AMONG the Soldiers of Fortune whose stories have been told in this book
were men who are no longer living, men who, to the United States, are
strangers, and men who were of interest chiefly because in what they
attempted they failed.
The subject of this article is none of these. His adventures are as
remarkable as any that ever led a small boy to dig behind the barn for
buried treasure, or stalk Indians in the orchard. But entirely apart
from his adventures he obtains our interest because in what he has
attempted he has not failed, because he is one of our own people, one of
the earliest and best types of American, and because, so far from being
dead and buried, he is at this moment very much alive, and engaged in
Mexico in searching for a buried city. For exercise, he is alternately
chasing, or being chased by, Yaqui Indians.
In his home in Pasadena, Cal., where sometimes he rests quietly for
almost a week at a time, the neighbors know him as “Fred” Burnham. In
England the newspapers crowned him “The King of Scouts.” Later, when he
won an official title, they called him “Major Frederick Russell Burnham,
D. S. O.”
Some men are born scouts, others by training become scouts. From his
father Burnham inherited his instinct for wood-craft, and to this
instinct, which in him is as keen as in a wild deer or a mountain lion,
he has added, in the jungle and on the prairie and mountain ranges,
years of the hardest, most relentless schooling. In those years he 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, to still even the
beating of his heart. Indeed, than Burnham no man of my acquaintance to
my knowledge has devoted himself to his life’s work more earnestly, more
honestly, and with such single-mindedness of purpose. To him scouting
is as exact a study as is the piano to Paderewski, with the result that
to-day what the Pole is to other pianists, the American is to all other
“trackers,” woodmen, and scouts. He reads “the face of Nature” as you
read your morning paper. To him a movement of his horse’s ears is as
plain a warning as the “Go SLOW” of an automobile sign; and he so saves
from ambush an entire troop. In the glitter of a piece of quartz in the
firelight he discovers King Solomon’s mines. Like the horned cattle, he
can tell by the smell of it in the air the near presence of water,
and where, glaring in the sun, you can see only a bare kopje, he
distinguishes the muzzle of a pompom, the crown of a Boer sombrero,
the levelled barrel of a Mauser. He is the Sherlock Holmes of all
out-of-doors.
Besides being a scout, he is soldier, hunter, mining expert, and
explorer. Within the last ten years the educated instinct that as a
younger man taught him to follow the trail of an Indian, or the “spoor”
of the Kaffir and the trek wagon, now leads him as a mining expert to
the hiding-places of copper, silver, and gold, and, as he advises, great
and wealthy syndicates buy or refuse tracts of land in Africa and Mexico
as large as the State of New York. As an explorer in the last few years
in the course of his expeditions into undiscovered lands, he has added
to this little world many thousands of square miles.
Personally, Burnham is as unlike the scout of fiction, and of the Wild
West Show, as it is possible for a man to be. He possesses no flowing
locks, his talk is not of “greasers,” “grizzly b’ars,” or “pesky
redskins.” In fact, because he is more widely and more thoroughly
informed, he is much better educated than many who have passed through
one of the “Big Three” universities, and his English is as conventional
as though he had been brought up on the borders of Boston Common, rather
than on the borders of civilization.
In appearance he is slight, muscular, bronzed; with a finely formed
square jaw, and remarkable light blue eyes. These eyes apparently never
leave yours, but in reality they see everything behind you and about
you, above and below you. They tell of him that one day, while out with
a patrol on the veldt, he said he had lost the trail and, dismounting,
began moving about on his hands and knees, nosing the ground like a
bloodhound, and pointing out a trail that led back over the way the
force had just marched. When the commanding officer rode up, Burnham
said:
“Don’t raise your head, sit. On that kopje to the right there is a
commando of Boers.”
“When did you see them?” asked the officer.
“I see them now,” Burnham answered.
“But I thought you were looking for a lost trail?”
“That’s what the Boers on the kopje think,” said Burnham.
In his eyes, possibly, owing to the uses to which they have been
trained, the pupils, as in the eyes of animals that see in the dark,
are extremely small. Even in the photographs that accompany this article
this feature of his eyes is obvious, and that he can see in the dark
the Kaffirs of South Africa firmly believe. In manner he is quiet,
courteous, talking slowly but well, and, while without any of that
shyness that comes from self-consciousness, extremely modest. Indeed,
there could be no better proof of his modesty than the difficulties I
have encountered in gathering material for this article, which I have
been five years in collecting. And even now, as he reads it by his
camp-fire, I can see him squirm with embarrassment.
Burnham’s father was a pioneer missionary in a frontier hamlet called
Tivoli on the edge of the Indian reserve of Minnesota. He was a stern,
severely religious man, born in Kentucky, but educated in New York,
where he graduated from the Union Theological Seminary. He was
wonderfully skilled in wood-craft. Burnham’s mother was a Miss Rebecca
Russell of a well-known family in Iowa. She was a woman of great
courage, which, in those days on that skirmish line of civilization,
was a very necessary virtue; and she was possessed of a most gentle and
sweet disposition. That was her gift to her son Fred, who was born on
May 11, 1861.
