Welcome to a new column, Real Life Romance, in which I discuss romances in history. Unlike the romance of romance novels, not all of these will be happy romances, and not all will be admirable, but all will highlight romances that influenced historical events or shine a light on less well-recognized aspects of history.
This month, we kick off with a romance that is near to my heart. It’s a romance that took place between scout, soldier, and conservationist Frederick Russell Burnham (‘Fred’) and my Great-Great-Aunt Blanche Blick. Their marriage took them through South Africa, Mexico, Alaska, and California. Fred was a rover and where he went, Blanche went too, toting a rifle, a sewing machine, and their children with her. Their story has been kept alive through historical records, Fred’s writing, and above all the oral history of several generations of aunties, who don’t want the nieces to forget that Blanche was a badass. I don’t know how Blanche and Fred felt about each other – but I do know that Blanche led a quiet middle-American life until BOOM this guy showed up and swept her off her feet. From then on Blanche had a life of mad adventure (Rhodesia [as it was known then], Alaska, gold mines all over the West), because she refused to stay home while Fred was adventuring.
Fred started life in the middle of a pulp adventure story and just kept going. If Fred’s account of his life is to be believed, he was saved by his clever mother from Sioux warriors as an infant (she hid him in a basket of corn), after which he grew up with his missionary parents on a Lakota Sioux reservation. He got his first lessons in wilderness tracking and scouting from his Sioux friends.
He went to school in Iowa where his classmate was Blanche Blick, but at the age of twelve his father died, so he left his mother and baby brother in Iowa while he went to California to earn a living and pay off his father’s debts. Feel free to use this family anecdote on your own children when they complain that you made them empty the dishwasher.
While Blanche was growing up with my more prosaic relatives in Iowa, Fred had various adventures in California, Arizona, and the Southwest. He returned to Iowa and married Blanche in 1884. By then, the Blicks had moved to Pasadena, California, where they grew oranges. Fred and Blanche joined the California Blick contingent and tried to settle down to orange farming, but Fred got restless. This had a huge impact on the Blick family, since Fred was basically the adult equivalent of a kid who jumps up and down saying, “GUYS! GUYS! WE SHOULD DO THIS THING! C’MON GUYS!” As a result those nice farming Blick boys, and Blanche, and at one point her sister Grace, were pulled into wild adventures as various combinations of in-laws followed Fred all around the world.
Lest I over-glorify Fred’s exploits, understand that Fred was the Forrest Gump of Imperialism and Manifest Destiny, fighting everywhere and meeting everybody. He fought Native Americans, he fought Native Africans, he fought in a giant feud in Arizona, he fought the Germans in WWI, and he panned for gold in Alaska and discovered oil in California. He was an ardent conservationist but of the Teddy Roosevelt variety – he liked shooting things and didn’t want to run out of large animals to kill for fun. This doesn’t negate the importance of his conservation work (for instance, he helped save the Desert Bighorn Sheep from extinction) but it does place his work in a specific historic and cultural context. While he had many admirable qualities (a cool head, intelligence, courage, endurance, and a deep respect for the knowledge and skills of local people regardless of their race or origin), it should not be forgotten that he also had a central role in some of the worst moments of American expansion and British colonialism.
Fred is most famous today for being the best friend of Lord Baden-Powell, who was inspired by Burnham to found the Boy Scouts of America. While Lord Baden-Powell is “The Founder of the Boy Scouts,” Burnham is sometimes known as “The Father of the Boy Scouts.”
In 1893 Blanche, Fred, and their six-year-old son Roderick went to Matabeleland, South Africa, to settle. Everything was terribly uncertain, and people kept telling Blanche to stay in California or at least to stay safely in the local town of Durban, but Blanche would have none of that. Fred wrote in glowing terms about her material contributions to the family’s survival in Africa, too. As Burnham says in Scouting On Two Continents:
On the faintest hint that I might leave my wife and Roderick in the comfortable town of Durban while I should go up country with some freight outfit to get a foothold, my wife’s pioneering blood began to tingle, and I knew there was no hesitancy on her part to venture on the long trek north.
The family lived in Africa for many years, during which time Blanche had two children. Her daughter, named Nada (the Zulu word for ‘lily’) died in the Second Matabele War (also known as the First War of Independence) during the siege of Bulawayo. Their son Bruce drowned in the Thames during a visit to London. Roderick survived several wars in Africa, the Alaskan Gold Rush, and various other exploits. As an adult, among other things, he started the first airline in Guatemala.
After the War of Independence ended, the Burnham’s decided to try out that orange farming thing again. Of course this lasted for about five minutes before Burnham heard about the Klondike Gold Rush. Wikipedia refers to Fred going to the Klondike along with Roderick, but family lore is adamant that Blanche (and possibly a brother-in-law or two) went as well. According to my aunties, Blanche opened and ran a boarding house while Fred was mining. Post-Klondike adventures together and separately included the Second Boer War and subsequent mining expeditions, mining in Mexico and California, and counterespionage in WWI. Eventually Fred found oil in California. This made him much richer than orange farming and mining. They also lived in England for quite a while together and once they came into money from oil they took several rather lavish trips around the world.
The photo below, taken in 1896, shows two real life romances in action. Blanche’s sister, Grace, fell in love back in California with a man my aunties refer to “an unsuitable suitor.” Grace’s brothers “ran him off” and then they felt sad for Grace. So they wrote to Fred and asked if he could find someone for Grace to marry in what was then called Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). He set her up with his friend Pete Ingram, and Grace and her father flew out to meet Pete. Apparently the meeting was a success, because here are Pete, Grace, Blanche, Fred, and the sisters’ father on Grace and Pete’s honeymoon trip. No word on how the Grace/Pete thing turned out after they married, but as far as anyone can tell, Fred and Blanche were very happy together – certainly they were rarely bored.
