42nd Issue: Frederick Russel Burnham and Stephanie St. Clair

This issue of the newsletter is about two people who had extremely different lives, though both were fascinating, at least to me. Please be warned that the second person I talk about, Stephanie St. Clair, had a lot of rape and murder in her life story, as well as racial violence, so don't read that if you do not want to. the first person I'm talking about was an explorer and military scout but I don't talk much about what specifically he did so it's not as bad. The first is Frederick Russell Burnham, who was a world-travelling adventurer and helped inspire the Boy Scouts with Robert Baden-Powell in the late 19^th and early 20^th century.

 

 

Frederick was born to a missionary family living on a Dakota Sioux Indian reservation in Minnesota. He went to school in Iowa, and met a woman named Blanche, who he later married. Frederick moved to California with his family as a kid, but then his father died and his mom and younger brother moved back to Iowa to live with his grandparents. Frederick, who was 12 at the time, stayed in California to make his own way. He worked as messenger on horseback for the Western Union Telegraph Company. A couple of years later when he was fourteen, he worked as a scout in the Apache Wars when he tried to find and capture the famous chief Geronimo. He tracked the Apache by “detecting the odor of burning mescal, a species of aloe they often cooked and ate. With careful study of the local air currents and canyons, trackers could follow the odor to Apache hiding places from as far away as 6 miles”. Frederick also learned survival skills and hunted and prospected, also working as a cowboy and guide during the next few years. He accidentally joined the losing side of the Pleasant Valley War in Arizona, and learned to shoot from either hand and while riding a horse. He made enemies this way.

Frederick did go back to California a while later to do high school, but never ended up graduating. When he went back to Arizona, he was appointed Deputy Sheriff of Pinal County, but then went back to being a cowboy instead. He went home for a visit to Iowa where he married Blanche, when he was twenty three years old. He took her back to California and bought an orange grove, but couldn’t stay put for long, returning to his life of prospecting and scouting.

Around this time, the American media decided that the West had been won. There were apparently no more uncharted territories to explore, and many scouts were deciding to make their living as entertainers instead. Frederick chose not to do that, and looked elsewhere to keep living as an adventurer. He heard about Cecil Rhodes who was working to make a railway in Africa, and he sold his things. In 1893, he took his wife and son and went to South Africa.

Once he got there, he decided to trek with his family up to where Rhodes was, which was a journey of 1000 miles. On his way, war broke up between the local King and Rhodes’ people, and once he got to his destination, Frederick signed up to scout for Rhodes right away. He was involved in fighting with Rhodes’ men against the colonial people to conquer parts of South Africa at the time. Frederick also explored the area in Northeastern Rhodesia that had lots of copper deposits and was chosen to be a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. Rhodes and the British South Africa Company built mines and a railroad to transport copper ore in the region.

The local people fought again against the colonizers, and in this second war Frederick was also involved. Robert Baden-Powell was also involved in this fighting. The two men met and discussed forming a group for young people that would become known later as the Boy Scouts. The two of them also assassinated the leader of the local people, the Matabele, who they were fighting a war against, and once he was killed, the war was effectively over. Once the war was over, Frederick went back to California. He took his oldest son, Roderick, who was twelve, with him up to Alaska to be a part of the Klondike Gold Rush.

During the Second Boer War at the turn of the century in South Africa, Frederick was summoned back to Africa to help be the Chief of Scouts. He spent most of his time behind Boer lines gathering information and blowing up railways. He was captured twice and escaped both times. In 1900, he was wounded seriously and was ordered to go to London. In England, he dined with the Queen Victoria. After she died, King Edward VII gave Frederick the Queen’s South Africa Medal. He became a member of the British Army despite being an American citizen, which was unusual. He became friends with Robert Baden Powell and then others who were involved in the Scouting movement like Theodore Roosevelt. He became an honorary scout in 1927, and got a Silver Buffalo Award in 1936.

In 1902, when Frederick had recovered from his injuries, he led a mineral prospecting expedition in Kenya. Then he returned to North America and worked on a river irrigation project in Mexico. He was in charge of private security for President Taft and President Diaz on their historic first meeting which was the first time a US President and Mexican President met. He and a Texas Ranger together foiled an assassination attempt on the day of the summit in 1909. He stayed in Mexico working on mining and irrigation projects but had to leave during the Mexican revolutions, especially in 1917 when Mexico prohibited the sale of land to foreigners.
After the US joined World War I, Theodore Roosevelt asked Frederick to raise a volunteer soldier division from the Western US, so he recruited volunteers, but President Woodrow Wilson refused to use them. This was because of a feud between the two men, and Frederick was just caught in the middle.