His education as a child consisted in memorizing many verses of the
Bible, the “Three R’s,” and wood-craft. His childhood was strenuous. In
his mother’s arms he saw the burning of the town of New Ulm, which was
the funeral pyre for the women and children of that place when they were
massacred by Red Cloud and his braves.
On another occasion Fred’s mother fled for her life from the Indians,
carrying the boy with her. He was a husky lad, and knowing that if she
tried to carry him farther they both would be overtaken, she hid him
under a shock of corn. There, the next morning, the Indians having been
driven off, she found her son sleeping as soundly as a night watchman.
In these Indian wars, and the Civil War which followed, of the families
of Burnham and Russell, twenty-two of the men were killed. There is no
question that Burnham comes of fighting stock.
In 1870, when Fred was nine years old, his father moved to Los Angeles,
Cal., where two years later he died; and for a time for both mother and
boy there was poverty, hard and grinding. To relieve this young Burnham
acted as a mounted messenger. Often he was in the saddle from twelve to
fifteen hours, and even in a land where every one rode well, he gained
local fame as a hard rider. In a few years a kind uncle offered to Mrs.
Burnham and a younger brother a home in the East, but at the last moment
Fred refused to go with them, and chose to make his own way. He was then
thirteen years old, and he had determined to be a scout.
At that particular age many boys have set forth determined to be scouts,
and are generally brought home the next morning by a policeman. But
Burnham, having turned his back on the cities, did not repent. He
wandered over Mexico, Arizona, California. He met Indians, bandits,
prospectors, hunters of all kinds of big game; and finally a scout who,
under General Taylor, had served in the Mexican War. This man took a
liking to the boy; and his influence upon him was marked and for his
good. He was an educated man, and had carried into the wilderness a few
books. In the cabin of this man Burnham read “The Conquest of Mexico
and Peru” by Prescott, the lives of Hannibal and Cyrus the Great, of
Livingstone the explorer, which first set his thoughts toward Africa,
and many technical works on the strategy and tactics of war. He had no
experience of military operations on a large scale, but, with the aid of
the veteran of the Mexican War, with corn-cobs in the sand in front of
the cabin door, he constructed forts and made trenches, redoubts,
and traverses. In Burnham’s life this seems to have been a very happy
period. The big game he hunted and killed he sold for a few dollars to
the men of Nadean’s freight outfits, which in those days hauled bullion
from Cerro Gordo for the man who is now Senator Jones of Nevada.
At nineteen Burnham decided that there were things in this world he
should know that could not be gleaned from the earth, trees, and sky;
and with the few dollars he had saved he came East. The visit apparently
was not a success. The atmosphere of the town in which he went to school
was strictly Puritanical, and the townspeople much given to religious
discussion. The son of the pioneer missionary found himself unable to
subscribe to the formulas which to the others seemed so essential, and
he returned to the West with the most bitter feelings, which lasted
until he was twenty-one.
“It seems strange now,” he once said to me, “but in those times
religious questions were as much a part of our daily life as to-day are
automobiles, the Standard Oil, and the insurance scandals, and when I
went West I was in an unhappy, doubting frame of mind. The trouble was
I had no moral anchors; the old ones father had given me were gone, and
the time for acquiring new ones had not arrived.” This bitterness of
heart, or this disappointment, or whatever the state of mind was that
the dogmas of the New England town had inspired in the boy from the
prairie, made him reckless. For the life he was to lead this was not a
handicap. Even as a lad, in a land-grant war in California, he had been
under gunfire, and for the next fifteen years he led a life of danger
and of daring; and studied in a school of experience than which, for a
scout, if his life be spared, there can be none better. Burnham came
out of it a quiet, manly, gentleman. In those fifteen years he roved the
West from the Great Divide to Mexico. He fought the Apache Indians for
the possession of waterholes, he guarded bullion on stage-coaches, for
days rode in pursuit of Mexican bandits and American horse thieves,
took part in county-seat fights, in rustler wars, in cattle wars; he was
cowboy, miner, deputy-sheriff, and in time throughout the the name of
“Fred” Burnham became significant and familiar.
During this period Burnham was true to his boyhood ideal of becoming a
scout. It was not enough that by merely living the life around him he
was being educated for it. He daily practised and rehearsed those things
which some day might mean to himself and others the difference between
life and death. To improve his sense of smell he gave up smoking, of
which he was extremely fond, nor, for the same reason, does he to this
day use tobacco. He accustomed himself also to go with little sleep, and
to subsist on the least possible quantity of food. As a deputy-sheriff
this educated faculty of not requiring sleep aided him in many important
captures. Sometimes he would not strike the trail of the bandit or “bad
man” until the other had several days the start of him. But the end
was the same; for, while the murderer snatched a few hours’ rest by the
trail, Burnham, awake and in the saddle, would be closing up the miles
between them.
