BURNHAM CONSIDERED HIMSELF a link in a long line of wanderers and pioneers. In the first sentence of his memoir Scouting on Two Continents, published in 1926 when he was sixty-five, he wrote, “My adventurous ancestors, migrating from England during the turbulent religious wars, carried a fierce love of freedom and great physical energy into the New World.” His forebears pioneered from Connecticut into Kentucky, then crossed the Mississippi to the frontier hamlet of Le Claire, Iowa, where Burnham’s mother learned to read in a log schoolhouse with a boy named Cody, known to fame as Buffalo Bill. By paragraph three of Scouting on Two Continents the Sioux are scalping settlers on the Minnesota frontier, and Burnham’s mother has stashed him in a corn shock before outrunning a war party.
Restlessness, dislocation, independence, violence: Burnham saw these as his heritage and implicit destiny. He was proud that his ancestry combined the learned and the martial, the book and the gun. His original American ancestor, a lawyer named Thomas Burnham, left England in 1635 in search of religious freedom. He landed in the new settlement of Hartford, Connecticut, where his independent views soon nettled the authorities. In 1645 he defended a woman accused of witchcraft and saved her from hanging, which so irritated the Puritan inquisitors that they banned him from the court.
Burnham’s great-grandfather, Abner Burnham, was born in Hartford and fought for the colonists in the Revolutionary War before settling in Madison, New York. Abner’s son Frederick was seriously wounded in the War of 1812. Afterward he moved his wife Harriet and his medical practice to Ghent, Kentucky, a frontier settlement on the Ohio River. Frederick’s son Edwin Otway Burnham (Burnham’s father) was born there in 1824. Six years later Edwin and his younger sisters Harriet and Caroline were orphans. They were sent back east to their grandfather Abner Burnham, who died soon thereafter.
Nevertheless, Edwin, a young man of ample physical and intellectual energy, graduated from both Oberlin College and Hamilton College, and then enrolled in Union Theological Seminary in New York City. In 1855, after three years there, he was licensed as a preacher of the Gospel. The following year he took all this higher education to the Minnesota frontier, becoming a missionary to the Winnebago Indians on their reservation at Tivoli (now the town of Le Ray). He set about saving heathen souls.
In nearby Sterling Center, a restless British immigrant named William Russell ran a general store. William and his second wife Rebecca had left England in 1845 with their young daughter and William’s four sons from a previous marriage. They started a farm in New York state, but in 1849 moved to the frontier, first in Iowa and then in Minnesota. Like the Burnhams, the Russells were deeply religious Congregationalists. William was also a passionate abolitionist who later wrote strong-minded essays for newspapers.
Edwin Burnham must have approved of the Russells’ rigorous Christian values. He definitely approved of their teenaged daughter Rebecca. He and Rebecca married in 1860 when she was eighteen, half his age. They set up house on the reservation. Ten months later, on May 11, 1861, a month after Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter, the couple’s first child was born among Indians. They named him to honor the merged streams of his ancestry: Frederick Russell Burnham. Not long after his birth, they left the reservation for a homestead with a one-room cabin about twenty miles from Mankato. It would soon be torched by rampaging Sioux.
Like many bloody encounters between settlers and Native Americans, the Dakota War of 1862 began with a spontaneous stupidity bred of resentment. On August 17 of that year, when Burnham was fifteen months old, four Dakota Sioux braves were returning to their reservation in southern Minnesota from a hunting trip. About eighty miles west of St. Paul, they came across a clutch of chicken eggs near the fence of a homesteader they knew. One of the braves scooped up an egg. His companion warned him against stealing a white man’s property. The egg thief mocked his cautious friend as a coward. To regain face, the insulted man proposed killing the egg’s owner right then, and challenged the others to join him. They accepted the dare. Soon the homesteader, his wife, son, stepdaughter, and a visitor lay dead.
Of course that wasn’t the real start of hostilities; their roots were old and deep. In the early 1850s, after decades of friction between Indians and white settlers encroaching into the Territory of Minnesota, several bands of eastern Dakota Sioux signed treaties giving them large reservations and annual federal stipends of food and cash. The following decade brought the federal government’s usual litany of broken promises, including reductions of the Indians’ reservations and stipends, which were further reduced by corrupt Indian agents and extortionate reservation storekeepers.