Frederick found oil in Dominguez Hills, California, in 1923, and became rich. The spot where the oil was found was where “as a small boy he used to graze cattle, and shoot game which he sold to the neighboring mining districts to support his widowed mother and infant brother." Frederick was interested in wildlife conservation because he was an avid hunter. He worked later in life to save the Desert Bighorn Sheep from extinction and was successful in helping to establish a wildlife refuge in Arizona.

Frederick died in 1947 at his home, and buried with his family members. His wife, Blanche, who had been with him for fifty five years, travelled with him in Africa and the Southwestern United States. They had three children together all of whom spent the first years of their lives in Rhodesia, and when they became rich in 1923 they moved to a mansion in California. Frederick and Blanche’s oldest son, Roderick, was born in California but spent his early years in Rhodesia until his parents sent him to boarding schools in France and England. He went to college in California and Arizona, playing football, and became a geologist to develop oil wells in South America. He fought in France in World War I, and in 1930 he and the founder of Paramount Pictures together started the first airline in Guatemala.

Frederick’s daughter died at the age of two of a fever, and his youngest son Bruce died by drowning in the River Thames at the age of eight. Frederick’s brother, Howard, lost a leg when he was fourteen and had tuberculosis, but he still lived with his brother as a teenager in California and learned how to shoot and ride. He moved to Africa to work as an engineer in the gold mines in South Africa, and teamed up with his brother Frederick in Mexico to work on an irrigation project. During World War I, Howard worked behind enemy lines in Germany as a spy for the French government, using his wooden leg to conceal tools and documents. Howard died during the war in France.


Stephanie St. Clair  lived a different, but just as interesting life, from 1886 to 1969. She had many nicknames, some of which were: "Queenie", "Madam Queen", "Madam St. Clair", and "Queen of the Policy Rackets". Stephanie was of mixed African and French descent, and was born in the West Indies. When she was fifteen, her mother, who had worked for her to go to school, became sick, and she had to drop out. Stephanie became a maid in a family where she was sexually assaulted by the son of her employer. She saved up her money and after her mother died, she left Martinique and went to France in 1912. Despite knowing how to read and write, which was rare for the time, she couldn’t get a job, so she left to go to New York within the year. The voyage was long and then she was quarantined, so she learned English. She fell in love with a guy named Duke in Harlem, but he tried to prostitute her so she shoved a fork in his eye. She tried to leave New York, but the KKK stopped the bus and killed and raped some of the black passengers, so she went back to New York, only to find out that Duke had been shot and killed in gang violence.

After that awful start to her life in the United States, she found a new boyfriend, Ed, who she worked with to start her own business selling drugs. After she made thirty thousand dollars, she told Ed she was going to leave and do her own thing. Ed wasn’t happy and tried to kill her, but she fought back and he cracked his head against a table and died.

Stephanie started to see success and become notorious in Harlem, investing money and beginning to run the leading numbers games in New York City. She hired her own men, and bribed police to keep her business going. She also ran unofficial banking systems as most banks would not take black customers at the time. The numbers game in Harlem was very male dominated, and Stephanie was one of the few women, also one of the biggest employers in her area. In the 1920s, she was making more than twenty thousand dollars a year, which was huge for the time.

 

 

Stephanie was an advocate for the black community at the time. She put ads in local papers educating others about “their legal rights, advocating for voting rights, and calling out police brutality”. When she was harassed by the police, she ran ads in the newspapers calling senior officers out for corruption. The police could not let this stand, and arrested her. She spent eight months in a workhouse, and to get back at the police for that, she “testified about the kickbacks she had paid police officers”. Over a dozen police officers were fired after this.

 After Prohibition ended, a lot of Jewish and Italian crime families in New York City no longer had the ability to make money off of illegal alcohol, so they tried to move in to the Harlem gambling scene, Stephanie’s business. Stephanie wouldn’t allow that. She tipped off the police about her rivals and the police took them down for her. She handed off her business to her second in command, so that she appeared clean in case the police came after her in turn. Stephanie wasn’t fully out of the game though, sending a telegram to the bed of one of her rivals before his death that said “As ye show, so shall ye reap”.

Once Stephanie had gone clean, she decided to advocate for political reform. She married a man (apparently known as "Black Hitler" due to his antisemitism) called Sufi Abdul Hamid, but they broke up when he cheated on her. He tried to steal her money too, but in 1938 Hamid got shot and Stephanie was charged for shooting him. She spent ten years in jail, but once she got out she kept working on advocating for civil rights and liberties. She also wrote columns in the newspaper about issues that faced her community.

In her old age, Stephanie was still rich, and her second in command who ran her numbers business after she left decided to live with her and write poetry. She died at the age of 83 in 1969. She was portrayed in several movies, but never as a main character. I haven’t seen this one, but apparently she’s a prominent figure in it.