That he is a good marksman goes without telling. At the age of eight his
father gave him a rifle of his own, and at twelve, with either a “gun”
or a Winchester, he was an expert. He taught himself to use a weapon
either in his left or right hand and to shoot, Indian fashion, hanging
by one leg from his pony and using it as a cover, and to turn in the
saddle and shoot behind him. I once asked him if he really could shoot
to the rear with a galloping horse under him and hit a man.
“Well,” he said, “maybe not to hit him, but I can come near enough to
him to make him decide my pony’s so much faster than his that it really
isn’t worth while to follow me.”
Besides perfecting himself in what he tolerantly calls “tricks” of
horsemanship and marksmanship, he studied the signs of the trail, forest
and prairie, as a sailing-master studies the waves and clouds. The
knowledge he gathers from inanimate objects and dumb animals seems
little less than miraculous. And when you ask him how he knows these
things he always gives you a reason founded on some fact or habit of
nature that shows him to be a naturalist, mineralogist, geologist, and
botanist, and not merely a seventh son of a seventh son.
In South Africa he would say to the officers: “There are a dozen Boers
five miles ahead of us riding Basuto ponies at a trot, and leading five
others. If we hurry we should be able to sight them in an hour.” At
first the officers would smile, but not after a half-hour’s gallop, when
they would see ahead of them a dozen Boers leading five ponies. In the
early days of Salem, Burnham would have been burned as a witch.
When twenty-three years of age he married Miss Blanche Blick, of Iowa.
They had known each other from childhood, and her brothers-in-law have
been Burnham’s aids and companions in every part of Africa and the West.
Neither at the time of their marriage nor since did Mrs. Burnham “lay
a hand on the bridle rein,” as is witnessed by the fact that for nine
years after his marriage Burnham continued his career as sheriff, scout,
mining prospector. And in 1893, when Burnham and his brother-in-law,
Ingram, started for South Africa, Mrs. Burnham went with them, and
in every part of South Africa shared her husband’s life of travel and
danger.
In making this move across the sea, Burnham’s original idea was to look
for gold in the territory owned by the German East African Company. But
as in Rhodesia the first Matabele uprising had broken out, he continued
on down the coast, and volunteered for that campaign. This was the real
beginning of his fortunes. The “war” was not unlike the Indian fighting
of his early days, and although the country was new to him, with
the kind of warfare then being waged between the Kaffirs under King
Lobengula and the white settlers of the British South Africa Company,
the chartered company of Cecil Rhodes, he was intimately familiar.
It does not take big men long to recognize other big men, and Burnham’s
remarkable work as a scout at once brought him to the notice of Rhodes
and Dr. Jameson, who was personally conducting the campaign. The war was
their own private war, and to them, at such a crisis in the history of
their settlement, a man like Burnham was invaluable.
The chief incident of this campaign, the fame of which rang over all
Great Britain and her colonies, was the gallant but hopeless stand made
by Major Alan Wilson and his patrol of thirty-four men. It was Burnham’s
attempt to save these men that made him known from Buluwayo to Cape
Town.
King Lobengula and his warriors were halted on one bank of the Shangani
River, and on the other Major Forbes, with a picked force of three
hundred men, was coming up in pursuit. Although at the moment he did
not know it, he also was being pursued by a force of Matabeles, who were
gradually surrounding him. At nightfall Major Wilson and a patrol of
twelve men, with Burnham and his brother-in-law, Ingram, acting as
scouts, were ordered to make a dash into the camp of Lobengula and, if
possible, in the confusion of their sudden attack, and under cover of a
terrific thunder-storm that was raging, bring him back a prisoner.
With the king in their hands the white men believed the rebellion would
collapse. To the number of three thousand the Matabeles were sleeping in
a succession of camps, through which the fourteen men rode at a gallop.
But in the darkness it was difficult to distinguish the trek wagon of
the king, and by the time they found his laager the Matabeles from the
other camps through which they had ridden had given the alarm. Through
the underbrush from every side the enemy, armed with assegai and
elephant guns, charged toward them and spread out to cut off their
retreat.
At a distance of about seven hundred yards from the camps there was
a giant ant-hill, and the patrol rode toward it. By the aid of the
lightning flashes they made their way through a dripping wood and over
soil which the rain had turned into thick black mud. When the party
drew rein at the ant-hill it was found that of the fourteen three were
missing. As the official scout of the patrol and the only one who could
see in the dark, Wilson ordered Burnham back to find them. Burnham said
he could do so only by feeling the hoof-prints in the mud and that he
would like some one with him to lead his pony. Wilson said he would lead
it. With his fingers Burnham followed the trail of the eleven horses to
where, at right angles, the hoof-prints of the three others separated
from it, and so came upon the three men. Still, with nothing but the mud
of the jungle to guide him, he brought them back to their comrades. It
was this feat that established his reputation among British, Boers, and
black men in South Africa.
