IN THE FIRST dash toward the king’s wagons, the patrol lost contact with three troopers assigned to cover the rear. As soon as Napier and the others left, Wilson asked Burnham if he could backtrack to the wagons and look for the missing men. Burnham was game, but said success seemed doubtful because of the rain and extreme dark. He would need someone to lead his horse. Wilson volunteered; he wanted to see how Yankees worked.
Eyesight was useless. Burnham dropped to his knees and crawled until he found the curved imprint of a horseshoe. Then he backtracked, feeling with both hands for the previous print. Once he got the horse’s stride and direction, the tracking went more quickly, and soon they were at the king’s wagons again. It was quiet, the surrounding campfires dimmed by rain. There was no sign of the missing men. Wilson assumed they had gone into the vlei to await dawn. He had to risk calling them, and gave a loud “Coo-ee!” Burnham added a cowboy yell. They heard a distant reply from the vlei. The men called several more times, leading the stray troopers to them.
The weird yelling roused the Ndebeles, who began shouting as well. But they didn’t investigate, Burnham learned after the war, because they were wary of a night attack. Burnham tracked back to the patrol, which now numbered sixteen. Wilson told everyone to get some rest, so they lay down in the mud and waited for the relief column from Forbes. Burnham had left the main camp quickly, without a coat, and was shivering in his wet shirt. Wilson threw his cape over both of them.
An hour later Wilson woke him and asked if he heard anything. Burnham put a billycan on the ground upside down as an amplifier and placed his ear to it, listening for vibrations made by tramping feet. Nothing. Wilson asked him to go out beyond the sounds of their horses and listen again. This time he heard faint sounds: brush being pushed aside, and many feet moving between the patrol’s position and the Shangani. The Ndebele were cutting them off, he told Wilson, then went back to sleep.
Sometime before dawn Wilson woke him again and told him to venture toward the wagon track so he could intercept the relief force before it passed them. Burnham found the track and waited. Rain dripped from leaves. A dog occasionally barked in the encampment. Eventually he heard the faint plashing of hooves. He whistled and clapped sharply once, a signal used by him, Bain, and Ingram. A reply came. Silhouettes of mounted men emerged from the gray dawn.
Burnham was surprised to see Ingram in the lead instead of Bain. Burnham told Ingram to wait while he fetched Wilson and the patrol. When they returned, they saw in the growing light that Forbes had not sent the column, only another small patrol: twenty-one men (two others had gotten lost and returned to camp). And no Maxim. They were now thirty-seven men surrounded by thousands of Ndebele warriors. “All of us who had ridden through the great camps and spent the night in the bush,” wrote Burnham, “knew then that the end had come.”
Forbes had listened to Napier’s message, which put him in a terrible dilemma. Wilson should have returned to camp before nightfall, as ordered. Yet Forbes trusted Wilson’s judgment, and if Wilson believed he could capture the king, perhaps the risk was worth it. But along with Wilson’s request to send troops and a Maxim, Napier had also delivered troubling new information. Forbes now knew the column was facing a big organized army of perhaps 3,000, not a few sickly warriors. The Shangani was running fast and was rising. Rain had turned the ground to muck. To attempt a night crossing of the river in such conditions, into the midst of a large force, would endanger the entire column. Splitting it was equally dangerous, since each half would be too small to withstand a serious assault. Captain Johannes Raaf vociferously advised against it.
Napier reminded Forbes that Wilson was risking everything by waiting for a Maxim and reinforcements. If those were not coming, Wilson needed to know so he could withdraw before daylight exposed the patrol to thousands of natives. Abandoning Wilson was unthinkable, yet Forbes was also reluctant to recall him, in case he really could capture the king and end the war.
Forbes decided to send another patrol to reinforce Wilson until the entire column could cross the river at daylight. He ordered Captain Henry Borrow and twenty-two men to saddle up. Napier expected to go, too, but was shivering with fever, so Forbes ordered him to rest. Bain was unconscious with fever. To replace him, Forbes sent Ingram, the only other man who could backtrack the trail in the dark. Each man took 100 rounds for his rifle, plus a revolver with twenty rounds. The patrol rode toward the Shangani at one o’clock. Near dawn, they found Burnham.
