Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device’s search function to locate particular terms in the text. Please bookmark your page before following any links.
Most of the book’s quotations from Burnham come from several primary sources. He wrote two memoirs: Scouting on Two Continents (S2C) (Doubleday, Page and Company, 1926), and Taking Chances (TC) (Wolfe Publishing, 1994, reprint of 1944 edition by Haynes Corporation). The other primary sources are the extensive Burnham papers held by Yale University and by Stanford’s Hoover Institution, which overlap but aren’t identical. In the rare instances where the Burnhams misspell a word, I have usually corrected it to avoid distraction.
At several places in the text, the translations of historical dollar amounts into modern equivalents come from measuringworth.com.
PROLOGUE
1 The details about the flight of Burnham’s mother from the Sioux war party are taken from S2C and various letters and newspaper reports in the Burnham archives.
Chapter 1: CHILD OF THE FRONTIER
5 The opening pages of S2C contain several errors. Burnham substitutes Red Cloud, the Oglala Sioux chief, for Little Crow, a Dakota Sioux, a mistake repeated countless times in newspapers and articles. He also says he was two when the war began; he was fifteen months old. He misdates the Sioux hangings—the year was 1862, not 1863. He identifies Minnesota’s governor at the time as Sibley, but it was Ramsey. He also misspells Le Claire and Red Wing. These are understandable mistakes in a memoir written sixty years after the events, but they also suggest a degree of sloppiness by Burnham and Mary Nixon Everett, who “edited and arranged” the book. As far as I can tell, the rest of S2C contains relatively few factual errors, which will be noted as they come up.
7 Helpful on the Sioux War: Folwell, A History of Minnesota; Bishop, Dakota War Whoop; Wingerd, North Country: The Making of Minnesota.
10 “Pampered protégés” comes from Dakota War Whoop, p. 280. As of 2015, the Wikipedia page on Burnham erroneously said that he was born on a Sioux reservation.
15 Some of the material on books of Western adventure was taken from Billington, Land of Savagery, Land of Promise, and from Smith, Virgin Land.
Chapter 2: A PUEBLO AND SOME PURITANS
19 The quotes from Burnham about the bounty of California and his sense of liberation after his father’s death both can be found in the rough draft of S2C in the Yale archive.
20 The anecdote about the drayman Wood is from a speech Burnham made to the Sunsetter Club of Los Angeles, date unknown, in the Yale archive.
23 For background information about mining and freighting: Fisher and Holmes, Gold Rushes and Mining Camps of the Early American West; Nadeau, City-Makers; Rossiter, Statistics of Mines and Mining in the States and Territories West of the Rocky Mountains, 32.
26 Among the helpful sources on Tiburcio Vásquez: John W. Robinson, “Tiburcio Vásquez in Southern California: the Bandit’s Last Hurrah,” California Territorial Quarterly 27 (Fall 1996); Will H. Thrall, “The Haunts and Hideouts of Tiburcio Vásquez,” Historical Society of Southern California Quarterly XXX, no. 2 (June 1948); and John Boessenecker, Bandido: The Life and Times of Tiburcio Vasquez (University of Oklahoma Press, 2010). Like other myths that turn Western thugs into heroes, the one about Vásquez as an idealistic revolutionary persists. The website of the Tiburcio Vásquez Health Centers in California, for example, explains that the founders “wanted to choose a name that evoked a sense of pride and fortitude in their community, and what better choice than the heroic character who—legend has it—defied authority in order to aid the downtrodden Californios?” Two California schools also are named after this criminal rogue.
29 The information about Clinton, Iowa, comes from S2C and TC, and from sections deleted from these books, found in the archives at Yale and Stanford.
30 The description of the evangelical revivalist comes from her biography: John Onesimus Foster, Life and Labors of Mrs. Maggie Newton Van Cott: The First Lady Licensed to Preach in the Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States (Hitchcock and Walden, 1872).
Chapter 3: WANDERINGS AND APPRENTICESHIPS
33 For Prescott and life in early Arizona, see Corle, The Gila. Virgin Mary’s menu appears on pp. 323–4.
34 Essential sources on the Apaches: Thrapp, The Conquest of Apacheria; and Haley, Apaches.
35 Several commentators have identified the old scout named Holmes who taught Burnham as W. A. “Hunkydory” Holmes. This is incorrect. Burnham was eighteen when he met Holmes, which would be 1879. He describes the scout as “an old man then, and physically impaired,” which makes sense for someone old enough to have served with Fremont and Kit Carson in the 1840s. Hunkydory Holmes, on the other hand, was born around 1839.
39 Burnham’s peripheral vision: from The Golden Penny, a London illustrated weekly, undated clip in a Burnham family scrapbook in the Stanford archive.
40 Some of the characteristics of a good scout sound similar to those measured in the new field of “risk intelligence,” defined as a cognitive skill allowing for good quick decisions on the basis of limited information in an atmosphere of uncertainty. See Alison George, “The Man Who Gave Us Risk Intelligence,” New Scientist, May 21, 2012.
41 “the atmosphere of adventure with prospects everywhere”: From Banning and Banning, Six Horses, 19 (foreword by Burnham).
Chapter 4: THE TONTO BASIN FEUD
43 Sources helpful for this chapter, in addition to those cited below: Barnes, Arizona Place Names; and Hodge, Arizona As It Is; or, The Coming Country. Compiled From Notes of Travel During the Years 1874, 1875, and 1876.
43 Angeline Mitchell Brown, from an excerpt of her “Diary of a School Teacher on the Arizona Frontier,” in Moynihan, Armitage, and Dichamp, eds., So Much To Be Done.
44 Don Dedera’s A Little War of Our Own is the most thorough and impartial treatment of the feud. Other sources consulted include Will C. Barnes, “The Pleasant Valley War of 1887,” Arizona Historical Review 4 (October 1931 and January 1932); Forrest, Arizona’s Dark and Bloody Ground; Herman, Hell on the Range; Pyle, Pleasant Valley War; and the chapters on the feud in Drago, The Great Range Wars.
47 The quote from P. P. Daggs comes from Dedera (A Little War of Our Own, 108), who found people in Pleasant Valley still reluctant to talk about those bloody events even a century later. Dedera correctly surmised that the family who befriended Burnham was the Gordons, who appear sporadically in contemporary newspapers such as the Arizona Silver Belt. Burnham’s rough drafts in the Yale archives identify the family as the Gordons. Rod Atkinson, Burnham’s great-grandson and a superb researcher, also dug up and shared useful information about the Gordons.
