Scouting on Two Continents

1. What they did

Frederick Russell Burnham, an American scout who later became Chief of Scouts under Lord Roberts in the Boer War, tells the story of his life from boyhood in the American West to the 1920s. He wrote it with Mary Nixon Everett, who persuaded him to set it down. It is a memoir, not a study, but tracking runs through it: Burnham’s work as a scout was finding, following and hiding trails.

The book covers four main stretches of his life:

• Learning in the American Southwest. At 18, an old frontier scout named Holmes took him for six months through the mountains of Arizona, New Mexico and Sonora and taught him “the details of trailing and hunting that make up a scout’s work”. Burnham then worked in Arizona during the Apache wars and range feuds, where he “cut for tracks” on long foot patrols and was himself trailed by both white frontiersmen and Apache trackers.
• Africa and the Matabele wars. In 1893 he and his wife and young son trekked north through the Transvaal. Boer hunters taught him “all the spoors of the different kinds of game; their habits, their food, and their enemies”. He scouted in the First Matabele War, including the long pursuit of King Lobengula and the Shangani Patrol, and again in the Second Matabele War.
• The Klondike gold rush and other travels.
• The Boer War, as Chief of Scouts, including his capture and escape.

2. What they found

Since this is a memoir, its “findings” are the tracking episodes and lessons Burnham describes. The main ones:

Following trails

• A trail wiped out by cattle and rain. Lobengula’s seven wagons were easy to follow at first, but at least fifty thousand cattle driven behind the king, marching regiments and daily rain “blotted out the king’s spoor almost entirely”. Trackers the book calls “Hottentots and Masarwas from the desert”, “whose existence largely depends on their ability to follow an antelope or recognize the faintest trace of small game”, worked on it alongside Boers, Australians and frontiersmen. Burnham says the final tracking fell to him and two other scouts, Ingram and Bain, and that “many times we lost the spoor, but we always found it again”. Charred wagon remains, and later spoor showing that only two wagons had crossed the Shangani River, told the column what the king was doing.
• Tracking by touch in the dark. Near the king’s camp at night, with no light allowed, Bain took off his boots and felt with his bare foot for the wheel marks, which the rain had pressed two to six inches deep. Burnham, asked to back-track to find three missing men, had to crawl and feel among cattle tracks with both hands for the curved horseshoe. At first, cold and tense, his fingers “conveyed nothing to my mind” until his commander told him to stand up and calm down. He then found the first shoe track, worked out the direction and stride of the horse, and back-tracked to a landmark ant heap.
• Reading who is on a trail. Following the hoof marks of two scouts sent for help, Burnham saw the prints of two sandals over their spoor, showing warriors were tracking the horses within half a mile, and then signs that ten or fifteen more, some barefoot, had joined. Another scout, Johann Colenbrander, read from the spoor that many were young spearmen running light without sandals, and judged they might give up sooner because the rain had softened their feet.
• Game sign. After lions attacked the expedition’s burros one night, Burnham scanned the sky for vultures to find a kill and circled for tracks; one burro came back with claw marks. Lost and near death from thirst in the desert in 1895, his party found tracks of wild boar, “whose tracks never extend any great distance from water”, and soon after dug water from damp sand.

Hiding and confusing trails

• The horseshoe swap. In Arizona, a friend named McLeod showed Burnham how to shake off two pursuers: move the shoes from his good horse onto a spare, unshod horse and send it running home to Tucson, then ride the now barefoot good horse through a sandy wash and fit it with shoes of a different pattern. The swap was done on gravelly ground, so the barefoot tracks would not visibly change while the shod horse’s tracks told “a clear tale”. The pursuers followed the spare horse all the way to Tucson.
• A false trail across mud. Pursued by Matabele warriors, Burnham and his companions rode through a soft vley, circled singly on dry ground, then rode back through the mud in single file, leaving “a very distinct black trail”, and hid in the bush. The trackers crossed over, lost the trail, and only worked it out after a long search.
• Back-tracking before resting. Two scouts escaped their pursuers because, before stopping to rest, one always back-tracked a little along his own trail. The warriors followed the trail step by step, which gave the scouts time to see them coming and move on.
• Other tricks: doubling back on his trail for a hundred yards before lying down; brushing out horseshoe marks where they crossed a path; and, in the Boer War, pretending to follow the spoor of a lost horse, turning back and forth over his own tracks, so that a passing party of Boers would take him for one of their own and let him pass.

Burnham repeatedly judges that a trick which fooled one set of trackers “would never have worked with Apache Indians”. He describes the patience of an Apache scout who will lie on a rocky point for days, “make no trail or sign”, and note every film of smoke, dust cloud, flight of a bird and movement of an animal. He also describes a guard during his captivity, from a people he names with a term of the time, as almost as hard to shake off a trail as a bloodhound.

3. What they concluded

• From his first teacher, Burnham took the lesson that “in the performance of even the simplest thing there is a right way and a wrong way”, and he credits remembered advice with saving his life and the lives of men in his charge.
• He argues that what matters most about the old frontier scouts is not their dramatic adventures but “their methods of meeting their problems as they arose day after day”, which are worth remembering “not only for what they did, but for what they knew and thought”.
• He stresses patience, constant use of all the senses, and memorising every step of a route so that it can be back-tracked at a gallop in daylight. He warns that exhaustion and low spirits can make “even strong eyesight and keen hearing” fail, so that “the most obvious signs on the road will be passed unobserved”.

4. How tracking was or was not used

Tracking is the author’s profession and the thread of the book. He describes trailing people, horses, cattle herds and wagons in the deserts of the American Southwest and the bush and veldt of southern Africa, by day and by touch at night; tracks and signs identification (shod and unshod horses, sandalled and barefoot people, the stride and direction of a horse, wild boar tracks near water, lion claw marks); reading the age, number and condition of the people on a trail; and many ways of hiding a trail or laying a false one. He learned trailing from a frontier scout in Arizona and game spoor from Boer hunters.

5. Tracker or observer certification

Reported but not validated. The author and the other trackers are described as skilled, and the author says he and his fellow scouts could outtrack the local trackers, but no test or certification of anyone’s skill is given. This is the author’s own account of his work, told many years later.

6. Other technologies, skills or innovations

• Bushcraft and scouting skills that go with tracking: finding water in the desert, night navigation by memorised landmarks, smoke signals, hiding horses, using a field glass, and watching birds such as vultures and buzzards for signs of what is happening on the ground.
• Horse care on long scouts, and the horseshoe-swapping method for disguising a horse’s tracks.