WANDERINGS AND APPRENTICESHIPS
AFTER ESCAPING IOWA, Burnham began what he called “a period of glorious wandering.” He drifted southwest across Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma, sometimes trailing remnant herds of the once-countless buffalo. Once, when he and several companions were surprised by a blizzard in the Texas panhandle, they swaddled themselves and their horses in green buffalo hides, hair side in. The hides froze solid but saved their lives.
Burnham paused in Texas, working as a cowpuncher, driving herds to slaughterhouses in Kansas. To make a stake, he ran a string of mustangs from Texas to Missouri. He blew his take on fancy spurs and other cowboy trappings, and was soon adrift again. At some point during these years, he and a boyhood friend named Homer Blick briefly returned to Iowa—not to Clinton, to see Burnham’s family, but to Prescott, 275 miles west of there, where Blick’s parents had moved with his sister, Blanche, the Clinton girl who had listened eagerly to Burnham’s dreams about scouting and Africa. “The schoolgirl sister still remembered me,” wrote Burnham, “and when again I rode into the wilderness, there was much in my heart to disturb my plans for the future—but I rode alone and far.”
His direction was southwest. Tales remembered from his California days pulled him toward the unruly frontier there. “No charm could hold me long against the lure of New and Old Mexico and Arizona.”
He made his way to Sante Fe, where lures were in short supply. So were lawful opportunities. He heard that mining camps were sprouting farther west, so he headed for Prescott, a gold-rush town barely fifteen years old, yet the capital of the sparsely populated Territory of Arizona. Soon after he set off, someone stole his only horse, leaving him worse than broke. Prescott was 500 miles away, across snow-covered mountains and country made hazardous by the latest Apache outbreak. He started walking. To avoid Indians, he traveled mostly at night, which also kept him from freezing in the winter dark. During the day he rested on a “Tucson bed,” made by using his back for a mattress and his belly for a blanket.
It’s hard to nail down a timeline for Burnham’s whereabouts during these years. His memoirs are little help, jumping around chronologically. But taken together with other references, his mention of Apaches raiding and haunting the mountains on the Arizona–New Mexico border probably refers to the rampage led by Victorio from September 1879 to October 1880. Since the mountains were covered with snow during Burnham’s trek, he likely made it in late 1879 or early 1880 when he was eighteen.
Cold, hunger, Indians, and frigid rivers almost did him in, but he also marveled at sights along the way: petrified forests, the Painted Desert, abandoned cliff dwellings. After a month or so he walked into Prescott. Gold had been discovered nearby in 1863, which led in 1864 to the nearly simultaneous founding of Prescott and its protective outpost, Fort Whipple. Both were in territory claimed by Apaches. The gold miners promptly ruined relations with the Indians by killing two Apache boys who wandered into a camp on the boomtown’s edge. The Apaches retaliated by massacring some miners. This violent cycle, constantly renewed by fresh blood, would send waves of terror through the region for the next twenty years.
By 1870, to serve its population of 668 plus itinerant prospectors, Prescott offered ten saloons, twice that many gambling halls, and one “eating house” in a log cabin, run by a woman called Virgin Mary. Her posted menu:
Breakfast: Fried venison and chili, bread, coffee, goat milk
Dinner: Roast venison and chili, bread, coffee, goat milk
Supper: Chili
When Burnham arrived a decade later, the town had grown to about 1,800. He may have crossed paths with Virgil Earp, who lived there in 1879 before leaving to meet Wyatt and his other brothers in a southerly boomtown named Tombstone, where Burnham certainly knew them.
Meanwhile, in Prescott, he met two men who furthered his education in scouting. The first was an old-timer named Holmes who had served with John C. Fremont and Kit Carson during some of Fremont’s explorations and blunders in the 1840s. Holmes’s family had been wiped out by Indians, and he was half broken in body and mind. Before he died he wanted to pass on some of his woodcraft, but he was often so vehemently demeaning to the boys drawn to him that they soon avoided him.