48 Some accounts of the feud mention Burnham, not always accurately. Forrest, in Arizona’s Dark and Bloody Ground, refers to Burnham twice and makes two errors: he writes that Burnham didn’t get sucked into the feud until 1887 and that he was a “boy” at the time. Burnham likely got involved in the early 1880s while the feud was still brewing; by 1887 he was twenty-six, hardly a boy.
49 The description of Burnham’s revolver comes from Jack Lott, “The Making of a Hero,” who knew the weapon firsthand. A photo of it, perhaps taken by Lott, can be found on the Wikipedia page for the Pleasant Valley feud. Lott was a big-game hunter, an aficionado of firearms, and a knowledgeable writer about guns. He also wrote several articles about Burnham, whom he greatly admired, and he was a friend of Burnham’s son Roderick, who died in 1976. Roderick evidently gave Lott his father’s guns, including the Remington revolver and several weapons used in Africa. Lott committed suicide in 1993. Burnham’s descendants have been unable to determine what happened to the guns.
49 The quotes about snap shooting with a revolver come from “The Revolver,” an essay by Burnham, evidently never published, found in the Stanford archives.
50 Like every researcher so far, I was unable to find any contemporary mention of old Gordon’s killing of the deputy and Burnham’s association with it. Dedera, who has investigated the feud most deeply, categorizes this shooting as “among probable but thinly documented cases” (159).
51 Pleasant Valley, now called Young, remains lovely and isolated, with a population of about 650. Sections of the road to it are still unpaved. Among its few streets are Graham Road and Tewksbury Boulevard. Every July during Pleasant Valley Days, Young celebrates the feud that tore it apart, offering a parade, reenactments, and tours of sites where blood was spilled. Like so much violent Western history, the Pleasant Valley feud has become a money-making attraction.
53 The quotations about Burnham’s eyes are from, respectively, the Introduction to S2C by Mary Nixon Everett, xix; and W. B. Courtney, “Great Scout,” Collier’s, October 19, 1935, 60.
54 “no moral anchors”: Davis, Real Soldiers of Fortune, 199.
54 Peter van Wyk (the pen name of Peter Craigmoe) speculated that the young Kansan who turned to rustling was the outlaw Billy Claiborne. Van Wyk spent many years researching Burnham’s life and wrote a fictionalized biography about him called Burnham: King of Scouts.
Chapter 5: TOMBSTONE
58 Helpful for this chapter, in addition to the sources cited below: Sonnichsen, Billy King’s Tombstone; and Federal Writers’ Project, Arizona, the Grand Canyon State.
58 James B. Hume is quoted in Philip L. Fradkin, Stagecoach: Wells Fargo and the American West (New York: Free Press, 2003), 104.
59 Lansing’s description of Ed Schieffelin comes from an unidentified Arizona newspaper quoted in Richard E. Moore, “The Silver King: Ed Schieffelin, Prospector,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 87, no. 4 (Winter 1986): 367–8. I also drew on Moore’s article for Schieffelin’s whereabouts before Tombstone.
60 The anecdote about the Schieffelin brothers’ survival plan if attacked by Apaches appears in Hammond, Autobiography, vol. 1, 78. Hammond, a mining engineer who later became good friends with Burnham, visited Tombstone and talked to the Schieffelins about a year after they opened their mines.
60 The names of mining claims come from Fisher and Holmes.
62 “Shooting from behind or shooting an unarmed man”: Myers, Tombstone’s Early Years, 94.
62 The anecdote about the death of John Heith (sometimes spelled Heath) from emphysema comes from Sonnichsen, ed., Billy King’s Tombstone, 186–7.
62 “leading diseases”: William H. Bishop, “Across Arizona,” Harper’s, March 1883.
62 On liquor in Western mining towns, Fisher and Holmes are informative and entertaining (183–93). Also Carmony, ed., Whiskey, Six-Guns and Red-Light Ladies.
63 Heidi Osselaer, an Arizona historian, has found more than 140 women who ran businesses in Tombstone during this era: “On the Wrong Side of Allen Street: Female Merchants in Tombstone, 1879–1884,” unpublished paper delivered at the Western History Symposium, August 2012, in Prescott, AZ.
64 According to material exhibited at the Bird Cage (now a tourist attraction) and on many websites, the theater took its name from a popular song, “She’s Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage.” The story goes that the comedian Eddie Foy and a songwriter named Arthur J. Lamb were chatting in the theater one evening soon after the place opened under a different name. As they watched the beautiful women in feathers who flirted with customers before heading for the upstairs “cages,” Lamb blurted the phrase that became the song’s title. He sat at the saloon’s piano and quickly composed a ballad. The famous singer Lillian Russell happened to be performing that night, the story continues, and she sang the brand-new song to many encores, whereupon the overwhelmed owner renamed the theater the Bird Cage.
A few of these details have some factual basis, but when mushed together they create an utter fabrication. Lamb did write the lyrics to the song, but he was born in Britain in 1870, so the story puts this lad on a barstool in a Tombstone brothel at age eleven. Eddie Foy and Lillian Russell did tour through Tombstone and may have entertained at the Bird Cage, but not with Lamb present. Nor was the Bird Cage’s name changed because of the song—Lamb wrote it in 1900, eleven years after the place closed. Similarly, the Bird Cage features a large painting of a popular belly-dancer called Fatima, later known as Little Egypt. The theater museum claims that Fatima performed there in 1881 and sent the painting the following year. But the belly-dancer who performed as Fatima—Farida Mazar Spyropoulos—was born in Syria around 1871, which makes the bare-breasted curvaceous female in the painting ten years old. These are the kinds of widespread, self-perpetuating, and wonderfully seductive lies waiting to ensnare every researcher into the Old West, where random unrelated facts are woven together and embroidered into myths.
65 McLeod: Burnham identifies him only by his last name, but he is almost certainly Neil McLeod, well-known at the time in Tombstone and Globe. Rod Atkinson discovered some helpful news clippings about this man, including several reports that he was killed in August 1884 near Nacozari de García, a town near Fronteras, Mexico. This fits with information in S2C, where Burnham states that McLeod was “killed accidentally by his own men. This happened in a smugglers’ camp near Fronterras.” Also helpful was a story about McLeod by Roscoe G. Willson, who calls him “the all-time king of Arizona smugglers.” (“Arizona Days,” 9).
