Tworzenie Nowego Amerykańskiego Chłopca poprzez Woodcraft
Nowadays we label our most progressive movements with a contradictory word of retrogression. We have come to realize that “back to the land” means a step forward; that “back to the simple life” expresses a wish to advance; that “back to practical education” means only to adapt the tangled theories of the schools to the life of the child as an embryo citizen.
Lined up with these “back to” movements forward, and in kinship with them, is another, devised for boys, and eagerly seized upon by boys. Its phrase is “back to the woods,” not only for health, pleasure, and adventure, but, beyond these, for fellowship and ethics, for the loyalty to comrades and to the high ideals that may be found there. You may hear it mentioned variously as the Boy Scouts, or the Seton Indians, according to the angle of approach. Whatever name is used, you may be sure that it is no mere theorist’s scheme for giving boys unwelcome ethics in sugar-coated pills called “playing Indian.” It is a practical, sane, appealing movement that wins boys to a realization of the spirit of fair play in all their relations to their fellows. It catches them young, and gives them the sense of citizenship and the square deal in time to count for good through all their lives.
It is a big movement. We seem to have taken it from our English brothers, but what really happened was that our English brothers took it in the first instance from us. They expanded and developed it into a great national institution; and then it crossed the water again, and seems to be expanding and developing into a great national institution here. And at the head of the organization is the man who started the thing many years ago in a small way, carrying it along until the English got hold of the idea and upon it built their own big organization.
That man is Ernest Thompson Seton, probably our best-known naturalist and student of outdoor life. Everybody knows Mr. Seton’s wild animals, and has seen his wonderful pictures, and perhaps heard him spin those marvelous yarns of his. We all know Lobo the Wolf, and few parts of America have been left untouched by the hand of the wizard whose mission has been the interpretation of the whole outdoor world. It is a good many years now since Mr. Seton began his organization of the Seton Indians.
These were groups of boys all over the country, drawn together by one of the strongest instincts of the American boy — the love of outdoor life. There are now more than one hundred and fifty thousand of them, scattered all through the States. They have their camp-fires and their councils and their big powwows; but the biggest powwow of all is the encampment that is held two or three times a year at the great central meeting-place. This is Wyndygoul, the name Mr. Seton has given to his country place at Cos Cob, Connecticut. Here is a splendid stretch of woods almost as nature left it, with a lake and hills and natural camping grounds, and the very council rock that the Indians used hundreds of years ago. And here, in truth, is the birthplace of the whole Boy Scout movement.
If you were to happen there during one of the encampments of the Seton Indians, you would travel over the pleasant, winding New England roads, and, after dodging innumerable automobiles on the old Boston Post Road, you would come by a byway suddenly on a big, sequestered stretch of woods reminding you of an Englishman’s country-seat. As you go along the white drive through a forest of pines, pheasants run across the road, a glimpse of a brook shows you all kinds of ducks and water-fowl, squirrels chatter among the trees, and you seem many leagues from the honking automobiles. Presently you come on an Indian tepee, with its tribal totem alongside; and if you happen to be with the Great Chief himself, a chorus of “How! How!” greets you, and the young Indians emerge from their tents and the woods round about.
One doesn’t have to be a pessimist to realize that in our national life we have as grown men exactly the same trouble we had as boys — that we are all of us playing the game to win, and that winning simply means overcoming somebody else. The essence of sport is really something very different — to overcome difficulties of time and space and all kinds of physical obstacles. Nature herself puts plenty of difficulties in our way. The man who first discovered that, with a sail closehauled and a rudder jammed hard against the opposing water, he could sail almost into the wind must have had one of the big primordial thrills that come sometimes into the hearts of men; he was advanced by vast ethnic intervals beyond the man that had simply sailed his boat faster than another man. For every winner of a race there must be a loser; and when we shout ourselves hoarse at a Yale-Princeton football game it is not so much because our team is nobly acquitting itself or doing the thing that is hard as because it is beating the other team. So most of us become “bleacher athletes,” sitting by and watching the fight; and what counts is not the game itself, but the score.
