Real Soldiers of Fortune
by
Richard Harding Davis
Part 3 out of 3
beach, and as the priest held the crucifix in front of him he spoke
to his executioners in Spanish, simply and gravely: "I die a Roman
Catholic. In making war upon you at the invitation of the people of
Ruatan I was wrong. Of your people I ask pardon. I accept my
punishment with resignation. I would like to think my death will
be for the good of society."
From a distance of twenty feet three soldiers fired at him, but,
although each shot took effect, Walker was not dead. So, a
sergeant stooped, and with a pistol killed the man who would have
made him one of an empire of slaves.
Had Walker lived four years longer to exhibit upon the great board
of the Civil War his ability as a general, he would, I believe, to-day
be ranked as one of America's greatest fighting men.
And because the people of his own day destroyed him is no reason
that we should withhold from this American, the greatest of all
filibusters, the recognition of his genius.
MAJOR BURNHAM, CHIEF OF SCOUTS
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. 0. 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.
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