Heritage - Seton and Beard, the Woodsmen
| Category: | Scouting Heritage |
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| Notes: | For any meeting, Scouting Anniversary Week, or a nature-themed campout. Covers two founders of the Boy Scouts of America. For the story of William D. Boyce and the Unknown Scout, see the good-turn minute. Part of a series on Scouting heritage - see the other heritage minutes in this category. |
When Scouting came to America in 1910, it didn't start from scratch. Two men had already spent years teaching American kids how to live in the woods. Their names were Ernest Thompson Seton and Daniel Carter Beard.
Ernest Thompson Seton was a naturalist, an artist, and a storyteller. He grew up in Canada, spent his childhood sneaking off into the woods to study animals, and grew up to write books like Wild Animals I Have Known. In 1902 he started a youth group built around camping, nature study, and campfires. When the Boy Scouts of America was formed, Seton became its first Chief Scout and wrote much of its very first handbook.
Dan Beard was a different kind of woodsman. He was an illustrator, too, who drew pictures for Mark Twain's books, and he loved the frontier skills of the pioneers. In 1905 he started his own group for boys, teaching them to build cabins, track animals, and handle an axe. When the BSA began, he joined it, and he served as its National Scout Commissioner for more than thirty years. Scouts everywhere knew him as "Uncle Dan," a white-bearded man in buckskins who seemed to be at every big Scout gathering.
They didn't always agree with each other. But both of them believed that time outdoors makes young people stronger, smarter, kinder, and more self-reliant.
So when you learn to identify a bird call, or build a fire, or lash a camp gadget together, you're carrying on what Seton and Beard were teaching kids in the woods more than a century ago.