Throughout the night the men of the patrol lay in the mud holding the
reins of their horses. In the jungle about them, they could hear the
enemy splashing through the mud, and the swishing sound of the branches
as they swept back into place. It was still raining. Just before
the dawn there came the sounds of voices and the welcome clatter of
accoutrements. The men of the patrol, believing the column had joined
them, sprang up rejoicing, but it was only a second patrol, under
Captain Borrow, who had been sent forward with twenty men as
re-enforcements. They had come in time to share in a glorious
immortality. No sooner had these men joined than the Kaffirs began the
attack; and the white men at once learned that they were trapped in a
complete circle of the enemy. Hidden by the trees, the Kaffirs fired
point-blank, and in a very little time half of Wilson’s force was
killed or wounded. As the horses were shot down the men used them for
breastworks. There was no other shelter. Wilson called Burnham to him
and told him he must try and get through the lines of the enemy to
Forbes.
“Tell him to come up at once,” he said; “we are nearly finished.” He
detailed a trooper named Gooding and Ingram to accompany Burnham.
“One of you may get through,” he said. Gooding was but lately out from
London, and knew nothing of scouting, so Burnham and Ingram warned him,
whether he saw the reason for it or not, to act exactly as they did.
The three men had barely left the others before the enemy sprang at them
with their spears. In five minutes they were being fired at from every
bush. Then followed a remarkable ride, in which Burnham called to his
aid all he had learned in thirty years of border warfare. As the enemy
rushed after them, the three doubled on their tracks, rode in triple
loops, hid in dongas to breathe their horses; and to scatter their
pursuers, separated, joined again, and again separated. The enemy
followed them to the very bank of the river, where, finding the “drift”
covered with the swollen waters, they were forced to swim. They reached
the other bank only to find Forbes hotly engaged with another force of
the Matabeles.
“I have been sent for re-enforcements,” Burnham said to Forbes, “but I
believe we are the only survivors of that party.” Forbes himself was too
hard pressed to give help to Wilson, and Burnham, his errand over, took
his place in the column, and began firing upon the new enemy.
Six weeks later the bodies of Wilson’s patrol were found lying in a
circle. Each of them had been shot many times. A son of Lobengula, who
witnessed their extermination, and who in Buluwayo had often heard the
Englishmen sing their national anthem, told how the five men who were
the last to die stood up and, swinging their hats defiantly, sang “God
Save the Queen.” The incident will long be recorded in song and story;
and in London was reproduced in two theatres, in each of which the
man who played “Burnham, the American Scout,” as he rode off for
re-enforcements, was as loudly cheered by those in the audience as by
those on the stage.
Hensman, in his “History of Rhodesia,” says: “One hardly knows which to
most admire, the men who went on this dangerous errand, through brush
swarming with natives, or those who remained behind battling against
overwhelming odds.”
For his help in this war the Chartered Company presented Burnham with
the campaign medal, a gold watch engraved with words of appreciation;
and at the suggestion of Cecil Rhodes gave him, Ingram, and the Hon.
Maurice Clifford, jointly, a tract of land of three hundred square
acres.
After this campaign Burnham led an expedition of ten white men and
seventy Kaffirs north of the Zambesi River to explore Barotzeland
and other regions to the north of Mashonaland, and to establish the
boundaries of the concession given him, Ingram, and Clifford.
In order to protect Burnham on the march the Chartered Company signed
a treaty with the native king of the country through which he wished
to travel, by which the king gave him permission to pass freely and
guaranteed him against attack.
But Latea, the son of the king, refused to recognize the treaty and sent
his young men in great numbers to surround Burnham’s camp. Burnham had
been instructed to avoid a fight, and was torn between his desire to
obey the Chartered Company and to prevent a massacre. He decided to make
it a sacrifice either of himself or of Latea. As soon as night fell,
with only three companions and a missionary to act as a witness of what
occurred, he slipped through the lines of Latea’s men, and, kicking
down the fence around the prince’s hut, suddenly appeared before him and
covered him with his rifle.
“Is it peace or war?” Burnham asked. “I have the king your father’s
guarantee of protection, but your men surround us. I have told my people
if they hear shots to open fire. We may all be killed, but you will be
the first to die.”
