He graduated from Wallace's Academy as a civil engineer and surveyor and made insurance maps until he visited New York on vacation and stayed to study art. His illustrations and articles graced the pages of St. Nicholas Magazine (where Jungle Book first appeared) and Youth's Companion. These articles and accompanying illustrations were later compiled into books.  He taught art from 1883 to 1890 at the Women's School of Applied Design. Uncle Dan was chosen to illustrate Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court.

To keep alive the spirit of the pioneers, he formed "The Society of the Sons of Daniel Boone". This group grew to become the largest boy's club in America, developing into "The Boy Pioneers" in 1905. His writings on the group appeared in Recreation magazine for which he was an editor. The boys were encouraged to keep an old unloaded gun as part of their fort, a fort being similar to a Boy Scout troop. Forts would keep records of their good deeds in protecting forests and wildlife by cutting notches in their gun stocks. The boys chanted:

Cut a notch, cut a notch, cut a notch soon,
For we are the Sons of Daniel Boone

He was quick to embrace the Boy Scout movement and was its first National Commissioner and Chairman of the Court of Honor. It was his idea to Americanize the Boy Scout fleur-de-lis by adding the American eagle and shield. His design for the emblem was granted a design patent by the U.S. patent office on July 4, 1911.

Like James E. West, Beard was originally against a younger boy program for Scouting and felt the term "Cub" derogatory.

He received the only gold Eagle badge ever awarded and the Roosevelt gold medal for distinguished service.  He was the president of the Society of Illustrators and of the Camp Fire Club. Near Mt. McKinley in Alaska is Mt. Beard, named in his honor.

Ernest Thompson Seton (August 14, 1860-October 23, 1946), Chief Scout ("the Chief") for five years, AKA "Black Wolf," was an award-winning wildlife illustrator and naturalist who was also a spell-binding storyteller and lecturer, a best selling author of animal stories, expert with Native American sign language and early supporter of the political, cultural and spiritual rights of First Peoples. Born August 14, 1860, in South Shields, Durham, England, of Scottish ancestry, he was the eighth of ten brothers (one sister died at age 6). The family, with the exception of a couple of the older brothers, went to Lindsay, Ontario, Canada, in 1866 after his father, Joseph, had lost his fortune as a ship-owner. Joseph did not make a good farmer, so by 1870 they moved to Toronto where he was employed as an accountant.

Seton was active in art from his early teens on. He won the Gold Medal for art before he was 18. At 19, he returned to England to apply for a scholarship at the Royal Academy of Art; he won a seven year scholarship that he did not complete - by 1881 his health (from poor food and living conditions) had become so poor that a cousin wrote his mother saying that she better get him back to Canada before he died. His family sent him a steerage ticket and he returned to Toronto. Two of his older brothers were homesteading in Manitoba, near what is now the small town of Carberry, so after his return he went by train to join them - however, Seton made a worse farmer than his father.

His natural history mentor was a Dr. William Brodie of Toronto, who had a son of about Seton's age. They had done natural history studies in the Toronto before and after the English expedition. Always distracted by natural surrounding, this was the time of his most active animal art and research. He counted every feather on the wing of a grackle by candlelight. He would go off into the Carberry Sandhills for days and weeks on end and was thought lazy and odd by the conventional people of the town. Here he wrote his first natural history articles and began exchanges of study skins with other naturalists in both Canada and the United States, including Theodore Roosevelt. Brodie the younger went to Manitoba, then went on to hunt land for himself. He was killed in an accident, which was a heavy blow to Seton.

In 1883 he went to New York where he met with many naturalists, ornithologists, and writers. From then until the late 1880s he spent his time between Carberry, Toronto and New York. He became an established wildlife artist and was given a contract in 1885 to do 1000 mammal drawings for the Century Dictionary. He did many of those drawings at the American Museum of Natural History, becoming life-long friends with, among others, Frank Chapman, William Hornaday, Coues, and Elliot. In the early 1890s he went to Paris to study art (this was where he did the research for his first book, The Art Anatomy of Animals, published in England). While speaking with his publisher he met Mark Twain for the first time.