Wilson, Borrow, and the other officers were conferring. Burnham heard Captain William Judd say what they all knew: “This is the end.” The question was how to reach it. They could die trying to cut their way out, or, as Wilson suggested, they could make another try for the king at his wagons, and either kill him or at least kill as many of his elite Imbizo regiment as possible. That was the ending they chose.
Watched by natives carrying spears and guns, the patrol rode across the vlei to the king’s wagons, set back against the trees. “With the bravado of the doomed,” wrote Burnham, “Wilson shouted to the king to surrender.” The wagons were still empty. Lobengula, believing that his offer of peace had been rejected, had left long before the Wilson patrol ever crossed the Shangani.
A troop of warriors stepped from behind the trees and opened fire. Two horses went down. Wilson shouted to cut the saddlebags to save the ammunition. The downed riders jumped on behind other horsemen, and the patrol retreated down the vlei to an immense anthill, twenty feet high and wide enough to protect their horses. But the Ndebeles soon outflanked them and poured in gunfire, disabling more horses and wounding a couple of men. Wilson ordered another retreat, into the trees where they had spent the night. When they reached the trees, the gunfire stopped. The Ndebeles knew they could take their time.
Wilson told the wounded and the unmounted to get into the center of the horsemen. In this formation the patrol slowly moved toward the Shangani to meet the main column and the Maxim, which they were certain were imminent. The Ndebeles let them proceed almost unmolested for about a mile. The reason became clear—a mass of warriors was waiting for them, blocking the path to the river.
The patrol paused. Wilson asked Burnham if he could get through to Forbes and tell him to hurry. Burnham said he didn’t think it was possible, but he would try. Wilson assigned a trooper named William Gooding, whose horse wasn’t as poor as the others, to accompany him. Burnham asked if Ingram could come as well. “We had done many things together,” wrote Burnham, “and it seemed fitting that in this last fight we should also be together.” Wilson immediately agreed, wrote Gooding afterward, figuring that three men improved the slim chance of breaching the wall of Ndebeles.
Burnham, Ingram, and Gooding rode toward the Shangani. Within 500 yards they ran into an impi approaching from the river. The warriors in front began firing. On the left was thick brush difficult for a horse to penetrate. On the right was open ground, the natural option for escaping on horseback. Some instinct told Burnham to avoid the right. He spurred his horse sharply left into the brush. Ingram’s horse balked, but changed its mind after Ingram gave its jaw a vicious kick. Fifty yards away, the Ndebeles fired a volley, but overshot as usual. Shredded leaves rained around them. A hundred warriors raced after them into the thicket.
Forbes’s column moved out that morning at 5:30, following the king’s spoor along the Shangani. At 6:30, heavy gunfire erupted across the river. Napier knew it was Wilson. The gunfire stayed heavy until eight, then slackened.
At 9:30 a large force of Ndebeles attacked the column, forcing it into laager along the river. Napier heard sporadic shots from Wilson’s direction until eleven, then nothing.
The counterintuitive turn into the thicket momentarily saved the three men. The approaching impi was the right horn of the formation advancing on the Wilson patrol. If Burnham had turned right, into the open vlei, the riders would have hit the central mass of warriors and been trapped by the flanking horns—as Wilson’s patrol soon would be.
After putting some distance between them and their pursuers, Burnham and the riders slowed to rest their horses. Behind them they heard a shout. The warriors had picked up their trail. The riders reached a narrow vlei. Burnham decided to try a trick that wouldn’t baffle Apaches but might work against the young warriors who ran the horn. The riders crossed the vlei, then made wide separate circles before coming back together to backtrack single file across the vlei. There, they separated and rode into the bush to hide in thickets where they could rest their blowing horses and watch the open ground.
