-year-old grandson of the Japanese commander-in-chief fired the shot that was the traditional opening in a samurai battle: a signaling arrow with a perforated wooden head that whistled as it flew to draw the attention of the gods to the deeds of bravery about to be performed. The Mongols responded with raucous laughter.
It was an omen of how the day’s battle would proceed. Both armies depended on their archers, but their fighting styles were dramatically different. The Japanese were accustomed to fighting in small-group or individual combat, seeking out worthy opponents by shouting a verbal challenge. They fired single arrows aimed at specific targets. The Mongols advanced in tightly knit formations and fired their arrows in huge volleys. Their movements were accompanied by roaring drums and gongs, which frightened the Japanese horses and made them difficult to control. When the Mongol forces pulled back, they fired paper bombs and iron balls that exploded at the samurais’ feet–something the Japanese had not seen before.
Seriously outnumbered and baffled by the invaders’ tactics, the Japanese were not able to hold the beaches. By nightfall, they had retreated several miles inland. Instead of pressing forward, the Mongolian forces returned to their ships for the night. A successful attack the next day seemed inevitable, but that evening an unseasonable storm struck the Mongol fleet, dashing its ships against the rocks. With their ships smashed and about one-third of their force dead, the Mongols withdrew. The Japanese hailed the storm as a divine wind (kamikaze), sent by the gods to protect them.
Seven years later, Kublai Khan tried again. The Mongols launched a two-pronged attack against Japan, with a combined fleet of almost 4,000 ships and 140,000 men. The Eastern Army sailed from Korea on May 22; the Southern Army sailed from southern China on July 5. The two fleets were to meet at Iki and proceed together against mainland Japan. The Eastern Army subdued Tsushima and Iki in early June. Instead of waiting for the Southern Army to arrive, they moved on to Hakata Bay.
Japan had used the intervening years to build earth and stone fortifications along the coast of Hakata Bay. When the Mongols arrived, Japanese defenders repulsed the attack from a secure position behind the defensive walls. When the Mongols retreated, the Japanese took the war to them, using small boats to attack the Mongosl at night. After a week of fierce fighting, the Eastern Army retreated to Iki Island to await the arrival of the Southern Army.
The two Mongol forces rendezvoused in early August. On the evening of August 12, the Japanese attacked, using the “little ships” tactic that had been successful before. The Mongols responded by linking their ships together to create a defensive platform. The battle continued through the night. At dawn, the exhausted Japanese retreated, expecting a decisive attack and the subsequent invasion of the mainland. Instead the Mongol ships, still linked together, were caught in a typhoon that dashed the ships against each other and the shore. When the typhoon subsided, the surviving ships headed out to sea, leaving thousands of stranded soldiers behind them to be massacred by the Japanese.
Japanese chroniclers cited the winds as proof that the gods themselves protected the island. The idea of “divine winds” (kamikaze) that protected Japan against invasion remained an important element in Japanese political mythology as late as the Second World War.