68 Coded messages: in addition to Burnham’s comments in S2C, see TC, chapter 21, “The Grapevine,” where he mentions several methods used by Indians, including messages sent via tiny woven baskets, scratched shells, logs in flooding rivers, and migratory birds trapped and stained in certain patterns, then released.
71 Apaches running hills with mouths full of water: Watt, Apache Tactics, 15. Apaches outrunning horses: Carr, Old Mother Mexico, 5–6. Carr, a popular editor and columnist for the Los Angeles Times who became Burnham’s friend, wrote that Burnham told him an Apache could run next to a horse until the horse collapsed.
72 The footrace in Globe: John F. Coggswell, “World’s Most Adventurous Man, Major Fred Burnham, D.S.O., Describes Greatest Peril He Ever Had to Face,” Atlanta Constitution, November 1, 1931, SM10.
Chapter 6: THE TIGERS OF THE HUMAN SPECIES
73 In addition to Burnham, Haley, Apaches, and Thrapp, The Conquest of Apacheria and Al Sieber, the main sources for this chapter are the indispensable Cozzens, ed., The Struggle for Apacheria; Watt, Apache Tactics; Downey and Jacobsen, The Red/Bluecoats; Dunlay, Wolves for Blue Soldiers; Worcester, The Apaches; and Smith, Captive Arizona.
74 Sherman on Arizona: quoted in Thrapp, The Conquest of Apacheria, xii.
76 Bourke, “black night of despair”: from his article “General Crook in the Indian Country,” The Century Magazine, March 1891, 644–9.
79 “In [Apache] combats”: from Crook’s article, “The Apache Problem” (1886), found in Cozzens, The Struggle for Apacheria, 597–8.
81 Miles on Apache camouflage: from Miles, Personal Recollections, 525.
82 Crook, “so many birds”: from “The Apache Problem,” in Cozzens, The Struggle for Apacheria, 600.
83 “the torture of a journey”: from Wesley Merritt, “Incidents of Indian Campaigning in Arizona” (1890), ibid., 155–6. Cavalry “as useless as gunboats”: from Charles King (one of Crook’s officers), “On Campaign in Arizona” (1880), ibid., 162. “Jagged, peaked, rocky”: from Powhatan H. Clarke, “A Hot Trail” (1894), ibid., 635.
85 Burnham never mentions Clum but almost certainly knew him from Tombstone, where Clum founded the Tombstone Epitaph in May 1880. The paper supported the Earp faction. Burnham may have run into Clum (and Wyatt Earp) again in the Klondike during the gold rush of 1898.
Chapter 7: HUNTING TIGERS WITH TIGERS
87 Atrocities at a ranch near the Gila River: recounted in Thrapp, The Conquest of Apacheria, 237–8.
88 For the Globe Rangers, see Thrapp, The Conquest of Apacheria, 255, and Al Sieber, 247, as well as Will C. Barnes, “The Apaches’ Last Stand in Arizona: the Battle of Big Dry Wash” (1931), in Cozzens, The Struggle for Apacheria, 277–8.
88 For the account of Burnham’s scout for Burbridge, in addition to S2C and TC, I used Burnham’s story “Half Jack-Rabbit, Half Wolf,” published in Boys’ Life, March 1928. This story, with minor changes, became a chapter in TC.
94 Two messengers, one mounted, one on foot: from Coggswell, “World’s Most Adventurous Man.”
94 Burnham’s chapter in S2C on the Apache raids of 1882 contains several small inaccuracies. He identifies the chief of scouts at the San Carlos Apache reservation as Fred Sterling. He was Albert D. Sterling, known as Al, and his official title was chief of police, though his native police were essentially scouts. Burnham also says that Sterling and his successor, “Cibicue” Charley Colvig, were killed by Apache government scouts who turned on them. That view was common at the time but is incorrect. Both men were slain by renegade Apaches who came up from Mexico. Burnham also mentions being part of a rescue party that saved some settlers on Cherry Creek in the Tonto Basin, including “a small boy named Charley Meadows, famous for many years afterwards as Buffalo Bill’s leading cowboy.” Burnham’s group undoubtedly saved a little boy, but not the famous Charlie Meadows, who was born in 1859 or 1860 and hence was slightly older than Burnham. The Meadows family did have a ranch in Tonto Basin that was attacked by Apaches in July 1882, but it wasn’t near Cherry Creek, and when the Apaches struck it, Meadows was serving as a scout under Al Sieber. Burnham also says that the grand jury report about corruption on San Carlos was written in 1883 rather than 1882.
Similarly, in “Half Rabbit, Half Wolf,” his chapter in TC about his service during the Apache raids of 1882, Burnham says that when he returned to Globe from a scouting expedition after the Apaches raided McMillenville in July (he calls it McMillan), he expected to report to Sterling. This jumbles chronology, probably because of faulty memory. Sterling was murdered in April 1882, several months before the McMillenville raid. It’s possible but unlikely that Burnham had been out of touch for months and hadn’t heard about Sterling’s death. In the same chapter, Burnham says he was scouting for signs of the band led by Chief Diablo, but this is mistaken. There were two important Diablos in Apache history, but both died before 1882. The renegade bands on the loose were led by Geronimo, Chatto, Juh, and Na-tio-tish.
Likewise, in both S2C and TC, he says that at the end of his scout around the Pinals for Burbridge, he met up with Scarface Charley, the famous Modoc chief. This is almost certainly a misidentification. The man may have been a Modoc and may have been called Scarface Charley—probably not an uncommon nickname in those days—but it’s doubtful he was the Modoc chief who fought the whites in California in the 1870s and then led his people to a reservation in Oklahoma, where he died in 1896. I found no evidence that this well-known Indian worked in Arizona as a government scout in the early 1880s. Throughout his life, Burnham avidly read accounts of the West. If he had known an Indian of that name in Arizona, he may have assumed the two were the same man.
94 For the testimony of various Apache leaders given to Crook, and Crook’s responses, see Cozzens, The Struggle for Apacheria, 295–313. For the grand jury’s indictment, see ibid., pp. 318–20. For the Silver Belt and Tiffany, see Trapp, The Conquest of Apacheria, 258n.
95 Robert K. Evans: from his “The Indian Question in Arizona,” Atlantic Monthly, August 1886, reprinted in Cozzens, The Struggle for Apacheria, 607.
96 The headline from the Arizona Silver Belt: April 7, 1883.
97 Bourke, “disgraceful page in history”: from his On the Border with Crook, 485. Crook’s defense of Apache scouts, from his “Resume of Operations Against Apache Indians, 1882 to 1886,” collected in Cozzens, The Struggle for Apacheria, 587–8.
