A Dynamite Tale: Scouting on Two Continents

Excerpted by “Scouting on Two Continents” by Maj. Frederick Burnham @1927

This excerpt takes place during Burnham’s early years in Globe – sometime late 1800’s

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Globe had many ups and downs and colorful events in  those days and only needed a Mark Twain or a Kipling to make its happenings treasures of literature. Like the neighboring camp of Tombstone, it had in its history all the elements of comedy melodrama and too often the grimmest tragedy. Life was lived intensely, and the lure of silver, gold, and copper, drew the strong and adventurous youth of a lusty young nation. As I remember it, we were all perennially on the crest of some little mining boom or else all dead broke and waiting for capital and a railroad to come along and develop the vast copper mines we knew existed but where were of no profit to us so long as we had only oxen and mules for transportation and our pics and shovels as tools. Whenever the Indians became active, all the miners and prospectors for miles around were made society, such as it was. Globe was the only place where youth could find any social amusement, and when a few hundred miners arrived in camp after months of ceaseless toil, they felt it was up to the town dwellers to assist them in celebrating the holiday.

I remember one Fourth of July when the principal mines were shut down and the merchants especially hard up. The town seemed stone dead. There was no firing of cannon, no dancing or speech-making, and no parades or picnics had been planned. Down the gulch just below Burns’s blacksmith shop stood a big cottonwood tree which had not infrequently been used as a gallows to assist certain undesirable citizens out of their troubles. Some wag suggested that we all go down to the cottonwood tree and hang ourselves as a protest to the dead-in-the-shell and unpatriotic townspeople of Globe. We compromised by spending a couple of hours trying to honor our great national holiday by mock-heroic speeches, wrestlin’, and horseplay, all in a spirit of boyish fun. But one of our number, a husky young miner named Dick Bilderback, took himself very seriously. After absorbing a bottle or two of red liquid, he got hold of a twenty-five-pound box of dynamite and a lot of fuses and caps which he carefully attached to the sticks of powder, and then proceeded to have a Fourth of July celebration of his own.  Walking up the main street of town he nonchalantly tossed his charges behind him in the middle of the road. each shot, as it went off, tore a considerable hole in the ground and raised a tremendous lot of dust, besides rocking every store and shack in the place.

The local policemen were not over anxious to arrest a man holding in his hand a sizzling fuse attached to a stick of dynamite , especially as Dick solemnly threatened to blow up the whole box and himself along with it if any one interfered with him. By the time the third charge had gone off, most of the population had fled to the hills, but we youngsters realized that some of the irate citizens had taken their guns and might kill Dick from afar, so we formed ourselves into a committee of the whole to keep him from being shot while he shot up the town, but when I saw Benbrook, a cool deputy sheriff, striding down the street Winchester in hand, I thought Dick as good as dead. Just at that instant, a white-haired old woman steeped briskly toward Dick. She was the Irish landlady of a miner’s boarding house and feared no man.

Dick shouted to her to keep back or he would blow her to Kingdom Come.

“Yis!” she retorted, “an’ the whol worruld wud be sayn’ ye did it to kape from payin’ me the week’s board ye are afther owin me! An’ me your partner in a silver claim wid yersilf an’ the Chilson boys over in Richmond basin, “ etc., etc. Her tongue flew fast, always putting Dick in the wrong and on the defensive, until finally he suggest that they talk it all over. Then she asked him if he would be “afther kapin’ a lady shtandin’ in the middle av the strate in the blazin’ sun- now wud he?” – and at that Dick stepped with her into the shade of a near-by porch where he put down his box of dynamite, keeping the fuses and the burning candle in his hands.

The old lady promptly sat down on the dynamite, covering the box entirely with her ample form and wide skirts. Dick was now like the pirate captain in the “Houseboat on the Styx”; he could not proceed with his plans without insulting a lady. Soon the gallant Irishwoman took the opportunity to blow out Dick’s candle, and so his celebration of the Glorious Fourth came to a peaceful end. But the incident seemed to wake up the whole burg, and that night everybody celebrated in quite the regular old-fashioned way, and we boys felt that the day was saved.

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Frederick Burnham lived in the Globe area in the late 1880’s where he learned how to survive from old scouts who taught him skills he would use throughout his life. He went on to distinguish himself on two continents as a man of integrity and great skills in the art of war..and scouting. He was also an accomplished story teller and even Theodore Roosevelt read his book “with enthralled interest.”

Burnham writes about his entanglement in the famous Tonto Basin Feud, his friendship with the “Editor of the Arizona SilverBelt (Judge Hackney) , his employment with McLeod, one of most successful smugglers in the southwest, and his life as Chief of Scouts during the Boer War in South Africa.

See: Maj.Frederick Burnham