Ninety Years

When Dan Beard was a boy he used to go fishing in Bank Lick, between the Confederate and Federal lines near the Ken tucky-Ohio border. In those days, if you were lucky, you could get 92-lb. catfish in Midwestern rivers. The boys called themselves Boone's Scouts; they would crawl on their hands and knees if the pickets began shooting at each other over their heads. Once Dan was fishing in Bank Lick when a beech tree suddenly exploded in the quiet afternoon, split as if hit by lightning. It had stopped a solid ball from a monstrous Columbian gun.

The war spoiled the countryside; the creeks turned into muddy sewers; pigs fed on the bodies of war horses. The boys from Covington built a fort, stole black powder, and shot nails and gravel at the kids from Newport across the Licking River. The Newport boys stole revolvers and shot at the kids from Covington when they went swimming. One of Dan's friends shot a Newport boy with a shotgun load of nails and gravel. "We did not understand," said Dan Beard, ". . . why it was wrong for the boys to fight when all the men of the nation were fighting. ..."

What he really liked was the rich, peaceful, mid-century life of the country, before and after the war--the Fourth of July, picnics, revival meetings, flatboats, marbles, kites, political rallies, stilts, hunting trips; above all, the inexhaustible wilderness.

Dan Beard felt like that for the next 80 years. He became a civil engineer, surveyor, map worker. Then he sold one of his fish drawings for $25. (Said Dan dreamily: ". . . Darned if I'd work any more.") He became a famed illustrator, a Manhattan clubman and after-dinner speaker. But he always seemed a little out of place with such sophisticated, mauve-decade colleagues as Charles Dana Gibson. He illustrated A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court for Mark Twain.

In a moment of genius, at 32, he dashed off The American Boys' Handy Book. This wonderful volume covered everything any boy needed to know, from how to make a blowgun to how to tie a double bowline. It sold 250,000 copies in 50 years, still sells to this day. The U.S. woods are dotted with lean-tos built according to Dan Beard's plans; each spring kites modeled on Dan Beard's pattern sail over innumerable U.S. villages. Millions of rabbits have avoided without difficulty the contraptions, involving a notched stick and a box, which were supposed to be rabbit snares. Long before the Boy Scouts of America were formally organized, a generation of U.S. boys had studied The American Boys' Handy Book, which inspired the whole how-to-make-it outdoors literature that culminated in the official Boy Scouts' Handbook for Boys.

Dan Beard had organized the Sons of Daniel Boone and later the Boy Pioneers as magazine-circulation builders, but in 1910, when he joined with Ernest Thompson Seton and others to form the Boy Scouts of America (Sir Robert S. S. Baden-Powell had already formed the British Boy Scouts), the movement spread far beyond such aims.

The Scouts went on growing until they included almost 10,000,000 members. Inspirational essays began to creep into the Handbook, instead of the terse descriptions of how to do things that Dan Beard had put into his first writing for boys; the old man became a public figure, in buckskins and with a message. He could stand no criticism of the Scouts, interpreted it as criticism of boys. Said he stoutly: "I would rather be a Boy Scout than a dictator, king or even the President of the U.S.A."

Last week, still writing his monthly column in Boys' Life, still preaching his love for the disappearing U.S. woods, Dan Beard died.

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