Chapter 8: A MINE, A WEDDING, A CHANGE OF PLANS
99 Burnham misspells the name of Buckey O’Neill as O’Neal, but the other details he mentions about the lawmen are correct. See Ball, Desert Lawmen. Other sources helpful on Arizona lawmen and Wells Fargo shotgun messengers: Charles Michelson, “Stage Robbers of the West” (1901), collected in Oliver G. Swan, ed., Frontier Days (Philadelphia: Macrae Smith, 1928), 405–13; Dale, Frontier Ways; and Virginia M. Hall, “Wells Fargo Treasure Boxes,” Calcoin News, Winter 2002.
100 “kill or be killed”: from Michelson, “Stage Robbers of the West.”
102 Sources helpful on mining: Lewis, ed., The Mining Frontier; Paul, Mining Frontiers of the Far West; the invaluable Spence, Mining Engineers and the American West; William S. Greever, The Bonanza West: The Story of the Western Mining Rushes, 1848–1900 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963); Fisher and Holmes, Gold Rushes and Mining Camps of the Early American West; Dobie, Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver; Dobie, Coronado’s Children.
103 For Cushman, see William Christen, Pauline Cushman: Spy of the Cumberland (Roseville, MN: Edinborough Press, 2006). In later years, her life worsened. After about ten years, she and Fryer separated. She moved between San Francisco, El Paso, and Arizona, sometimes working as a seamstress or charwoman. She began taking opiates for pain. In 1893, at age sixty, she overdosed and died in a San Francisco boarding house. In 1910, the army remembered her and reburied her remains with full military honors in Presidio National Cemetery. Her gravestone: “Pauline C. Fryer, Union Spy.”
104 Dick Chilson’s letter was published in Judge Hackney’s newspaper, the Arizona Silver Belt, on January 5, 1884. The same page carried a story about the mine’s sale for $90,000. Another account about the mine said the sales price was $60,000, but that was written nearly twenty-five years after the contemporary account in the Silver Belt: see The Western Investors Review 15 (October 1908): 10.
105 Shafts of sunshine on the Burnhams’ wedding day: Family lore related to me by Burnham’s grandson, Fred Burnham.
106 In S2C Burnham misspells Sirrine as Sirine.
107 Most of the information about Howard in this chapter comes from Burnham’s chapter about him in TC.
110 Dobie, Corle, and Fisher and Holmes are entertaining on lost mines.
114 On the various corrupt “rings,” see Lamar, The Far Southwest, 139ff.
Chapter 9: TO AFRICA
117 When the Burnhams decided to emigrate to southern Africa, they began saving letters, their own and those from relatives and friends. Consequently, the primary sources about Burnham’s life go from almost nothing to abundance. The letters quoted from this point on are in the Burnham archives held by Yale and Stanford. An excellent selection that covers the Burnhams’ time in southern Africa is Bradford and Bradford, eds., An American Family on the African Frontier.
118 For background on the British South Africa Company, the best single source is Galbraith, Crown and Charter.
121 Background material about the Chicago World’s Fair was drawn from Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City (New York: Vintage, 2003).
124 Churchill, “Aryan stock”: quoted in Richard Toye, Churchill’s Empire (New York: Henry Holt, 2010), 81. For Churchill’s racial views, see also Lawrence James, Churchill and Empire: A Portrait of an Imperialist (London: Pegasus, 2014). In recent years, several books have addressed the thorny issue of Gandhi and race, most recently Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi Before India (New York: Knopf, 2014). The quotations here come from Joseph Lelyveld, Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India (New York: Knopf, 2011), 54, 57, 58.
Chapter 10: TO THE FRONTIER
137 Description of the Burnhams’ arrival in Fort Victoria: from Melina de Fonseca Rorke, The Story of Melina Rorke, R.R.C. (New York: Greystone Press, 1938), 123–4.
138 Not long after Burnham camped at Great Zimbabwe, a syndicate called the Ancient Ruins Mining Company began destructive operations there. When Rhodes found out, he stopped it and established laws against damaging ancient sites. But he was not absolutely opposed to pillaging such places, and he reserved interesting objects for himself. He later gave Burnham restricted rights to search for gold and artifacts at Dhlo-Dhlo, another of Zimbabwe’s fantastic ancient sites, sixty miles east of Bulawayo. Burnham and his friend Pete Ingram took about 600 ounces of gold beads from there, and sold their interest to another syndicate for a few thousand pounds.
Chapter 11: WAR IN MATABELELAND
140 For background about the war of 1893 I consulted, among many others, Glass, The Matabele War; Blake, A History of Rhodesia; Keppel-Jones, Rhodes and Rhodesia; Wills and Collingridge, The Downfall of Lobengula; W. D. Gale, Zambezi Sunrise: How Civilisation Came to Rhodesia and Nyasaland (Cape Town: Timmins, 1958); and O. N. Ransford, “An Historical Sketch of Bulawayo,” Rhodesiana 16 (July 1967): 56–65.
143 The original spelling of Lobengula’s capital was Buluwayo, changed after the war to Bulawayo, which remains its name. For simplicity I use the modern spelling throughout.
146 In S2C, Burnham misspells the name of Robert Vavasseur, the scout who went with him to find Bulawayo, calling him Vaversol. Burnham also misspells the name of the man who entered burning Bulawayo with him, calling him Poselt instead of Posselt. He also misdates this excursion as November 2 instead of November 3.
148 Hilaire Belloc: from The Modern Traveller, 1898.
Chapter 12: THE KING’S SPOOR
151 Glass, The Matabele War, is especially helpful on the incident of Lobengula’s stolen gold.
Chapter 13: THE SHANGANI PATROL
158 The literature about the Forbes column and the Shangani patrol is copious. In addition to the sources mentioned for the previous chapter, these contemporary sources were instructive for this chapter and the next: Burnham’s account, with an interview, in two parts in the Westminster Gazette (January 8 and 9, 1895), some of which is repeated in Haggard, “Wilson’s Last Fight”; Du Toit, Rhodesia, Past and Present, 135–50; “Diary” of William Napier, Historical Manuscripts Collection, MISC/NA4. National Archives of Zimbabwe, Harare; W. L. Gooding, “A Ride For Life,” Grey River Argus (New Zealand newspaper), vol. XXXVI, issue 7986 (July 10, 1894).
