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Frederick Burnham Russell was one of the greatest milita...)
Frederick Burnham Russell was one of the greatest military scouts to have ever lived.
Born on a Dakota Sioux reservation he was taught the ways of the Native Americans from as soon as he could walk. At the tender age of fourteen, having had little formal education, he was supporting himself and learning from some of the last cowboys and frontiersmen of the Old West. These lessons would pay dividend in his later life, first as a tracker for the United States Army in the Apache Wars and later as a scout for the British Army in the Matebele Wars in Southern Africa. Frederick Burnham Russell was a remarkable figure who revolutionized the art of scouting in both the British and United States armies. Indeed his influence would lead his friend, Robert Baden-Powell, to begin the international Scouting Movement. In Scouting on Two Continents Burnham records the details of his brilliant life in fascinating detail and provides insight into the life of an unique adventurer in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. “Burnham in real life is more interesting than any of my heroes of romance.” Rider Haggard “Burnham is a most delightful companion ... amusing, interesting, and most instructive. Having seen service against the Red Indians he brings quite a new experience to bear on the Scouting work here. And while he talks away there’s not a thing escapes his quick roving eye, whether it is on the horizon or at his feet.” Robert Baden-Powell Frederick Burnham Russell has been described as the “Father of Scouting.” He fought in the Pleasant Valley War, Apache Wars, the First and Second Matabele Wars as well as the Second Boer War. His book Scouting on Two Continents was first published in 1926. He passed away in 1947.
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Frederick Russell Burnham was an American explorer, scout, and soldier of fortune. He is known for his service in the British South Africa Company and in the British Army in colonial Africa, as well as for teaching woodcraft to Robert Baden-Powell in Rhodesia. He will be remembered as a person, who inspired the establishment of the international Scouting Movement in the United States.
Background
Frederick Russell Burnham was born on May 11, 1861 in Tivoli (near Mankato), Minnesota, a small settlement on an Indian reservation. He was the elder of the two sons of the Rev. Edwin Otway Burnham, a Congregational minister and missionary, and Rebecca (Russell) Burnham. His father was a native of Kentucky; his mother's family had come from England around 1832 and had settled in Iowa.
The elder Burnham, a graduate of Union Theological Seminary, was also a homesteader and farmer, and though he retained, as Frederick Burnham later wrote, the "narrow Puritanical ideas of his scholastic environment, " he introduced his son to the pleasures of woodcraft, tracking, and nature study.
When Burnham was nine his father suffered a lung injury in a barnbuilding accident and moved his family to Los Angeles, Calif. --then a small ranching town. After his father's death in 1873, Burnham decided to remain in the West rather than return east with his mother and brother.
Education
Burnham was chiefly educated at home, where he learned the "three R's" and memorized Bible passages. His mother told him adventure stories, but these often paled beside the family's own frontier experiences, which included at least one narrow escape from an Indian war party.
Career
Already Frederick Burnham was determined to lead the life of a scout, and he set out systematically to learn his craft. Beginning at the age of thirteen as a horseback messenger for the Western Union Telegraph Company, he spent the next two decades ranging widely over the Southwest and Mexico. Except for an unhappy year living with an uncle and attending high school in Clinton, Iowa, he hunted and sold big game, prospected for gold, fought Apaches, served as a deputy sheriff, and was even a hired gunhand in an Arizona range war.
Above all, Burnham sought out the best scouts living in the Southwest, including one who had worked for General George Crook, and closely studied their methods.
Girding himself for the rigors of his vocation, he studied military strategy, learned to subsist on minimal rations of food and water, and even gave up smoking in order to heighten his sense of smell. In the course of learning the "signs of the trail, " Burnham acquired a knowledge of botany, meteorology, and geology, which provided a solid foundation for his future prospecting ventures.
Burnham had been intrigued since childhood by tales of Africa, and he greatly admired the exploits of the British colonialist Cecil Rhodes. Summoned by an "irresistible call, " Burnham went to Matabeleland (later part of Rhodesia) in 1893 on the eve of a bloody rebellion by the Matabeles, an offshoot of the Zulu nation, against the colonial settlers. As a scout for Rhodes' British South Africa Company, Burnham gained considerable fame when he sought unsuccessfully to relieve a force commanded by Major Allan Wilson that had been attacked by a large band of Kaffir warriors.
Wilson's force was killed to a man, but their fight for survival and Burnham's rescue attempt were quickly legendized in the press and in Wilson's Last Stand, a popular London stage play. In the second Matabele rebellion in 1896, Burnham's heroic image was enhanced by an episode in which he supposedly killed the M'Limo, believed by the settlers to be a deified tribal prophet who had inflamed the Matabele against the whites. The M'Limo seems actually to have been an invisible spirit whose commands were interpreted by a number of native priest-oracles.
In a daring raid, Burnham tracked one of the most provocative of these oracles to his sacred cave in the Matopo mountains and there killed him, apparently in cold blood. Subsequent popular legend regarded this act as instrumental in ending the rebellion, but its real effect is difficult to judge. When not helping to quash native uprisings, Burnham led several expeditions from his home in Bulawayo, the principal settlement of southern Rhodesia, to explore the area north of the Zambesi River, where Rhodes had granted him an unpegged claim of one hundred square miles.
A friend of the adventure novelist H. Rider Haggard, the romantic Burnham hoped to locate the Englishman's fabled "King Solomon's Mines. " Though failing in this, he mapped previously uncharted regions, located significant African ruins, and discovered important copper deposits. His expeditions also provided Rhodes with geographical and geological information necessary to complete the projected Cape-to-Cairo railroad; it was Burnham who came upon the rich Wankie coal fields, a vital factor in the future economic development of Rhodesia.