The warriors raced by, down the vlei to where the jumble of tracks sent them milling in different directions. A crash of gunfire came from the direction of Wilson’s patrol. The riders knew the main attack had started.
Eventually the warriors figured out the trail and began running back toward the hidden riders. Burnham’s group remounted and retreated toward the sound of gunfire, then made a small loop and paused again. Their pursuers seemed to buy the ruse, assuming that their prey was returning to the patrol. The riders crossed the narrow vlei for the third time. Now they could hear the Maxims firing across the river and knew Forbes was under attack. That explained why the column hadn’t relieved Wilson this morning. They wondered if the column was being wiped out as well.
They rode on to the Shangani and got a shock—it was now 200 yards wide and flowing fast. Their horses might be too exhausted to swim it, but staying on the bank meant certain death. They plunged in, holding their rifles and bandoliers above their heads. The current took them, but the horses managed to struggle to the other side. Atop the bank, they saw hundreds of Ndebeles watching them from the bush. They rode toward the sound of the Maxims, and when the Ndebeles began shooting, they asked their horses for one last gallop to enter the laager.
Burnham reported to Forbes. He told his commander that he feared the three of them were the only survivors of Wilson’s patrol.
The battle continued throughout the afternoon. Sixteen horses were killed. By three o’clock, the troopers began seeing Ndebeles across the river wearing familiar uniforms—taken from Wilson’s men. That evening Forbes sent up rockets to give any survivors the column’s location. They could hear the Ndebeles singing and chanting in celebration.
Forbes needed to get word to Bulawayo that Lobengula remained free and that the column desperately needed food, ammunition, and reinforcements. It would be a hard ride of 100 miles. Three men were capable of slipping through the Ndebele forces. Bain was still down with fever. Burnham, after spending two days in the rain with no coat and no food, was shivering badly and had just vomited. Besides, Forbes wanted him as scout for the column. So Ingram would go. Because the ground was soggy and the horses exhausted, it was best to leave in the dark. Ingram took another man named Billy Lynch. They left during a thunderstorm on two gaunt horses that were also the column’s best.
The next morning at nine o’clock, the column began a long retreat. They were moving east along the Shangani toward the place where it bends south. Their main food supply, slaughter oxen, was gone, as were most of their provisions. Their horses were worn out, forcing most men to walk. They had been soaked for days, and some men had malaria. The loss of the Wilson patrol—thirty-four men—was a terrible blow to morale. “The men are done up,” wrote Napier in his diary. From across the river, the Ndebeles harassed them with gunfire throughout the day.
Perhaps these stresses led Forbes to make what Burnham called “a peculiar request.” He wanted the scout to cross back over the river right then and look for signs of Wilson’s squad. Burnham later wrote to his uncle:
In broad daylight to cross a swollen river in the face of a numerous enemy and on a weak horse in soft mud walk five miles up a narrow vlei thickly set on both sides with bush was absolute suicide. It was not likely that several thousand men who fought so determinedly on the 4th would allow a solitary horseman to ride among them in daylight on the fifth. In all the orders I have ever received in any campaigns against an enemy this was the most peculiar. But fully believing that a scout must go to his death at once if ordered—as the sacrifice of one may save many—and not knowing the reasons Forbes chose this time and place, I prepared to go. But told Maj. Forbes that I wanted it as an order and not a voluntary service. He was very angry. I did not volunteer. I said to him Make it an order Major, I never yet disobeyed one. He would not and the matter dropped.
As the retreat proceeded, the Ndebeles harassed them and attacked in force seven or eight times. The terrain often put the column into indefensible positions, perfect for annihilating the column with a large mass. But the Ndebeles, though a constant threat, no longer seemed organized. Their poor marksmanship also helped preserve the column; they wounded many but killed only one.
