Howard Burnham

Mather Howard Burnham (May 27, 1870 – May 4, 1917), was an American who went by the name of Howard; his brother was the celebrated scout Frederick Russell Burnham. He traveled the world, frequently worked as a mining engineer and, during World War I, he became an intelligence officer and spy for the government of France. He had a wooden leg which he used to conceal tools for spying when he was behind enemy lines. Early life Burnham was born to a missionary family on a Sioux Indian reservation in Tivoli, Minnesota (near Mankato), just before his family moved to Los Angeles, California. He was named after his cousin Lieutenant Howard Mather Burnham, a United States Army Civil War officer who was killed in action in the Battle of Chickamauga. His father, the Rev. Edwin Otway Burnham of Kentucky, a long time frontiersman and a missionary, died when Burnham was only 3, leaving the family destitute. He and his mother, Rebecca (Elizabeth) Russell Burnham, originally from Westminster, Middlesex, England, left to live with an Uncle in Iowa, but his brother Fred, then 12, stayed in California to repay the family debts and to make his own way. At 14, Burnham was in school in Massachusetts. Ill with an injured leg, his brother sent him the money to return to Los Angeles. His leg was removed four inches below the knee. He also suffered from tuberculosis, and following the amputation, he had a long convalescence. For those two years, he lived with his brother, who taught him how to shoot, saddle a horse and pack animals, the art of scoutcraft and how to ride the range, and all of this in spite of his wooden leg. A voracious reader with an amazing memory, he enjoyed books on military strategies and tactics and was fascinated by history, geology, metallurgy, and mining. He roamed the deserts from Death Valley to lower California, living among and learning from the Cahuilla Indians of Agua Caliente (now Palm Springs, California), and teaming up at times with solitary prospectors to learn desert prospecting, pocket hunting, and the mysteries of the "great horn spoon" (probably the California Gold Rush). In 1888, during one of his desert prospecting excursions, Burnham had a shoot-out with an Indian (not Cahuilla). He was on an old trail leading over the mountains between Kawia and San Jacinto and less than an hour before the attack he met an Indian with whom he had a conversation in Spanish.