I wonder how much this is responsible for the kind of game we play when we are no longer boys, in after life, when the whole point of the game seems to be to beat some one else. Suppose all of Harriman’s transcendent genius had been expended in building up the best railroad system that could be made, in vanquishing time and space, and demonstrating what could be accomplished by the indomitable will and purpose and untiring effort of the strong man. Mightn’t the net result have been something finer and better than Harriman ever attained, and mightn’t he have gone from earth with some finer memory to take with him of the world he had lived in than the thought that he had met Stuyvesant Fish and fought him and beaten him? “Must a game be played for the sake of pelf?” as Browning once asked. Can’t our boys find something else to inspire them than the hope of beating anotherboy? If a boy can ride his horse over the fences, and swim across the lake, and run swiftly, and hit the mark, and feel his pulse beat strong and true, and his nerves and muscles under sure control, does it make him any more the master of the world about him that he can beat some other boy?
Is it reaching the standard, or beating some one to it, that really counts?
It was after walking and talking with Seton, and mingling with those keeneyed “Indian” boys of his, that I found myself asking these questions. “Black Wolf” the boys call him, dark of hair and sure of foot and keen of eye; a man that can trace the way of the eagle in the air and of the serpent upon the rock, who knows the call of a hundred birds and the tracks of fourfooted creatures and all the magic and mystery of the woods. Seton is master of the arts and crafts that delight the soul of a boy, of the things that for all ages have stirred the hearts of men in whose veins the blood runs red and full; and I knew that there I should find no mushy altruism nor thin-blooded closet philosophy. He is a man very much alive, and he was among real, live boys who, like the Spartan youth, learn to ride and shoot and speak the truth.
“Must a game be played for the sake of pelf?” It all came back to Browning’s eternal question, which somehow out there in the woods, among fifty typical. American boys, seemed to set forth so vividly the great question that lies so close to the life and struggle and ideals of the American people.
Must every achievement imply a human defeat?
What answer would you make, you American people? Now that you put it plainly before yourselves, what do you think about it?
Black Wolf didn’t answer me all at once. But he asked me to come to the big Council Fire on Friday night, where the boys would wear in their Indian war-bonnets the feathers they had won, and where new insignia and decorations would be conferred. He told me of some of the things for which they award decorations. The achievement of an honor is called a coup, adopting a term that the American Indians picked up from the French and made their own; a very high and signal honor is called a grand coup.
First and foremost, a boy achieves a coup for saving a human life at the risk of his own; it is a coup or a grand coup, at the discretion of the Council.
The athletic coups are graded according to the ages of the boys; thus, it is a coup for a boy between ten and fourteen to run a hundred yards in 14⅕ seconds; for a lad between fourteen and eighteen to run the distance in 12⅗ seconds, or for a boy over eighteen to run it in 10⅘ The long-distance events are open only to those over twenty-one, among whom it is a coup to walk ten miles in an hour and three-quarters, or 100 miles in thirty hours, or to swim five miles in four hours, or ten miles in any time. All the way down the line of athletics there are honors and distinctions to be gained; so that in running, jumping, kicking a football, rowing, and every form of bodily strength and skill, the boys find a long list of honors to be striven for.
