Portal:Arizona/Selected biography/5

Frederick Russell Burnham, DSO (May 11, 1861–September 1, 1947), was an American scout and world traveling adventurer best known for his service as Chief of Scouts to the British Army in Colonial Africa and for teaching woodcraft (i.e., scoutcraft) to Robert Baden-Powell, becoming one of the inspirations to the founding of the Scouting Movement. But much earlier in his life, Burnham worked as a cowboy and a hired gun in Arizona for the losing side of the Pleasant Valley War, the most violent of the range wars. Marked for death and almost killed by a bounty hunter, he made the difficult journey out of Globe and hid out in Tombstone. In the 1880s in Arizona, he fought against the Apache, was hired as a scout for the U.S. Army in the Geronimo champaign, worked the mines, guarded Wells Fargo shipments, and became a professional hunter. Burnham is also known for having worked with Arizona boy scouts in 1936 on a state-wide campaign to save the Bighorn Sheep. This effort led to the establishment of two federally protected bighorn game ranges in Arizona, which Burnham himself dedicated in 1939: Kofa National Wildlife Refuge and Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. His son was captain of the University of Arizona football team (1905-1908), and several of his descendants still reside in Arizona. His grandson, Russell Adam Burnham, is a Tucson native and was the U.S. Army's Soldier of the Year in 2003, and the U.S. Army Medical Corps NCO of the Year in 2007.