In 1862 the federal annuity due in late June or early July was tardy again, stalled in a Congress distracted by the Civil War. The Sioux depended on the money to buy food and supplies, so by August they were hungry and angry. Meanwhile the traders’ warehouses on the reservations were full of provisions guarded by soldiers. At a tense gathering at the Lower Sioux Agency on August 15, the Indians asked the traders to advance them food on credit until the annuity arrived. Andrew J. Myrick’s response on behalf of himself and the other three storekeepers was translated to the crowd: “If they are hungry, let them eat grass.”
The next day, August 16, the federal payment to the Sioux of $71,000 in gold coins reached St. Paul. It was too late. On August 17 an egg and an insult sparked the massacre that would lead to war, atrocity, and vengeance, events that would become foundational memories for young Fred Burnham.
The four Sioux who killed the homesteaders fled to their village and described what they had done. At a council that night, some braves wanted to turn over the killers. Others urged war against the intruders who had lied to them, stolen their land, and now were starving them by reneging on the promise of money to buy food. The pro-war faction pressed the others to reclaim Sioux honor and territory while so many white men were away at their Civil War.
The main chief, Little Crow, wavered. As the homesteaders were being murdered that Sunday, Little Crow had been attending the Episcopalian service on the reservation. He had turned himself into a farmer. He was building a brick house and he liked his white man’s bed. He had been photographed wearing a cravat, button coat, and high starched collar, and he had visited Washington, D.C. several times as the Sioux’s representative. But he believed that Sunday’s massacre would end the federal stipend and bring down the white man’s wrath. He agreed to lead his people into war.
Early the next morning Sioux in war paint attacked the Lower Agency, shocking the whites there. One of the first targets was the storekeeper Myrick. The Indians riddled him with arrows and stuffed his mouth with grass, perhaps not in that order. About two dozen other whites, all well-known to the Indians, were murdered as well. Some Christian Indians saved several settlers from death.
From there the warriors spread to the townships and isolated homesteads such as the Burnhams’. They killed the men and captured the women, raping some. They slaughtered some children and left others clinging to their mothers. Barns and crops were burned. In Milford the braves murdered fifty German settlers. Other townships were wiped out and razed. Outside of Fort Ridgely, a large party of warriors overtook thirteen white families in flight. The Sioux’s leader spoke English and had often hunted with the leader of the refugees. The Indian warned his white friend to beware of the Chippewas, who were on the warpath. When the settlers relaxed, the Sioux killed twenty-five of them, male and female, and took some women captive.
As news of the uprising spread on August 18, panicky settlers fled to the barricaded settlement of New Ulm, which soon contained more than a thousand people. Few had guns or bullets, which suggests how completely stunned they were by the uprising. The refugees exchanged horrifying stories about pregnant women cut open, babies nailed to trees, young girls brutally raped. On August 19 about 500 Indians with firearms attacked the settlement, whose defenders mustered half that many guns. In two days of fighting, twenty-six whites were killed and at least twice that many were wounded. The Sioux’s casualties were unknown. Much of the town was burned.
Over the next few days Sioux war parties terrified the Minnesota River Valley. Settlers in twenty-three counties fled their townships and homesteads. But the Indians’ main weapon—surprise—was gone. When the whites finally responded with militia and soldiers, the Indians were quickly outnumbered and outgunned. In late September, less than six weeks after the uprising began, it effectively ended with the capture and surrender of 303 Sioux warriors and the recovery of 269 captives. Another 1,500 Indian women, children, and elderly braves were placed in custody. Many had nothing to do with the violence. Some had opposed it. The whites didn’t care about such distinctions. All Sioux were the same. Little Crow fled and escaped.
Hysteria inflated the number of dead settlers into the thousands. (The true number was somewhere between 450 and 800.) Rumor also exaggerated the number of rapes and mutilations, though enough of these had been survived or witnessed to create horror beyond mere figures.
The settlers also felt betrayed. They had assumed the Sioux were peaceable neighbors living contentedly on gifts from the federal government: land, housing, medical care, a yearly stipend. “Our nation’s pampered protégés,” complained one contemporary commentator. Neighborliness and generosity had been paid back with vicious treachery, proving the Indians’ irredeemable savagery. The Sioux were labeled fiends, demons, beasts deserving extermination.
This volatile mix of grief and outrage led to calls for vengeance. A mob carrying axes and clubs tried to break through the troops protecting the Indian prisoners, and killed one of them. Most people in Minnesota wanted all the imprisoned braves hanged.