It is a coup to have sailed any two-man craft for thirty successive days, twelve hours a day at the wheel — the other man not a professional sailor;
To have made a continuous canoe trip of five hundred miles, sleeping out every night;
To travel alone on foot one hundred miles, carrying one’s own outfit, sleeping out every night;
To enter the Arctic Circle;
To cross the Equator by sea or rail; on foot, a grand coup;
For a boy under eighteen to have climbed Ben Nevis, or Ben Lomond, Vesuvius, Mt. Washington, etc.;
For one over eighteen to have climbed Mont Blanc, or Monte Rosa, the Matterhorn, Mt. Rainier, Mt. Hood, Popocatepetl, etc.;
To come to camp through strange woods from a point one mile off, and return in thirty minutes;
To catch ten horses or cattle in corral, with ten throws of the lasso;
To pack a horse with not less than one hundred pounds of stuff, with diamond hitch, to hold during eight hours of travel;
To guess the height of ten trees or other high things, and the weight of ten stones or other things ranging from one ounce to one hundred pounds, within ten per cent of average error;
To know and name fifteen star groups;
To take the latitude from the stars at night with a cart wheel, or some homemade instrument, ten times from different points, within one degree of average error;
To know the semaphore code and signal, as well as receive a message a quarter of a mile off, at the rate of two words a minute;
To know and draw unmistakable pictures of the tracks of twenty-five of our common wild quadrupeds;
To recognize fifty wild birds by note.
These are only a few things, taken at random from the list of honors. You will see that they are hard things to do — not to be accomplished by wishing or by a brief spurt, but calling, most of them, for coördination in high degree of nerve, muscle, and brain. They are all things worth doing, and things that any boy — or a man, for that matter — may be proud to do.
But what impresses you most of all is this — that to win his feather the boy does not have to beat some other boy; what he does is to reach a standard, to overcome natural handicaps of time and space and fatigue. Here, in very truth, is a human victory carrying with it no implication of a human defeat. A boy who can swim across the lake and back earns his feather none the less if there be fifty boys who can swim the same distance. As a matter of fact, there is no likelihood that fifty boys in camp can do it; for, as a rule, these things, as you may easily guess from the partial list I have given you, are hard things todo. But what counts is reaching the standard — not passing your competitor.
As Seton puts it in his book: “In our non-competitive tests the enemies are not ‘the other fellows,’ but time and space, the forces of nature.”
When they meet about the Council Fire, these young Indians wear a war-bonnet — a kind of headdress or cap in which are spaces for a row of feathers. Twenty-four feathers complete the circle, and he who has achieved the full twenty-four thereupon becomes a Sagamore, entitled forever thenceforth to sit in the Council of the nation. The grand coup is denoted by a bit of horsehair in the top of the feather, and twenty-four of these make him who has earned them a Grand Sagamore. If one who has filled the circle achieves twenty-four feathers more, filling the tailpiece and earning forty-eight feathers in all, he becomes a Sachem; the winner of forty-eight grand coups is a Grand Sachem. That these honors call for high effort and hard work further appears from the fact that in all the years of these boys’ encampments there have been but five Sagamores. No one has yet attained the dignity of Grand Sagamore or of Sachem or Grand Sachem.
No one, I suppose, except the veriest fanatic, imagines that either among boys with good red blood in their veins or among normally constituted men we could go very far without a healthy spirit of emulation. Every man wishes to be distinguished among his fellows. So with the Seton Indians; manifestly the warrior with twenty feathers in his cap has in a certain sense overcome the boy with only ten. But that is a rational and healthy emulation, and gives full play and scope to the normal instinct. That is the kind of emulation which distinguishes civilized men from the brutes. That is the kind of emulation which is stimulated by the Carnegie medals for heroism and by the Nobel prize; and somehow Seton and those young Indians of his seem to have discovered a way of stimulating and rewarding achievement far indeed advanced beyond us when we sit on the grand stand and cheer our own team — for its success that comes to it in direct proportion as it licks the other team. What a splendid thing it was when our fleet won its deathless victory at Santiago; but what a petty and sordid aspect came over it all when it degenerated into a rivalry between Sampson and Schley!
