The Boy Scouts
of
Woodcraft Camp
Author of
The Boy Scouts on Swift River
The Boy Scouts on Lost Trail
The Boy Scouts in a Trapper’s Camp
Illustrated by C. S. Corson
The Penn Publishing
Company Philadelphia
1922
To my Wife
whose faith and encouragement
have placed me in her debt
beyond my power to pay
The Boy Scout movement has appealed tome from the very first as a long step in theright direction. It stands for an organizedboyhood on a world-wide plan. It has in itthe essentials for a stronger and better manhood,based on character building and physicaldevelopment. Clear and clean thinkingand self-reliance are its fundamental principles.Its weakness has been and is the difficultyin securing leaders, men with an understandingof and sympathy with boys, who cangive the necessary time to active work in thefield with the patrols, and who are themselvessufficiently versed in the lore of the woods andfields.
For years, before ever the Boy Scouts wereorganized, I had dreamed of a woodcraft campfor boys, a camp which in its appointmentsand surroundings should make constant appealto the imagination of red-blooded, adventure-lovingboys, and which should at thesame time be a true “school of the woods”[Pg 6]wherein woodcraft and the ways of natureshould be taught along much the same linesas those on which the Boy Scout movementis founded.
In this and succeeding volumes, “The BoyScouts on Swift River,” “The Boy Scouts onLost Trail,” “The Boy Scouts in a Trapper’sCamp,” I have sought to portray the life ofsuch a school camp under Boy Scout rules.“The Boy Scouts of Woodcraft Camp” hasbeen written with a twofold purpose: Tostimulate on the part of every one of my boyreaders a desire to master for himself themysteries of nature’s great out-of-doors, thesecrets of field and wood and stream, and toshow by example what the Boy Scout’s oathmeans in the development of character. Manyof the incidents in the succeeding pages aredrawn from my own experiences. And if,because of reading this story, one more boy isled to the Shrine of the Hemlock, there to inhalethe pungent incense from a camp-fire andto master the art of tossing a flapjack, I shallfeel that I have not written in vain