Except Burnham. When Holmes cursed that young Fred didn’t know how to saddle a horse properly, or to hobble it properly, or to braid a proper rope to use as a hobble, or to tie the right knot with his poorly braided rope, Burnham didn’t slouch off but listened and learned, and then showed up the next day for more. Holmes began to take him seriously. He and his eighteen-year-old apprentice traveled into the mountains of Arizona, New Mexico, and northern Mexico for six months of advanced training in hunting, tracking, and woodcraft.
Holmes flooded Burnham with information and scorched him with criticism. There was a right way, a precise way, to do everything. One small error, one careless moment, could have devastating consequences, especially in hostile territory. Saddling a horse improperly, for instance, overtaxed its muscles, which affected its gait and durability and might even cause lameness. A horse improperly hobbled, or hobbled with a poorly braided rope, could break free when spooked, leaving its owner on foot.
Holmes also taught Burnham survival skills that often saved him in future years: how to protect himself from snakes, floods, and forest fires; the best way to ascend and descend cliffs; how to find water in the desert and to forage for food; how to travel by the stars and maintain direction during daylight without a compass; how to double back, avoid ambush, and hide his trail.
The tracks of other horses brimmed with information. How many horses had passed? When? Were they walking, trotting, or galloping? Was it a war party or a hunting party? If a single horse, was it running free or carrying a rider? Was it tired or fresh? Holmes could study a horse’s tracks and follow them even when mixed with hundreds of others. This may seem unbelievable but was not uncommon among good trackers, who could trail a horse for hundreds of miles. “The [horse] thieves had three days start and the trail had grown somewhat cold and in places obliterated by the passage of other stock over it,” began a story with the headline “Good Work Done by Good Men: Horse Thieves Caught and Stock Recovered!” in the Arizona Silver Belt in February 1883, “but the pursuers were no novices, and so they never lost the tracks. One of the animals stolen . . . had a mule shoe on the off fore foot, which, on account of its greater squareness at the toe made it easier tracking.”
The same was true for human footprints. Even when someone tried to eliminate tracks by covering his shoes or moccasins with burlap, he compressed the desert’s surface and left a smooth “shine” that, in slanting sunlight, contrasted with untrod ground.
Tracks also disclosed a timeline. Were the tracks’ edges collapsing or still sharp? If it had rained recently, were the tracks mottled and eroded or untouched by raindrops? Had night animals or insects left sign atop or beneath the tracks? Horse droppings, too, were time capsules—how far toward their center were they dry, relative to the temperature and other conditions? Likewise broken twigs—was the end fresh or dried out? A skilled tracker only needed a few clues: fibers caught on bushes, pebbles overturned or pressed into the ground.
Animals spoke to the attentive scout. The alarm cry of a bird, the clatter of a panicked deer, a sudden pause in the chorus of droning insects—these were alerts. Burnham also learned to pay close attention to his horse, a sentinel with superior hearing. If your horse dilated its nostrils, or lifted its head and pointed its ears in a particular direction, heed the signal. If your horse stopped grazing, note the direction of its cocked ear. If it resumed feeding, relax; if it didn’t, investigate.
To the observant, said Holmes, the tiniest details carried messages. A broken cobweb indicated that someone or something recently passed by during daylight, since most webs were spun overnight. Other signs of passage: scuff marks, bent grass, small stones dislodged from their cradles, a disturbed ants’ nest. Airflow, Holmes told Burnham, resembles a river whose currents carry sensory information—a tip that would save Burnham’s life in South Africa when he avoided blundering into a group of Boers because their camp smoke drifted down a ravine. A scout was someone on whom nothing was lost. Every sign was a word, and the words accumulated into a story.
Burnham’s second mentor in Prescott was “Dead Eye” Lee, who had scouted for George Crook in his first campaign against the Apaches from 1872 to 1873. Like most men in Arizona Territory, Lee had gold fever and was now trying his luck at prospecting. Burnham was eager to learn that skill as well as everything Lee could teach him about scoutcraft. Lee took Burnham into the Santa Maria Mountains northwest of Prescott, “a rough desert land of wide mesas covered with boulders or lava and cleft by tortuous canyons hundreds of feet deep.”