The missionary also spoke urging Latea to abide by the treaty. Burnham
says the prince seemed much more impressed by the arguments of the
missionary than by the fact that he still was covered by Burnham’s
rifle. Whichever argument moved him, he called off his warriors. On
this expedition Burnham discovered the ruins of great granite structures
fifteen feet wide, and made entirely without mortar. They were of a
period dating before the Phoenicians. He also sought out the ruins
described to him by F. C. Selous, the famous hunter, and by Rider
Haggard as King Solomon’s Mines. Much to the delight of Mr. Haggard,
he brought back for him from the mines of his imagination real gold
ornaments and a real gold bar.
On this same expedition, which lasted five months, Burnham endured one
of the severest hardships of his life. Alone with ten Kaffir boys, he
started on a week’s journey across the dried-up basin of what once had
been a great lake. Water was carried in goat-skins on the heads of the
bearers. The boys, finding the bags an unwieldy burden, and believing,
with the happy optimism of their race, that Burnham’s warnings were
needless, and that at a stream they soon could refill the bags, emptied
the water on the ground.
The tortures that followed this wanton waste were terrible. Five of
the boys died, and after several days, when Burnham found water in
abundance, the tongues of the others were so swollen that their jaws
could not meet.
On this trip Burnham passed through a region ravaged by the “sleeping
sickness,” where his nostrils were never free from the stench of dead
bodies, where in some of the villages, as he expressed it, “the hyenas
were mangy with overeating, and the buzzards so gorged they could
not move out of our way.” From this expedition he brought back many
ornaments of gold manufactured before the Christian era, and made
several valuable maps of hitherto uncharted regions. It was in
recognition of the information gathered by him on this trip that he was
elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.
He returned to Rhodesia in time to take part in the second Matabele
rebellion. This was in 1896. By now Burnham was a very prominent
member of the “vortrekers” and pioneers at Buluwayo, and Sir Frederick
Carrington, who was in command of the forces, attached him to his staff.
This second outbreak was a more serious uprising than the one of 1893,
and as it was evident the forces of the Chartered Company could not
handle it, imperial troops were sent to assist them. But with even their
aid the war dragged on until it threatened to last to the rainy season,
when the troops must have gone into winter quarters. Had they done so,
the cost of keeping them would have fallen on the Chartered Company,
already a sufferer in pocket from the ravages of the rinderpest and the
expenses of the investigation which followed the Jameson raid.
Accordingly, Carrington looked about for some measure by which he could
bring the war to an immediate end.
It was suggested to him by a young Colonial, named Armstrong, the
Commissioner of the district, that this could be done by destroying
the “god,” or high priest, Umlimo, who was the chief inspiration of the
rebellion.
This high priest had incited the rebels to a general massacre of women
and children, and had given them confidence by promising to strike the
white soldiers blind and to turn their bullets into water. Armstrong
had discovered the secret hiding-place of Umlimo, and Carrington ordered
Burnham to penetrate the enemy’s lines, find the god, capture him, and
if that were not possible to destroy him.
The adventure was a most desperate one. Umlimo was secreted in a cave
on the top of a huge kopje. At the base of this was a village where were
gathered two regiments, of a thousand men each, of his fighting men.
For miles around this village the country was patrolled by roving bands
of the enemy.
Against a white man reaching the cave and returning, the chances were a
hundred to one, and the difficulties of the journey are illustrated by
the fact that Burnham and Armstrong were unable to move faster than at
the rate of a mile an hour. In making the last mile they consumed three
hours. When they reached the base of the kopje in which Umlimo was
hiding, they concealed their ponies in a clump of bushes, and on hands
and knees began the ascent.
Directly below them lay the village, so close that they could smell the
odors of cooking from the huts, and hear, rising drowsily on the hot,
noonday air, voices of the warriors. For minutes at a time they lay as
motionless as the granite bowlders around or squirmed and crawled over
loose stones which a miss of hand or knee would have dislodged and sent
clattering into the village. After an hour of this tortuous climbing
the cave suddenly opened before them, and they beheld Umlimo.
Burnham recognized that to take him alive from his stronghold was an
impossibility, and that even they themselves would leave the place was
equally doubtful. So, obeying orders, he fired, killing the man who had
boasted he would turn the bullets of his enemies into water. The echo of
the shot aroused the village as would a stone hurled into an ant-heap.
In an instant the veldt below was black with running men, and as,
concealment being no longer possible, the white men rose to fly a great
shout of anger told them they were discovered. At the same moment two
women, returning from a stream where they had gone for water, saw the
ponies, and ran screaming to give the alarm. The race that followed
lasted two hours, for so quickly did the Kaffirs spread out on every
side that it was impossible for Burnham to gain ground in any one
direction, and he was forced to dodge, turn, and double. At one time
the white men were driven back to the very kopje from which the race had
started.
