Daniel Carter Beard

• Born: June 21, 1850
• Birthplace: Cincinnati, Ohio
• Died: July 11, 1941
• Place of death: Suffern, New York

Biography

Daniel Carter Beard was born on June 21, 1850, in Cincinnati, Ohio, to a family that produced several artists. His father, James Henry Beard, was a self-taught painter who specialized in portraits of children and animals; his mother was Mary Caroline Carter Beard. The family later moved across the Ohio River to Covington, Kentucky. Along the Ohio-Kentucky border region, Beard developed a keen appreciation of nature and the advantages of honing wilderness survival skills. He and his young friends called themselves Boone’s Scouts in honor of Kentucky’s most famous frontiersman, Daniel Boone

At the age of nineteen, Beard graduated from Worrall’s Academy in Covington, Kentucky, and began working as a civil engineer for the city of Cincinnati. In 1874, he worked for the Sanborn Map and Publishing Company. When the family relocated to New York City in 1878, Beard moved along with his parents and siblings. His first impression of New York was one of disillusionment. Still a Kentucky boy at heart, he felt the city was failing to provide open spaces welcoming to young people.

Beard studied at New York’s Art Students League and by 1880 was listing his profession as an artist; he illustrated books and magazine articles. In 1882, he sold an article he both wrote and illustrated, “How to Camp Without a Tent,” to St. Nicholas Magazine. During that same year, he published what would become a lifelong best-seller, What to Do and How to Do It: The American Boy’s Handy Book. Filled with instructions for such skills as building kites, making boats and fishing poles, constructing blow guns, raising dogs, stuffing animals, stocking aquariums, and camping, the book sold more than 250,000 copies during Beard’s lifetime. He eventually wrote many other books on outdoor skills.

In 1889, Beard gained greater prominence as a book illustrator when Mark Twain asked him to illustrate A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Twain was extremely pleased with Beard’s work. Over the next decade, Beard illustrated more of Twain’s books and short stories, and the two men remained friends until Twain’s death in 1910.

By 1894, Beard was teaching a course on how to draw animals at the School of Applied Design in New York. When he married Beatrice Alice Jackson during that same year, artist Charles Dana Gibson served as his best man. He and his wife had two children, Barbara and Daniel, and the family made their home in Long Island, New York. Beard had been a member of the Swedenborgian Church but joined the Quaker faith after his marriage.

Between 1905 and 1908, Beard illustrated for such magazines as Recreation, Woman’s Home Companion, and Pictorial Review. While working with Recreation in 1905, he established and promoted a movement called the Boy Pioneers, Sons of Daniel Boone. In 1910, that group was consolidated with several other boys organizations to form the Boy Scouts of America. Beard was a charter member of the executive committee and afterward wrote a monthly column for the scouts’ magazine, Boys’ Life. By 1929, the Boy Scout movement had expanded to forty-two nations.

Beard maintained memberships in numerous societies dedicated to preservation of the environment and natural history, and Alaska’s Mount Beard was named in his honor. A bridge over the Ohio River also was named in his honor, and his boyhood home in Covington, Kentucky, was later declared a National Historic Landmark. When Beard died in Suffern, New York, on July 11, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt agreed to be named as an honorary pallbearer.

Beard is still well known for his illustrating work, especially in Twain’s books. However, his most prominent place in history is as a father of the Boy Scout movement.