Natural Patrols

[Kudu]

 

The Redskins Patrol was a subset of the Patrol Leader's "Redskins Tribe," an alternative Scouting "Troop" that he had organized while he was still too young to join the BSA.

 

The tribe's activities were drawn from his extensive collection of library-discard books about Native Americans. His favorite finds were Ben Hunt and Ellsworth Jaeger, followed by Julian Harris Salomon, Ernest Seton, Dan Beard, Baden-Powell, and William Hillcourt.

 

The Patrol Leader, "Chief Standing Wolf," was a very quick reader with a photographic memory, but he and his Patrol members were all tough, street-wise white kids. They held their own Patrol campouts almost every week.

 

Of course they would have laughed at the idea that they needed the Scoutmaster's approval to camp without adult supervision. For one thing their own parents didn't always know where they were. The Assistant Patrol Leader, "Running Bear," sometimes slept in the other kids' paper-route newspaper storage boxes when he decided that returning to his step-father's house was not in his best interests :-/

 

When Baden-Powell set about transforming his best-selling military book Aids to Scouting into Scouting for Boys, he borrowed heavily from Ernest Seton's Birch Bark Roll. One of the important differences, however, was that the organizing unit of the Birch Bark Indians was a "Band," a group of 15-50 boys and girls. Managing that many people always required someone older than themselves.

 

Part of Baden-Powell's genius was that he saw a similarity between small military scouting patrols and the tendency he had observed for both native and English boys in all of the far corners of the English Empire to organize themselves into small, natural "boy gangs."

 

The thing about these natural Patrols is that they are usually not what we adults preconceive them to be. Less than half of the Redskins "Tribe" were in the Redskins Boy Scout Patrol. Some of the members (younger brothers and a few self-confident neighbors) were as young as nine. The older 13-year-olds would not be caught dead in a Boy Scout Uniform. One of the non-Scouts even had a principled stand against taking what he called "golden rule" oaths.

 

Despite their "disadvantaged" backgrounds, they all seemed to share a fierce adherence to their own version of the Scout Law which helped keep order among themselves, but of course it had its own weird kid-logic.

 

When camping away from adults, they constructed natural shelters and lived off the land as much as possible. They even made their own tools, which included everything from improvised pots and pans to using deer antlers to form hunting blades from the flint that they found along the railroad tracks.

 

On BSA winter campouts, the Patrol refused to sleep in the cabin with the rest of the Troop, preferring to camp out in the snow. One night they entered our warm cabin dressed in home-made leggings and moccasins, with their faces and chests covered in war paint. They performed a traditional silent dance ceremony with their mouths filled with water, which they spat out at each other at the end. The Assistant Patrol Leader explained to me that it was a ritual that Apache boys performed for their fathers. They would run five miles through the desert without swallowing the water in their mouths to prove that they had the determination they needed to undertake their Vision Quest.

 

It only takes one functional Patrol to get the ball rolling in a Troop. At first many of the other Scouts wanted to join the Redskins Patrol, but gradually their own Patrols began to gel around their own mutual interests. The Patrols did not always get along with each other, but that is another story :-)

 

Kudu

 

Thanks, miki, so noted!

(This message has been edited by Kudu)

[Miki101]

Interesting stuff, Rick.

 

I just have one very small, minute detail...it's Julian Harris Salomon.

 

Keep fighting the good fight with the Baden-Powell/Seton/Beard history...Our organization's roots need to be known by all Scouts and Scouters.

 

miki

[Kahuna]

Thanks for posting that bit of history. I have long thought our founders would be rolling over in their graves if they could see a typical BSA operation, like a camporee or FOS of today. I've done a lot of reading on B-P, James West and Bill Hillcourt, but very little on Seton and some of the others. I'll have to correct that deficiency in the coming year.

[Miki101]

THE CHIEF by H. Allen Anderson will bring you up to speed on Seton.

[Kudu]

I've done a lot of reading on B-P, James West and Bill Hillcourt, but very little on Seton and some of the others. I'll have to correct that deficiency in the coming year.

 

Seton's "Woodcraft Indians" handbook, The Birch Bark Roll can be found at The Inquiry Net, see:

 

http://inquiry.net/traditional/seton/birch/index.htm

 

Dan Beard's handbook, The Boy Pioneers: Sons of Daniel Boone can be found at:

 

http://inquiry.net/traditional/beard/pioneers/index.htm

 

Kudu

 

 

(This message has been edited by Kudu)