To the Sagamore, with his twenty-four feathers, it is given, as I have said, to sit in the Council of the nation; and the investiture of the new Sagamore was one of the chief events set for the great evening of the Council Fire. I had seen much of the boys in their tepees and camps, and they joyfully welcomed me among them at their great powwow on Friday night. On the big council rock were painted in rude Indian fashion the signs of the Four Winds: the White Rabbit for the North Wind, the Rising Sun, the Wild Duck, and the Grizzly Bear. You who have wandered over the world in search of picturesque pageants might well make at camping time this journey to Cos Cob; for at night around the Council Fire, in a splendid natural amphitheatre amid the great, dark pines, you will realize to some extent that strange Indian instinct for color, the perpetual contrast of the soft, neutral tones with the barbaric reds and blues. Mr. Seton himself, the beloved Black Wolf of the Council, infuses the whole gathering with much of his own great spirit of the forest; and, accompanied by the dull beating of the tom-toms, or an occasional blaze from the Council Fire lighting up the sky, he spun for us there weird tales of the camp and trail, ghost stories, and the annals of his four-footed friends.
The Sagamore Silver Fox and his warriors danced about the fire in Indian fashion that recalled old days down in New Mexico, when I used to hear from the Pueblo Indians the stories of their fathers. It was a night of witchery, of magic, with an occasional wild bird’s cry coming out of the dark about us, mingling strangely with the howling of the wolf in Seton’s yarn.
The boys were for the most part from small cities within a radius of a hundred miles, but they were versed in woodcraft in a way that would put many of my Rocky Mountain friends to shame. There was a fire-building contest, in which seven boys were each provided with a log of wood, a quart of water, and one match. It was a friendly and amusing contest, to determine in what time one might from these materials build and light a fire and bring the water to a boil. Try this once or twice, and you will spoil half an hour before you know it. John Pryor, in sight of us all, built a roaring fire, made an inclined support for his can of water, and brought the water to a boil — all in a trifle under eight minutes by the watch. This was indeed a mighty achievement, and later, in the Council, Mr. Seton brought John Pryor before the multitude and thus invested him:
“This night has John Pryor beaten all known records in the swift making of fires. Let his deed be forever remembered in the Council, and let him henceforth have a new name and by this name and none other let him be known among the tribes. And that you may all know that this is so, on this piece of birch-bark are written all the names and nicknames by which he has ever been known among his fellows. This bark, and all those names and nicknames, do I now cast into the Council Fire before your eyes, so that they may be consumed and forever forgotten; and now, John Pryor, I call and name you Magic Fire-builder, and as Fire-builder shall you be henceforth known, and none shall hereafter call you by any other name.”
“How! How!” came in dull chorus from the assembled warriors, and John Pryor’s name was made.
The warrior Black Wolf, having won his twenty-four feathers, was that night made a Sagamore; and before the assembled tribes, by the light of the Council Fire, Seton, the Black Wolf, set forth Kingbird’s deeds of prowess that had made him one of the Five. With picturesque ceremony he invested him with the robe and headdress of the Sagamore, and there before the Council the new Sagamore took again the vows of the Seton Indians. These are the vows:
- Not to rebel.
- Not to kindle a wild fire; nor to leave a fire in camp without some one to watch it.
- To protect the songbirds; not to injure or frighten songbirds, nor to disturb their nest or eggs, nor to molest squirrels.
- Not to make a dirty camp, nor to bring firearms of any kind into the camps of those under fourteen, nor to point a weapon at any one.
- To keep the game laws.
- Not to smoke (for those under eighteen).
- Not to have fire water in camp.
- To play fair.
- To keep his word of honor sacred.
There are now scattered over the country between a hundred and fifty and two hundred thousand of these Seton Indians. Although, of course, only a few of these, from fairly near by, can attend the National Council at Wyndygoul, their organizations are strong and vigorous and are run on the same general plan throughout the country. These boys have opened to them in clear and understanding fashion the book of the woods and fields and the open sky. Put one of the Seton Indians down at random in any part of the world, and it would be hard for him to be bored. They early become learned in the art of self-government, and are a radiating force for the diffusion of the qualities that make for manliness. They are safe and sane.
