“where boys become men”
A Cultural Landscape Observation of Philmont Scout Ranch
Cimarron, NM
Figure 1 A bus of new arrivals drives under the gateway to Philmont Scout Ranch. The new arrivals enthusiastically wave at the scouts outside the bus. (National Geographic Magazine, September 1956)
[This essay draws from coursework prepared as part of Prof. Gail DuBrow’s Vernacular Architecture course at the University of Minnesota and as part of Prof. Randall Mason’s Cultural Landscape course at the University of Pennsylvania.]
In the midst of a sweltering New Mexico summer day a bus filled with eager scouts triumphantly drives through a gateway that proclaims “Philmont Scout Ranch, Camping Headquarters.” Hanging out of the windows, several boys enthusiastically wave at other boys walking past. Having completed their trek, they knowingly motion back at the new arrivals that are about to begin their own adventure. The side of the bus proudly proclaims “Philmont or Bust” and at last they have reached their final destination in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. These scouts had an extensive journey that began in Raleigh, North Carolina, traveling over sixteen hundred miles. But for many scouts, their journey began long before they arrived in the mountains; it began when they entered scouting many years prior at the age of seven or eight. For these senior scouts, Philmont is the pinnacle of their scouting career, a wilderness to test their innumerable skills, and a place to prove their newfound manhood.
Figure 2 Philmont (red) is located in the northeastern part of New Mexico (lower left). The boundaries of the property are noted to the right with prominent locations highlighted in red. (Modified from Philmont Digital Archives)
Philmont Scout Ranch
Located in northeastern New Mexico, Philmont Scout Ranch is a high adventure wilderness camp for boy scouts. Founded in 1938, Philmont consists of over 220 square miles, or 140,171 acres of property. Today it is has the unique distinction of being the world’s largest youth camp, receiving over 22,000 participants each summer and employing over 1,100 staff.[1] Scouts from across the country and world make the pilgrimage to Philmont in the later years of their scouting careers as a rite of passage and a way to conclude their time in scouting. But, Philmont Scout Ranch was not always so grand, nor was it synonymous with achievement in scouting. How and why did Philmont achieve the renown that is associated with it today?
The landscape of Philmont Ranch has an extensive and complex history, and embodies a miniature narrative of the history of the American West. Purchased by a wealthy oilman Waite Phillips in 1922 as a summer home, it was gifted to the Boy Scouts of America in 1938. However, the history of the landscape begins hundreds and even thousands of years before the Boy Scouts owned the land. The earliest known history dates to the Puebloans and Jicarilla Apache who once occupied the North Ponil valley in pit-houses and cliff dwellings. Subsequent layers incorporate the narratives of loggers, miners, mountain men, pioneers, and ranchers who began to settle the area as early as the 1700s when Spanish explores visited the region.
From its founding, Philmont has capitalized on the multilayered history of the landscape by presenting a highly romanticized version of frontier life in the American West to its participants. Organizers created interpretive history programs at various locations throughout the property for their campers. Many of these programs were headed out of the ruins of pioneer homes, derelict mining camps, and in one case among the remnants of a Native American settlement. Staff members would dress up as miners, loggers, Native Americans, and cowboys to reenact and portray how the boy scouts understood the history of the region and more specifically the history of their property. These interpretations reflected a specific set of values, which the Boy Scouts made manifest in the landscape and the folklore surrounding the image of the camp.
