Posted 21 December 2004

It’s easy to imagine the sort of treatment that Hollywood could give Finn Burnett today. In the right hands, his extraordinarily diverse career (trail breaker, mail rider, railroad man, gold prospector, cowboy) would become a story of redemption, in which a crack Indian fighter slowly becomes a friend of the Natives. Robert David Beebe’s biography was originally published in 1935, and it was based on the direct reminiscences of the eponymous frontiersman himself. Accordingly, Finn Burnett is much less Dances With Wolves, and far more John Wayne. Not that the narrative suffers for this. A reliance on the 177-page manuscript dictated by Burnett to his granddaughter means that though avowedly disjointed, the various stages of his frontier life are evoked with an authentic eye for detail. Burnett evidently had an uncanny knack for being in the right place at the right time – if not for personal safety, then at least for the historical record – and so this biography can cover many crucial moments in the transition and development of the west: Finn was working at Fort Phil Kearney at the time of the Fetterman Massacre; driving mules for the railroads, he was at Promontory, Utah, for the driving of the golden spike that completed the first transcontinental railroad; he took part in the now famous Hay Field Fight, in which nineteen frontiersmen held off a force of approximately 2,500 Sioux; and he concluded his career directing agriculture on the newly formed Shoshone reservation. All this certainly makes for lively reading, and a useful potted history of extraordinary times. Numerous chapters could be used in isolation as succinct and detailed descriptions of an historical moment. But since Burnett’s memory seems to be the only source for most of the information (there are no footnotes or bibliography) then perhaps a ghosted autobiography may have been a more successful format.

To the modern reader, it is the treatment of the Indian fighting that dates the piece most obviously. There is never a sense of even-handedness in the presentation of violence. This is most telling adjectively: whilst the cavalry ‘charged’, the Sioux descend ‘like an avalanche of fighting fiends’ (126). Indians ‘swarm’; they make ‘a wild yelling and jabbering’; they are ‘hideously-painted maniacs’ (185, 188). And if there is one thing better than a dead Indian, it is an Indian who believes that ‘all white men are wise’ (275). Chief Washakie, the famous Shoshone chief, and the subject of numerous works in his own right, appears here as Burnett’s friend and little more than a cipher for manifest destiny rhetoric: ‘The white men are as many as are grasshoppers upon the plains […] He would be a fool who would counsel his weak Indians to fight […] a people […] who are all great medicine-men’ (275). There is, however, an even greater enemy contained within these pages: bureaucracy. Whether the axe to grind is David’s or Burnett’s, both faceless government and the army command structure receive a drubbing. The ‘swivel-chair officers in Washington’ who were ‘envious of the man in the field’ are accorded most of the blame whenever it needs apportioning (93). A chapter is devoted to the ‘Maladministration’ of the Shoshone reservation and is darkly amusing on the succession of drunks and morphine addicts who were placed as agent, ‘for the sole purpose of removing them from Washington’ (320). The ending, of course, could not be more Hollywood: Burnett settles down to ‘a life of love and peace and sweet contentment’ on a ranch awarded to him by the Shoshone; the frontier awaits the approaching ‘hosts of lovable, hard-riding cowboys’ (366). The world of Finn Burnett is oftentimes engaging and frequently fascinating: but such statements should stand as a warning to all prospective readers.

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