The American Hippo Ranch Plan, Part 1

In 1910, the U.S. had a meat shortage and a water hyacinth overgrowth problem. The obvious solution to the double dilemma: Import hippos from Africa.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This episode is brought to you by square Space. Start
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Build it Beautiful. Welcome to you stuff you missed in
history class from hot works dot com. Hello, and welcome

(00:23):
to the podcast. I'm Holly Frying and I'm Tracy Vie Wilson.
Uh So, the US, as well as many other parts
of the world, but we're talking about US today, has
a well established farming tradition and livestock is a huge
part of that. So when you think about American farming,
you may envision herds of cattle, or pig farms or
even free range chickens when you think about what the

(00:45):
livestock landscape looks like. But there was a time when
a very different animal was being considered as a potential
source of meat. Uh. This is one of those episodes
that turned into two because there is so much wild
and really enjoyable stuff here, and even so, uh two
of the main characters could easily fill episodes on their
own outside of what we include in this episode. And

(01:08):
there's even more to this story than we can include
in two episodes. But today we're going to talk about
those two men in their early lives and what led
them to a really wild partnership where they were working
to try to convince the U. S. Congress, the press,
and wealthy investors that hippo bacon was the food that
should be on American plates. I really did just say,
hippo bacon. That's a bad idea. This is such a

(01:33):
wild story because that in and of itself is kind
of like a when I have told people that this
is what I was researching to talk about, that sends
them into peals of laughter and like they're very excited
to talk about it. But then there's so much more
because this is a story with spies in it, swampland
congress wars, as well as of course hippo's. So in

(01:56):
nine ten, the United States was really facing a big
meat shortage. Immigration had caused a huge surge in population
and the meat industry really couldn't keep up. Its attempts
to keep up had led to some pretty dicey and
disgusting practices, and additionally, overgrazing of food animals had caused
really serious damage to the lands where cattle were normally raised.

(02:20):
Things are becoming dire enough that people were considering using
dogs as food, which is a normal part of cuisine
and other parts of the world, but it's definitely taboo
in the United States. Yeah, basically, there were a lot
of people brainstorming a lot of different ways that we
could supplement the meat um supply here in the US

(02:41):
as things were getting really, really quite dire for a
lot of people. But the grazing lands that still did
work that we're still viable. We're already occupied by cattle
and a lot of them. As we said, we're in
terrible shape even for that. However, one thing that is
very prevalent, particularly in the southeast, are swamps and bayous,

(03:02):
and they were not being used for farming. They were
largely regarded at this point as waste land. And moreover, uh,
the floating water hyacinth that was found in these swamplands
was growing out of control. Water hyacinth had originated in
the Amazon basin, and it's considered an invasive nuisance plant
because it can choke up natural waterways and it's extremely heavy.

(03:24):
An acre, which is a little less than half a
hector of these plants can weigh as much as two
hundred tons. Which is more than a hundred and eighty
one thousand kilograms. And the water hyacinth was introduced to
the US in eighteen eighty four at the New Orleans Exposition,
and it was a gift from the Japanese delegation. But

(03:46):
once it was accepted as a gift and moved into
the area, it's spread at a downright alarming rate. Water
hyacinth actually grows more quickly than any other tested plants. UH.
Within seventy years of reaching Florida, this plant had covered
an estimated hundred and twenty six thousand acres that's fifty
hectares of waterways, and it made them very difficult to

(04:09):
traverse by boat. It was really clogging up the existing
system I imagine, crowding out other uh other plan and
animal life correct. To fight the overgrowing plant species and
to try to provide a new answer to what the
media was calling the meat question, Robert Brussard, who was
a congressman from Louisiana, hatched a plan. They would import hippos.