Philmont was created at a time when prominent individuals—mostly white males—were questioning what masculinity was, interpreting it to their own ends, and using an idealized image of the American West to support their assertions. Western life—the life of the pioneer in particular—was seen as the embodiment of man’s struggle for identity and by extension the struggle to establish the identity of the nation. The ‘untamed’ landscape of Philmont could and should be the grounds in which boys could become men. This sentiment was echoed in the introduction to a booklet put out by Philmont in its early years entitled “A Manual of Woodslore Survival or How to Eat Weeds and Like ‘Em”:
Do you like a fight? The mountains! The mountains—how they call to us! The streams and rivers fling a challenge in our teeth! The wind in the timberline whispers “come! come!” And how they defy!! “Come if you can,” the mountain ranges cry. “Come if you will,” the shadowy canyons echo. “Conquer us—if you can!” The prairies take up the song, “Pit your hands and wits against our mysteries and force us to submit—if you can! One of us shall conquer! One of us shall conquer!” So shall it be you or the wilderness? I say it can be you. … Do you like a fight? Let Philmont be the proving grounds!![2]
Sentiments like these echoed across the Boy Scouts of America and across the nation. Victorian thinkers and many of the founders of the Boy Scouts began to question what manhood should be.
The Boy Scout’s romanticized notions of western life fit within a much larger back to nature movement across America and the development of summer camps as typologies. In the Victorian era, preceding the founding of the boy scouts, the term masculinity was coined.[3] The hardships and struggles of frontier life, many Victorians believed, was responsible for establishing the morals and ideals of our nation; the boy scouts interpreted pioneer life in much the same way. The rise of summer camps coincided with the rise of the back to nature movement and the redefinition of what masculinity was. Architectural historian Abigail van Slyck emphasized this when she wrote, “for many Americans, the solution lay to instituting a new kind of summer experience for boys, one that would remove them from the feminized home for some period of time and send them out into nature in the company of the right kind of men.”[4]
Using a cultural landscape approach, this paper argues Philmont was a physical manifestation of the ideals of manhood created by the Boy Scouts. The history of Philmont—its prehistory particularly—is quite long and complex. Writing about it all would be near impossible. This study limits the scope of the research to the first few decades following the camps founding in 1938. In much the same way, the geographic area of Philmont is immense. Several ‘case studies’, or particularly poignant examples, were chosen as representative of the larger cultural landscape of Philmont Scout Ranch.
Figure 3 Waite Phillips pictured in cowboy clothing. (Zimmer, Philmont: An Illustrated History)
The ‘First Man’: Waite Phillips and His Vision
“Put a boy in touch with nature and the job of inspiring him with high ideals is an easier one than any other environment”
—Waite Phillips
Waite Phillips, the benefactor of Philmont donated the property in 1938 to the Boy Scouts of America after observing several scouts camping on his property for a number of years. However the reasons for his donations are rooted much deeper in the narrative of his own life, his sons, and his twin brother’s Wiate Phillips. In his statement to the Tulsa Daily World newspaper after his second gift of 91,538 acres he wrote:
That ranch represents an ideal of my youth … and has meant a lot to my son and his pals. Now I want to make it available to other boys … I’d be selfish to hold it for my individual use. For twenty consecutive years, [the] ranch been a part of my life. My son grew to manhood there.[5]
Figure 4: Dedicatory Plaque to Waite Phillips upon the donation of the property (Zimmer, Philmont: an Illustrated History)
In his own words, Phillips associates Philmont with manhood; in much the same way the boy scouts associated manhood with the landscape. So it is only natural that those beliefs were transmitted with the property upon their donation. This association is particularly clear in the dedicatory plaque erected on the property that states Waite Phillips vision:
These properties
Are donated and dedicated
To the Boy Scouts of America
For the purpose of perpetuating
Faith-self reliance-integrity-freedom
Principles used to build this great nation
By the American pioneer
So that
These future citizens may
Through thoughtful adult guidance
And by the inspiration of nature
Visualize and form a code of living
To diligently maintain these high ideals
And our proper destiny
The specific set of values laid out in this statement was key in the formative years of the ranch. As Phillips clearly indicates he believed in the association of strong American values with those of the “American pioneer”. But where did he gain these associations and why was the transition from manhood to boyhood so important to Phillips?
