Earthcraft History

The Origins of Woodcraft

Woodcraft was the brainchild of Ernest Thompson Seton (1860-1946), the Canadian-American writer, artist and naturalist. The first Woodcraft Tribe was established at Wyndygoul, Seton's estate at Cos Cob, CT, in the year 1902. Seton's estate had been left unfenced by its previous owner, and when Seton put up fences in the hope of establishing a wildlife sanctuary, local boys who had had the run of the grounds embarked on a campaign of vandalism. Instead of prosecuting the boys, Seton went to the local school and invited them to spend Easter weekend at an "Indian village" on his estate.

Forty-two boys showed up. Seton had prepared the village as promised, complete with tipis and a council ring, and had arranged for games and woodland activities to fill the daylight hours. At night, around a campfire, Seton Å a legendary storyteller Å held the boys rapt with tales of nature and Native American life. By the time the weekend was over, the boys had decided to make their "tribe" a permanent one.

The unique feature of the "Woodcraft Indians," as Seton's group came to be called, was that the group was governed by the boys themselves, with adults serving mostly as advisers. Members of the tribe elected their own Chief, Second Chief, Keeper of the Tally and Keeper of the Wampum, and ran their own affairs. Traditions from the First Peoples of the continent played a central role in the group as it evolved, partly because children found (and still find) them a source of endless fascination, but also because Seton - himself a friend of many native leaders of the time, and one of the first white people in this century to take an active role in seeking justice for North America's native peoples - came to believe that the teachings and lifeways of the First Peoples were in many ways superior to those of his own culture.

The first tribe's considerable success led Seton to realize that the same program could be used elsewhere to offer young people access to the outdoor life and teach them skills of self-reliance, self-discipline and cooperation. He ran a series of articles in the Ladies Home Journal, which were later collected into the Birch Bark Roll - the handbook of the movement - and the Book of Woodcraft. A novel, Two Little Savages, communicated the same vision to a widening audience. Later, starting in 1912, Seton began to develop forms of Woodcraft to fit an adult audience as well - the Woodcraft Clubs, for those interested in the outdoor life as a hobby and an avocation, and the Red Lodge, for those who sought to pursue the deeper and more spiritual side of the Woodcraft Way.

The Boy Scout movement, founded by Lord Baden-Powell in 1908, had an ambivalent relationship to Seton's Woodcraft. Elements of the Woodcraft program were borrowed by the Boy Scouts, whose early handbooks contained much Seton material. For five difficult years Seton was a central member of the Boy Scouts of America and tried, with limited success, to shape the organization along Woodcraft lines. Although Baden-Powell borrowed much of Scouting from Seton's work, Scout troops have always been governed by adults rather than their own members, and Scouting took on an increasing number of military elements in its early years, especially before and during the First World War. Seton's efforts to work against this trend ultimately led to his expulsion from the national Boy Scout organization.

Less problematic was Seton's relation to another youth movement founded in the same years, the Camp Fire Girls. Mr. and Mrs. Luther H. Gulick, founders of the Camp Fire program, were close friends of Seton's, and Mr. Gulick sat on the Woodcraft advisory council for some years. Seton's ideas were borrowed freely, with his enthusiastic permission and assistance, for the original Camp Fire system.

Seton finally left the Boy Scouts of America after a series of political struggles in 1915, and immediately refounded a national organization of his own, the Woodcraft League of America. The League was open to people of both sexes and all ages, and its program proved highly popular. The first edition of the Book of Woodcraft, which was published in 1912, inspired the formation of a multitude of Woodcraft groups across the country and around the world.

The Golden Age

The period between the two World Wars was in many ways the Golden Age of Woodcraft. According to surviving information (which is incomplete at best), there were Woodcraft groups active during these years in Canada, England, Ireland, France, Belgium, Austria, Poland, Russia, Japan, the former Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, and the British protectorate of Palestine (now Israel). There may have been Woodcraft programs in other countries as well, of which no records survive. In the United States, besides the Woodcraft League itself, the Camp Fire Girls and several Seton-influenced groups within the Boy Scout organization incorporated much of Seton's program, and Woodcraft ideals and practices were also taken up by many summer camps and local youth programs.