158 Burnham’s low opinion of Forbes is muted but clear in S2C and in his contemporary letters and interviews. For instance, Du Toit (cited above) includes this exchange between himself and Burnham:
“Do you think that Wilson’s force could have kept their position or forced a retreat if Forbes had sent one Maxim with the reinforcements?”
“I have not the least doubt, though this might have been less in accordance with military tactics.”
“What had Forbes to do, according to the general opinion of Wilson and his men?”
“We were all of opinion that, if he did not wish to cross the river in the night with his whole force, he should have sent word to us to return at once.”
166 The guilty batmen: two years later, during the Second Matabele War, the verdict was nullified on grounds of insufficient evidence and lack of jurisdiction by the sentencing magistrate.
168 The fate of the Shangani Patrol was the emotional climax of a patriotic drama called Cheer, Boys, Cheer that ran in London for 177 performances in 1895. Another drama that opened in London in 1899, Savage South Africa, reenacted the incident, and was turned into a movie that same year called Major Wilson’s Last Stand. Both starred Peter Lobengula, who claimed to be the son of King Lobengula. Peter led fifty warriors into battle against Wilson in two shows each day. The production was sensational in several ways. The theater featured a “native village” where the audience could mingle with the performers, most of whom were near-naked black men. This proved especially popular among female theatergoers, which led to censure in the papers. The role of Burnham was played by a Wild West performer with the stage name Texas Jack. A few years later, Texas Jack took a Wild West show to South Africa, where he hired a young American trick-roper called the Cherokee Kid, soon to be famous as Will Rogers—who, to complete the circle, became friends with Burnham in the 1930s in Los Angeles. I’m indebted to Rod Atkinson for much of this information.
Chapter 14: SPEARS INTO PEGS
171 Blanche’s restful personality: letter from Arthur Bent to Burnham, April 10, 1907, in Yale archive.
175 “a ring of financing adventurers”: Truth, December 14, 1893: 1273.
Chapter 15: CASHING IN
183 Haggard on Burnham: from his autobiography, The Days of My Life, vol. 2, 121. The section on Burnham covers pp. 121–30.
185 Burnham briefly tells the story about the copper bracelet in S2C. John Hays Hammond gives a longer version in Autobiography, vol. 1, 272–4.
189 Trek through thorn belt: in S2C, Burnham says he was looking for the Gwelo River, but this is a failure of memory. The group crossed the Zambezi at Victoria Falls, far to the west of the Gwelo. In a letter to his mother written just after the trek, he says he was trying for the Gwai River, which makes geographical sense.
190 Message carved on gunstock: Burnham mentions this in a letter to his mother and in S2C, but gives no details about the message itself. Burnham’s son Roderick gave this gun to Jack Lott, who photographed it and wrote about it. See Lott, “Burnham, Chief of Scouts,” 193–201, and “Do You Own a Piece of History?”, 57–63, 80–1.
Chapter 16: WAR AGAIN
195 The literature about the Jameson Raid is extensive. Especially helpful for this chapter were Pakenham, The Boer War, and Wheatcroft, The Randlords.
In addition to the sources already cited, these were helpful: Ranger, Revolt in Southern Rhodesia; Ranger, Voices From the Rocks; Oliver Ransford, “An Historical Sketch of Bulawayo,” Rhodesiana 16 (July 1967): 56–65; O. N. Ransford, “ ‘White Man’s Camp’, Bulawayo,” Rhodesiana 18 (July 1968): 13–21; Kennedy, Islands of White; Selous, Sunshine and Storm in Rhodesia; Baden-Powell, The Matabele Campaign; Clarke, The Plumtree Papers.
195 Churchill on the Jameson Raid: quoted in Wheatcroft, The Randlords, 10.
203 Bulawayo’s “hanging tree” still grows alongside Main Street.
205 In S2C, Burnham states that Nada was “not yet three years old.” In fact, she died twelve days before her second birthday.
205 White bloodlust: Selous, Sunshine and Storm in Rhodesia, 29–31. For his other remarks on the subject, see especially 34–7, 64–7, and 192–4. Among other examples of white vengeance aroused by native atrocities, he mentions the Sioux War in Minnesota (31)—an odd case for him to cite or know about; he probably heard of it from Burnham. Baden-Powell also was surprised by the settlers’ strong desire for vengeance, until he heard the stories and saw the victims: see The Matabele Campaign, 29–31. In an account of the first war, C. H. W. Donovan described his change from rationality to vengeance: With Wilson in Matabeleland, 239–42.
Chapter 17: THE MOUTHPIECE OF GOD
209 Selous on Mlimo: Sunshine and Storm in Rhodesia, especially 15–17.
210 For Baden-Powell and the ideals of scouting, see MacDonald, Sons of the Empire.
210 Baden-Powell on Burnham: The Matabele Campaign, 70–1; on the importance of military scouting, 89–121. Throughout their long correspondence, Baden-Powell never stopped asking Burnham for more bits of woodcraft.
213 Various sources spell the name of the man Burnham shot in the cave as Jobani, Jobaani, Jobane, Tshobani, Dshobani, Dshobane, and Juane.
217 Stent’s account was reprinted in his A Personal Record of Some Incidents in the Life of Cecil Rhodes (Cape Town: Maskew Miller, 1924). Stent’s account and the Ndebele spokesman are quoted in Blake, A History of Rhodesia, 138. Rhodes’s remark about “moments in life that make it worth living” is also quoted in Ranger, Revolt in Southern Rhodesia, 245.
219 Burnham’s unpublished essay about Rhodes is in the Yale archive.
220 “Hasten forward quickly there”: quoted in White, The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience, 83.
Chapter 18: KLONDIKE
223 In his first paragraph about the Klondike in S2C, Burnham gets several things wrong: the strike occurred on August 16, 1896, not 1897, and the discoverer’s name was Carmack, not Karmack. News of the strike didn’t reach Seattle until July 1897. Later in the chapter, Burnham erroneously says that writer Joaquin Miller was among the flood of newcomers into Dawson in June 1898, but Miller had spent the previous winter there and nearly starved.
223 Books especially helpful for this chapter: Adney, The Klondike Stampede; Greever, The Bonanza West; Berton, The Klondike Fever; and Gray, Gold Diggers.
228 “reeking bog”: Adney, The Klondike Stampede, 365.
231 “swish, swish”: ibid., 412.
232 “still considerable”: Los Angeles Evening Express, October 20, 1898.
234 Chopped bacon: Adney, The Klondike Stampede, 204.
236 Estimates vary about the worth of gold taken from the Klondike during the gold rush years. The figure of $29 million from 1897 to 1899 comes from The Canadian Encyclopedia’s article on the gold rush.
