A MINE, A WEDDING, A CHANGE OF PLANS
BURNHAM’S SERVICE AS a scout, along with the truce arranged by Judge Hackney with his Tonto Basin enemies, ended his fling with outlawry. “I began now to see life from another angle,” he wrote. “Life worth living depended on property, and property on law, and these three factors were necessary to lift men from chaos and savagery.”
Hackney suggested that Burnham’s skills in eluding assassins and tracking Apaches would be valuable in more respectable pursuits. The old editor introduced him to lawmen in Globe who put him to work as a deputy. “The county taxes were hard to raise, the territory vast; trailing criminals was difficult and expensive,” wrote Burnham. “By preliminary scouting, I could often save a posse of men from wasting their time—in fact, I could do most of their work.” According to Burnham, as his value became apparent, he found work tracking fugitives for well-known sheriffs throughout Arizona: John Peter Gabriel of Florence, Robert “Bob” Paul of Tucson, William “Buckey” O’Neill of Prescott.
On one of these missions he was careless enough to let his horse get stolen by two Mexican thieves. This lapse in vigilance rankled. To atone to himself, he determined to track down the robbers. Their trail took him to Mexico, back to Tucson, then into the deserts south of Casa Grande. From there the thieves rode into and out of Mexico again. He lost the track for a while, but picked it up again at Weaver Station (a gold boom camp about sixty miles northwest of Phoenix) and followed it over the Apache Trail. The pursuit ended there, he wrote, with “a tragic capture in Tonto Creek.” He didn’t elaborate on the adjective, which implies fatality.
This sort of tenacity made him a natural hire for Wells Fargo, whose famous policy was never to stop pursuing anyone who committed a crime against it. Between 1870 and 1884, robbers attacked Wells Fargo stagecoaches hundreds of times, so the company’s absolutist policy kept its detectives busy. The thieves were usually after Wells Fargo’s iconic iron treasure boxes, painted green, which could hold up to 150 pounds of gold and silver bullion. At Wells Fargo, Burnham found another mentor in T. B. Thatcher, one of the bulldog assistants to Wells Fargo’s main bulldog, chief detective James B. Hume. Thatcher sent Burnham “to distant points in California, mining camps and ranching counties, sometimes into towns, and into all the underworld life.”
In between these assignments he rode on Wells Fargo stages out of Globe, protecting shipments of silver bullion. The job title was “shotgun messenger.” The message was double-aught buckshot delivered from a sawed-off shotgun, a combination that could blow a window in a bandit. The work took nerve, since the robbers’ first target was the messenger, who usually rode next to the driver. For that reason Burnham preferred to crouch in the rear boot, where he was small enough to fit. Because of the risks, the messenger was well paid. “He got a hundred and fifty dollars a month,” noted one account, “and didn’t have anything to do but kill or be killed.” Others who rode shotgun for Wells Fargo included Wyatt Earp and Bret Harte.
After these stints in law enforcement, he decided to head into the desert with a few starry-eyed prospectors from Globe. Because of his skills, Burnham’s main job was to position himself with a rifle in some hidden cleft, to guard against Apaches. They camped near Maricopa, twenty miles from Casa Grande, and began hunting for gold placers. These occur where gold has been eroded out of rocks and carried away in streams. The gold settles in the streambeds and banks, and sometimes accumulates in crannies or pockets called vugs (from the Cornish word for cave, vooga). In the desert Southwest, these streambeds are usually dry.
Finding gold was another form of tracking, of observing acutely and following geological signs to your target. Burnham and his companions looked for likely spots, especially quartz stained red by oxidized iron. Iron could indicate pyrite, often found with gold and silver. They winnowed surface gravels by tossing shovelfuls into the wind to get a residue of black sand and perhaps a few grains of gold. When they had accumulated large sacks of this sifted material, they loaded it onto pack animals and traveled to a water hole where they could pan it.
“We were always millionaires until the final clean-up,” wrote Burnham, “when we generally found we had much black sand and little gold.” They typically gleaned just enough to buy more supplies for another stint of shoveling under the desert sun, fueled by beans, flour, coffee, and salt pork, the prospector’s characteristic round of drudgery and miserable food, made bearable by hopes about the next dig. Prospectors, wrote Burnham, were “dreamers of the desert” who have “a perennial optimism like the sublime faith experienced by those who have just joined the church or been converted to a new cult.”
