His father, the Reverend Edwin Otway Burnham, was a Presbyterian minister educated and ordained in New York he was born in Ghent, Kentucky. To symbolise the friendship between Burnham and Baden-Powell, the mountain beside Mount Baden-Powell in California was formally named Mount Burnham in 1951.īurnham was born on May 11, 1861, on a Dakota Sioux Indian reservation in Minnesota, to a missionary family living near the small pioneer town of Tivoli (now gone), about 20 miles (32 km) from Mankato. He earned the BSA's highest honor, the Silver Buffalo Award, in 1936, and remained active in the organization at both the regional and national level until his death in 1947. This effort led to the creation of the Kofa and Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuges in Arizona. In the 1930s, he worked with the BSA to save the big horn sheep from extinction. Burnham joined several new wilderness conservation organizations, including the California State Parks Commission. After the war, Burnham and his business partner John Hays Hammond formed the Burnham Exploration Company they became wealthy from oil discovered in California. For political reasons, the unit was disbanded without seeing action. Army division similar to the Rough Riders, which Theodore Roosevelt intended to lead into France.
Burnham returned to the United States, where he became involved in national defense efforts, business, oil, conservation, and the Boy Scouts of America (BSA).ĭuring World War I, Burnham was selected as an officer and recruited volunteers for a U.S. He had become friends with Baden-Powell during the Second Matabele War in Rhodesia, teaching him outdoor skills and inspiring what would later become known as Scouting. In special recognition of Burnham's heroism, the King invested him into the Companions of the Distinguished Service Order, giving Burnham the highest military honors earned by any American in the Second Boer War. Citizenship, his military title was British and his rank of major was formally given to him by King Edward VII. Feeling the need for new adventures, Burnham took his family to southern Africa in 1893, seeing Cecil Rhodes's Cape to Cairo Railway project as the next undeveloped frontier.īurnham distinguished himself in several battles in Rhodesia and South Africa and became Chief of Scouts. He escaped and later worked as a civilian tracker for the United States Army in the Apache Wars. After moving to the Arizona Territory in the early 1880s, he was drawn into the Pleasant Valley War, a feud between families of ranchers and sheepherders. Burnham had little formal education, never finishing high school. By the age of 14, he was supporting himself in California, while also learning scouting from some of the last of the cowboys and frontiersmen of the American Southwest. He helped inspire the founding of the international Scouting Movement.īurnham was born on a Dakota Sioux Indian reservation in Minnesota where he learned the ways of American Indians as a boy. He is known for his service to the British South Africa Company and to the British Army in colonial Africa, and for teaching woodcraft to Robert Baden-Powell in Rhodesia. Father of the international Scouting movement, Honorary President of the Roosevelt Council (Arizona) Boy Scouts of Americaįrederick Russell Burnham DSO (– September 1, 1947) was an American scout and world-traveling adventurer. Messenger, Indian tracker, cowboy, gold miner, oil man, U.S.
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