Scouts' honour: did Robert Baden-Powell really mastermind the Boy Scout movement? Or was it a Canadian?

It was only a photograph. But nearly thirty years later, the memory of it was still infuriating, encapsulating a lifetime's resentment. It was September 23, 1910, and Sir Robert Baden-Powell (known as B-P), the immensely popular British founder of the Boy Scouts, was in New York to acknowledge the publication of the first edition of the official handbook of the newly created Boy Scouts of America (BSA). A celebratory dinner was planned for that evening at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where Baden-Powell would be joined by Daniel Carter Beard and Ernest Thompson Seton, two respected colleagues who had been instrumental in introducing Scouting to the United States. "Uncle Dan" Beard was the founder of the Society of the Sons of Daniel Boone, later renamed the Boy Pioneers, which by the early twentieth century had become the largest boys' club in America. A British-born Canadian, Seton was a celebrated naturalist, artist, and author who in recent years had devoted much time and energy to his Woodcraft Indians, another popular youth organization.

Baden-Powell, Beard, and Seton met earlier that day at the headquarters of the YWCA. The organization's director suggested a group photograph to commemorate the occasion, and the men retired to the roof of the building. (See page 30.) What happened next would become the subject of considerable controversy. In a 1938 letter to Beard, Seton recounted his version of events. "The assumption was that we were all equals," he wrote. "As we were about to pose, B-P said, 'I think I'll sit down,' and moved over to the ventilator. You and I had to stand, by which trick he made us his subordinates, although he was the latest to enter the field."

No doubt Beard had long forgotten this trivial episode. But Seton clearly had not. In fact, he had nursed a profound bitterness toward Baden-Powell for decades and remained convinced to the end of his life that the "Father of Scouting" had brazenly stolen his ideas and the international acclaim that should have been his.

Ernest Thompson Seton's story began in a distant place and under a different name. Born Ernest Evan Thompson in South Shields, Durham, England, in 1860, he was six when his family immigrated to Canada. They settled in rural Lindsay, Ontario, where Seton developed his lifelong love of nature and wildlife. Unsuccessful at farming, the family then moved to Toronto. Here, Seton often took refuge from his stern Presbyterian household in the wilds of the Don Valley, where, inspired by James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, he spent many solitary hours "playing Indian." A gifted artist, Seton went on to study at prestigious academies in London and Paris. It was during this formative period that he assumed a new identity. He had been fascinated by the dubious family tale that his father was heir to Scottish nobleman Lord Seton, the Earl of Winton. To emphasize this alleged connection, he settled on the name Ernest Thompson Seton.

With no aristocratic inheritance forthcoming, Seton lived a nomadic life…