by David L. Witt | May 20, 2022 | Curator's Notes
The Red Book or How To Play Indian by Ernest Thompson Seton In 1903 Ernest Thompson Seton published a pamphlet through the Curtis Publishing Company titled “How to Play Indian. Directions for Organizing a Tribe of Boy Indians and Making their Teepees in the True...
by David L. Witt | Apr 29, 2022 | Curator's Notes
Portrait of Charles Eastman, Wikipedia The turning years from the 19th into the 20th century brought new challenges to the relationship between American Indians—white Americans. The entirely traditional pre-European life of indigenous people was over. The shooting...
by David L. Witt | Mar 24, 2022 | Curator's Notes
Eagle Award, Boy Scouts of America, ca. 1967 Experimental Camp According to Boy Scouts of America administrator Edgar M. Robinson, planning for the first “official” camp had started nearly a year prior to the 1910 creation of the Scouts. The foresighted YMCA official...
by David L. Witt | Mar 21, 2022 | Curator's Notes
Life Badge, Boy Scouts of America, 1965 Present at the Creation I have written about the creation of American Scouting from Seton’s point of view in my book about him. Here I want to examine a different perspective, that of Edgar M. Robinson, the actual organizer. I...
by David L. Witt | Mar 17, 2022 | Curator's Notes
Star badge, Boy Scouts of America, 1964 Short Misleading History of the Boy Scouts Here is the well known if incorrect short history of the Boy Scouts of America: The British general Robert Baden-Powell invented paramilitary Scouting out of whole cloth in 1908 with...