But in the end they evaded assegai and gunfire, and in safety reached
Buluwayo. This exploit was one of the chief factors in bringing the war
to a close. The Matabeles, finding their leader was only a mortal like
themselves, and so could not, as he had promised, bring miracles to
their aid, lost heart, and when Cecil Rhodes in person made overtures of
peace, his terms were accepted. During the hard days of the siege, when
rations were few and bad, Burnham’s little girl, who had been the first
white child born in Buluwayo, died of fever and lack of proper
food. This with other causes led him to leave Rhodesia and return to
California. It is possible he then thought he had forever turned
his back on South Africa, but, though he himself had departed, the
impression he had made there remained behind him.
Burnham did not rest long in California. In Alaska the hunt for gold had
just begun, and, the old restlessness seizing him, he left Pasadena and
her blue skies, tropical plants, and trolley-car strikes for the new raw
land of the Klondike. With Burnham it has always been the place that is
being made, not the place in being, that attracts. He has helped to make
straight the ways of several great communities--Arizona, California,
Rhodesia, Alaska, and Uganda. As he once said: “It is the constructive
side of frontier life that most appeals to me, the building up of a
country, where you see the persistent drive and force of the white man;
when the place is finally settled I don’t seem to enjoy it very long.”
In Alaska he did much prospecting, and, with a sled and only two dogs,
for twenty-four days made one long fight against snow and ice, covering
six hundred miles. In mining in Alaska he succeeded well, but against
the country he holds a constant grudge, because it kept him out of the
fight with Spain. When war was declared he was in the wilds and knew
nothing of it, and though on his return to civilization he telegraphed
Colonel Roosevelt volunteering for the Rough Riders, and at once started
south, by the time he had reached Seattle the war was over.
Several times has he spoken to me of how bitterly he regretted missing
this chance to officially fight for his country. That he had twice
served with English forces made him the more keen to show his loyalty to
his own people.
That he would have been given a commission in the Rough Riders seems
evident from the opinion President Roosevelt has publicly expressed of
him.
“I know Burnham,” the President wrote in 1901. “He is a scout and a
hunter of courage and ability, a man totally without fear, a sure shot,
and a fighter. He is the ideal scout, and when enlisted in the military
service of any country he is bound to be of the greatest benefit.”
The truth of this Burnham was soon to prove.
In 1899 he had returned to the Klondike, and in January of 1900 had been
six months in Skagway. In that same month Lord Roberts sailed for
Cape Town to take command of the army, and with him on his staff was
Burnham’s former commander, Sir Frederick, now Lord, Carrington. One
night as the ship was in the Bay of Biscay, Carrington was talking of
Burnham and giving instances of his marvellous powers as a “tracker.”
“He is the best scout we ever had in South Africa!” Carrington declared.
“Then why don’t we get him back there?” said Roberts.
What followed is well known.
From Gibraltar a cable was sent to Skagway, offering Burnham the
position, created especially for him, of chief of scouts of the British
army in the field.
Probably never before in the history of wars has one nation paid so
pleasant a tribute to the abilities of a man of another nation.
The sequel is interesting. The cablegram reached Skagway by the steamer
_City of Seattle_. The purser left it at the post-office, and until two
hours and a half before the steamer was listed to start on her return
trip, there it lay. Then Burnham, in asking for his mail, received it.
In two hours and a half he had his family, himself, and his belongings
on board the steamer, and had started on his half-around-the-world
journey from Alaska to Cape Town.
A Skagway paper of January 5, 1900, published the day after Burnham
sailed, throws a side light on his character. After telling of his hasty
departure the day before, and of the high compliment that had been paid
to “a prominent Skagwayan,” it adds: “Although Mr. Burnham has lived in
Skagway since last August, and has been North for many months, he has
said little of his past, and few have known that he is the man famous
over the world as ‘the American scout’ of the Matabele wars.”
Many a man who went to the Klondike did not, for reasons best known to
himself, talk about his past. But it is characteristic of Burnham that,
though he lived there two years, his associates did not know, until the
British Government snatched him from among them, that he had not always
been a prospector like themselves.
I was on the same ship that carried Burnham the latter half of his
journey, from Southampton to Cape Town, and every night for seventeen
nights was one of a group of men who shot questions at him. And it was
interesting to see a fellow-countryman one had heard praised so highly
so completely make good. It was not as though he had a credulous
audience of commercial tourists. Among the officers who each evening
gathered around him were Colonel Gallilet of the Egyptian cavalry,
Captain Frazer commanding the Scotch Gillies, Captain Mackie of Lord
Roberts’s staff, each of whom was later killed in action; Colonel Sir
Charles Hunter of the Royal Rifles, Major Bagot, Major Lord Dudley, and
Captain Lord Valentia. Each of these had either held command in border
fights in India or the Sudan or had hunted big game, and the questions
each asked were the outcome of his own experience and observation.