The warriors were tried by a military court in November 1862. They weren’t provided lawyers. All 303 were quickly found guilty of rape and murder, and were sentenced to death. Eastern Quakers and philanthropes, as well as the Episcopal bishop of Minnesota, implored President Lincoln to pardon the Indians on grounds of humanitarianism and years of white provocations. Lincoln agreed to look into the matter, enraging people in Minnesota. The state’s governor, Alexander Ramsey, warned the president that if the federal government didn’t kill the Indians legally, the incensed people of his state might do so illegally. When word reached Minnesota that Lincoln was leaning toward pardons, a drunken mob marched on the Indian prison in Mankato but was dispersed by the U.S. Cavalry.
Lincoln decided that the evidence proved only two Indians guilty of rape and forty of “wanton murder.” Of these forty, he commuted the sentence of one man to ten years and ordered the other thirty-nine to be hung. He nullified the death sentences of the other imprisoned braves.
Minnesota again felt betrayed, this time by its federal government, in cahoots with Eastern do-gooders, neither of which had any understanding of Indians or life on the frontier—Western resentments that would persist long after the frontier disappeared. “While [the Indian] still lies in wait for our heart’s blood, sympathy for the ‘poor, wronged red man,’ is being roused, in some parts of our nation,” wrote Harriet E. Bishop in the first history of the uprising, Dakota War Whoop, or, Indian Massacres and War in Minnesota, of 1862–3 (1864). “Had the tragic scenes, of which we have given but a faint outline, been concentrated for one stereoscopic view, in any Eastern city, had their streets been drenched with blood, as were our prairies, had fire and ravishment come to their homes, as to ours, we think we know the New England heart well enough to say, that quite as little leniency would have been desired for the perpetrators, as by us.”
On December 26, 1862, a crowd that included Burnham’s parents gathered in Mankato to watch the Indians hang. One of the thirty-nine condemned had been reprieved. Most of the other thirty-eight had agreed to be baptized. They painted their faces and ascended the gallows chanting their eerie death song, which silenced the crowd. Bags were placed over their heads, nooses tightened around their necks. A drum was beaten slowly three times. Each Indian reached out and clasped hands with his companions to either side. A settler whose wife and children had been burned alive was given the honor of cutting the rope to open the scaffold. The hangings in Mankato remain the largest mass execution in U.S. history.
“I remember hearing my parents relate vividly how the braves met their fate,” wrote Burnham six decades later, “singing the Sioux war song; undaunted, exultant, and defiant to the end. . . . Those were rough days and fierce resentments. Today, recalling all the crimes of the Indians, which were black enough, one cannot but cast up in their behalf the long column of wrongs and grievances they suffered at the hands of the whites. Then hatred dies, and I can entertain the honest hope that they have all reached the Happy Hunting Ground of their dreams.”
At the time, a darker mood prevailed. President Lincoln had stopped the execution of the other imprisoned warriors, but the people of Minnesota demanded that these braves and all other Dakota Sioux be expelled from the state, a pattern that would be repeated throughout the West. The warriors were shipped to a prison in Illinois. Their families went to a temporary internment camp. In April 1863 the U.S. Congress annulled all treaties with the tribe and sold its reservation. The interned families were sent to a bleak reservation in the Dakota Territory, then moved three years later to another reservation in Nebraska.
Meanwhile in July 1863 the state hired hunters and trappers to track down any Dakota Sioux left in Minnesota. The government offered a bounty of $25 for every dead male, payable upon proof such as a scalp. Most of the surviving Sioux had fled the state, so few bounties were collected.
The most notable bounty went to a settler who shot and killed a brave as he was collecting raspberries with his teenaged son in a forest west of St. Paul. The dead man turned out to be Chief Little Crow, who had slipped back into Minnesota. State officials triumphantly displayed his skull and scalp in the capital city.
The Dakota War was the last spasm of the frontier era in Minnesota, which helped give it the aura of myth. Burnham was too young to have his own memories of it, but it colored his childhood. He grew up hearing firsthand stories about Indian treachery and massacred settlers, retribution and Eastern arrogance, the deadly consequences of lax vigilance.