In the early years of his life in Conway, Iowa, Waite Phillips and his brother Wiate ran away from home at sixteen for an unknown destination in the West. Without a plan and on their own, the brothers worked their way west taking on any manner of odd jobs. For three years, they traveled up and down the West working as miners, loggers, railroaders, and as a ranch hands. In 1902 Wiate’s appendix ruptured and he passed away, causing Waite great grief. After his twin brother’s death, Waite moved back to Iowa to be with his family and studied business at the Western Normal College. Upon graduation, Phillips worked for his brothers oil company, Phillips 66, before starting his own in 1914. The Waite Phillips Company, as he called it, was among the first in the oil industry to take on all aspects of the oil process—refining, transportation, and marketing facilities. In 1925, he sold the company and purchased the land around Philmont for his summer home.[6]
It is not a hard assumption to make that those early years of traveling the West with his twin brother Wiate were particularly notable in Waite’s life. The variety of experiences they had—mining, logging, working on ranches—was reflected in the history of the property that Waite purchased in New Mexico. Pioneers, miners, and loggers all called Philmont home at some point in its history. After purchasing the property, Phillips was noted to have sought out the oldest people in Cimarron (i.e. the city nearest Philmont) in order to obtain the stories and oral histories of those that occupied the land before him. In 1942 Phillips explained why, “It is my belief that the romance, history, and traditions of the country in which the ranch is located will contribute much toward perpetuating American idealism and patriotism among boys from all parts of America.”[7] Waite Phillips and his brother grew to manhood in the American West and upon purchasing the property of Philmont, Phillips sought to share that same experience with his son Chope and later with the countless scouts of Philmont Scout Ranch.
Figure 5: Painting by Norman Rockwell of scouts pointing at the Tooth of Time, a mountain that symbolizes Philmont. (Zimmer, Philmont: an Illustrated History)
The Pinnacle of Scouting: Philmont
Since its founding in 1938, Philmont has been associated with older scouts and the idea that traveling to Philmont was a sort of capstone experience. From their earliest days in scouting, young scouts would hear stories from older scouts who had been to Philmont, hiked its trails, and returned to retell their adventures. In this way, Philmont developed a mythical aspect to it among troops across the nation. Stories of the ranch were retold over and over across the country, creating a powerful image of achievement that was associated with Philmont. In the Boy Scout Handbook, purchased by all scouts across America, the author describes this image:
“Some day when you are fourteen years of age and have shown real scout spirit and camping ability, you may have a chance to take part in an unforgettable Philmont expedition—taking on challenging tasks, tackling man-sized obstacles, solving man-sized problems. … When you check out after that kind of experience, you’ll know that you’ve has a man’s adventure.[8]”
These “man-sized” adventures were only available for older scouts, further adding to the myth and mystique of Philmont. By the time a scout reached the proper age to attend Philmont, they had been hearing and thinking about it for a good portion of their young lives.
Figure 6: Promotional brochures depict scenes of western life. Bucking broncos, mountainside shelters, and backpackers populate the covers of several brochures. (Philmont Digital Archives)
Beyond the scout to scout-to-scout self-perpetuation of the Philmont image, the marketing by the Boy Scouts ingrained the image of Philmont with that of manhood. National publications like Boy’s Life magazine and National Geographic covered stories of the ranch, spreading its reach to a much larger audience.[9] Promoters used images of cowboys on bucking broncos, backpackers in front of majestic mountains, and captions like “The Land of Mountain Men” and “Yahoo! We’re off the Adventure” to make Philmont’s image and identity synonymous with American pioneers and western lore that was popularized at the time.[10] These various images created an ideological landscape, or rather these images imbued the cultural landscape of Philmont with an identity of manhood and achievement that did not physically exist within the landscape. The boy scouts perpetuated and manufactured the image of Philmont to meet their specific interpretations of western history and what manhood was supposed to be; they helped to invent and shape a particular understanding of how boys should become men.