.
My sources: Wikipedia, because our family lore is skimpy on dates and Wikipedia is not, Burnham’s book Scouting on Two Continents, and all the female relatives on my mother’s side.
Do you have a suggestion for Real Life Romances? We’re open to stories from everywhere and everyone. Please email us and tell us about it!
Interesting piece and great photos. Can you identify the other Blick’s in the photos? You are correct about Charles and Judd Blick, other Blicks, and Pete Ingram going to the Klondike with Burnham — I’ve found several references. They made two separate trips to the Klondike over two years, and only the second one was with the young Roderick. Blanche was my great-grand mother and I’m the unofficial historian for the Burnhams.
Very cool. 🙂
How wonderful it is to have colorful relatives in your background and what a great way to kick off a new column! I love the idea of featuring real life romances, I’ll be racking my brain to think of suggestions.
What a wonderful story. If I read it in a romance novel I would have thought the author was just being ridiculous, but evidently real people did travel hither and yon like this.
Really looking forward to future columns.
Blanche Blick was also an active letter writer and several boxes of her handwritten correspondence is still available at Yale with Major Burnham’s archives. The Blick letters from Africa were published by in 1994 by Drs. Mary and Richard Bradford in the book — An American Family on the African Frontier: The Burnham Family Letters, 1893-1896. You can buy a hardback copy inexpensively from Amazon.
Wow! I loved this post. Also, I find myself wondering what in the heck I’m doing with my time.
Another interesting real-life love story with adventure can be found in the book Love, Life, and Elephants – an African love story, by Dame Daphne Sheldrick. They worked in a wildlife park, struggled to end poaching, and Daphne was the first person to successfully hand rear orphaned elephant babies.
@rod atkinson: If it’s OK for me to contact you (we’re related, yay!) SB Sarah will send me your email address. I have some other photos I can send you, and I’m so excited about the book of letters!. Here’s the members of the Blick family in the group family photo as listed in my grandma’s handwriting. from context the names in parentheses would be the names the women married into:
Back row l – r: John Charles Blick, Catherine Fay (Wells) Blick (known as Kate), Judd Dunxing Blick, Grace (Ingram) Blick, Madge Hunter Blick (Ford)
Front Row: James Shannon Blick, Phoebe Elinor Blick, Blanche Blick (Burnham), Homer Eli Blick. Joseph James Blick
I do have a suggestion – my great-grandmother, Theodora, as a teen, eloped with her cousin, Skuli Thoroddsen, a poor law clerk. She managed to turn him into an important politician and herself into a well known poet (people write theses on her works) while having 13 children and going on to found the Communist party in her country. The two of them also were important in obtaining independence for their country. If you are interested, let me know and I can either put something together or give you details.
This is awesome. I love that these people are in your family and wish that I knew cool stories like this about my family. I started looking into my family on ancestry a couple of months ago and was able to track my dad’s family to Ireland in the 18th century. I wasn’t able to find anything about them other than their birthdates/death dates and when the immigrated. I often found myself inventing backgrounds for them.
For instance, I found a woman named Elizabeth Curry (my first name is Elizabeth, so I thought that was cool), who was born in 1789 and had twin boys in the 1820’s. I did not find any evidence of her being married (not that she couldn’t have been–it just means that the info wasn’t there) and I found myself imagining what the life of a single mother of twins in the 19th century would have been like and if that was why they came to the US.
Then, I found my great-great grandparents and realized that my Great-Great Grandmother was widowed in 1905 and that her husband left her with only $60 and a slew of young children to raise. I couldn’t help wondering how she managed to deal with her husband’s death and figure out what to do with her life. (She must have been a strong woman because not only did she outlive her husband, but also her daughter; my Great Grandmother died a year before her mother, when my Grandfather was only 10.)
Carrie, yes, please do ask Sarah for my email address. I look forward to hearing from you.
This is so cool! I have a couple of really interesting love stories in my family: my maternal grandparents and my paternal great grandfather and wife number (2? 3?) something. My grandmother (Bobo) was named after my Paw Paw’s grandma. My Paw Paw’s grandma and my Bobo’s mom were best friends (they weren’t related — we’re not that Southern!) They were married nearly 60 years.
My great grandfather had a traveling Wild West show from the 20s to the 50s. He ended up running a big prison rodeo in Oklahoma, and (…according to him) was quite famous in Latin America. He married famous silent film cowboy Tom Mix’s daughter (…not my great grandmother…heh)
Thank you for sharing, CarrieS. I agree, how cool to have colorful relatives in your background. And, now you found more relatives!
Very cool story, and I like the idea of this column.
But I’m going to be the pedantic jerk who suggests maybe you shouldn’t say “flew out to meet Pete” for events >7 years before success at Kitty Hawk 🙂
Fascinating article. I consider my parents to have had a “great romance”, but their circumstances were much more common place to those of us born in the 20th century. However, I’ve always considered William and Catherine Boucher Blake to be a fascinating real life romance and I’d be intrigued by more information on their love story.
I imagine that Fred and Blanche would be very pleased to read this story you tell about them. Because it’s a great story, but also because it’s well told.
I am Fred and Blanche’s grandson. My father was Roderick, and on Dec 31, 1918, waiting to return from France at the end of WWI, he wrote his mother (Blanche) a letter for the ages, which I hope Rod will get published at some point. It proves Blanche to be the badass you suggest as he describes their experiences together in Rhodesia and how that inspired him in the trenches in 1918, and winning the Croix de Guerre to hold up the family name! With the other things he wrote, you know that Blanche was a truly loving woman, so your account was a great column and fairly accurate! Fred
That’s wonderful, Frederick II! Thrilled to find my relatives here!