Though the real frontier had moved west by the 1860s, Minnesota was far from settled. The Sioux had been killed or expelled, but other Indians remained a common presence, and Burnham grew up playing with Indian children. For settlers such as Edwin and Rebecca Burnham, self-reliance was still essential for survival. Pioneers carved small homesteads from forest and prairie by felling trees and sawing boards for houses, barns, and fences. They cleared and plowed the land, grew crops and raised livestock for food and trade. Currency was rare. Instead, people bartered—muskrat skins for eggs, beaver pelts for grain.
Most of the Burnhams’ clothing came from wool spun from a small flock owned by Rebecca’s brother. Young Burnham’s aunt taught him to spell three-letter words as she turned wool into yarn for mittens and clothing. The family made their own soap, sugar, candles, and dyes, and tanned their own leather from cattle and deer. Boys ran traplines for otter, mink, beaver, wolf, sable, and muskrat.
With a wife and son to feed, Edwin had given up missionary work for farming. He threshed wheat with a simple flail and hauled his surplus by ox wagon to market at Red Wing, about 100 miles away. Though a farmer in the hinterland, Edwin maintained a steady correspondence with educated men back east such as Horace Greeley, whose letters often contained packets of seeds or cuttings of new plants. After moving to a new farm near Wilton, Minnesota, Edwin tired of the flail and brought in the area’s first McCormick reaper. Curious neighbors came to watch the newfangled contraption work.
The Minnesota winters were brutal. Snowed-in settlers regularly froze in their cabins. Cattle left outside became ice sculptures; their horns would sometimes freeze and burst. Burnham recalled one snowstorm that lasted several weeks and reduced the family to a diet of boiled turnips. Starving timber wolves howled at their front door and tried to get at the livestock protected by makeshift shelters made of rails and straw.
After the long confining winters, spring and summer were joyous for the children. They transformed their parents’ frightening stories into play. “Our games generally patterned on some form of Indian warfare,” wrote Burnham, “and whoever was ‘It’ had to submit to being ‘scalped,’ and prisoners must allow themselves to be tied to the stake, along with other penalties suggestive of frontier incidents.”
Social gatherings typically had a practical justification—a barn raising, a quilting bee, or, in autumn, a corn husking that turned drudgery into a competition. Sometimes the gatherings included wrestling, stone throws, and other physical contests.
The adult activity that most interested young Burnham was trick shooting, another skill with a utilitarian purpose. Edwin Burnham was a scholarly man of God, but he also excelled at marksmanship. He passed his passion for it along to his son, who got his first rifle at age eight. Edwin could split a soft lead bullet on an axe blade. To verify the deed, he positioned a big kettle behind the axe to catch the bullet’s two ringing halves. He could also make a bullet snuff a candle or drive a nail, feats that Burnham would later perform in Africa to amaze British soldiers. The most rigorous test of a marksman’s ability was the autumn turkey shoot. A live turkey was tied behind a log or some other barrier so that only the bird’s bobbing head sporadically showed. The men used muzzle-loaders charged with black powder and homemade round bullets. The best marksmen, according to Burnham, could hit a turkey’s head at 200 yards.
Occasionally there was a dance. Young Burnham knew about dancing through his father’s abomination of it. Edwin Burnham, recalled his son, divided the community into two groups, the godly and the ungodly. “The crimes of the ungodly,” wrote Burnham, “in the order of importance were—first and worst, they danced. For awhile I did not know what that terrible sin was, but I suspected it was worse than murder.”
One summer, soon after his father left on a short trip, someone organized a dance in a grove about two miles from the Burnham homestead. “This was my mother’s chance to dare to be young and gay,” wrote Burnham. She not only risked perdition, she brought along her son. Young Fred never forgot it. “There was an amazing number of those lost souls whirling around,” he wrote, “and they seemed to be astonishingly happy. It was the first time I ever heard a fiddle.” It all enthralled him.
Edwin Burnham’s list of ungodly vices, in addition to dancing and music, was long: smoking, drinking, gambling, swearing, and card-playing. The ungodly fished and hunted on the Sabbath. They invited hellfire by kissing and sparking before marriage. They also indulged in the frivolous temptations of novels and poetry. These sinners could be redeemed, preached Edwin, by going to revival, renouncing Satan, and embracing Jesus.
“As for the Godly people,” wrote Burnham, “they were ‘Don’ts’ personified. It seemed that anything one really wanted to do was ungodly and most of the things one hated to do were Godly. Happily, there were a few liberal spirits in my clan, and my mother was one of them.” Though Rebecca Burnham was a Bible-reading Christian and a regular at temperance meetings, her faith didn’t prohibit joy and amusement. She secretly read her son thrilling melodramas such as Longfellow’s “Evangeline” (“This is the forest primeval”) and “The Song of Hiawatha.”
