Translations:test-translate/en/23/cs

Bott

Taught you to use the canoes, I presume, paddle and…

Clark

You see, all the things that we thought were fun, they had some fundamental reason back of it. Taught us how to canoe, taught us how to swim, taught us how to run. And then we'd get a feather, we'd get a coup, if we could run a hundred yards, or if we could do all these various things that he taught us to do. And so we had the growth of life, just at the time when boys, that developed our mentality and developed our bodies in the best possible way. And then when the groups came from other places around, then the competition got greater.

But the greatest thing happened in 1904. I told you we had started in 1902, and we had grown in 1903. Mr. Seton was a member of the Camp Fire Club of America, and in 1904 he invited the Camp Fire Club of America to spend their summer outing at his place in Wyndygoul, and to have something of interest for these very fine men. I remember Mr. Abercrombie of Abercrombie and Fitch was there. I remember, oh, several of the big names of big people in New York, in the athletic world, were there.

And amongst the people who came to that first camp was an Englishman, Sir [Robert S. S.] Baden-Powell. He came, and for entertainment Mr. Seton had us boys come up and run races and, oh, do all the things around camp. Have the deer hunt, go through the woods where he had taught us the names of trees and tell the people the kinds of trees that they were.

And the great thing was Sir Baden-Powell, he took that idea that Mr. Seton had started in Cos Cob back to England. And when he got back to England, he thought it was such a wonderful idea that he started doing the same thing there.

But where we were called Seton Indians and where he had been in the Boer War, he called them Boy Scouts. So the Boy Scout movement that's over the world today - in practically every good country in the world today, I think, there are Boy Scouts - the Boy Scout movement came from England back to us.

And then I remember sitting around the camp fire one night, and Mr. Seton told us about the Boy Scout movement, and he suggested we change our name from the Woodcraft Indians, as we were known, to Boy Scouts. And so the first Boy Scouts in the United States were the group in Cos Cob. We were absolutely the first. The first fifty numbers were reserved for men like Mr. Abercrombie, Mr. [Daniel C.] Beard, Mr. Seton, and all those outstanding individuals. But the numbers were numbered for us Boy Scouts from fifty on. I'm not sure what my number was, but I think it was fifty-seven. But we were the first group of Boy Scouts in the United States, under the leadership of Mr. Seton.

Well, by that time, since 1902, when it started, to 1910 when we became Boy Scouts, Mr. Seton had developed a book. That book was called the Birchbark Roll, and in that book was listed the things that you ought to do in order to get a feather for so doing.