Ernest Thompson Seton and the origins of the Woodcraft movement

Abstract

When the nature-writer Ernest Thompson Seton died in the autumn of 1946, few British newspapers carried an adequate obituary. He had, it seemed, already passed into obscurity. It was a fate hardly deserved. In his prime Seton had gained fame as a writer, artist, and naturalist, and his books on animal life, once nursery classics, had been a dominant influence on a whole generation of young naturalists.1 He was also the founder of the first outdoor youth movement, and it is with this aspect of his career that the present paper deals. There has always been an undercurrent of controversy about the founding of the Boy Scout movement, in spite of the innumerable volumes that have been written on the history of the organization. Such a controversy was expressed unobtrusively in a letter from Lord Northcliffe to a friend, in which he wrote: 'Be very wary of B-P. He is not the inventor of the idea of Boy Scouts.'2 And as early as 1913 Lord Baden-Powell thought it necessary to write a 'Note for when I am Dead', explaining how he had founded the Boy Scouts. Surely an unusual course of action, unless he suspected that one day his claims would come to be challenged ? Even within the movement a doubt still lingers, and a recent (1963) editorial comment in The Scouter remarked that 'at one time there were strong feelings abroad that the Scout movement was not founded by B-P but that it was started by that famous American