her occasion Fred's mother fled for her life from the Indians,
carrying the boy with her. He was a husky lad, and knowing that if she
tried to carry him farther they both would be overtaken, she hid him
under a shock of corn. There, the next morning, the Indians having been
driven off, she found her son sleeping as soundly as a night watchman.
In these Indian wars, and the Civil War which followed, of the families
of Burnham and Russell, twenty-two of the men were killed. There is no
question that Burnham comes of fighting stock.

In 1870, when Fred was nine years old, his father moved to Los Angeles,
Cal., where two years later he died; and for a time for both mother and
boy there was poverty, hard and grinding. To relieve this young Burnham
acted as a mounted messenger. Often he was in the saddle from twelve to
fifteen hours, and even in a land where every one rode well, he gained
local fame as a hard rider. In a few years a kind uncle offered to Mrs.
Burnham and a younger brother a home in the East, but at the last moment
Fred refused to go with them, and chose to make his own way. He was then
thirteen years old, and he had determined to be a scout.

At that particular age many boys have set forth determined to be scouts,
and are generally brought home the next morning by a policeman. But
Burnham, having turned his back on the cities, did not repent. He
wandered over Mexico, Arizona, California. He met Indians, bandits,
prospectors, hunters of all kinds of big game; and finally a scout who,
under General Taylor, had served in the Mexican War. This man took a
liking to the boy; and his influence upon him was marked and for his
good. He was an educated man, and had carried into the wilderness a few
books. In the cabin of this man Burnham read "The Conquest of Mexico
and Peru" by Prescott, the lives of Hannibal and Cyrus the Great, of
Livingstone the explorer, which first set his thoughts toward Africa,
and many technical works on the strategy and tactics of war. He had no
experience of military operations on a large scale, but, with the aid of
the veteran of the Mexican War, with corn-cobs in the sand in front of
the cabin door, he constructed forts and made trenches, redoubts,
and traverses. In Burnham's life this seems to have been a very happy
period. The big game he hunted and killed he sold for a few dollars to
the men of Nadean's freight outfits, which in those days hauled bullion
from Cerro Gordo for the man who