Boy Scouts on Old Superior

Product Description

Or The Tale of the Pictured Rocks – Annotated Edition (The Boy Scout Series by Fletcher)

The first of the Boy Scout fiction books began to appear in 1911, less than a year after the founding of the Boy Scouts of America in 1910 – showing how rapidly the BSA began to capture the minds of young American boys, and how quickly it came to be an influential presence in American society.

Boy Scouts on Old Superior Or The Tale of the Pictured Rocks – Annotated Edition is the seventh volume of a twelve-book series by Maj. Archibald Lee Fletcher, whose biography appears in for Foreword.

Boy Scouts on Old Superior marks a major change in the tone and flavor of the series. Starting with this book, Fletcher leaves behind the familiar characters and exploits of the boys of the Beverly, Indiana, Beaver Patrol, and turns to their compatriots in the Beaver Patrol of Chicago. This new group of boys, like their small-town brethren live shortly after the turn of the twentieth century, are more street-wise due to having lived in an urban environment all their lives. Like the characters in the previous stories, they drew together to start a Boy Scout troop of their own, and decided to take the hardworking Beaver as their symbol. Unlike the more rural boys we have read about earlier, however, they find themselves in a city in which the Boy Scouts already have a significant presence, and do not encounter mistrust and ignorance of the Scout mission. Their challenges have more to do with the toughs that inhabit the places they visit than with rival patrols.

In this seventh volume, the Beavers become involved with Chicago police and, as way to avoid one of their members going to jail, end up on the trail of smugglers who inhabit a mysterious series of caverns along the shores of Lake Superior.

Let the reader be aware. These stories are true adventure stories and the reader will see the scouts armed, find them without adult supervision and will find them in more grownup situations than the scouts in the first six books of this series.

Nevertheless, these six titles that make up the final chapters of The Boy Scout Series by Fletcher are delightful reading. The members of this incarnation of the Beaver Patrol will soon become as familiar to readers as the previously introduced members of the Troop from Beverly, Indiana. In these books, we meet a group of four boys of sixteen, without family ties, who share an apartment in the city. Each of them holds down full time employment in the city, while still finding time to participate in Scouting activities.

Members of the patrol include: George Benton, blue-eyed, imaginative and inclined to be a student of history. George is the leader of the Beaver Patrol. He is employed at State Street department store, where he works eight hours a day at a basement bargain counter, for eight dollars a week. Charley Green, fleshy and blond, is known to his friends as “Sandy,” Sandy is employed in the mail room of a daily newspaper.

Will Smith, athletic, brown-eyed, and inclined to look on the dark side of life, holds a clerk position in the office of a well-known criminal lawyer, who will become the benefactor of the Patrol.

Finally, Tommy Gregory, red-headed, freckled, and as full of tricks as a young monkey, is a messenger boy down in the loop district of Chicago.

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