Frederick Russell Burnham DSO (May 11, 1861 – September 1, 1947) is an American scout and world-traveling adventurer.

He is known for his service to the British South Africa Company and to the British Army in colonial Africa, and for teaching woodcraft to Robert Baden-Powell in Rhodesia.

He helps inspire the founding of the international Scouting Movement.

Burnham was born on a Dakota Sioux Indian reservation in Minnesota where he learned the ways of American Indians as a boy.

By the age of 14, he was supporting himself in California, while also learning scouting from some of the last of the cowboys and frontiersmen of the American Southwest.

Burnham has little formal education, never finishing high school.

After moving to the Arizona Territory in the early 1880s, he is drawn into the Pleasant Valley War, a feud between families of ranchers and sheepherders.

He escapes and later works as a civilian tracker for the United States Army in the Apache Wars.

Feeling the need for new adventures, Burnham takes his family to southern Africa in 1893, seeing Cecil Rhodes's Cape to Cairo Railway project as the next undeveloped frontier.

Burnham distinguishes himself in several battles in Rhodesia and South Africa and becomes Chief of Scouts.

Despite his U.S. citizenship, his military title is British and his rank of major is formally given to him by King Edward VII.

In special recognition of Burnham's heroism, the King invests him into the Companions of the Distinguished Service Order, giving Burnham the highest military honors earned by any American in the Second Boer War.

He had become friends with Baden-Powell during the Second Matabele War in Rhodesia, teaching him outdoor skills and inspiring what will later become known as Scouting

Burnham returns to the United States, where he becomes involved in national defense efforts, business, oil, conservation, and the Boy Scouts of America (BSA).

During the First World War, Burnham is selected as an officer and recruits volunteers for a U.S. Army division similar to the Rough Riders, which Theodore Roosevelt intends to lead into France.

For political reasons, the unit is disbanded without seeing action.

After the war, Burnham and his business partner John Hays Hammond form the Burnham Exploration Company; they become wealthy from oil discovered in California.

Burnham joins several new wilderness conservation organizations, including the California State Parks Commission.

In the 1930s, he works with the BSA to save the big horn sheep from extinction.

This effort leads to the creation of the Kofa and Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuges in Arizona.

He earns the BSA's highest honor, the Silver Buffalo Award, in 1936, and remains active in the organization at both the regional and national level until his death in 1947.

To symbolize the friendship between Burnham and Baden-Powell, the mountain beside Mount Baden-Powell in California will formally be named Mount Burnham in 1951.