Burnham and another young romantic grew impatient with this slow pace toward wealth. They quit their crew, outfitted themselves in Tucson, and began chasing gold and good fortune. Those will-o’-the-wisps lured them through cactus, greasewood, and sagebrush in southwest Arizona, all the way to the salt marshes of the Gulf of California in northern Mexico. There, the horses died of thirst. “We saved ourselves,” wrote Burnham, “by distilling salt water with the aid of a few ollas found in a deserted Indian camp.” They started plodding north. Seventy miles or so later they stumbled into Yuma, “clad in such bits of rawhide and canvas as had withstood the thorns and cactus.” In keeping with Western humor, their wretched emaciation made them the laughingstock of town. But bad luck and misery were never enough to discourage Burnham. Like Ed Schieffelin of Tombstone fame, he never abandoned the dream of a big strike, and would prospect off and on for the rest of his life.
After the debacle in Mexico, he vowed to give up glitter-eyed speculation, at least for a while, and to find work that paid cold cash. His destination was the Bradshaw Mountains, 100 miles north, where several silver mines were booming. The biggest and richest was the Tip Top, so he looked for work there first. The superintendent, Charles Jefferson Clark (grandson of the great explorer William Clark), told him that “only the best single-jack miners could break rock in the Tip-Top mine, for the vein was narrow and harder than flint to drill.” A single-jack miner worked alone, using one hand to hit a steel chisel with a four-pound sledge and the other to rotate the chisel quickly between blows, in a constant exhausting rhythm. It was done in tight spaces underground, by the light of a candle that put a dull glint on top of the chisel so the miner had a target for his swing.
Burnham probably wasn’t disappointed to be rejected for this dreary labor. Clark asked if he could shoot. “I demonstrated,” wrote Burnham. Clark immediately offered him ten cents a pound for fresh venison to feed the miners. Burnham jumped at it. He had roamed the district and knew that deer abounded on nearby Black Mesa and in Bloody Basin. Before long he had to hire two Indians to haul his kills, marked with red flags, back to the mines. He baled the deer skins and slept on them in his small cabin in the mountains before selling them for twenty-five cents each to buy more cartridges.
In the spring of 1883 Burnham used part of his profits to take an overdue trip to Iowa. He visited his mother (his younger brother Howard was at school in Massachusetts). But the main reason for the trip was Blanche Blick, the Clinton schoolgirl who had listened to his dreams without laughing, and who had implicitly committed to him despite his wanderlust and poor prospects. She had been busy during the years of his absence, earning several teaching certificates while living with her parents. She was twenty-one, nearly a spinster, and he was twenty-two. He couldn’t expect her to wait forever.
Burnham asked for her hand. Her father approved, with the provision that they couldn’t marry until Burnham demonstrated an ability to support a wife, a trait hitherto undetectable. Burnham knew only one lawful, though improbable, path to financial independence. It led back into the desert, where hidden gold lay waiting. If he found enough of it, he could put a ring on Blanche’s finger.
That fall he was back in Globe, where he teamed up with Richard Chilson. Three years older than Burnham, Dick Chilson came from a mining family and had lots of experience with a pick and chisel. Burnham bought a grubstake with his venison money. They decided to investigate the desert near an Arizona stagecoach station at Casa Grande. A married couple named Fryer ran a hotel and livery there. Burnham had met them while chasing the Mexican horse thieves, and they had excited him with tales about the area’s potential riches.
People who knew Mrs. Fryer’s history might have been surprised to find her in a remote Arizona burg—or perhaps not, since hard times and dreams had pushed people to reinvent themselves all over the country. Mrs. Fryer started life as Harriet Wood, born in New Orleans in 1833. She grew up to be tall and striking, more handsome than pretty. She moved to New York and became an actress under the stage name Pauline Cushman. During the Civil War she did theatrical tours. In 1863 in Louisville, at that time controlled by Union forces, Confederate sympathizers paid her to toast their president, Jefferson Davis, after her performance. She got fired for it, which advanced her plan. Beforehand, she had informed the Union commander of the offer and volunteered to use it as an opening to spy for the federal government.