But the Indian feature was really only an incident — not an essential; and in this organization that had for several years been going on quietly among us lay the germ of what is now swiftly becoming a world-wide movement among English-speaking peoples and many who are not English. From this little exposition of the parent body you will see that it has nothing of the military idea. You probably noticed the lack of one feature much present in most boys’ organizations — that of drill.
When General Baden-Powell saw the vast possibilities in such an organization, and upon it modeled that of the Boy Scouts of England, he had in mind something very different from the idea of a military body; and on this very subject of drill here is what he says:
“I am continually being asked by officers — not by the boys — to introduce more drill into the training of Boy Scouts; but although, after experience of thirty-four years of it, I recognize the disciplinary value of drill, I also see very clearly its evils. Briefly, they are these:
“(1) Drill gives a feeble, unimaginative officer a something with which to occupy his boys. He does not consider whether it appeals to them or really does them good. It saves him a world of trouble.”
“(2) Drill tends to destroy individuality, and when once it has been learned it bores a boy who is longing to be tearing about on some enterprise or other; it blunts his keenness.”
As a matter of fact, in England the Boy Scouts are really not organized on military principles. Not only is General Baden-Powell, who has resigned from the army to devote himself altogether to the movement, insistent on subordinating the military idea, but people very averse to militarism in general are among the most enthusiastic organizers of the Boy Scouts. I suppose it is because the traditions and temperament of Englishmen are so largely along the line of fighting that people instinctively associate a movement like that of the Boy Scouts with something military; but actually, the military idea plays a very subordinate part.
I don’t know whether I have emphasized unduly the feature of the Seton Indians whereby the idea of prizes, in the nature of a reward for overcoming an opponent, gives way largely to that of honors for attaining a standard. But our English friends seized at once on this, recognizing what was really the new and distinctive feature of the Seton Indians. Indeed, in some respects they seem to have on the other side of the water a somewhat healthier conception of sport than we; for over there it sometimes seems as though they were more in the habit of playing the game for the sake of the game. The Boy Scouts of England now number some 400,000, and a very vital and energizing force they are in English life. The movement has extended not only through all the large towns of Great Britain, but into Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada, and is in the way of becoming general in Germany, Russia, Denmark, Norway, Austria, Argentina, and Chile.
The nub of the Boy Scout movement in England seems to be in the idea of going ahead of the rest for the sake of the rest, of training nerve and muscle so that they are of use to one’s fellow men, of “doing a good turn.” It is the sworn duty of a Scout to be chivalrous, to help the weak, to look out for his fellows, and to lend a hand. He may not take pay for an act of courtesy or helpfulness. The movement seeks to get hold of the boy in the formative stage, to instill in him the altruistic impulse, at once to get the boy away from the degenerating tendencies in modern life and from the everpresent struggle for self.
So out of the Seton or Woodcraft Indians our English brothers with startling swiftness have developed a great organization that at once fired the popular imagination. Probably no other movement among the boys of England has ever grown so fast into so tremendous a force. Over there they are fond of quoting Roosevelt’s words wherein, as so often before, he caught the ear of the people in the forceful utterance of long-familiar truths:
“If you are going to do anything permanent for the average man, you have got to begin before he is a man. The chance of success lies in working with the boy, not with the man.”
And so the Boy Scout movement, sweeping rapidly into a world-wide organization, has crossed the ocean and under another name come back to its birthplace; just at the time when we are wondering what is wrong with our educational methods, and questioning, now that sixty-five per cent of our population lives in cities, what is to be the effect of that on the social fabric of the rising generation. The idea of the Boy Scouts has hit the American fancy, and has spread with great enthusiasm all over the country. The Central Committee, at 124 East Twenty-eighth Street in New York, is flooded with inquiries and can’t begin to fill the demand for organizers.
