846 
FOREST AND STREAM 
He Thought Also of the Welfare of His Descendants—He Regarded Himself As the Custodian of 
the Wild Life That Surrounded Him. 
Speck, and the matter, was long ago noted by 
others. 
On these family hunting grounds their owners 
exercised great care to protect the food animals 
and the fur; and they taught their young people 
—now growing up and to follow them in control 
of the hunting and the trapping—never to kill 
animals to such an extent as to reduce the breed¬ 
ing stock. In this matter they were almost as 
careful as is the white farmer as to his domestic 
herds. The territories were regulated wisely. 
Close count was kept of the game, so that the 
owner of the hunting grounds knew just about 
Before 1886 if boys wanted to camp they had 
to do all the camping; now it is done for them. 
Camping for boys is now become a full-fledged 
institution in the scheme of outdoor life in 
America and so far as several hundred camps 
that are publicly known is concerned it is high¬ 
ly organized. After camping for boys proved 
successful from the triangular view points of 
the boy the parent and the promoter, organizer 
and director—and in most cases owner,—of the 
camps, as a natural sequence in these feministic 
days camps for girls followed. To-day it would 
be hard to tell these camps apart, excepting that 
the boys wear flappers on their legs where the 
girls wear bloomers. Equipment and activities 
are alike. Before outdoor sports and life were 
shared by girls with their brothers the fashion¬ 
able feminine attitude of mind was to shriek at 
sight of a toad or the apparition of sudden 
death. To-day the naturalized girl camper ten- 
how many of each kind of animal it held. This 
number regulated the killing. The beaver and 
other fur-bearers were watched and kept account 
of and only a certain proportion was taken. No 
hunter ever destroyed all the inhabitants of a 
beaver house. Moreover, after certain portions of 
a man’s hunting ground had been hunted for one 
year, these portions were often allowed to remain 
undisturbed the following year. 
The Indian took these precautions in behalf of 
himself and his immediate family, but not alone 
for these. He thought also of the welfare of his 
descendants—those who were to come after him 
derly picks up a milk snake, properly calls it a 
Lampropeltis doliatus triangulus and takes it 
back to camp in her off stocking. As for emerg¬ 
encies—she scientifically saves a life in a canoe 
upset and counts it all in the day’s work. On 
hikes girls often stand the elemental hardships 
better than the boys. 
Until March, 1911, there was no organization 
among the directors of organization and private¬ 
ly owned camps for boys and girls excepting 
some inter-camp athletic leagues but out of a 
boys’ camp exhibit at the Sportsmen’s Show of 
that year at the Madison Square Garden was 
organized the Camp Directors’ Association of 
America. 
The President is George L. Meylan, M. D., 
Physical Director of Columbia University; Vice- 
President, Professor Edward M. Healy, Pratt 
Institute, Brooklyn; and Secretary, Mr. W. W. 
Thomas of 142 Bruce Avenue, Yonkers, N. Y. 
in the future, generations which he himself might 
never hope to see. In other words, he regarded 
himself as the custodian of these hunting grounds, 
which he was to occupy and use for the period of 
his life, and then to hand down in as good condi¬ 
tion as he had received them, to his children, who 
in turn would pass them on to their children, and 
so on to the end of time. The practice closely 
parallels the view that the Indian took of the 
ownership of the tribal lands, of which he re¬ 
garded himself merely as the life tenant. His 
feeling as to land occupancy I have explained in 
another place: 
“According to his view neither the tribe nor 
any member of it has in any piece of land rights 
other than the right to occupy and use it, the in¬ 
dividual for life in common with his fellows, the 
tribe forever to the exclusion of unfriendly peo¬ 
ples. In the past the old people occupied this 
land, hunted over it, gathered fruits from it, or 
cultivated it; and as they passed away the same 
operations were performed by one generation after 
another; and after those now occupying it shall 
have passed from life, their children and their 
children’s children for all succeeding generations 
shall have in it the same rights that the people of 
the past have had, and those of the present pos¬ 
sess, but no others. The land cannot be sold by 
the individual or the tribe.” 
Such a broad view of the game that is in our 
land we sportsmen ought to take. But the white 
man with his acquisitiveness and selfishness 
wishes to secure everything for himself and is not 
willing that his fellows shall have the same chance 
that he has. The feeling, while common to civil¬ 
ized humanity, is not altogether to its credit. It 
would be far better were we all to share the sen¬ 
timents expressed by one of our best sportsmen 
and most famous men, Colonel Roosevelt, who 
said, “Wild beasts and birds are by right not the 
property merely of the people alive to-day, but 
the property of the unborn generations, whose 
belongings we have no right to squander.” 
Monthly meetings of the Association are held 
at the Berkeley School, Seventy-second Street 
and West End Avenue, and the sixth annual 
banquet will be held Saturday evening, March 
18th, at the Hotel McAlpin. At nearly every 
meeting valuable papers are read by members 
with a questionary following. The rapid devel¬ 
opment of the Boy Scouts of America has multi¬ 
plied summer camps for boys so rapidly that it 
must be hard for even national headquarters to 
keep track of them. While most of these are 
small some of them include hundreds of camp¬ 
ers on their rolls for the ten weeks of the camp¬ 
ing season. The commercial phase of this sum¬ 
mer population in the woods is one of some im¬ 
portance because of the equipment and supplies 
provided which in many of the private camps 
is elaborate and costly. The commissary pro¬ 
vides a nice new volume of business for whole¬ 
salers and retailers to whom trade in summer is 
welcome. The Camp Directors’ Association of 
America has definite aims and ideals and stands 
for the advancement, elevation and betterment of 
organized camping for the young mentally, mor¬ 
ally and physically. The extensions of this new 
phase of outdoor life will within ten years reach 
an aggregate that cannot now be clearly fore¬ 
seen but it will be a vast new interest. 
Teaching the Young Idea How to Camp 
A^Movement, Nation Wide, That is Familiarizing the Coming Generation 
With the Great Outdoors 
By Allen Samuel Williams, of the Camp Directors’ Association of America. 
