Boy Scouts of Woodcraft Camp

The Boy Scouts of America is barely a decade old when Walter Upton arrives at Woodcraft Camp, a city boy with a head full of textbook knowledge and everything to prove. He can recite the principles of orienteering, thebotanical names of trees, the theory of fire-building. What he cannot do is any of it with shaking hands and rain in his face. This is the story of what happens when book learning meets the wild, and which one wins. But make no mistake: this is not a tale of humiliation and redemption. It is something more interesting. Walter finds that the wilderness asks something different of him than correct answers, and his fellow Scouts teach him that real learning lives in the doing, not the knowing. An artifact from the movement's idealistic early days, when adults genuinely believed that boys could be made into better men through compass readings and campfires.