239 The cablegram from Lord Roberts: the Bradfords write that Burnham’s son Roderick was waiting on the dock for the fresh newspapers that day, and that a purser gave him Roberts’s cable, whereupon Roderick ran home with it (295–6). I found nothing in the letters or any other source to corroborate this pleasing story. Instead, I rely on the more likely version in Davis, Real Soldiers of Fortune, 217. Davis interviewed Burnham extensively at a time when Burnham’s memory about the cable was still fresh.
Chapter 19: CHIEF OF SCOUTS
240 In addition to books previously mentioned, helpful books for this chapter and the next include Thomas Pakenham’s matchless The Boer War; Belfield, The Boer War; Gooch, ed., The Boer War, especially Wessels, “Afrikaners at War,” 73–106, and Glenn R. Wilkinson, “ ‘To the Front’: British Newspaper Advertising and the Boer War,” 203–12; Conan Doyle, The Great Boer War; Lowry, ed., The South African War Reappraised; Tuchman, The Proud Tower; Wisser, The Second Boer War; Wessels, The Anglo-Boer War 1889–1902; A Handbook of the Boer War, With General Map of South Africa and 18 Sketch Maps and Plans (London: Gale and Polden, 1910); Richard Danes, Cassell’s History of the Boer War, 1899–1901 (London: Cassell, 1901); and Reitz, Boer Commando.
The Boer War chapters in S2C occasionally jumble or condense events, as memories (and memoirs) are apt to do. For minor discrepancies, I have relied on contemporary letters and accounts rather than Burnham’s later recollections.
242 “courage matched only by stupidity”: Pakenham, The Boer War, 240.
242 Maoris and Canadian half-breeds: from an unidentified newspaper clip pasted into a scrapbook kept by the Burnhams, now in the Stanford archive.
243 Davis: “Major Burnham, Chief of Scouts,” Real Soldiers of Fortune, 189–228. The book remains highly entertaining.
243 In S2C, Burnham gets two things wrong about “Long Cecil,” an artillery gun built during the siege of Kimberley. The American engineer who designed it was George Labram, not Le Brun, and it fired a twenty-eight-pound shell, not a hundred-pound shell.
245 Conan Doyle, The Great Boer War, 257–8.
247 Letter from Burnham to Baden-Powell about importance of admitting failure: September 18, 1909, in the Yale archive.
249 The defaced illustration of Burnham: from the Los Angeles Examiner, March 10, 1907, pasted into a Burnham family scrapbook in the Stanford archive.
249 In a chapter of S2C entitled “The Pietersburg Failure,” Burnham recounts his three futile attempts to scout the town of Pietersburg. He also says Pietersburg (now called Polokwane) is twenty-five miles from British headquarters south of Bloemfontein. But Polokwane and Bloemfontein are 400 miles apart. In letters written at the time, Burnham refers to scouting excursions towards Petrusburg, a hamlet on the road to Bloemfontein. Everett, the editor of S2C, evidently confused the better-known Pietersburg with Petrusburg, and Burnham didn’t catch it.
Chapter 20: BEHIND ENEMY LINES
272 Lord Roberts’s letter to Burnham is reprinted in S2C, 351. The letter awarding Burnham £2,000, sent on Roberts’s behalf by C. V. Hume from Pretoria on July 31, 1900, is in the Yale archive.
Chapter 21: CELEBRITY AND HINTERLANDS
273 Burnham “as well as other celebrities” on the Dunottar Castle: in Major A. W. A. Pollock, With Seven Generals in the Boer War: A Personal Narrative (London: Skeffington, 1900), 283.
275 Burnham devotes a chapter of TC to Churchill, mostly about their time on the Dunottar Castle, the name of which he misspells.
276 Mainly About People: from a news clip of unknown date, sometime in the fall of 1900, pasted into a Burnham family scrapbook in the Stanford archive.
283 Burnham devotes a few pages to the War of the Golden Stool, with emphasis on the heroism of the British officers and native soldiers: TC, 46–8.
286 Burnham uses the older name for the Dagara (or Dagaaba) people, calling them the Dagarti.
287 The Burnham family scrapbook in the Stanford archive contains clips about Burnham’s Gold Coast expedition from, among others, the Daily Mail, African Review, Illustrated London News, West Africa, The Financier and Bullionist, and Gold Coast Globe and Ashanti Argus. The quote “one of the very greatest goldfields in the world” appeared in the last-named paper on July 9, 1901. The headline from the Daily Mail appears on an undated article in the scrapbook, reprinted by the New York Times on August 12, 1901.
288 DSO ceremony and Burnham’s worry about his sword: Family lore related to me by his grandson, Fred Burnham.
288 “uncivilized Afrikander savages”: quoted in Pakenham, The Boer War, 530.
289 Burnham’s devotion to Africa waned after Rhodes’s death: from V. L. Ehrenclou, “Major Burnham—the Scout,” Union Oil Bulletin, June 1925: 10.
Chapter 22: BRITISH EAST AFRICA
291 There is comparatively little written about the early days of the East Africa Protectorate. Helpful were Somerset Playne, ed., East Africa (British): Its History, People, Commerce, Industries, and Resources (London: Foreign and Colonial Compiling and Publishing Co., 1908–09); Lord Hindlip, British East Africa, Past, Present, and Future (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1905); P. L. McDermott, British East Africa; or, Ibea; a History of the Formation and Work of the Imperial British East Africa Company (London: Chapman & Hall, 1893); and Kennedy, Islands of White.
291 In TC, Burnham writes that in 1902 “officers of the British East Africa Company” engaged him to go to East Africa (75). That’s misleading. Burnham was hired by a different entity, the East Africa Syndicate, a few of whose directors had previously been associated with the chartered company.
293 Dispute about the discovery of Lake Magadi: see M. F. Hill, Magadi: The Story of the Magadi Soda Company (Birmingham, U.K.: Kynoch Press for the Magadi Soda Co., 1964), 12–13. For another thorough history of the Magadi claim, which accepts Hill’s version of its discovery, see Lotte Hughes, “Mining the Maasai Reserve: The Story of Magadi,” Journal of Eastern African Studies 2, no. 1 (March 2008): 134–64. Lake Magadi continues to be mined for soda.