(04:33):
The hippos would theoretically eat all the hyacinth, and then
they would be used for their meat. But Brussard couldn't
convince the rest of Congress that his idea would work
without help from some experts. Uh. In addition to a
researcher named William Newton Irwin who actually specialized in fruit
trees but was very interested in the viability of this

(04:54):
hippo idea, Brussard brought two men together for his team
of experts, named Frederick Russell Burnham and Fritz Duchane. Frederick
Russell Burnham was an explorer and a really intense man.
He's rumored to be one of the potential inspirations for
Indiana Jones. He thought that quote civilizing Africa was an

(05:15):
important effort. Yeah, that's kind of just a quick We're
going to talk a lot more about him in a minute,
but that sort of gives you an idea of kind
of who he was in terms of being an explorer
and a conqueror of sorts. On the other hand, Fritz
Duchane was a chameleon. Uh. He was. And this is

(05:35):
one of those words that we're going to get a
million pronunciation corrections on because there are many different ways
to say it. Um. The Dutch or Afrikaan's version my
understanding is boer, but boer is very common in the
when you you're a native English speaker, or even like
just or even bore. Yeah, there are a lot of

(05:58):
ways people say this word. So his family were descendants
of Dutch settlers who had moved to Africa, and Duquesne
really has a fascinating life story. He used numerous aliases
throughout his life and in many ways was considered a
grade A con man. Both Burnham and Duquesne had fought

(06:18):
in the Second Boar War on opposite sides. The Second
Boarer War, also called the South African War or the
Anglo Boor War, went on from October eleventh, eighteen nine
to May thirty first, nineteen o two. Great Britain went
to war against two Boar republics, the South African Republic

(06:38):
and the Orange Free State. This was an expensive war
for Britain, though their troops really far outnumbered the Boar
troops at five hundred thousand British troops to the Boers
eighty eight thousand. Yeah, you would think they were Uh.
They they had the enemy so outgunned that it would
be a quick in and out. But it really cost

(07:00):
them a lot, both to send the people there in
the first place and to maintain it. Uh So In
this war, Burnham worked as a spy for the British
and Duquesne as a spy for the Boers. The two
men were actually given missions to kill one another during
the conflict, although they probably never knew each other personally.
So that brings up the question of how did they

(07:20):
both end up working to bring hippos to Louisiana. So
we're gonna tell that story starting with talking about Burnham.
And first though, we're gonna have a brief word from
a sponsor. So Frederick Russell Burnham, as you said, we're
going to talk about him in a bit more detail,
was born in southern Minnesota in eighteen sixty one, so

(07:41):
during the Dakota War of eighteen sixty two and even
after that, the Burnham's often found themselves in danger being
white settlers in this area, and at times Frederick's father,
who was actually a Presbyterian minister, would arm himself to
protect his wife and child against attacks that were sometimes
made on white settlers, and there were so times they
found themselves in danger of being attacked. When Frederick was

(08:05):
two and his father, Edwin was away, his mother Rebecca,
saw a group of Lacoda men emerging from the forest
near their home. She knew that she could not run
from them while also carrying a toddler, so she hid
Frederick in a pile of corn and told him to
stay still and be quiet. She then ran six miles,
which is a little less than ten kilometers. Meanwhile, the

(08:28):
Lakoda men she had seen burned the house down, but
little Frederick stayed quiet and still as he had been
instructed to do, and he was still waiting there silently
in the corn pile the next morning when his mother
got back. Yeah, that's one of those incidents where, when
he recounted it later, he would say that was like
the beginning of his training as a scouch in a spy. Uh.

(08:51):
He stayed tough as nails throughout his childhood. At the
age of nine, he actually punctured a lung when a
log fell on him, but he recovered and he continued
to be very adventurous. He his spirit did not seem
dampened by this injury at all. The family moved briefly
to California a couple of years later, although Edwin did
not live much longer than that, and after his death,

(09:12):
Rebecca returned east and Frederick, who was only thirteen at
the time, decided he was going to stay behind and
get a job, in part to pay off the money
that Rebecca had had to borrow to finance her travel
back home. He sort of famed for often riding horse
after horse to exhaustion. So he would basically just ride
a horse till it couldn't go anymore. He wouldn't take

(09:34):
a break, he would just switch to a new mount
when that previous one was exhausted, and then he would
continue to run messages. And he worked from a base
of operations in Los Angeles, and from there he ran
roots out to Anaheim, Santa Monica, and Pasadena. So he
just was kind of this tireless, hard working, super adventurous kid.
And again he was only thirteen when he was doing

(09:55):
all of this. When he was fourteen, he briefly lived
with relatives in Clinton, Iowa, but he became bored and
restless pretty quickly, so he ran away. A year later,
he made his way down the Mississippi and a stolen canoe,
eventually ending up in Texas. There he met an old
scout named Holmes, who taught him all about how to

