Scope and Content Note
The papers of Daniel Carter Beard (1850-1941) span the years 1798-1941, with the bulk of the material dated between 1915 and 1935. The collection consists of correspondence, diaries, family papers, speeches, articles, collected source material for writings and speeches, school composition books, address books, sketch books, illustrations, photographs, memorabilia, and printed matter relating to Beard's activities at the Culver Military Academy, Dan Beard Outdoor School, and with the Boy Scouts of America. The papers are organized into nine series: Diaries ; Family Correspondence ; Family Papers ; General Correspondence ; Special Correspondence ; Subject File ; Speech, Article, and Book File ; Miscellany ; and Oversize .
The three major phases of Beard's career as illustrator, author, and guiding spirit of the American Boy Scout movement are amply documented. Items relating to his life as an artist include numerous early sketch books and composition books containing essays and lessons prepared during his student years. Beard furnished pictures for the first illustrated editions of Samuel Langhorne Clemens's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and Tom Sawyer Abroad, and the papers contain his correspondence with Clemens concerning this work. There is a great deal of correspondence with Charles Dana Gibson, who served as best man at Beard's wedding. Correspondents from the art world include Gutzon Borglum, Howard Chandler Christy, Henry C. Pitz, Frederic Remington, Norman Rockwell, Frederic Dorr Steele, Lorado Taft, John Quincy Adams Ward, S. J. Woolf, and N. C. Wyeth.
Daniel Beard came from an artistic background. His father, James Henry Beard, was a well-known portrait painter among whose sitters were Henry Clay, John Quincy Adams, and Benjamin Harrison. His brother, Frank Beard, originated the once popular "chalk talks," which were lectures illustrated by the speaker with crayon sketches drawn during the course of the lecture. The Family Correspondence and Family Papers series in these papers contain many manuscripts of both Frank Beard and James Henry Beard, including a draft of the latter's autobiography.
Daniel Beard's career as an author is represented with the original manuscript of his autobiography, Hardly a Man Is Now Alive (1939), and an extensive collection of articles devoted to outdoor life that range in subject matter from the making of "Billy Bow-Leg Moccasins" to instructions for tying a "Real Sour-Dough Diamond Hitch." Most of the articles were prepared for publication in the magazine Boy's Life, to which Beard was a regular monthly contributor. There is also a great deal of correspondence with the publishing firms of J. B. Lippincott Company and Charles Scribner's Sons, which printed most of the twenty-seven books written by Beard. Among his correspondents in the field of literature are Samuel Langhorne Clemens, Hamlin Garland, Zane Grey, William Dean Howells, Edwin Markham, H. L. Mencken, Albert Bigelow Paine, Maxwell Perkins, Upton Sinclair, Hendrik Willem Van Loon, and Owen Wister.
The third and most bountiful phase of the collection concerns Beard's efforts to create and develop the Boy Scout movement in the United States. There are papers relating to Sons of Daniel Boone (renamed Boy Pioneers of America), the organization Beard established in 1905 that was a forerunner of the Boy Scouts of America. In addition to the manuscripts detailing the origin of the Boy Scouts in 1910, there is important correspondence with other leaders of the scouting movement in this country and abroad. Perhaps the most important of these are with Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell, Baron Baden-Powell of Gilwell, the British soldier who was the founder of the original Boy Scout movement in 1908; and Ernest Thompson Seton, author of the nature study Wild Animals I Have Known and organizer of yet another woodlore group, the Woodcraft Indians (1902). Among the major figures initially associated with the Boy Scout organization who are represented in these papers are George J. Fisher, Walter W. Head, Edward Sanford Martin, Augustus Post, George D. Pratt, Frank Presbrey, Isaac Sutton, Frederick Vreeland, and James E. West.
President Theodore Roosevelt's dictum regarding the strenuous life strongly appealed to Daniel Beard, and following the president's death he instituted annual pilgrimages to his grave at Oyster Bay, Long Island. The papers contain Beard's correspondence with Roosevelt, his widow, Edith Kermit Carow Roosevelt, son Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. (1887-1944), and other members of the family.
There are three groups of Special Correspondence relating to the Dan Beard Outdoor School for Boys, the Boy Scouts, and the Sons of Daniel Boone. The latter two groups consist of letters received by Beard from children who were members of these organizations. The correspondence relating to the Dan Beard Outdoor School for Boys concerns the summer camp he established in 1915 at Hawley, Pennsylvania, and operated until the mid-1930s. The letters are inquiries from parents concerning the camp and the progress of their children and purely internal correspondence relating to the financial and logistical operations of the camp.