Not for a single evening could a faker have submitted to the midnight
examination through which they put Burnham and not have exposed his
ignorance. They wanted to know what difference there is in a column of
dust raised by cavalry and by trek wagons, how to tell whether a horse
that has passed was going at a trot or a gallop, the way to throw a
diamond hitch, how to make a fire without at the same time making a
target of yourself, how--why--what--and how?
And what made us most admire Burnham was that when he did not know he at
once said so.
Within two nights he had us so absolutely at his mercy that we would
have followed him anywhere; anything he chose to tell us, we would have
accepted. We were ready to believe in flying foxes, flying squirrels,
that wild turkeys dance quadrilles--even that you must never sleep in
the moonlight. Had he demanded: “Do you believe in vampires?” we would
have shouted “Yes.” To ask that a scout should on an ocean steamer prove
his ability was certainly placing him under a severe handicap.
As one of the British officers said: “It’s about as fair a game as
though we planted the captain of this ship in the Sahara Desert, and
told him to prove he could run a ten-thousand-ton liner.”
Burnham continued with Lord Roberts to the fall of Pretoria, when he was
invalided home.
During the advance north he was a hundred times inside the Boer laagers,
keeping Headquarters Staff daily informed of the enemy’s movements; was
twice captured and twice escaped.
He was first captured while trying to warn the British from the fatal
drift at Thaba’nchu. When reconnoitring alone in the morning mist he
came upon the Boers hiding on the banks of the river, toward which the
English were even then advancing. The Boers were moving all about him,
and cut him off from his own side. He had to choose between abandoning
the English to the trap or signalling to them, and so exposing himself
to capture. With the red kerchief the scouts carried for that purpose he
wigwagged to the approaching soldiers to turn back, that the enemy were
awaiting them. But the column, which was without an advance guard, paid
no attention to his signals and plodded steadily on into the ambush,
while Burnham was at once made prisoner. In the fight that followed he
pretended to receive a wound in the knee and bound it so elaborately
that not even a surgeon would have disturbed the carefully arranged
bandages. Limping heavily and groaning with pain, he was placed in
a trek wagon with the officers who really were wounded, and who, in
consequence, were not closely guarded. Burnham told them who he was and,
as he intended to escape, offered to take back to head-quarters their
names or any messages they might wish to send to their people. As
twenty yards behind the wagon in which they lay was a mounted guard, the
officers told him escape was impossible. He proved otherwise. The trek
wagon was drawn by sixteen oxen and driven by a Kaffir boy. Later in the
evening, but while it still was moonlight, the boy descended from his
seat and ran forward to belabor the first spans of oxen. This was the
opportunity for which Burnham had been waiting.
Slipping quickly over the driver’s seat, he dropped between the two
“wheelers” to the disselboom, or tongue, of the trek wagon. From this he
lowered himself and fell between the legs of the oxen on his back in the
road. In an instant the body of the wagon had passed over him, and while
the dust still hung above the trail he rolled rapidly over into the
ditch at the side of the road and lay motionless.
It was four days before he was able to re-enter the British lines,
during which time he had been lying in the open veldt, and had subsisted
on one biscuit and two handfuls of “mealies,” or what we call Indian
corn.
Another time when out scouting he and his Kaffir boy while on foot were
“jumped” by a Boer commando and forced to hide in two great ant-hills.
The Boers went into camp on every side of them, and for two days,
unknown to themselves, held Burnham a prisoner. Only at night did he and
the Cape boy dare to crawl out to breathe fresh air and to eat the food
tablets they carried in their pockets. On five occasions was Burnham
sent into the Boer lines with dynamite cartridges to blow up the
railroad over which the enemy was receiving supplies and ammunition. One
of these expeditions nearly ended his life.
On June 2, 1901, while trying by night to blow up the line between
Pretoria and Delagoa Bay, he was surrounded by a party of Boers and
could save himself only by instant flight. He threw himself Indian
fashion along the back of his pony, and had all but got away when a
bullet caught the horse and, without even faltering in its stride, it
crashed to the ground dead, crushing Burnham beneath it and knocking him
senseless. He continued unconscious for twenty-four hours, and when he
came to, both friends and foes had departed. Bent upon carrying out his
orders, although suffering the most acute agony, he crept back to the
railroad and destroyed it. Knowing the explosion would soon bring the
Boers, on his hands and knees he crept to an empty kraal, where for
two days and nights he lay insensible. At the end of that time he
appreciated that he was sinking and that unless he found aid he would
die.
Accordingly, still on his hands and knees, he set forth toward the sound
of distant firing. He was indifferent as to whether it came from the
enemy or his own people, but, as it chanced, he was picked up by a
patrol of General Dickson’s Brigade, who carried him to Pretoria. There
the surgeons discovered that in his fall he had torn apart the muscles
of the stomach and burst a blood-vessel. That his life was saved, so
they informed him, was due only to the fact that for three days he had
been without food. Had he attempted to digest the least particle of the
“staff of life” he would have surely died. His injuries were so serious
that he was ordered home.