The toast made her popular among Confederates. She headed farther south. In Tennessee, charmed officers gave this attractive actress tours of their fortifications and dropped chatty hints about their strategies. She took notes and made drawings. When she tried to leave for the North, she was searched and the documents were found hidden in her shoes. She was sentenced to hang. A providential attack by Union forces saved her; the retreating Confederates left her behind. General James A. Garfield (later president) awarded Cushman the honorary rank of brevet major, and President Lincoln praised her service to the Union.
Always opportunistic, she began touring and lecturing as “Miss Major” Pauline Cushman. P. T. Barnum scooped her up for his traveling show, dressing her in the uniform of a Union officer. By 1868 her commercial appeal had waned. She was alone and broke, but still resourceful, which led to her arrest as a pickpocket. In 1872, like other desperate people seeking better times, Cushman went west. She spent a few years around San Francisco, sometimes performing with an Irish comedian. In 1879 she married a man even taller than she, Jeremiah Fryer (her third husband), and went with him to the coach station at Casa Grande. That’s where Burnham met her. He always called her Major Pauline.
Like most Arizonans, the Fryers were intensely interested in the possibility of a big strike. Prospectors who passed through Casa Grande left behind plenty of glowing rumors. When Burnham and Dick Chilson stopped there in autumn of 1883, the Fryers filled the young prospectors’ ears with the newest enticing gossip, stoking their gold fever.
“We traced minute particles of float, fine as dust,” wrote Burnham, “and worked for weeks in the burning sun, using magnifying glasses.” Chilson’s brother joined them. They carried water in canteens so they could immediately test promising gravels and float rock, crushing them and then swirling the grit with water in a horn spoon. They followed this tedious, laborious procedure for several months over hundreds of desert miles. Nothing.
Around Christmas, their luck changed. Dick Chilson wrote to his father:
I have struck four feet of gold ore that will go for $1,000 to the ton. I took out $300 worth of gold dust with my pocket knife. I have got two 25-pound boxes of gold dust worth about $3,000. I have got nuggets of gold, pure gold, as large as a bird’s eggs. I sunk nine feet on the ledge and took out ten tons before I noticed the gold, and therefore blasted away several thousand dollars. I have $5,000 in sight. . . . There are clusters of gold as a big as dollars sticking through the ledge. There has been a sale made of one mine near me for $3,000,000; and another sold four miles from me for $20,000. I declined $16,000 for mine.
They named their mine the Christmas Gift. Mines were proving out all over the area, and that lowball offer of $16,000 soon shot up. Since none of the partners had the patience to develop the mine, and since the vein could peter out tomorrow, in January 1884 they accepted an offer of $90,000, equivalent to about $2 million today. (Over the next few years, the mine would yield about $200,000 worth of gold.)
Burnham’s share would more than appease Blanche’s father. To further demonstrate his sensibleness, in February he went to Pasadena and bought a twenty-acre orange grove, a symbol since boyhood of California’s verdant promise. He knew nothing about oranges and had no interest in agriculture, but the grove made him a bona fide landowner with a rooted occupation, just the credentials to satisfy a fiancée’s father.
He returned to Iowa in triumph. On March 2, 1884, he and Blanche were married. The day was rainy, but as the ceremony began, shafts of sunlight broke through, which Blanche took as a blessing on the union. They returned immediately to the orange grove. Burnham used the Christmas Gift money to bring his mother and brother to Pasadena; they probably were pleased to escape the charity of Burnham’s uncles. He also gave his mother’s parents a small pension to ease their old age. Throughout his life, whenever he had money, Burnham was generous with it, especially to members of his and Blanche’s family, whom he called their tribe.
Installed in his orange grove with his new wife, the wandering scout seemed ready to set aside his dreams of adventure and settle into husbandry.
It didn’t work. He could outrun Apaches and track thieves for hundreds of miles, but oranges stumped him. “I believe it takes more gray matter to outwit the vagaries of an orange tree and coax it into productivity,” he wrote, “than is required for a railway president, governor of a state, or manager of a life-insurance company.” He figured each orange cost him twenty-five cents to grow and sold for less than a penny. Almost immediately, “the mountains and the desert began calling again, and in the dim distance returned my lifelong vision of Africa.”