Lee taught him that these desert slot canyons, barely touched by the sun and impenetrable by a horse, often held water at their lowest point. He advised carrying a piece of canvas or rubber cloth to lug this hidden water to your horse. Absent those, he showed Burnham how to use a saddle blanket or even his clothing to absorb a gallon or two that could be transported to a horse, without too much loss, by turning the sopping bundle over and over in a ball as he walked, then wringing it out into a hat or rock hollow. Agaves could save a thirsty man; their basal leaves sometimes held pockets of old rainwater that could be sipped through a reed straw. An Apache on the move would sometimes fill a dead horse’s intestines with water and wrap them around his body. If desperate, you could chew the inside of certain cactuses, especially barrel cactus, for moisture.
The other necessity was food, for man and mount. To travel into dangerous country where a gunshot or a fire was inadvisable, a frontiersman carried nutritious prepared food. In Arizona, the preferred ration called for grinding dried venison into powder, adding an equal amount of flour, and baking the mixture into hard loaves that fit into saddlebags. “Ten pounds of this concentrated food,” wrote Burnham, “would, at a pinch, last a man ten days and keep him in strength, albeit lean and hungry.” Apaches often made do with a bag of pinole, maize flour mixed with dried crushed seeds and mesquite beans. Later, in Africa, Burnham would become familiar with the “iron rations” of other cultures—for the Maasai, the milk and blood of cows; for the Bedouin, dates and camel’s milk.
In a harsh land where inexperienced people who ran out of food would starve, Indians and frontiersmen could sustain themselves by foraging. The plentiful yucca offered edible fruit and flowers, and the seeds could be ground into flour. Wild potatoes, berries, and squash grew for those who knew how to find them, and ground bees would lead you to honey. Even the soft inner bark of the pine could be chewed for sustenance. To survive, a scout trained his stomach to digest almost anything.
Lee had hunted Apaches for Crook in Arizona’s rough canyon country, where the Indians seemed to vanish. One way Lee tracked them was through their staple food, hearts of mescal, which they roasted in great mounds and occasionally fermented into a liquor. The Apaches were expert at concealing the smoke from these bakes, but they couldn’t hide the aroma, which wafted down narrow canyons on air currents and could be traced to its source.
Lee, like Holmes, used this example to underscore two things for young Burnham. First, a scout must develop and train all five senses to the highest degree, not just sight and hearing but smell, touch, and taste. Each of these senses would one day save Burnham’s life. He trained his peripheral vision to almost 180 degrees, a skill he later demonstrated to incredulous journalists. “He can stroll casually through a street of fifty shops,” wrote a London reporter after Burnham returned from the Boer War, “and tell you at the other end the name, business, and principal articles exhibited in connection with each establishment.”
To keep his senses sharp, Burnham early on gave up tobacco. Likewise alcohol, which saturated mining camps and boomtowns. Men who didn’t drink were often mocked, but Burnham avoided liquor as detrimental to a scout’s perceptions. (Temperance had nothing to do with this; he later opposed Prohibition. He also served alcohol to guests, and on rare occasions had a glass of wine or beer, but he seems to have gotten tipsy just once, when he accidentally took a big gulp of a friend’s cocktail. “And it has made me woozy,” he wrote to his wife. “If you were here now you would see [me] nearer drunk than you ever did in your life, a delightfully swaying sensation in the head, but a great desire left to see you right away and now. We must have one drunk together just to know what it is before we cross to the great unknown.” It was 1911 and he was fifty.)
Whatever dulled the senses was hazardous to the scout. For that reason it was necessary to train yourself to endure deprivation for long periods—hunger, thirst, sleeplessness, absolute stillness—while remaining alert. The hardest of these to defeat was lack of sleep. Burnham eventually disciplined himself to operate without it for two nights and part of another day. The worst hours to get through were three o’clock to five o’clock in the morning, when pinches and pinpricks and bitten lips no longer worked. Then he switched to harsher reminders: sharp raps with a knuckle on the back of the head, or a borrowed bit of tobacco rubbed near the eyes. “By thus torturing myself,” he wrote, “I kept going.”
