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.

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.

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.

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.

[6][7][8][9] 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.

Initially, he remained at his post in the mines in the Boer Republic, but as a precaution, he sent his wife to Cape Town, South Africa, then a British colony.

[13][20] Only weeks earlier, his brother had been prospecting in Alaska during the Klondike Gold Rush when he received a telegram from Lord Roberts requesting his assistance in the war – Fred left for Africa within the hour.

[21] Fred Burnham had just been appointed Chief of Scouts for the British Army and was en route to South Africa via England, but he was still too distant to provide any immediate help.

[23] While his wife and children stayed in England and France, Burnham returned to North America in 1907 and for the next few years became associated with the Yaqui River irrigation project in Mexico with his brother Fred.

[24] In 1909, he traveled with Hector Walker of England on a 300-mile journey from Phoenix, Arizona into Mexico, and then east through Chihuahua and into the Sierra Madres to look for good grazing lands and minerals.

[27] He immediately left Mexico for France and stopped in Barcelona, Spain on his way to Algiers, Algeria, then a French colony that the German Intelligence had infiltrated to support of the rebels.

Traveling through neutral Switzerland, Burnham assumed his former identity as an American mining engineer and crossed into Germany on the plea of extreme ill-health – his tuberculosis had violently resurfaced.

Burnham had spent much time before the war in German spas, and his work for the French intelligence had been classified, so the real reason for his near-death return was not suspected by the authorities.

[1] While in Germany, Burnham applied his engineering skills to converting simple household materials in useful surveying instruments, and he used his wooden leg to conceal these tools when he traveled to places such as Bad Nauheim.

From his death bed, Burnham shared his secrets with other intelligence officers and the French government transported his family from England to Cannes.

He was buried in Cannes beside the tomb of A. Kingsley Macomber, another American, to honor the French Admiral François Joseph Paul de Grasse whose fleet had enabled George Washington to force the surrender of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown, Virginia in 1781.