Interpretive Programs and the Ideal Man
A large part of Philmont’s appeal as a high-adventure camp in the boy scouts is derived from its interpretive programs. Each summer, staff members dress up in period clothing to act out scenes of western life: lumberjacks climb spar poles and hew timbers, cowboys throw ropes ensnaring cattle, mountain men shoot black power rifles. While the entire Philmont experience is not interpretive, not all staff are dressed or act like they are from another era, these ‘living histories’ constituted the majority of the images surrounding the camp in the early years. These interpretations are designed to be authentic experiences of history, but often were little more than the scout’s (or staff’s) own romanticized interpretations of western life.
Mountain Men: Rayado and Kit Carson
Perhaps the most well known example of this is at the home of Kit Carson on the southern end of Philmont property, called Rayado. Christopher “Kit” Carson is a controversial figure in the history of the American West, but at the time was well regarded as a pioneer of American idealism, perhaps similar to Daniel Boone in the east. Carson was among the first mountain men in the region and served as guide and agent for Indian Affairs. Upon purchasing the property, Phillips gained the home of Carson, whose narrative parallels much of Phillips’s own, both having run away from home at a young age to explore the American West.[11]
After the donation of the land to the boy scouts, the home of Kit Carson was drastically reconstructed, and in many ways wholly manufactured. Figure seven shows a picture of the ruin around the time Phillips purchased the property compared with an image of it as it exists today. The contrast is jarring. Here, at the home of Kit Carson, the boy scouts used the narrative of the famous mountain man as an essential component of their narrative. The reconstructed property came to be known as Carson-Maxwell basecamp. Twelve-day expeditions often started from this point. Rayado, Carson’s home would be the first experience they had in the backcountry, one of pioneer life and mountain men, setting the tone for the entire trek.
Figure 7: Pictured is the former ruin of Rayado, Kit Carson’s home, prior to the 1949 reconstruction (right). (MacDonald, Cimarron and Philmont and Zimmer, Philmont an Illustrated History)
Figure 8: Two scouts peer upwards at a petroglyph of kokopelli. (Zimmer, Philmont: and Illustrated History).
The Boy Scouts and the ‘Noble Savage’
Indian Writings, or Scribblings as it was formerly known, is home to numerous detailed petroglyphs from the ancient Puebloan people, and the later Jicarilla Apache. As the former name suggests, Native American culture was interpreted and appropriated in many conflicting ways by the Boy Scouts. Early scouting handbooks teach young boys how to built teepees, headdresses, and other Native American items. However, this practice was not necessarily ill intentioned. Ernest Thompson Seton, one of the founders of the boy scouts, saw Native American life—in his own way—as worthy of being emulated, that savagery was a good thing. Architectural historian Abigail van Slyck unwraps Seton, “antimodernists like Seton considered savagery a useful antidote to effete modernity and an integral ingredient in the protection of ‘robust, manly, self-reliant boyhood.”[12] Scouters in the early years used their own interpretations of Native American culture at summer camps as a statement to counter modernity, and bring campers closer to nature. At Philmont, rather than dressing up as ‘Indians’, scouts could participate in archeological digs to uncover remnants of Native American life. Petroglyphs allowed scouts to make up their own meanings for the marking etched into the rocks. Campers could sleep near digs sites, and petroglyphs throughout the canyon.
Creating the Image of Pioneer Life: The Stockade
Figure 9: The Stockade pictured with the Tooth of Time in the background. This made up fortress served as a starting point for many treks at the ranch. (Seton Memorial Library)
The stockade, similar to Rayado (Kit Carson’s Home), was one of the starting points for twelve day treks.[13] Campers would walk through the imposing palisade walls of the fort into the courtyard where they would sleep around fires and hear stories of the great western pioneers. Located strategically below the Tooth of Time, the stockade created a picture prefect image for Philmont Scout Ranch, appearing on numerous promotional materials. The Tooth of Time, the mountain in the background, is so named because the Santa Fe Trail runs below it. When settlers reached the Tooth of Time, they knew that they were two weeks from Santa Fe. The stockade structure itself is not historic at all; rather it was entirely fabricated, supposedly by Waite Phillips as a playground for his son. Later additions and alterations to the structure created the fortress in figure 9. Stockades in many western movies were the quintessential locations pioneers visited on their journeys westward. They represented safety and order in an entirely unknown and wild world. The stockade at Philmont served a similar function, setting the tone for their trek. Scouts became the pioneers moving through the fortress on their journey into the unknown wilderness. The dual image of the tooth of time (associated with the Santa Fe Trail) and the stockade set up an image of pioneer hardship from the beginning of the trek. Scouts were hiking the same trails that settlers did, enduring the same hardships, and were becoming men among similar conditions.