Second, Lee emphasized that in addition to physical and observational skills, a scout needed psychological insight. It was vital to learn everything possible about a foe’s culture, tactics, social customs, and superstitions. Such intelligence was as valuable as woodcraft or knowledge of landscape because it offered clues about how that foe would act and react in various circumstances.
To all these things the scout must add the skills of deduction and improvisation—the ability, wrote Burnham, “to interpret and to act,” sometimes instantaneously, in response to the unexpected.
Even mastering all this, instructed Lee, was not enough. The scout also needed to develop the psychological strength to spend long periods by himself. “Ten days in the mountains alone,” said Lee, “especially if it is hostile country, will teach you more than I can tell you in six months.” In his writings, Burnham often refers to this lesson. A scout spent most of his time alone, completely self-reliant, amid enemies who wanted to kill him. Essentially, the scout had to accustom himself to being prey.
“There is nothing that sharpens a man’s senses so acutely,” wrote Burnham, “as to know that bitter and determined enemies are in pursuit of him night and day. In many lines of endeavour, errors may be repeated without fatal results, but in an Indian or savage war, or in a bitter feud, one little slip entails the ‘Absent’ mark for ever against a man’s name.”
Learning to endure isolation was essential but painful. “The lash of solitude,” wrote Burnham, was “one of the greatest ordeals in the world.” It intensified everything, from perceptions to mental stress. Only in solitude could a scout learn to concentrate his mind for hours on one focus, yet too much isolation could destroy a scout’s mental balance. Inability to bear solitude led to mistakes. A lapse in alertness or patience, a surrender to boredom, meant missed clues, which could be fatal. For most men, the combination of physical hardship, imminent menace, and solitude was intolerable.
“What the white scout has to learn from the Indian,” wrote Burnham, “is the power to endure loneliness, as well as the stoical indifference to physical pain. The Boers of the high veldt, the Tauregs and Beduoins of the desert, and the Apaches, have this power in superlative degree.” These tribes, especially the Apaches, exemplified Burnham’s scouting ideals: iron bodies, iron wills, and encyclopedic mastery of their environments.
After his apprenticeships with the old scouts, Burnham set out on his own. As usual, he was broke. Penniless young men in Arizona who preferred lawful work often did odd jobs until they could scrape together a few dollars for some salt, flour, coffee, fatty bacon, and beans (“Arizona strawberries”). To these they added a pick, a shovel, a miner’s pan, and a horn spoon. This latter was essential for detecting gold, evinced by the common oath, “I swear by the great horn spoon.” It was a cow’s horn cut in half lengthwise to produce a curved shallow vessel. Prospectors put promising ore into their horn spoons, added water, then gently swirled, hoping for glitter. They loaded their tools and supplies onto a horse or mule, along with their dreams, and disappeared into the mountains to prospect for gold and silver. A friend of Burnham’s wrote of those days, “Travel—it was the impulse and the act and the life. There were fairly no moorings: neither home nor bonnet nor bib. There were restless young men in droves; there was the atmosphere of adventure with prospects everywhere.”
Everyone knew stories about prospectors who found a seam and followed it to fabulous wealth. Burnham resembled all the other dreamers hoping for a big strike. As an eighteen-year-old in Arizona he caught gold fever—his words—and never recovered. He chased bonanzas for the rest of his life, with just enough luck to keep his hopes burning.
In what was probably the latter half of 1880, he outfitted himself and rode into the mountains of central Arizona, “determined to wrest from them their hidden treasure.”
The high country mocked his dreams and wore him out—the fate of most prospectors. By the spring of 1881 his clothes were rags, his boots busted. He was so skinny, as the saying went, that if he closed one eye he looked like a needle. He could hang his hat on his horse’s jutting hip bones.
It was time to rejoin the world, recuperate, and make some cash. He heard about a new silver strike at Globe, eighty-five miles south, and decided to go where the fresh money was flowing. He rode down off the grand escarpment called the Mogollon Rim. “Others have ridden to the rock rim of the world and gazed into the depths below,” he wrote, “climbing and delving into every cranny—to no end. My own venture cost me all I had made, and I came down into the warm valleys of Tonto Basin and Salt River to begin life anew.”
That new life soon enmeshed him in the bloodiest feud in U.S. history.