page_title: Frederick Russell Burnham
section_title: Post war
hierarchical_section_title: Frederick Russell Burnham / Later life / Post war
caption_attribution_description: The Esperanza Stone. Major Frederick Russell Burnham standing next to the stone he found in Mexico (1910)
context_page_description: Frederick Russell Burnham DSO was an American scout and world-traveling adventurer. 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. He helped inspire the founding of the international Scouting Movement.
  Burnham was born on a Dakota Sioux Indian reservation in Minnesota where he learned the ways of American Indians as a boy. 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. Burnham had little formal education, never finishing high school. 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. He escaped and later worked as a civilian tracker for the United States Army in the Apache Wars. 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.
context_section_description: After convalescing, Burnham became the London office manager for the Wa Syndicate, a commercial body with interests in the Gold Coast and neighboring territories in West Africa. He led the Wa Syndicate's 1901 expedition through the Gold Coast and the Upper Volta, looking for minerals and ways to improve river navigation. Between 1902 and 1904 he was employed by the East Africa Syndicate, for which he led a vast mineral prospecting expedition in the East Africa Protectorate (Kenya). Traveling extensively in the area around Lake Rudolf (now Lake Turkana), he discovered a huge soda lake.
caption: The mysterious Esperanza Stone. Found by Burnham in Mexico in 1909
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