He went to Mesa, Arizona, to talk to a Mormon engineer named George M. Sirrine whom he knew from his travels. Mormons had settled Mesa, registering it as a town in 1878. Burnham had been impressed by their ability to grow crops in the desert thanks to a system of irrigation canals built by Sirrine, who had reconstructed channels and gradients dug ten centuries earlier by the Hohokam Indians.
By 1883 Mesa had 300 people and was growing. So was nearby Phoenix. Sirrine told Burnham that the increasing need for water made a dam on the Salt River inevitable. Burnham, always prospecting, bought some land and water rights, and began studying irrigation. He also bought a small interest in the Mesa Canal Company. Blanche and Howard, bored by oranges, soon joined him. Blanche began teaching school. But waiting for water rights to bear fruit was as dull as watching oranges ripen.
Things were briefly enlivened by a ricochet from Tonto Basin days. Burnham heard that a friend from his side of the feud had killed someone from the other side in a gunfight. The friend was now in jail awaiting trial, but some townspeople wanted to hang him straightaway. This bloodlust was being further lashed toward violence by the dead man’s lover, a beautiful woman and “a wonderful firebrand,” wrote Burnham, “who knew well how to stir up excitement in a frontier community.” She wanted his friend’s head, so Burnham called her Salome.
He rode across the desert to the town. The citizens clearly were on the verge of fusing into a mob eager for what Burnham called “a necktie party.” The endangered man had four other friends in town, including a tough ex-sheriff from Nevada who had a hotel room directly across from the jail. This became the allies’ meeting place. In preparation, they slit the hotel room’s cloth ceiling and hid an arsenal in the rafters. They also removed the window sash and several adobe bricks to create a wider line of fire toward the jail. It so happened that Burnham and the town’s sheriff had ridden together as boys in California. Burnham told him that if a mob tried to take the prisoner, the sheriff could expect a fusillade from the hotel.
The next evening, the mob marched to the jail and called out the sheriff. Burnham’s group took up their positions. The sheriff opened the thick wooden door and said he would shoot the first man who tried to walk through it. The crowd could overrun him easily, he added, but he wanted them to know that all four ringleaders were now in the gun sights of men who would kill them at the first shot.
There was a pause. Was the sheriff bluffing, or would some of them get perforated? That possibility took some air out of the mob’s bloodlust. They seemed poised between a nudge one way or the other. Salome tried to provide it, shrieking, “What are you all waiting for?”
“Waiting for you to kiss the sheriff!” yelled one of the men in the hotel room, in a tone that mocked her as a Jezebel. Some in the mob laughed, a crack in their resolve, which the sheriff began crowbarring with all the reasons the townspeople shouldn’t reject law and order. A few people called out that maybe he was right. Within moments the mob’s will wavered and broke. People silently stalked off. Burnham turned from the hotel window and slumped to the floor, his gun across his knees.
During his first year in Pasadena, while trying to grow oranges, Burnham got reacquainted with his brother Howard. They hadn’t seen each other in six years. At fourteen, Howard was nine years younger. He arrived in California ill from a severely injured leg. Doctors in Los Angeles said he wouldn’t recover unless the leg was amputated four inches below the knee. Howard held Burnham’s hand as doctors chloroformed him and sawed it off. One of the surgeons gave him six months to live. This began to seem optimistic after Howard contracted tuberculosis, which had killed his father.
But Howard showed the grit that marked him for the rest of his life. He quickly adapted to his wooden leg (it later came in handy as a hiding place when he worked as a spy in Germany during World War I). During the months of convalescence, Burnham taught him the rudiments of frontier life: riding, shooting, some scoutcraft, the art of the horn spoon. Howard was an eager, determined student, and learned to shoot well with either hand.
At sixteen, Howard left to look for gold in deserts “from the Panamints in Death Valley to Lower California,” sometimes teaming up with old prospectors who could teach him how to spot promising ground or hunt down pockets. Whenever he collected a little gold, he stored it in a quill from a roadrunner’s wing. Like his brother, Howard was a voracious reader, and his pack was always heavy with books about geology, metallurgy, and mining as well as history and military strategy.