Although he returned to North America in 1897 to mine gold in the Klondike, Burnham was recalled to South Africa early in 1899 with the outbreak of the Boer War. Named chief of scouts in the field for the British army, he was twice captured by the Boers and was wounded in a thwarted attempt to sever the Pretoria-Delagoa Bay railway line before being invalided to England in June 1900.
There he was given the rank of major, was widely feted by London society, and was awarded both the Distinguished Service Order and the South African Medal. Returning to Africa in 1901, he explored the Volta River in West Africa and later, as a representative of the British East Africa Company, the vast territory between the Indian Ocean and Victoria Nyanza. One of his parties discovered Lake Magadi, a rich source of carbonate of soda. Burnham returned to the United States in 1904, and over the next decades engaged in several prospecting and exploring ventures.
Spurred by tales of buried cities, he led archaeological expeditions into Mexico, and his discoveries added to the knowledge of Mayan civilization. With the mining engineer John Hays Hammond, whom he had first met in Africa, he launched a project to irrigate and cultivate the Yaqui River valley of northern Mexico, a plan frustrated by the onset of the Mexican civil war of 1912. More successful was the Burnham Exploration Company, an oil venture established with Hammond in 1919, which developed the highly productive Dominguez Hill field in California. Concerned with the preservation of the American wilderness, Burnham was one of the original members of the California park commission, and in his later years he lived on a cattle ranch in the High Sierras near Sequoia National Park. In neither personality nor physique did Burnham fit the rough-and-tumble stereotype of the frontier scout.
Burnham died of a coronary thrombosis in Santa Barbara, California, at the age of eighty-six, and was buried in Three Rivers, Tulare County, California, near his ranch. His important scouting career in Africa had begun just as the American frontier was coming to a close.
Achievements
In the 1920's, Burnham formed an oil exploration company and successfully drilled wells and operated the Dominguez Hills oil field. After he purchased 5, 000 acres near Three Rivers, California, he began to pursue ranching, so he helped to establish wildlife parks and natural preserves in the United States and Africa, and promoted the idea of conservation long before it was fashionable to do so.
In 1936, Burnham was awarded the Silver Buffalo, the highest award given by the Boy Scouts of America. Mt. Burnham, a peak in California's Angeles Natl. Forest, is named in honor of him and adjoins Mt. Baden-Powell.
Burnham was a founding member of the American Committee for International Wildlife Protection (now a committee of the World Conservation Union). He was also one of the original members of the first California State Parks Commission (serving from 1927 to 1934), a founding member of the Save-the-Redwoods League, president of the Southwest Museum of Los Angeles from 1938 until 1940, and he served as both the Honorary President of the Arizona Boy Scouts and as a regional executive for the BSA throughout the 1940s until his death in 1947.
Quotations:
As he once commented: "It is the constructive side of frontier life that most appeals to me, the building up of a country . .. ; when the place is finally settled I don't seem to enjoy it very long".
Membership
Burnham filled various public offices and also served as a member of the Boone and Crockett Club of New York.
Personality
A slight, though muscular man, handsome, with a bronzed complexion, and penetrating light-blue eyes, he was nicknamed "He-Who-Sees-in-the-Dark" by African natives and "Hawkeye" by his colleague-in-arms Sir Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts, who regarded Burnham as a model for emulation by the young. Quiet, courteous, and well informed, he possessed a personal modesty rare in one of his calling.
Quotes from others about the person
President Theodore Roosevelt, 1901: "I know Burnham. 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. "
Fritz Joubert Duquesne, 1933, One warrior to another: "To my friendly enemy, Major Frederick Russell Burnham, the greatest scout of the world, whose eyes were that of an Empire. I once craved the honour of killing him, but failing that, I extend my heartiest admiration. "
Sir H. Rider Haggard: "Burnham in real life is more interesting than any of my heroes of romance!"
27th Annual Report of the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) (1936): "Frederick Russell Burnham: Explorer, discoverer, cowboy, and Scout. Native American, he served as chief of scouts in the Boer War, an intimate friend of Lord Baden-Powell. It was on some of his exploits demanding great courage, alertness, skill in surmounting the perils of the out-of-doors, that the founder of Scouting based some of the activities of the Boy Scout program. As an honorary Scout of the Boy Scouts of America, he has served as an inspiration to the youth of the Nation and is the embodiment of the qualities of the ideal Scout. "
Connections
Perhaps most untypical was the fact that Burnham's adventures were all carried out en famille. After his marriage in March 1884 to Blanche Blick of Clinton, Iowa, he was accompanied everywhere both by his wife and by a bevy of in-laws. Burnham's daughter Nada (named after the heroine of a Haggard story) was the first white child born in Bulawayo. He also had two sons: Roderick and Bruce. Burnham's wife died in 1938, and on October 28, 1943, he married Ilo K. Willits.
Father:
Edwin Otway Burnham
1825–1873
Mother:
Rebecca Elizabeth Russell Clapp
1842–1905
1st wife:
Blanche Blick Burnham
1862–1939
2nd wife:
Ilo K. Willits
Partner:
John Hays Hammond
After the war, Burnham and his business partner John Hays Hammond formed the Burnham Exploration Company.
Daughter:
Nada Burnham
1894–1896
Son:
Bruce Blick Burnham
1897–1905
Son:
Roderick Deane Burnham
1886–1976
Brother:
Mather Howard Burnham
1870–191
Friend:
Robert Baden-Powell
It was in Africa where Burnham met and taught scouting skills to Robert Baden-Powell, who would later go on to found the Boy Scout movement. Burnham and Baden-Powell remained lifelong friends.
Friend:
H. Rider Haggard
A friend of the adventure novelist H. Rider Haggard, the romantic Burnham hoped to locate the Englishman's fabled "King Solomon's Mines."