(10:16):
make his way through burying types of terrain, Holmes and
other old timers in the area gave burn him a
whole education in the skills he would need in survival
uh and you know, gave him the knowledge that he
would need to prosper on his own. Burnham also became
a really expert shooter during this time. He actually practiced
to shoot ambidextrously so that he would have equal skill

(10:40):
in both hands, and he really got to a point
where he had great precision. He also trained himself to
handle almost any hardship he might encounter on missions as
a scout, So he trained himself to go without food, sleep,
and water to endure great pain. And allegedly he trained
himself to slow his own heartbeat. And he developed this

(11:02):
unique food source that he would use throughout his life.
UH that enabled him to travel fairly light and stealthily,
and also so he would not have to cook as
he traveled, because if you are trying to travel on
the download, you don't want to be starting a campfire.
So to do this, he would pulverize dried venison into
a powder, and then he would mix that powder with

(11:25):
flour and bake this into little loaves that he could
put in his his little bag, and he could eat
a little bit of it each day and keep himself going.
This sort of made me think of it being the
wild West Scout version of Limbus. I always think that
uh lembus is a vegetarian food. But you know that's

(11:45):
just me well, just in that it's like this thing
that's very sustaining and that you can carry for long
periods of time. It wasn't so much the content that
made me think of Limbus. So he tried his hand
at searching for gold in the American Southwest, but he
only met with success one time. He used the money
that he got from this one success to go back

(12:05):
to Iowa, where he returned to a young lady named
Blanche Blick. The two of them got married and moved
to Pasadena to start a citrus grove. They weren't very
successful at doing this, though, and his restlessness eventually led
him to speak adventure again. This time he headed for
Africa with his wife and their infant son, Roderick. The

(12:27):
three of them departed on New Year's Day and eventually
landed in South Africa. So while he was not a
particularly big man, his reputation was enormous, and he first
made a name for himself as a freelance scout, so
for a price, he would, for example, creep into enemy
territory in search of information. He would patrol for interlopers,

(12:48):
he would perform discreet acts of sabotage, and he eventually
got the nickname King of Scouts for his skill and
his stealth, and he was described by the militaryman he
sometimes served as being half jack rabbit and half wolf.
He was also pretty disarming in social situations. He loved
to tell stories of his adventures in Africa and in

(13:09):
the American Indian territories. One tale of his skill at
entertaining a gathering goes that he was, you know, spending
a tale at one of his skirmishes that he had
been in Africa, and at one point in the middle
of the story, he said, we'll kill that snake when
I finished this story, And then he gestured casually to
a rattlesnake that had been heading towards the group and

(13:29):
their outdoor gathering, but no one else had noticed it
before that point. Yeah, just cool as a cucumber. I'm
gonna get to that snake. Let me finish what I
was saying, which then becomes a wonderful, hilarious story in
and of itself. It's probably no surprise then that a
man like Burnham, who was full of swagger and this
sort of old school ma cheesemo, was friends with Theodore Roosevelt.

(13:52):
I swear I did not mean to make a Roosevelt series,
because I knew we just talked about Alice. But in fact,
Burnham made friends with a lot of the lenn High places,
particularly if they were men that were like him, that
were drawn to adventure. They he just kind of always
connected with those kinds of people. While he was traveling
in Rhodesia, he became friends with Englishman Robert baden Powell,

(14:13):
and eventually Baden Powell would found the Boy Scouts, inspired
in part by Burnham's adventurous spirit and fortitude. And we're
gonna continue to talk about Burnham's life in the time
he spent in Africa, as well as his activities once
he returned to the US. After we have a brief
word from one of our sponsors. So people listening to

(14:33):
this podcast are probably not surprised that we are lifelong learners,
just like a lot of you also are. And that's
one of the reasons why we really genuinely love the
great courses. We've really enjoyed watching their lecture series Master
of War History's Greatest Strategic Thinkers by Professor Andrew Wilson.
This really chronicles the earliest examples of military strategy and

(14:55):
how these same principles applied to conflicts today. There's actually
an entire section about, uh that the evolution of air
power in the theory and practice of war because mankind
had been fighting wars on land and water at that
point for hundreds of years, and now all of a sudden,

