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. Burnham continued on the trail until he heard a slight report and felt something hit his right leg, and then a second report resulting in a flesh wound to his left leg. He immediately threw himself flat on the ground and commenced cautiously eyeing the surrounding country for the enemy. When saw a hat rising from behind a rock about 150 yards away, he drew his pistol and fired on the hat. His enemy fled down the Los Coyotes creek, down the canyon trail Burnham had been following, with the intent to assume a new ambush. Burnham recognized his enemy as the Indian he had met a short time earlier and he knew that this Indian was carrying a Winchester rifle and had him out-gunned. Burnham left his pack animal, tools, provisions and blankets and quickly fled on his horse down a steep cliff away from the trail and to safety in San Jacinto.
For the next few years, Burnham studied mining and worked on and off in the California desert as mining engineer at the Alvord mine, a gold mine owned and operated by the Burnham-Clapp family and their Pasadena business partners 1885–1891. He received his professional mining certification from the Pacific Chemical Works of San Francisco, an assay company owned and operated by Henry Garber Hanks, the first State Mineralogist for California.