Still less here than in England can we account for the popularity of the movement on the theory of its being military in principle. We have no war scare, and we can’t become enthusiastic over the plan of four battleships a year; no one except a few highstrung young men, like Mr. Hobson, grows nervous at the prospect of our military subjugation. If the movement were nothing but an adjunct to fighting, it would never have taken hold of this country as it has done. The ideals and aspirations of the American people are not in the direction of war; what is troubling thoughtful men and women everywhere is to find out the matter with the United States; to find where lies the solution of our social and industria] problems — problems far indeed removed from anything in the nature of war.
At the head of this American organization is Ernest Thompson Seton himself, with a nation-wide movement behind him for putting into effect over a far larger field than ever before the purposes and ideals of the Seton Indians. These Seton Indians still maintain their separate organization, entirely distinct from that of the Boy Scouts. There is also another somewhat similar organization known as the Sons of Daniel Boone. At their head is Mr. Dan Beard, and much of the impulse and inspiration of the Boy Scout movement in England came from Mr. Beard’s organization.
Before he becomes a Scout the boy must take the Scout’s Oath, thus:
I give my word of honor that I will do my best:
- 1. To do my duty to God and the country.
- 2. To help other people at all times.
- 3. To obey the Scout Law.
And this is the Scout Law:
- 1. A Scout’s honor is to be trusted.
- 2. A Scout is loyal to the President, and his officers, and to his parents, his country, and his employers.
- 3. A Scout’s duty is to be useful and to help others.
- 4. A Scout is a friend to all, and a brother to every other Scout, no matter to what social class the other belongs.
- 5. A Scout is courteous.
- 6. A Scout is a friend to animals.
- 7. A Scout obeys orders of his parents, patrol leader, or schoolmaster without question.
- 8. A Scout smiles and looks pleasant under all circumstances.
- 9. A Scout is thrifty.
There are three classes of Scouts: the Tenderfoot, the Second-Class Scout, and the First-Class Scout. A Tenderfoot must be at least twelve years old, know the Scout law and signs, the history of the flag, and be able to tie four standard knots. The Second-Class Scout must understand elementary first aid and bandaging, the semaphore and the Morse alphabet, be able to track half a mile in twenty minutes, go a mile in twelve minutes at “scout’s pace,” lay and light a fire, using not more than two matches, cook under ordinary camp conditions, have at least one dollar in the savings bank, and know the sixteen principal points of the compass.
The First-Class Scout must have all this and considerably more; for instance, he must have two dollars in the savings bank, actually receive and send semaphore or Morse messages, understand the means of saving life in fire, drowning, runaway, and similar emergencies, judge distances, size, numbers, and height within twenty-five per cent of error, and himself train up a Tenderfoot.
And then the honors of the Scouts are awarded on the same principle as the much-prized feathers of the Seton Indians; one attains honor not by overcoming his adversary — “beating the other fellow” — but by mastering the difficulties of time and space and the forces of nature itself.
What will be the effect of such a spirit, of ideals such as these, instilled in the hearts of perhaps a million American boys for a whole generation? Will it help to solve the problems of the United States? Englishmen are fond of saying that their admirals and generals learned the art of war on the football fields of Eton and Harrow. Our future admirals and generals will have little to do with the decaying art of war; for the struggle of the coming generation is a struggle with wrong and injustice among ourselves, a struggle for the supremacy of the Common Good and the social and industrial uplift of our fellow-men. It was said by the most profound of our foreign critics that in breaking away from the old Confederation and adopting our Constitution, the American people accomplished one of the mightiest revolutions of history “without the drawing of a drop of blood or the shedding of a single tear.” Imagine the rising generation filled with the idea that honor and distinction lie in the way of doing the thing that is hard and of service to one’s fellow-men, and not at all in the way of beating an adversary and sending him down to defeat; and then picture, if you can, another form of revolution — the American republic with a new kind of social tissue, with our men of light and leading finding full field for an emulation nobler than any we have known, our captains of industry achieving triumphs that have in them no implication of some one else’s defeat, and winning victories that have caused no other man to fall.
That is the meaning and message of the Boy Scouts of America.
