MAJOR BURNHAM, CHIEF OF SCOUTS
AMONG the Soldiers of Fortune whose stories have been told in
this book were men who are no longer living, men who, to the
United States, are strangers, and men who were of interest chiefly
because in what they attempted they failed.
The subject of this article is none of these. His adventures are as
remarkable as any that ever led a small boy to dig behind the barn
for buried treasure, or stalk Indians in the orchard. But entirely
apart from his adventures he obtains our interest because in what
he has attempted he has not failed, because he is one of our own
people, one of the earliest and best types of American, and
because, so far from being dead and buried, he is at this moment
very much alive, and engaged in Mexico in searching for a buried
city. For exercise, he is alternately chasing, or being chased by,
Yaqui Indians.
In his home in Pasadena, Cal., where sometimes he rests quietly
for almost a week at a time, the neighbors know him as "Fred"
Burnham. In England the newspapers crowned him "The King of
Scouts." Later, when he won an official title, they called him
"Major Frederick Russell Burnham, D. S. O."
Some men are born scouts, others by training become scouts. From
his father Burnham inherited his instinct for wood-craft, and to this
instinct, which in him is as keen as in a wild deer or a mountain
lion, he has added, in the jungle and on the prairie and mountain
ranges, years of the hardest, most relentless schooling.
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