(15:16):
airplanes and dirigibles and Zeppelins and that kind of thing
all really changed the whole landscape of how conflict played out. Yeah,
and that's just been in the last hundred years or
so that we've been kind of figuring out that whole
new angle to strategic thinking as it relates to warfare.
So we talked about how Burnham was eating these like

(15:38):
ride venison cake things, and he continued throughout his life
to eat other odd stuff in the interest of not
letting his stomach get in the way of what he
needed to do. He would live off of milk and
ox blood or stolen uncooked corn during his adventures in Africa,
even if these were misery to eat. Yeah, if you've

(15:59):
ever eaten uncooked corn like fresh not even entirely ripe corn,
that is not easy to eat. There are also stories
that he would sometimes eat rotten produce that had been discarded,
that he would kind of snatch so that he would
stay on the d l keep himself fed, but not
not necessarily in the most delightful or yummy of ways. Uh.

(16:19):
And while the Burnham's were actually in Africa, they had
a second child, the daughter named Nota A, and the
family was actually caught in the conflict of the Second
Mada Bili War when they were living just outside the
city of Bulawayo. And this conflict, combined with a horrible
livestock virus, actually resulted in a huge tragedy for Frederick. So,
while this colony that they were in was constantly under siege,

(16:42):
his two year old daughter not A developed an intense
fever and she eventually died. And Uh. When Burnham identified
the leader of the uprising that had been behind this
attack on the colony, he is said to have tracked
him to a cave where he shot him, and Burnham
would later write that he the whole time this conflict
happening with this man, where he was killing this man,

(17:02):
he had these visions of his wife clutching their dying daughter,
and that sort of drove him to this murder. He
left Africa the following year chasing rumors of gold once again,
but then he abandoned that enterprise when he was called
back to Africa to serve in the Second Boer War.
After that war was over, he spoke with a great
deal of respect about the Boars, and especially he was

(17:24):
impressed with their lead scout and another man reporting to
the lead scout. He went by the name Black Panther
of the Veld. He would later say that the Black Panther,
who he had actually spent the war trying to kill,
was the craftiest man he had ever met, and in truth,
that Black Panther was Fritz Duquine. As we said at
the top of the episode, they had actually been assigned

(17:44):
to kill each other so that they could eliminate these
very stealthy scouts the other side each had. Burnham had
actually been captured during this conflict, but he managed to
avoid being identified by showing how very smart and philosophical
he was, since he knew that the description the Boers
had of him described him as an Offish American, and

(18:05):
so he kind of led this brief double life. But
he eventually made an escape in the dark of night,
and he spent the next week's cutting the Bowers supply
lines and blowing up their railways after dodging a great
deal of fire while he was hunkered down in the brush,
Burnhon was eventually retrieved by British forces and he was
sent to England to be treated for his injuries. He

(18:25):
actually met Winston Churchill on the ship to London. Soon
Blanche and the couple's third child, Bruce, joined him. Another
tragedy struck, though, because young Bruce later drowned in the Thames.
Their oldest son, Roderick, at this point was nineteen and
was in school in California. He had actually had a
premonition about Bruce's death, which he relayed to his grandmother

(18:48):
before they got the news of the child's passing. The
Vernons returned to Pasadena once uh Frederick was recovered and
they were still grieving Uh. So they were morning and
regrouping there, and it was in this time that the
scout began working on an article that he would eventually
publish in early nineteen ten, and that article was called
Transplanting African Animals. And this article, once it came out,

(19:11):
immediately got people talking, and because of the meat shortage,
all kinds of people wanted to speak with Frederick Burnham.
And that's where we're going to cliffhainm this one. In
our next episode, we're going to talk more about how
Burnham and another wild character worked with Robert Broussard to
try to bring hippos to the United States as livestock,

(19:31):
which still is a terrible idea, but also terribly funny
to think about. It's funny except that hippos are actually
really aggressive and territorial and they will look that murder. Oddly,
that gets left out of a lot of the discussion. Uh.
But in the meantime, I have a couple of pieces
of listener mail and I selected these because both of

(19:54):
these are people that wrote us about some interesting creative
endeavors that they have done related to pod casts that
we have also talked related to podcasts that we've done
in the past. The first one is from our listener
Bradford Johnson, and he says, thank you for your recent
presentation on essay Andrea and his ill fated balloon expedition.
I was delighted to hear your report on this event

