Product Description

Daniel C. Beard was not only a founder of Boy Scouting in America, but also a prolific and engaging author. His great passion was making boys and girls feel at home in nature, to allow them to experience its wonders while fostering their sense of self-sufficiency and independence. The present volume introduces young people to the pleasures and challenges of camping. In it, Beard suggests any number of projects, plans, and schemes to entertain those whose travels take them into open fields and forests, who want to know everything from how to build kites and birdhouses to snow houses and snow men.

There are chapters on packing a horse, on making clothes and moccasins, on camp cooking, on building piers, boats, and sleds. As usual, the directions are clear, the diagrams simple, and the activities seductive. This is an age when the most common phrase one hears from children is "I"m bored." With this book in hand, you can send them into the smallest woodland plot and be sure they'll have an activity that will occupy them for hours, as well as projects that are not only fun to do but that actually work.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #26779 in Books
• Brand: Channel Craft
• Published on: 2000-08-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 1.00 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 428 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Daniel C. Beard (1850-1941), a founder of the Boy Scouts of America, introduces the adventure inherent in the great outdoors and offers simple solutions for overcoming various obstacles in The Field and Forest Handy Book: New Ideas for Out of Doors, first published in 1906 and now reissued in a facsimile edition. Readers can learn how to make a luna kite in the spring, a cheap boat in the summer, an altar camp stove in the autumn and a toboggan in the winter. For those who want to stay indoors, a chapter titled "How to Build Play Houses, Secret Castles and How to Make Mysterious Chests" is included.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Handbook for raising Tom Sawyer
I hardly know where to begin. Like the Boys' and Girls' Handybooks, this hefty little book is full of ideas from a bygone era. Written in 1906, the activities are not always the kind of things our kids can do today...but this is a book of IDEAS! While you might not want to camp in a swamp, this book will tell you how. That information might come in useful for another project someday. The book also has historical value--the vocabulary is sometimes quite dated--but that's part of the fun!

Other ideas from the book, which is organized by season: Kites, herbarium, quail farming, bird houses, cages, aquaria, carts, rafts, boats, camping, indoor ideas, outdoor cooking, sleds, packs, and so much more. Oh, and DO learn how to cook a muskrat!

great fun!
Originally written 100 years ago, this delightful book shows you how to enjoy the Great Outdoors. Divided seasonally, the author shows you, via illustrations and diagrams, how to make kites, bird houses, aquariams, boats,sleds, moccasins, shirts, and various camping utensils. For the more adventurous, he shows you how to construct bridges, dams, piers and outdoor dwellings of different kinds. He also provides tips for camping out in your own backyard.
Dan Beard was one of the founders of the American Boy Scouts and an irresistibly cheerful, "can-do" attitide makes this book fun for the serious and armchair outdoorsperson alike.

Perfect for a young man
My son read the covers off the first D. C. Beard book we got (The American Boys Handy Book) and I can tell this will swiftly suffer the same fate. Detailed instructions for dozens of projects... he can't put it down.