Part 11 (1/2)
In his home in Pasadena, Cal, where sohbors know hiland the newspapers crowned hi of Scouts” Later, when he won an official title, they called him ”Major Frederick Russell Burnham, D S O”
So 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 le and on the prairie and es, years of the hardest,In those years he has trained hier, 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 Burnhae has devoted himself to his life's work le- 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 yourpaper To hi as the ”Go SLOW” of an auton; and he so saves frolitter of a piece of quartz in the firelight he discovers King Solomon's mines Like the horned cattle, he can tell by the slaring 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 Hol a scout, he is soldier, hunter,expert, and explorer Within the last ten years the educated instinct that as a younger ht him to follow the trail of an Indian, or the ”spoor”
of the Kaffir and the trek wagon, now leads hi-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 alocks, his talk is not of ”greasers,” ”grizzly b'ars,” or ”pesky redskins” In fact, because he is hly informed, he is h 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 forht 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, dis the ground like a bloodhound, and pointing out a trail that led back over the way the force had justofficer 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 theht you were looking for a lost trail?”
”That's what the Boers on the kopje think,” said Burnha to the uses to which they have been trained, the pupils, as in the eyes of animals that see in the dark, are extreraphs that accompany this article this feature of his eyes is obvious, and that he can see in the dark the Kaffirs of South Africa fir 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 hismaterial 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 e of the Indian reserve of Minnesota He was a stern, severely religious raduated froical Seminary He onderfully skilled in wood-craft Burnham's mother was a Miss Rebecca Russell of a well-known fae, which, in those days on that skirmish line of civilization, was a very necessary virtue; and she was possessed of a ift to her son Fred, as born on May 11, 1861
His education as a child consisted inmany verses of the Bible, the ”Three R's,” and wood-craft His childhood was strenuous In hisof 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'sthe 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 hi, 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 Burnha stock
In 1870, when Fred was nine years old, his father eles, Cal, where two years later he died; and for a tirinding To relieve this young Burnhaer 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
Burnhaer brother a hoo with them, and chose to make his oay He was then thirteen years old, and he had detere enerally brought ho turned his back on the cities, did not repent He wandered over Mexico, Arizona, California Hegame; and finally a scout who, under General Taylor, had served in the Mexican War Thisto the boy; and his influence upon hiood 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 y and tactics of war He had no experience of e 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 Burnha game he hunted and killed he sold for a few dollars to the ht outfits, which in those days hauled bullion from Cerro Gordo for the man who is now Senator Jones of Nevada
At nineteen Burnhas 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 ious 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 s, which lasted until he enty-one
”It seeious 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 one, and the ti new ones had not arrived” This bitterness of heart, or this disappointland 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 Burnhaentleman In those fifteen years he roved the West froht the Apache Indians for the possession of waterholes, he guarded bullion on stage-coaches, for days rode in pursuit of Mexican bandits and Ahts, in rustler wars, in cattle wars; he was cowboy, hout the the nanificant and fa this period Burnha a scout It was not enough that byeducated for it He daily practised and rehearsed those things which soht mean to himself and others the difference between life and death To i, of which he was extremely fond, nor, for the same reason, does he to this day use tobacco He accustoo 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, Burnha up the oes without telling At the age of eight his father gave hiun”
or a Winchester, he was an expert He taught hiht hand and to shoot, Indian fashi+on, hanging by one leg fro it as a cover, and to turn in the saddle and shoot behind him I once asked hi horse under him and hit a man
”Well,” he said, ”h to him to make him decide my pony's so much faster than his that it really isn't worth while to followhimself in what he tolerantly calls ”tricks” of horsens of the trail, forest and prairie, as a sailing-athers from inanimate objects and dumb animals seems little less than s he always gives you a reason founded on some fact or habit of nature that shows hiist, 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 fivefive others If we hurry we should be able to sight them in an hour” At first the officers would sallop, when they would see ahead of the 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