Meanwhile, Burnham sold his land and water investments in Mesa. The engineer Sirrine was doubtless right that Phoenix’s thirst would require a dam, but Burnham didn’t have the patience to wait. (The Theodore Roosevelt Dam would be dedicated by its namesake in March 1911. The reservoir it created, Lake Roosevelt, put the southern portion of the Tonto Basin under water.)
Blanche was pregnant. They returned to the orange grove, but the place again made Burnham restive. He reconnected with some friends from Texas and Arizona. They decided “to take a whirl for fortune in the Northwest.” They prospected for gold in Idaho, Washington, and Canada. Burnham learned about icy rivers, deep snow, and sled dogs, lessons he would use in the Klondike. He and his partners didn’t hit a big lode, but did discover a vein of silver that paid out modestly for a number of years.
When he returned to Pasadena several months later, in the fall of 1886, Blanche presented him with his new son, Roderick, born on August 22. (Burnham would be elsewhere for the births of all his children.) Roderick’s arrival motivated him to take another stab at agriculture and domesticity. “I had recurring fits of aberration in which I persuaded myself that I could run an orange grove at a profit,” he wrote. “It was not long, however, before I was seized with another attack of mining fever.”
By early winter he was gone again, this time prospecting in the San Jacinto Mountains, west of Palm Springs. He and a partner found “a thread of gold in quartz,” and with great expectations opened a mine. Howard joined them, as did a young man named William Kettner, later a four-term Democratic congressman from San Diego. But the golden thread soon broke, and by spring of 1887 Burnham was back in Pasadena with his exasperating oranges. Pasadena was growing. He began selling lots from the grove, holding the mortgages himself.
Blanche acutely missed her large family. By the fall of 1887 she and Burnham had persuaded her parents and eight siblings to move to California, where gold may have been elusive but dreams and schemes abounded. Eight Blicks plus the Burnhams were eligible to claim government land. “All were land hungry,” wrote Burnham. “Like thousands of others, we all took up desert claims, timber claims, homesteads, homestead preemptions, and various other opportunities of securing the right to starve without let or hindrance.” The closest homestead plots were in Antelope Valley, 100 miles away over the San Gabriel Mountains. Together, the Burnham–Blick clan marked off several thousand acres and built cabins to legalize their claims.
That fall, in the midst of this land speculation, Howard showed up, wrote Burnham, “and again infected me with the virus of mine hunting.” The source of infection was an old prospector with Howard named Jack Guesford. Guesford repeated his tale to Burnham: in the mid-1860s he and two companions had been prospecting into Death Valley when they hit a lode of rich galena, the main mineral in lead ore. Lead ore often meant silver. Guesford was sure he had found his bonanza. But on the very day they found the galena, before they could load their burros with ore for assaying, Piute Indians had attacked and chased them off. Now, twenty-five years later, Guesford hoped to find his lost lode. Howard was eager to help him search. They just needed financing.
Fabled lost mines had been a staple of Western gossip and dreams since conquistadores sought the Seven Cities of Cibola. Whenever old chimeras evaporated, new ones appeared. The West was vast enough to accommodate anything imaginable, and sometimes reality matched imagination. Everyone knew the stories about prospectors who discovered fabulous ledges but had to abandon them because of Indians or thirst or hunger; about miners who loaded their burros with rich ore from some new discovery but got killed by Indians or thirst or a cougar or thieves before anyone knew the lode’s exact location. Some of these mines became so famous they entered legend—the Peg-Leg, the Tayopa, the Adams Diggings, the Lost Dutchman—all stupendously rich, all poised for rediscovery. Thousands of miners searched for them over the decades, and still do.
Burnham certainly knew these tales and, given his recurring virus, would have been susceptible to them despite his skepticism about an old prospector’s burnished memory. He grubstaked Howard and Guesford. They left for the desert mountains beyond Owens Lake.
Two months later, they were back. After a couple of days to regain his bearings, Guesford had tracked his memories to the very pile of galena he and his companions had dug out on the morning when Piutes drove them away. The ore he and Howard brought back assayed modestly for silver, but it was enough to bring on the delirium. In the spring of 1889 Burnham, Howard, and Guesford provisioned themselves to go develop the lost mine. Blanche, tired of staying home, came too, as did their two-and-a-half-year-old son. “Roderick was big enough to walk,” noted Burnham, “therefore big enough to ride.”
