An early Boy Scout troop, Western Springs, Illinois.  They looked more like a military outfit then than they do these days. Today the term “Boy Scout” is often used to suggest someone who is honest, moral and squeaky clean, almost to the point of insufferability.  I was a Boy Scout back in the 1980s, and I can vouch that that description couldn’t be universally applied to all my fellow Scouts, certainly not all the time.  But there’s more to Scouting than that.  The initial appeal of Scouting wasn’t so much a club for paragons of virtue, but rather an outlet for boys looking to tough it out. Scouting started in the early 20th century.  The Boy Scouts officially launched in Great Britain in 1907, but its origins reach back about a decade earlier, during the Boer War.  Britain was fighting unrest in the Cape Colony (now South Africa).  Early in the war, the Boers besieged the small town of Mafeking, which was held only by the Mafeking Cadet Corps. ...