On leaving the army he was given such hearty thanks and generous rewards
as no other American ever received from the British War Office. He was
promoted to the rank of major, presented with a large sum of money, and
from Lord Roberts received a personal letter of thanks and appreciation.
In part the Field-Marshal wrote: “I doubt if any other man in the force
could have successfully carried out the thrilling enterprises in which
from time to time you have been engaged, demanding as they did the
training of a lifetime, combined with exceptional courage, caution, and
powers of endurance.” On his arrival in England he was commanded to dine
with the Queen and spend the night at Osborne, and a few months later,
after her death, King Edward created him a member of the Distinguished
Service Order, and personally presented him with the South African
medal with five bars, and the cross of the D. S. O. While recovering
his health Burnham, with Mrs. Burnham, was “passed on” by friends he had
made in the army from country house to country house; he was made the
guest of honor at city banquets, with the Duke of Rutland rode after the
Belvoir hounds, and in Scotland made mild excursions after grouse. But
after six months of convalescence he was off again, this time to the
hinterland of Ashanti, on the west coast of Africa, where he went in the
interests of a syndicate to investigate a concession for working gold
mines.
With his brother-in-law, J. C. Blick, he marched and rowed twelve
hundred miles, and explored the Volta River, at that date so little
visited that in one day’s journey they counted eleven hippopotamuses. In
July, 1901, he returned from Ashanti, and a few months later an unknown
but enthusiastic admirer asked in the House of Commons if it were
true Major Burnham had applied for the post of Instructor of Scouts at
Aldershot. There is no such post, and Burnham had not applied for
any other post. To the Timer he wrote: “I never have thought myself
competent to teach Britons how to fight, or to act as an instructor
with officers who have fought in every corner of the world. The question
asked in Parliament was entirely without my knowledge, and I deeply
regret that it was asked.” A few months later, with Mrs. Burnham and his
younger son, Bruce, he journeyed to East Africa as director of the East
African Syndicate.
During his stay there the _African Review_ said of him: “Should East
Africa ever become a possession for England to be proud of, she will owe
much of her prosperity to the brave little band that has faced hardships
and dangers in discovering her hidden resources. Major Burnham has
chosen men from England, Ireland, the United States, and South Africa
for sterling qualities, and they have justified his choice. Not the
least like a hero is the retiring, diffident little major himself,
though a finer man for a friend or a better man to serve under would not
be found in the five continents.”
Burnham explored a tract of land larger than Germany, penetrating a
thousand miles through a country, never before visited by white men,
to the borders of the Congo Basin. With him he had twenty white men and
five hundred natives. The most interesting result of the expedition
was the discovery of a lake forty-nine miles square, composed almost
entirely of pure carbonate of soda, forming a snowlike crust so thick
that on it the men could cross the lake.
It is the largest, and when the railroad is built--the Uganda Railroad
is now only eighty-eight miles distant--it will be the most valuable
deposit of carbonate of soda ever found.
A year ago, in the interests of John Hays Hammond, the distinguished
mining engineer of South Africa and this country, Burnham went to
Sonora, Mexico, to find a buried city and to open up mines of copper and
silver.
Besides seeking for mines, Hammond and Burnham, with Gardner Williams,
another American who also made his fortune in South Africa, are working
together on a scheme to import to this country at their own expense many
species of South African deer.
The South African deer is a hardy animal and can live where the American
deer cannot, and the idea in importing him is to prevent big game in
this country from passing away. They have asked Congress to set aside
for these animals a portion of the forest reserve. Already Congress has
voted toward the plan $15,000, and President Roosevelt is one of its
most enthusiastic supporters.
We cannot leave Burnham in better hands than those of Hammond and
Gardner Williams. Than these three men the United States has not sent to
British Africa any Americans of whom she has better reason to be proud.
Such men abroad do for those at home untold good. They are the real
ambassadors of their country.
The last I learned of Burnham is told in the snapshot of him which
accompanies this article, and which shows him, barefoot, in the Yaqui
River, where he has gone, perhaps, to conceal his trail from the
Indians. It came a month ago in a letter which said briefly that when
the picture was snapped the expedition was “trying to cool off.” There
his narrative ended. Promising as it does adventures still to come, it
seems a good place in which to leave him.
Meanwhile, you may think of Mrs. Burnham after a year in Mexico keeping
the house open for her husband’s return to Pasadena, and of their first
son, Roderick, studying woodcraft with his father, forestry with Gifford
Pinchot, and playing right guard on the freshman team at the University
of California.
But Burnham himself we will leave “cooling off” in the Yaqui River,
maybe, with Indians hunting for him along the banks. And we need not
worry about him. We know they will not catch him.