“In America,” reads the 1943 Handbook for Boys, “boys and men as a rule, take readily to out-door life, because so many of our relatives and ancestors were pioneers, woodsmen, explorers, and prospectors who had a part in discovering and developing the great natural resources of a new world.”[14] For the creators of Philmont and the early scouts that camped there, this was certainly true. The landscapes of Philmont read as a miniature narrative of the history of the American West. Pioneers, mountain men, and ranchers were romanticized and their lives were interpreted to scouting’s own end.
The preexisting history and structures of the site were co-opted to manufacture a specific interpretation of what manhood should be. Prominent individuals like Waite Phillips found the answer to lie in the myth and romanticism of the American west. In many ways the youthful adventures of Waite and Wiate Phillips were the precursor to the later interpretive programs and historical narrative of Philmont Scout Ranch. As the pinnacle of the scout camping experience, Philmont developed a mythical image through both word of mouth and widespread publications. In these rugged western environments Waite and his brother grew to manhood, just as his son Chope, and generations of other boys did years later at Philmont Scout Ranch. The challenging landscapes of Philmont and their multilayered historical narratives provided scouts with a testing grounds in which they could assert all they had learned in scouting. Philmont was after all where boys became men.
Endnotes
[1] “Philmont ‘Quick Facts,’” Boy Scouts of America, 2017, http://www.philmontscoutranch.org/PTC/PromotePTC/request/tips.aspx
[2] Russ Vliet, A Manual of Woodslore Survival or “How to Eat Weeds and Like ‘Em (Raton, New Mexico: Range Print, undated), 5.
[3] Abigail A. Van Slyck, A Manufactured Wilderness: Summer Camps and the Shaping of American Youth, 1890-1960 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 9.
[4] Van Slyck, A Manufactured Wilderness, 8.
[5] Tulsa Daily World, Fall 1941. Quoted in Stephen Zimmer and Larry Walker, Philmont: a Brief History of the New Mexico Scout Ranch (Santa Fe: Sunstone Press, 2000), 11.
[6] Stephen Zimmer and Nancy Klein, Vision, Grace, and Generosity: The Story of Waite and Genevieve Phillips and the Philmont Scout Ranch (Cimarron: Boy Scouts of America, 2002), 2-8.
[7] Zimmer, Philmont: a Brief History, 11.
[8] Boy Scout Handbook (New Brunswick: National Council Boy Scouts of America, 1959), 342.
[9] See Andrew H. Brown, “Philmont Scout Ranch Helps Boys Grow Up,” National Geographic (Washington, D.C.), Sep. 1956.
[10] Promotional Program Brochures, 1942-1952, Philmont Scout Ranch Document Archive, Philmont Scout Ranch Seton Memorial Library Digital Archives, http://www.philmontscoutranch.org/Museums/Archives.aspx.
[11] Randall M. MacDonald, Gene Lamm, and Sarah E. MacDonald, Images of America: Cimarrón and Philmont (Charleston: Arcadia Publishing, 2012), 22.
[12] Van Slyck, Manufactured Wilderness, 172. See also Philip Deloria Playing Indian.
[13] Lawrence Murphy, Philmont: a History of New Mexico’s Cimarron Country (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1972), 220.
[14] Handbook for Boys (New York: Boy Scouts of America, 1943), 453.
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