301 Burnham’s photo album of African trophy animals is in the Stanford archive.
Chapter 23: PROSPECTS AND LOSSES
306 Hammond’s two-volume autobiography is an appealing neglected work. Burnham appears in it several times.
306 Haggard tells the story of Carmichael, Montezuma’s treasure, Hammond, and Burnham in The Days of My Life, vol. 2, 128–30. Other information about the treasure appears in letters between Haggard and Burnham. As late as 1923, Haggard was still asking Burnham if his explorations in Mexico had ever turned up signs of Carmichael’s lost city.
311 “as though he had been shot”: The Days of My Life, vol. 2, 130. After the drowning, Bruce’s nurse, Elizabeth Badrick, almost lost her mind. The Burnhams didn’t hold her responsible and occasionally corresponded with her. She evidently fell on hard times. In 1926, Burnham sent a gentle letter with money to buy her a gravesite and a stone, with hopes that it would not be needed for many years. She died in 1931.
315 Ridgway’s: William Justus Boies, “The Mining Flame and the Public Moth,” November 24, 1906: 13–14, and Lindsay Denison, “The Gamble for Nevada Ores,” December 15, 1906: 3–6.
Chapter 24: A PRESIDENT SAVED, ANOTHER FORTUNE POSTPONED
320 Burnham’s story “Rogue Elephant” appeared in the October 1906 issue of Collier’s magazine.
321 The details about Harriman’s Pelican Lodge at Klamath Falls are taken from a contemporary account in the Des Moines Daily News, August 29, 1908: 2. The headline about the bear hunt appeared in The Call (San Francisco), August 19, 1908: 3.
321 On Mexico and the Yaqui Valley, the following were helpful: Sanderson, Agrarian Populism and the Mexican State; Dwyer, The Agrarian Dispute; Edwards, “The Protection of American Lives and Property”; Trow, “Woodrow Wilson and the Mexican Interventionist Movement of 1919”; Jeff Banister, “The Río Yaqui Delta: Early Twentieth-Century Photos from the Richardson Construction Company,” Journal of the Southwest 40, no. 3 (Autumn 1998): 397–401; Hart, “Social Unrest, Nationalism, and American Capital in the Mexican Countryside”; Gonzalez, The Mexican Revolution; C. V. Whitney, High Peaks (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1977); and Pamela A. Matson, ed., Seeds of Sustainability: Lessons from the Birthplace of the Green Revolution (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2012).
322 The sales brochure for the Yaqui Valley is in a Burnham family scrapbook in the Stanford archive.
324 Charles Frederick Holder, “The Esperanza Stone,” Scientific American, September 1910: 196ff. I don’t know the stone’s fate and whereabouts. Holder later interested several publishers in a book about Burnham and wrote some chapters based on Burnham’s dictation, but it was never published. The manuscript is in the Stanford archive.
324 Taft–Díaz meeting: in his autobiography, Hammond devotes two pages to Burnham’s role in this, vol. 2, 565–6. In The Secret War in El Paso: Mexican Revolutionary Intrigue, 1906–1920 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2009), Charles H. Harris III and Louis R. Sadler provide a thorough description of the Taft–Díaz meeting, including the security preparations, the seizure of the man with the gun (they identify Burnham’s partner as Ranger Moore), and a photo of the type of “pencil pistol” confiscated: 1–16, 212–4. The news clip from the New York World, October 13, 1909, is in the Stanford archive. While writing his autobiography, Hammond asked Burnham for his recollections of the incident, which may explain why both men misdate the year as 1910 instead of 1909.
330 Smuggled arsenal: the story appeared in the Los Angeles Evening (Herald) Express on April 22, 1912. Other papers reprinted it the next day, including the New York Times.
Chapter 25: HIPPOS AND SPIES
336 In his chapter about Duquesne in TC, Burnham confuses congressional bills from 1906 and 1910, writing that the later bill was defeated because a congressman accused President Roosevelt of wanting to fund hunting safaris for wealthy friends. But the president in 1910 was Taft. In Burnham’s address to California’s Humane Association in 1910, when his memory was fresh, he gets it right, blaming the class-conscious congressman for the failure of the 1906 bill.
338 Most of the material about Duquesne and the importation of African animals was drawn from the archives at Yale and Stanford, and from Burnham’s chapter on Duquesne in TC. An entertaining, exhaustive treatment of this episode is Jon Mooallem’s “American Hippopotamus,” The Atavist 32 (December 2013).
338 The biographical sources on Duquesne are as fantastic, and sometimes as credible, as their subject: see chapter 9 of Thomas Joseph Tunney and Paul Merrick Hollister, Throttled!: The Detection of the German and Anarchist Bomb Plotters (Boston: Small, Maynard and Co., 1919), which is available on Wikisource; Clement Wood, The Man Who Killed Kitchener: The Life of Fritz Joubert Duquesne, 1879– (New York: W. Faro, 1932); and, more reliably, Art Ronnie, Counterfeit Hero: Fritz Duquesne, Adventurer and Spy (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1995). For the Nazi spy ring, see Peter Duffy, Double Agent: The First Hero of World War II and How the FBI Outwitted and Destroyed a Nazi Spy Ring (New York: Scribner, 2014).
339 “Denizens of Jungle”: unidentified newspaper clipping about the Broussard hearing in March 1910, found in a Burnham family scrapbook in the Yale archive.
Chapter 26: SCOUTING FOR MINES AND FOR ROOSEVELT
344 Hammond’s remarks about prospecting and prospectors come from a speech to the American Mining Congress in Chicago, October 27, 1911, in the Hammond archives at Yale.
345 Mining romances: quoted from Mining and Scientific Press (1893), in Spence, Mining Engineers and the American West, 100.
348 Roosevelt on Burnham, “He is a scout and a hunter”: quoted in Davis, Real Soldiers of Fortune, 216.
353 The information about Roderick’s service in the army comes from Rod Atkinson, Roderick’s grandson.
353 Wilfred Owen, “Dulce et Decorum Est.”
Chapter 27: CLOSING THE CIRCLE
359 Figures from the Mixed Claims Commission: Hart, “Social Unrest,” 85n. Deaths of American miners: Spence, Mining Engineers and the American West, 294.
360 Whitney’s shares in Yaqui: Whitney’s son, Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, later claimed that he bought his father’s certificates of ownership for $5,000 on the open market, without his father’s knowledge, and immediately traveled to Mexico, where he sold them to General Álvaro Obregón, soon to become the country’s president, for $500,000. According to C. V. Whitney, his father never knew about the episode, which provided the money C. V. used to help found Pan American Airways. See his autobiography, High Peaks, 17–24.