They left their horses in the settlement of Independence because horses couldn’t survive at the mine’s location in the Mojave Desert. The site was accessible only by a thin trail over dry mountains. At the mining camp, Guesford and Burnham dynamited the deposit to open a shaft. Howard kept them supplied with water, hauling it with burros from many miles away. The usual optimism of mining camps reigned. “For several weeks,” wrote Burnham, “we were millionaires.”
Then the bottom fell out of everything. After three months of work, the silver vein vanished, demonstrating the adage, “Many a good mine was ruined by working it.” The land boom also went bust. All the acreage in Antelope Valley was next to worthless, as were the mortgages for the lots in the orange grove. Burnham and his family returned there “to see if the financial blizzard had blown away every crumb of my life savings. . . . we found the same sun shining as of old and the same acres still in place. Everything that had happened was in men’s minds. . . . Most of us had been claiming equities we had never earned, although we made a great outcry when our paper profits vanished. There was hardly a soul of us who had not lost a million.”
Perhaps Burnham developed his resilience by riding the boom-and-bust rhythm of mining. Throughout his life, he alternately made money or speculative fortunes and then lost much of them to financial panics or slippery partners. Then he would start anew, ever optimistic.
As usual, Burnham couldn’t rest in Pasadena. He almost immediately bought a fifty-acre ranch near Fullerton, California, and took Blanche and Rod there to live. But ranching also paled quickly, and by fall he and Howard were prospecting in Hassayampa, Arizona, with Blanche and Rod settled in nearby Mesa. Hassayampa didn’t pan out. By the spring of 1890 the Burnhams were back in Pasadena. Blanche and Rod stayed there while Burnham spent much of the next two years away, “hunting lost mines and opening up prospects from Colorado to Mexico, with occasional backslidings to ranching.”
The long weeks on the road led to many letters between the couple. Burnham didn’t save Blanche’s, but she saved some of his. They depict a driven man. He traveled all over the West, by horse and train, looking for potentially profitable mines. He slept in everything from fine city hotels to mining camps, and talked to prospectors, mining engineers, sellers, potential buyers. He took the train to Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and New York to meet possible investors or to propose himself as a mining scout working on commission.
The letters bubble with prospects, with golden rings just beyond his fingertips. “If I had time,” he wrote from Denver in May 1890, “could stay here and catch onto something and make money.” But that would take patience, and he was rushing to the next possibility. The acceleration of modern life amazed him—Chicago the day before yesterday, he wrote to Blanche, Pittsburgh yesterday, St. Louis today, Kansas City tomorrow, with Denver soon after, then Salt Lake and home to Los Angeles. Less than twenty years earlier, a locomotive in Minnesota had astonished him. Now the vast spaces of the West were being tamed and cinched tight by rails and telegraph wires, making it harder to breathe.
The letters also showed a man deeply in love with his wife. In August 1890, from a hotel in Denver, he wrote to Blanche that someone was playing beautifully on the piano in the parlor, which put him in a wistful mood. “You shall be in my arms in thought tonight my dear,” he wrote. “But why say that, for you are in my thoughts all the time anyway, except when on mining business and then I am dead to all the world. Your lover as ever, Fred.”
Two days later, still in Denver, he was walking to the assayer’s to look up a treatment for zinc ores. He paused at a shop window just short of the office to admire a photograph of Colorado sandstones. As he stood there, the front wall of the assay office blew out, knocking down a horse and lifting Burnham off his feet. Fire engulfed the building. Two more tremendous explosions followed, probably from the assayer’s chemicals. If he hadn’t paused, he would have been inside. “Is it not strange what trivial things turn the course of life?” he wrote to Blanche. “But my race is not yet run and it was not to be that I should die that way and time.”
One of Burnham’s investments was the Alvord Mine. It was northeast of Barstow, on one of the bleak isolated mountains that jut from the sagebrush flats of the Mojave Desert. Burnham and a revolving crew lived at this austere camp, sledgehammering hard rock to find gold. The rocks they broke varied widely in color: dark chocolate, milk chocolate marbled with blue quartz, red-and-black that rang like iron, glittering white quartz. The camp was more than thirty miles from the nearest railroad. Everything, including water, had to be hauled in from miles away.