The column’s other unrelenting foes were hunger and fatigue. The men marched for nine more days, much of it in heavy rain through rugged country—ravines, tall grass, dense thorn, rocky ridges and kopjes. The thorns tore their clothing into rags. The rain rotted the boots from their feet, which the rocks lacerated. They began wrapping canvas ammunition wallets and bits of tattered clothing around their feet. They slept on the wet ground, without blankets. The Maxims saved them many times when the Ndebeles attacked, so the heavy guns couldn’t be abandoned; the men sometimes had to cut roads through the bush for the carriages.
Horses became too lame to walk and were shot. One night the column realized that their campground was a death trap. Warriors surrounded them on three sides. The fourth side was the wall of a ravine, so steep the Ndebeles left it unguarded. Yet it was the only path of escape. Burnham scouted a route up it and returned. The ravine had to be climbed in silence, so as a precaution the men killed all their dogs. They also uncoupled the Maxims from their carriages. Long after midnight Burnham led the scramble up the steep route. The men carried the Maxims and the wounded on their shoulders. That’s where the guns rode for the rest of the march, as well as the heavy boxes of ammunition.
They were starving. Twice they stole some cattle and feasted, but during the last half of the march they had nothing but boiled grass and what was left of their emaciated horses. “Hide, sinew, and bones,” wrote Burnham. The meat was so stringy and full of air bubbles that the men often threw it up. Burnham and Bain gladly accepted the portion no one else wanted, the head, having learned from the Indians that “the last bit of nourishment in a starving animal is in the brain.”
Every night, Burnham scouted the route ahead. He kept himself awake by constantly splashing water in his face and pinching his eyelids. After Bain recovered from fever, he joined Burnham out front.
Dissatisfaction with Forbes’s leadership grew so strong that Captain Johannes Raaf, a Boer, virtually took command. The column’s only hope was that Ingram and Lynch had somehow gotten through, and that a relief force was en route. On December 12 someone thought he saw a signal rocket, so the column sent up a reply. No response. Instead they fought another hour-and-a-half battle with the Ndebeles.
Then on December 14 they met two horsemen riding toward them. One was Frederick Courteney Selous, famous in Africa as an explorer and hunter, and greatly admired by Burnham. Selous said that Ingram and Lynch had made it to Bulawayo in four days. A relief force with food and medicine was just ahead, along with Rhodes and Jameson. Rather than wait, the ragged column marched the last few miles to Inyati, where they were met with cheers and a feast. They had been in action for twenty-three days on ten days’ rations. That night they slept dry, gorged, and serene. Within a few days they had covered the forty miles to Bulawayo. After a medical inspection, Dr. Jameson pronounced Burnham the only man in the column still fit enough to walk forty more miles.
King Lobengula was in flight and his regiments were dispersing. Some pioneers had suffered or died, but the conquest of Matabeleland by a handful of settlers had been relatively quick and easy. On Christmas Day in Bulawayo, Rhodes announced that every soldier and officer who participated in the war would be awarded 6,000 acres, mineral rights to twenty acres, and an equal share in profits from the king’s 250,000 cattle. “The key to a country as large as all Western Europe,” wrote Burnham, “was now in our hands.”
Blanche hadn’t heard anything from her husband since he had left to chase Lobengula, expecting to be home in two weeks. In mid-December, she did hear of him from several men on leave in Victoria. They told her, “Dr. Jameson says that if there were ten Burnhams, Lobengula would have been captured weeks ago.” Pleasing, but no salve for her worry and loneliness.
To celebrate New Year’s Day 1894, many of Victoria’s inhabitants rode in ox-wagons to picnic in a grove of towering fig trees. After lunch, during the running matches, they saw two horsemen approaching. “It’s Burnham,” said someone who recognized the scout’s distinctive hat, a stiff-brimmed Stetson. Seven-year-old Roderick started running, shouting, “Papa! Papa!” Blanche followed, as she later wrote, “a little more sedately. . . . He has made a fine record and is more talked of I do believe than any man in the column, at least by the Victoria people. They never saw such scouting, such daring and such wonderful escapes.”