(20:16):
as I mounted an art show around Strindberg's photographs called
Tangible Dreams of a Dying Explorer in eleven. This was
a large scale installation that wol my paintings with the
photographic work of my colleague ce Courtney around Strindberg's images.
We found the story compelling and illuminating in so many ways.
Your exposition of this topic comes full circle for me

(20:36):
as I'm a longtime listener to the podcast, as I
was undoubtedly tuned in when I was creating those paintings. UH,
this is so cool. And I went to Bradford's UH
site which is Bradford Johnson dot net and you can
see some of this work that he did and it
is absolutely beautiful and I encourage people to do it.
It is so gorgeous and it's just another neat way
to see how um this piece of history has been

(20:59):
interpreted by the modern eye and and through art, and
it's just another really cool way to engage with it.
Our other listener mail is from our listener Sandy, and
she writes, hi, Tracy and Holly. I'm fairly new to
your podcast and thoroughly enjoyed listening. When I am walking
around my home, my hometown in Pullman, Washington, she says, well,
I'm intrigued by all your podcasts. I especially related to

(21:21):
the episode titled The Woman Who Turned to Soap. My
husband is a playwright and in the late nineteen nineties
he created a play entitled oddly Enough, The Woman Who
Turned to Soap, which is based on the untimely death
of Hattie Illingsworth, whose body floated to the top of
Late Crescent in n Our small theater group had originally
found the story in Jessica Amanda Salmonson's book entitled Phantom Waters.

(21:44):
While the ghost tale in this book is fanciful, the
true details of the story intrigued us. We worked on
the play for a year and a half and ultimately
toured it around the Northwest and performed in the Seattle
Fringe Festival in During our research on this story, we
uncovered some newspaper archives in Port Angele's, Washington, and we
spoke to the medical student Harlon McNutt, who was mentioned

(22:05):
in your piece. He was in his nineties when we
met him, and it was obvious that he loved talking
about Hattie's discovery. He was a true gentleman of his era.
He told us how excited everyone was when Hattie's body
floated to the top of Lake Crescent. He described the
body as friable with the consistency of ivory soap. One
of the men pried open her mouth with a piece
of firewood so they could get a look at her

(22:26):
teeth for dental records, which is how she was eventually
identified as I recall, he said that a piece of
her jaw broke off. He also said that Hattie was
wrapped in a blanket and was wearing quote excuse my language, ladies,
panties and end quote, but she says, is charming. Their
play was mixed media, had live theater, slides, music and

(22:47):
video with a mythic sort of Lady of the Lake
take on the real events of the day, and it
began with a handwashing ritual that was meant that they
invited the audience into the sort of the world of
the story. She says, if we didn't use I resob
we certainly should have. Like Crescent itself is considered eerie,
and we were told that the native Collalum's refused to

(23:08):
fish there. However, I don't know if that's really true.
The lake is rather spooky though, or maybe we were
just spooked by our own research. Uh. I love it, Sandra,
Thank you so much. That's a really, really cool way
again to engage with history. So if you're doing plays
or anything based on any of the topics we've covered,
I highly encourage you to write us about him, because

(23:28):
I love hearing about those kinds of projects. If you
would like to write to us, you can do so
at History Podcast at how stop works dot com. You
can also write it's at Facebook dot com slash misst
in history, on Twitter at misst in history, at miss
in history dot tumbler dot com, and we're on pinterest
dot com slash missed in history so I can't wait
to pin hippo photos. You can also visit missed in

(23:50):
History dot spreadshirt dot com if you would like to
purchase some stuff you missed in history class goodies for
yourself or your friends. If you would like to learn
a little bit more about what we talked about today
sort of, you can go to our parents side house
to works type in the word hippo and one of
the articles that comes up is how does a hippo
make its own sunscreen? UH? If you would like to

(24:10):
read that, I highly encourage you to do so. You
can also visit us at our home on the web,
missed in history dot com, where we have show notes
the full archive of all of our episodes going way
back to even before Tracy and I were ever involved
in the show, UH in a whole lot more so,
we encourage you to do a little extra research at
how stuff works dot com and missed in History dot
com for more on this and thousands of other topics.

(24:37):
Does it has to work stat