England became the scene of some important developments during these years. In 1915, inspired by Seton's ideas, the father-son team of Ernest and Aubrey Westlake founded the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry (OWC). The Westlakes, who were Quakers and pacifists, had been active adult leaders in the Boy Scout movement, but left in disgust over the militaristic stance taken by Baden-Powell and the Scouting hierarchy during the First World War. The OWC established a Forest School in the New Forest, in the south of England. Seton was the OWC's titular Grand Chieftain, and visited OWC groups in England several times between the wars.

A similar process led to the birth of the most colorful of the British Woodcraft organizations, the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift. John Hargrave, the Kindred's founder, wrote Lonecraft - a handbook of Scouting and Woodcraft for boys who had no access to organized groups - before his twentieth birthday. After a tour of duty as a medical corpsman in the First World War, Hargrave became Boy Scout Commissioner for Camping and Woodcraft, but split with the Scouting organization in 1919 to found a Woodcraft group of his own. Kibbo kift, a phrase in old Kentish dialect meaning "Proof of Great Strength," provided a name, and Seton's Woodcraft formed a framework on which the gifted and charismatic Hargrave constructed his own system. Hargrave wrote several books on Woodcraft, at least two of them (Lonecraft and The Great War Brings It Home) classics of the movement, and his work had an immense influence on youth groups around the world.

In 1924, in turn, Hargrave faced a schism of his own when Leslie Paul, a Kibbo Kift member, organized a breakaway group - the Woodcraft Folk - that quickly established connections with the Labour Party and progressive social movements generally. Within a few years, the Woodcraft Folk became the largest of English Woodcraft groups, a status it retains to this day.

Another country where Woodcraft caught on strongly was the former Czechoslovakia, where Milos Seifert, a high school teacher in a small town near Prague, founded a Woodcraft group called Deti Ziveny ("Children of Zivena") in 1912. As far as is known, this was the first Woodcraft group in continental Europe. Many other Czech and Slovak groups followed in Seifert's wake, and Seton himself visited Czechoslovakia in 1936.

Seton himself was almost continually busy during this time. The structure of the League went through several revisions, and new editions of the Birch Bark Roll and Book of Woodcraft had to be prepared regularly; special camps for Woodcraft leaders were held every summer. In 1930 he moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he expanded the leadership camps and founded a College of Indian Wisdom, dedicated to teaching and preserving the traditions of the First Peoples of North America.

The coming of the Second World War brought fuel restrictions that made it impossible for the leadership camps and the College to continue. Seton himself died in 1946, and many of the Woodcraft groups in the United States declined or went out of existence in the years that followed. The temper of the Fifties and early Sixties, when Cold War paranoia was at its height and any criticism of American society was labeled disloyalty, made survival difficult for the Woodcraft movement. Woodcraft's positive view of Native American cultures, a source of controversy since the movement's beginning, was especially problematic at a time when reservations were being terminated and the conventional wisdom held that First Peoples should be forced to assimilate into the "superior" white culture. Competition by the Boy and Girl Scouts and other youth groups worsened the situation. Some Woodcraft groups did survive, though, and elements of the Woodcraft system continued to be central in many camps and groups.

Overseas, the situation was similar. Many groups apparently went out of existence during the Second World War. The descent of the Iron Curtain in 1945-6, in turn, forced surviving Woodcraft groups in Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe to go underground or be merged into official Communist youth groups. Still, in several European countries Woodcraft groups survived this difficult period and carried on the Woodcraft Way.

Woodcraft Today

Currently there are Woodcraft groups scattered over North America and Europe, most of them small but many highly active. In the United States, the largest current group is the Woodcraft Rangers, which operates a summer camp and youth groups in the Los Angeles area. Many North American summer camps still rely on important parts of Seton's program. Many of these were founded by Seton's friends and students.

In England, the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry and the Woodcraft Folk still exist, the former on a relatively small scale, the latter on a much larger one. The Kibbo Kift converted itself into a political movement during the Depression, espousing social and economic reform, and then went out of existence in 1950; a successor organization, the Kibbo Kift Foundation, still exists and preserves many Kindred artifacts and records.

One of the most unexpected turns in Woodcraft history came about in 1989, with the collapse of Soviet control over Eastern Europe. In the former Czechoslovakia, no less than seven hundred Woodcraft groups - which had been masquerading as hiking, fishing and canoeing clubs during the years of Communist rule - came out of hiding and announced their identity as Woodcrafters. The Czech Republic and Slovakia remain two of the most active regions in the world of Woodcraft.