But Burnham also confirmed to the picnickers that the rumors about Wilson and his thirty-three men were true. Many, including Burnham, blamed Forbes. The commander’s decisions and everything about the campaign would soon be examined by a Court of Inquiry. In hindsight it was clear that sending a small patrol to help Wilson had merely increased the number of the slaughtered. But Captain Napier, Wilson’s strongest advocate to Forbes on the night of that decision, defended Forbes in his diary. Wilson knew the risks he was taking, noted Napier, and Forbes was “quite right” not to risk the entire column to reinforce him. “Whatever may befall this action,” he wrote, “no blame can ever attach itself to a single individual.” The Court of Inquiry agreed. Forbes was exonerated, but his reputation never recovered. Burnham and Ingram won medals from the BSAC for their roles in the campaign, and were awarded extra mineral and land concessions for their exemplary services.
The two batmen were tried for stealing Lobengula’s gold and for failing to tell Forbes about the peace offering. Testimony revealed that the men were heavy gamblers who had suddenly begun flashing lots of gold sovereigns, a rare form of currency in Matabeleland. Three Ndebeles testified, including the two who carried the gold. The batmen were found guilty and sentenced to fourteen years’ hard labor.
In late January 1894 word arrived that Lobengula had died in the fever districts near the Zambezi River, perhaps of smallpox. The Ndebeles began drifting back into Matabeleland. Their indunas agreed to peace, surrendering their assegais and some of their guns. Rhodes and Jameson began planning large reservations for them in the north.
In late February 1894 some Ndebeles led a white trader to the place where the men of the Shangani Patrol spent their last hours. The trader saw a rough circle of remains where the men had crouched behind their dead horses. The Ndebeles told stories about the bravery of the white troopers, how they fought on despite many wounds, how they had killed ten times their number. In the weeks after the war, as more Ndebeles talked, such stories multiplied. To honor the patrol’s courage, the Ndebeles had left the corpses unmutilated. More than one native said that near the end, just before running out of ammunition, the survivors stood up and sang. Folklore quickly turned the song into “God Save the Queen.” The white trader buried the remains. Rhodes later had the bones exhumed and reburied at Great Zimbabwe. Later still he ordered them exhumed again and buried near his own gravesite, World’s View, on a hill in the Matopos.
The last stand of the Shangani Patrol and the miraculous escape by three men made irresistible newspaper copy. The story was covered throughout the English-speaking world. The Times of London alone featured ten stories about the incident in the first three months of 1894.
The incident also brought Burnham his first fame as “the American scout,” a tag he would carry for the rest of his life. Newspapers sought him out for stories about the Shangani Patrol. In early January 1894, he sent his own account to his uncle and asked him to forward a copy to the San Francisco Examiner, the brash newspaper owned by young William Randolph Hearst, who often published foreign correspondents. Burnham thought Hearst might pay $200 or so for a firsthand report about the Shangani Patrol, and might even want something once a month about Mashonaland. Burnham instructed his uncle to give the money to his mother in Pasadena, if anything came of it (nothing did). Burnham also sent an account to H. Rider Haggard, the writer of romantic adventures, not for publication but in case Haggard found anything useful in it for his upcoming story about the Shangani Patrol.
Like icons of the American West such as Davy Crockett at the Alamo and George Custer at Little Bighorn, Wilson and his thirty-three men almost instantly entered the realm of legend. They became heroes and martyrs for both imperial Britain and the nascent state of Rhodesia. The incident inspired at least two popular long-running dramas in London. For the settlers in Rhodesia, as the newly conquered territory was soon named, the story of brave whites surrounded by overwhelming numbers of threatening blacks became a keystone myth. It would resonate long beyond the racial turbulence of the next century and the name-change to Zimbabwe.
Burnham always spoke about Wilson and the members of the patrol with the greatest respect, and was proud of his association with it. But the attention he got because of it sowed the first seeds of resentment toward him among a small faction of British settlers, and later led to denunciations of him by a few Rhodesian historians as a lying coward. (See appendix.)