Once the boy could read on his own, Edwin believed the Good Book was sufficient and required him to memorize verses. But “some blessed soul put into my hands a child’s edition of Greek mythology that gave me a hint of another world of ideas, strange and exciting.” Six decades later he still fondly recalled the people who gave him glimpses of a life beyond the terrors and constraints of his father’s severe Christianity. In a letter written late in life he remembered a kind teacher in Minnesota who sat him on her knee “and told me the wonders of the stars and a hundred illuminating things of life. It was my first conception of God as different from a dangerous angry monster wanting to send me to hell.” He was so grateful for her liberating gift that he earnestly offered her a potato wrapped in brown paper.
Books helped release Burnham from his father’s constrictions and also fueled his dreams. “As a boy I was always hungry for books full of action and shy on preachment.” He doesn’t mention particular titles, but in the 1860s, when he was learning to read, the action category was dominated by highly embroidered biographies of famous frontiersmen such as Kit Carson, Daniel Boone, and Davy Crockett, and by dime novels, which began appearing in the 1860s, about sensational Wild West adventurers with names such as Deadwood Dick, Mustang Sam, and Duke Darrall, hero of W. J. Hamilton’s Old Avoirdupois; or, Steel Coat, the Apache Terror.
For a boy who read avidly and dreamed of adventure, just the titles must have fired the imagination. Burnham probably knew the popular “frontier thrillers” of Charles Wilkins Webber, such as Old Hicks the Guide, or Adventures in the Comanche Country in Search of a Gold-Mine, and The Prairie Scout, or Agatone the Renegade: a Romance of Border Life. He was probably familiar with the equally popular adventure books of “Captain” Mayne Reid, such as The Scalp Hunters: or, Romantic Adventures in Northern Mexico, and The Boy Hunters, or, Adventures in Search of a White Buffalo (a particular favorite of Theodore Roosevelt).
The formulaic heroes of these potboilers were always brave and unflappable. Most were absurdly virtuous, never cussing or drinking. They were intimate with Mother Nature but never with wholesome women, whose decency transformed even the roughest of them into gentlemen. Regrettably—though to great commercial success—these paragons also were obliged to kill hundreds or even thousands of outlaws and Indians. This mixture of morals and mayhem contributed to Burnham’s conceptions of manhood and the West. The romantic myths about the frontier that suffused these books colored his boyhood dreams and later tinted his perceptions about his own experiences.
In Scouting on Two Continents he ascribed his most influential literary moment to a brief stay with a family in Mankato, where a sixteen-year-old girl read aloud every evening from a book about the adventures of two boys in the wilds of the Orange Free State in South Africa. “Then and there,” he wrote, “I made a solemn resolve to become a scout, to trek to South Africa, and to see the whole world and its wonderful life.”
Other influences closer to home fed his dreams about scouting and the West. A harvest hand who claimed to have wandered the Rocky Mountains told the marveling prairie boy about great peaks sprinkled with gold and silver, prowled by fierce Indians and bears as big as cows. The neighboring Indians also inspired him. “The small boys of my day got much of their education through their interest in Indian ways,” he wrote, “and we played with Indians at every opportunity.” Burnham decided that the best way to turn his dreams about scouting and Africa into reality was to assimilate the Indians’ woodcraft and physical toughness. This meant disciplining himself to go without food, water, or sleep, and to endure pain without flinching, for instance by pushing pins into his flesh. He eventually perfected these skills to an astonishing degree.
Other forces were shaping Burnham’s future as well. Edwin Burnham, carrying a timber for a new cabin, slipped on ice. The timber crushed his chest and fractured a rib, puncturing his lung. He seemed unable to recover his strength. Domestic sorrows piled up. The Burnhams’ second child, Edward, born in November 1863, died in September 1866. A third child, Mary, died in July 1868 at eight months old. Another child, Mather Howard Burnham, arrived in May 1870.
By the end of that year Edwin had decided that a warmer climate might improve his health and fortunes. In December the Burnhams traveled on the new transcontinental railroad across endless plains still dotted with buffalo. On New Year’s Day the train crossed into the state where the family hoped to find a new life: California.
California. (From Barnes’s Complete Geography by James Monteith, 1885.)
