History of the OA

The Order of the Arrow is a recognized official program activity of the Boy Scouts of America, intended to recognize those Scouts who best exemplify the Scout virtues of cheerful service, camping, and leadership.

The Founding

Founded in 1915, just seven years after the acclaimed English war hero Robert Baden-Powell started Scouting in Great Britain, the Order of the Arrow is the uniquely American honor society of Scouting. Its origin and development are tightly intertwined, like a well-made square knot, with Scouting itself in the United States. Its history is a remarkable saga of a good-hearted visionary's effect on many generations of youth.

The new Scout movement was enjoying halcyon days in an America still at peace in 1915, while young men in Europe were dying by the thousands in a war more terrible than any before in history. Boys in the U.S. seemed to be donning Scout uniforms everywhere as membership grew rapidly from coast to coast. Prominent businessmen, civic and religious groups, and politicians, including Congressmen and the President, vied to match the enthusiasm of boys surging into Scout camps across the nation, eager to be part of the great wave of Scouting which had reached American shores in the years before World War I.

E. Urner Goodman and Treasure Island

As E. Urner Goodman, then a 25-year-old Scoutmaster, walked along Chestnut Street in downtown Philadelphia in May 1915, he heard newsboys hawking the Philadelphia Inquirer's headlines, blaring the sinking of the Cunard ocean liner Lusitania, hit by a U-boat's torpedoes within view of the Irish coast. Urner was busy with plans that would also have far-reaching effects, for he had agreed to take the job of Camp Director at the Philadelphia Scout council's camp perched on idyllic Treasure Island in the Delaware River. What he had in mind would leave a lasting imprint on thousands of American youth in the twentieth century.

Urner's thoughts in 1915 were focused on developing methods to teach the Scouts attending summer camp that skill proficiency in Scoutcraft was not enough; rather, the principles embodied in the Scout Oath and Law should become realities in the lives of Scouts. As a means of accomplishing this — without preaching and within a boy's interest and understanding — he decided to launch an innovative program that summer based on peer recognition and the appeal of Indian lore.

Troops would choose, at the conclusion of camp, those boys from among their number best exemplifying these traits, who would be honored as members of an Indian lodge. Boys so acknowledged in the eyes of their fellow Scouts would form a fraternal bond joined together in a richly symbolic brotherhood.

Carroll Edson and the Delaware Indian Influence

Assistant Camp Director Carroll A. Edson helped Urner research the lore and language of the Delaware Indians who had inhabited Treasure Island, which they combined with characters from James Fenimore Cooper's "Last of the Mohicans" to develop dramatic induction ceremonies for the Order of the Arrow, as the fledgling honor society was dubbed. Even today, these rites make a lasting impression on Scouts who have been elected to the Order of the Arrow.