The history of Pow Wows goes back to nearly the beginning of Cub Scouts.
1933:
LaGrange District of the West Suburban Council in LaGrange, Illinois:
"The annual LaGrange Pow Wow was the outgrowth of a desire on the part of the five
Cubmasters of LaGrange to get the boys and their parents out in the open for an
afternoon of games, a family picnic supper, and a Council Fire and presentation of
awards. The council circle and fire were planned to bring to the boys some form of
Indian ceremony and the story of Akela."
I was fortunate to win an eBay auction of the 1939 Pow Wow book from West
Suburban Council. Inside the book are 5 pages giving details of the 6 previous Pow
Wows. Click here to download a 575K .pdf of those 5 pages.
The book from the 7th Pow Wow appears remarkably similar to the Pow Wow books
we see today. There are sections for games, songs, crafts, skits, etc. However, each
section of the book was written by a separate council, and appears to have been
pre-printed, brought to the Pow Wow, and assembled on site. This proved a
remarkable challenge to scan. Some sections were printed on colored pages,
alternating blue and gold paper. Some sections are very faint, requiring the contrast
to be set to 99% before a good scan could be obtained. Some paper is thin, and is
crumbling apart, while other pages are printed on what we now call construction paper.
I can't tell if the books were assembled by a dedicated group, or by each individual
participant. So it is possible that there is more to this book, which is not included in my
copy.
Another notable entry is the first six pages show a listing of who attended, with name,
city, and position. Unfortunately, no unit numbers are given.
Throughout the book were advertisements from various companies. I have included
these in a separate 30-page 2.6Mb .pdf file. Click here to download.
The complete book, without the ads, contains 138 pages. To download, click here for
the 15Mb .pdf file. Or click here for the 385K OCR Text file of the book.
For these 4 files only of the 1939 Pow Wow book, I release the .pdf and .txt files into
the public domain.
I have handouts from a 1951 Pow Wow in the Miami Valley Council. I will post those
here soon.