Yet many strange characters found the place, looking for work or refuge. One night a red-headed giant appeared out of the desert, singing in a rich baritone. From his gunnysack he pulled a square-headed eight-pound sledge, twice the usual weight. His only other possession was a violin, which he played nimbly. Such characters “eddied in on the whirlwinds or floated in from nowhere on a moonbeam,” wrote Burnham in a passage deleted from his memoir. “Indians, smugglers, miners, writers—even a poet, or missionary and several criminals, hiding from deputies. There was always time to study these people, and from all much of interest could be gleaned, because the contacts are so much closer than in cut and dried city life.”
The rough ore from Alvord had to be hauled for crushing and refining to a mill at Camp Cady, about ten miles away. To fix this inconvenience, Burnham built a mill at the mine. In September 1891, right after they melted out their first bar of gold bullion, the mill burned down and “one snug little fortune went up in smoke.”
This and other frustrations depleted Burnham’s finances and aggravated his restlessness. He was still supporting his mother. Blanche’s parents and siblings partly depended on him as well. Perhaps better opportunities awaited elsewhere. Blanche had absolute faith in him and would go anywhere. “My Darling B.B.,” he wrote in late 1892,
Your gem of a letter came to hand last eve. And the three little flowers fell in my hand still giving out their faint and delightful odor. I credited young Roderick with gathering them and that he had not forgotten me yet.
The letter though short breathed such sentiments as for a little time all the plans and schemes of the world faded away as mists in the morning and my heart went out to you unclouded by a shadow and with the confidence that only long years together can beget. And I felt you worthy of all that is best in me—and doubly fortified to meet whatever is in store in the future.
The West no longer felt like the future. The frontier was past, crisscrossed by railroads and telegraph wires. Homesteaders were draining in from all directions. The Indians were almost gone, either massacred as at Wounded Knee (1890) or shipped east to reservations. Territories that had been wild when Burnham came west were now judged tame enough to enter the Union: Washington, Montana, and the Dakotas in 1889, Idaho and Wyoming in 1890. (Arizona remained a territory until 1912.) Rowdy camps and boomtowns had become ghost towns or bland churchy places like the one he fled in Iowa. His mother’s childhood friend, Buffalo Bill Cody, whose stories about the West had fired his imagination, had been transformed from a plainsman and Indian fighter into a gaudy entertainer. There was no demand for the scouting skills that Burnham respected above all things and had spent so long perfecting.
The tough prospectors, frontiersmen, and renegades who had ventured into the West’s wild places were being replaced by a second wave with clean boots and soft hands. Since his early days in Globe, Burnham had resented the fat cats who used money and men like chess pieces in a rigged game. But paths of escape and opportunity had always been accessible. Now conglomerates, cattle barons, railroad tycoons, and ruthless big-money “rings,” assisted by their corrupt political allies, were gobbling up land and banks, taking control of everything, hogging possibilities, leaving crumbs for everyone else. The egalitarianism of the trail and the camp was almost obsolete. The gap between rich and poor was widening, and so was the possibility of jumping over it. Democracy seemed to be slipping away.
Burnham became an ardent proponent of the ideas in Edward Bellamy’s best-selling utopian novel Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (1887), which decried the “beasts of prey” fattening from the era’s brutal capitalism. Bellamy envisioned a future where private property was nationalized and socialism prevailed. Burnham approved the vision but doubted its likelihood.
The economy was spluttering. He wanted out, someplace where imagination and possibilities weren’t yet hemmed in or already optioned by plutocrats. He and Blanche flirted with the idea of Patagonia. They got serious about prospecting in Panama, where malaria and yellow fever had recently defeated the first attempt to dig a canal. To prepare, he went to San Francisco in early 1892 to study mine engineering, and Blanche began learning Spanish (Burnham already spoke cowpen Spanish). In November they sold most of the orange grove, cutting the strings to what had been their home base for eight years. Next stop, Panama.
On a family timeline written by Burnham, the entry after the Panama plan is dated January 1, 1893: “Changed our minds and left for Africa.”
Southern Africa. (Reprinted with permission from The Matabele War by Stafford Glass (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1968.)
