Frederick Russell Burnham - Early Life

Early Life

Burnham was born to a missionary family on an Indian Reservation in Tivoli, Minnesota. His father Edwin Otway Burnham was from Kentucky whilst his mother had immigrated to America from England. As a toddler, he witnessed the burning of New Ulm, Minnesota, by Taoyateduta (Little Crow) and his Sioux warriors in the Dakota War of 1862. During the uprising, his mother, Rebecca (Elizabeth) Russell Burnham, hid the not-quite-two-year-old boy in a basket of green corn husks and fled for her life. Once the Sioux had been driven away the mother returned to find the house burned down. Her young son was safe, fast asleep in the basket and protected only by the corn husks.

The young Burnham attended schools in Iowa and there he met Blanche Blick, who would later become his wife. His family moved to Los Angeles, in 1870. Two years later his father, the Rev. Edwin Otway Burnham of Kentucky, himself a long time pioneer and missionary along the border of the Ho Chunk (Winnebago) Indian reservation in Minnesota, died. Burnham was only 12. While his mother and his then 3 year old baby brother Howard Burnham returned to Iowa, the young Burnham stayed in California to make his own way.

For the next three years, Burnham worked as a mounted messenger for the Western Union Telegraph Company in California and Arizona. On one occasion his horse was stolen from him by Tiburcio Vasquez, a famous Californio bandit. At 14, he began his life as a scout and Indian tracker in the Apache Wars. He traveled in northern Mexico and the American Southwest, including Texas and Oklahoma, earning a living as a buffalo hunter, cowboy, and prospector, and he continued working as a scout while tracking Indians in the Cheyenne War. The young Burnham eventually went on to attend high school in California but never graduated.

In 1882, Burnham returned to Arizona and was appointed Deputy Sheriff of Pinal County, but he soon went back to cattle and mining interests. He joined the losing side of the Tonto Basin Feud before mass killing started, and only narrowly escaped death in Arizona. He returned to Prescott, Iowa, to visit his childhood sweetheart, Blanche, and the two were married on February 6, 1884. That same year, he and Blanche settled down to tend to an orange grove in Pasadena, California, but within a year he was back prospecting and scouting.

In the 1880s the American press had been popularizing the notion that the West had been won and there was nothing left to conquer in the United States. This idea changed Burnham's life. Ever the soldier of fortune, he began to look elsewhere for the next undeveloped frontier. When he heard of the work of Cecil Rhodes and his pioneers in building the Cape to Cairo railway in Africa, Burnham sold what little he owned and, in 1893, set sail to Cape Town, South Africa, with his wife and young son. He soon joined the British South Africa Company as a scout and headed north.

Burnham is the brother of Mather Howard Burnham, a mining engineer and spy, and second cousin of Lt. Howard Mather Burnham, killed in the American Civil War.

Active as a Freemason, Burnham was a member of Excelsior Lodge No. 195. He rose to become a Thirty-second Degree Mason of the Scottish Rite.