360 Helpful about Dominguez, in addition to the archives: Dodd, “Dominguez Oil Field”; and C. R. McCollom, “The Dominguez Field,” Union Oil Bulletin (date uncertain), 11–13, in the Stanford archive. Today much of the old oil field is occupied by the Dominguez Hills campus of California State University, in Carson. Burnham’s grandchildren still receive dividend checks from his oil stocks.
361 Hammond, “impossible to believe they had missed something” quoted in the Boston Post, September 1925, typescript of article found in the Burnham archive at Yale.
Chapter 28: AFTER THE BONANZA
363 “Howdy partner” screenplay: in the Yale archive.
364 After leaving his Hollywood Hills mansion, Burnham donated his animal trophies, along with the larger collection of King Macomber, to the Southwest Museum of the American Indian in Los Angeles, now part of the Autry National Center. Most of the trophies were ruined by years spent in a warehouse, but a few heads, including a massive Cape buffalo, are now on display at the International Wildlife Museum in Tucson.
365 On Madison Grant and the intersection of conservation with scientific racism, a helpful source is Jonathan Peter Spiro, Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant (Burlington: University of Vermont Press, 2008).
366 “strange monsters of evil”: TC, ix.
367 Burnham’s letter about Blanche was written to Everett and appears in S2C, xxii.
368 “hopelessly in love”: letter from Ilo to Howell Wright in February 1949, in the Stanford archive. Wright accepted the Burnham papers for Yale.
368 Ilo’s correct name and age are cloudy. Her maiden name was Willits, and she evidently was previously married to someone named Ferree or Ferre. I found documents that spelled her name Ilo Willits Ferre, Ilo Willits Ferree, Ilo Klore Willits, and Ilo Kay Willits. The universities to whom she donated Burnham’s papers confuse things further. The Yale archive calls her Ilo K. Willetts; Stanford uses Ilo K. Willits [or Ferrce]. In several letters she claims to be thirty-seven years younger than Burnham, which would make her birth year 1898, but records list her birthdate as June 20, 1894; my thanks to Rod Atkinson for this nugget. After Burnham died she had to sell the hillcrest home in Santa Barbara. While organizing Burnham’s papers she lived in small houses near Los Angeles, then in smaller apartments. Her letters refer to a book that she completed about Burnham in the mid-1950s, but the manuscript has disappeared. She died in Anaheim in 1982.
371 “The man in the arena” was part of a speech entitled “Citizenship in a Republic,” delivered by Roosevelt at the Sorbonne in Paris, France, on April 23, 1910.
371 “world-wide harvest of death”, etc.: from TC, viii–ix.
Appendix: THE CONTROVERSIES
THE SHANGANI PATROL
373 Ransford, The Rulers of Rhodesia, 331. Ransford’s single sentence on Burnham and the Shangani Patrol manages to be factually sloppy as well as slanderous. Ingram didn’t become Burnham’s brother-in-law for two more years. Perhaps Ransford used this premature tag to intensify the insinuation that the two men were spineless colluders.
373 O’Reilly, Pursuit of the King.
374 For Gooding, see earlier citation.
374 Peter Emmerson, foreword to Scouting on Two Continents, unpaginated.
374 For a thoughtful rebuttal of the desertion theorists, see Lott, “Major F. R. Burnham, D.S.O.: A Vindication.”
375 For an interesting treatment of the Victorian ideal of a brave death, see MacDonald, The Language of Empire.
376 “The white induna’s eye”: S2C, 202.
376 Norris-Newman: Matabeleland and How We Got it, 128.
376 Weale, letter to the editor, Rhodesia Herald, December 22, 1944.
THE MLIMO
377 Sykes, With Plumer in Matabeleland, 259–61.
377 Hole and hoax: The Making of Rhodesia, 367n. For another critique of Hole’s assertions, see Bradford and Bradford, An American Family on the African Frontier, xxii–xxiii.
378 Frederick de Bertodano’s diary: Historical Manuscripts Collection, BE 3/2/1, National Archives of Zimbabwe. For comments about his service in the Boer War, see Craig Wilcox, Australia’s Boer War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). My critique of de Bertodano’s diary is deeply indebted to Peter van Wyk’s dismantling of it in Burnham: King of Scouts, 565–8, and also in his papers in the Stanford archive.
381 Burnham’s modesty: people who knew him always mentioned this, as did most newspaper stories. Many reporters noted that Burnham talked easily about anything except himself, and that his exploits had to be dragged out of him. A few examples will suffice: in a story written shortly after the Mlimo incident, a reporter for the London Daily Telegraph (August 23, 1896) noted that Burnham refused to elaborate on his report to Lord Grey with any dramatic details. The reporter called him “as quiet, unassuming a man as can be imagined. . . . His speech is soft and low, and he is as modest as a girl . . .” In a 1901 profile of Burnham for Pearson’s Magazine, the famous war correspondent Curtis Brown wrote, “Time and again attempts have been made to persuade Major Burnham to set down a record of these incidents in his own words and with the details that should clothe, as with flesh and blood, the bare skeletons of facts already known. But such efforts were unavailing despite all inducements. He would say ‘that writing was not in his line,’ or give some other excuse. His thoughts never seemed to concern themselves in the least with spectacular effects or with popular applause. . . . The difficulty of getting from such a man, little by little, the details of some of the more exciting events in his career has been considerable, but the result has proved well worth the effort” (“Burnham the Scout,” Pearson’s Magazine 6, no. 5 [November 1901]: 507). A year earlier, in October 1900, after Burnham had been invalided home from the Boer War, Brown tried to get him to talk about the Shangani Patrol, the Mlimo, and his missions in the Boer War: “The Major refuses to talk of these things for newspaper publication—he says it wouldn’t look right—but he had some shrewd and noteworthy observations to make concerning the warfare and the scouting of the future.” Richard Harding Davis noted that, because of Burnham’s modesty, it took five years to gather enough material to write the chapter about him in Real Soldiers of Fortune (1906). One of Burnham’s Rhodesian critics, John O’Reilly, tries to reverse-spin all this, theorizing that Burnham’s seeming modesty was a shield to fend off inquiries that could reveal his true base nature. No unbiased reader of Scouting on Two Continents can fail to notice Burnham’s unpretentious voice and frequent acknowledgments of failure—odd traits for a lying braggart.
382 For Hartley, see Clarke, The Plumtree Papers, 43–5.
383 For the valuable observation that Fripp attributed the details in his drawing to Armstrong, I am indebted to Rod Atkinson.
384 Hensman, A History of Rhodesia, 232.