He had trouble with his eyes (mostly from the close work on the Anatomy book) and was told that, unless he did not use his eyes heavily for at least six months, he could become blind. So he left France and went to New Mexico where he hunted wolves. The story of "Lobo" came from this hunt, first published in Scribner's Magazine and then with other stories in book form as Wild Animals I Have Known. As well known in Europe as in North America, Seton wrote approximately ten thousand scientific and popular articles during his lifetime and received an honorary Master's Degree in Humanities from Springfield College, MA. His painting, "Triumph of the Wolves," was exhibited at the First World's Fair in Chicago in 1893, as the entry from Manitoba. It was at this time he was appointed Official Naturalist to the Government of Manitoba, a title he held until his death in 1946.

He married for the first time in 1896, to Grace Gallatin, a wealthy socialite, who was also a pioneer traveler, founder of a women's writers club, a first rank suffragette, and a leading fund raiser for War Bonds in WW I. Their only child, Ann, was born in 1904 (she died in 1990; Grace lived until 1959). Ann, writing under the pen-name of Anya Seton, wrote historical novels that were very popular; several were made into movies in the 1940s and 1950s.

In 1902, the first of a series of articles that began the Woodcraft movement was published in the Ladies Home Journal. In 1906, while in England, he met with Baden-Powell, who was introduced to him by the Duke of Bedford. They exchanged correspondence from then until after B-P founded the Boy Scouts; Seton felt B-P borrowed material and concepts from him without giving proper credit.

In 1907 Seton funded and made a 2000 mile canoe trip in northern Canada, with Edward Preble of the US Biological Survey as his traveling companion. Although not a surveyor, doing his mapping with only a good compass, the maps he made on this trip were used until the 1950s and are still considered extremely accurate.

In 1910, Seton was chairman of the founding committee of the Boy Scouts of America, writing the first handbook (including B-P's Scouting material); he was responsible for many of the concepts found within Scouting throughout the world. However, Seton did not like the military aspects of Scouting, and Scouting did not like the Native American emphasis of Seton. With the advent of WW I the militarists won, and Seton resigned from Scouting. In 1915 Seton founded the Woodcraft League of America as a co-educational program open to children between ages "4 and 94." In 1922 the children's organization "Little Lodge" was merged with the Western Rangers, becoming the Woodcraft Rangers, which then became a young boys organization; however, it became a co-educational organization by the early 1950s.

Seton continued to run Woodcraft Leadership Camps in Greenwich until 1930 when he moved to Santa Fe. In 1931 he became a United States citizen. In Santa Fe, he built a castle on 100 acres in his "retirement" and continued to train leaders in Woodcraft. In 1934 Seton and Grace were divorced. Seton married his second wife, Julia Moses Buttree (also known as Julia Moss Buttree) in El Paso, Texas, in 1935. Julia was an author in her own right. Her first book, Rhythm of the Redman, was published before she married Seton, who did the illustrations for the book. She worked as Seton's assistant and secretary, and they performed joint lectures in schools, at clubs, in churches, and lecture halls of towns and universities, throughout the United States, Canada, France, England and the Czech Republic. In 1938 they adopted a daughter, now Dee Seton Barber, who appeared with them on stage.

The Leadership camps continued in Santa Fe until 1941, but were not continued after the war, as Seton died in 1946 at the age of 86. After Seton's death, Julia continued to write and maintain the Santa Fe estate, and also lectured on her own, her last tour sponsored by the Audubon Society in 1967. She suffered a stroke in 1968 and died in 1975 in Santa Fe.

West was an orphan, suffering with tuberculosis, who worked to put himself through college and law school. He worked as an attorney in juvenile cases in Washington, D.C. The BSA was formed there because the founders wanted to show Scouting’s national appeal. West and Robinson met through the YMCA.

Besides being a key person in the growth of the BSA, West more than any other person created a well-organized national structure that was a key to the BSA's growth and reputation. He intended to make Scouting only a temporary diversion from his legal career, but that changed with the tremendous growth of the movement. West for many years resisted the creation of a Cubbing program for younger boys and an Explorer program for older boys, feeling that they would take Scouts away from the main program, youths aged 11-18.

Despite all his organizational skills, he was as about as popular with Scouts as homework. Boyce, Beard, and Seton did not get along with West. Boyce saw Scouting as his own organization and West virtually deleted Boyce's name from BSA records. Seton had different goals for the program and views of how Scouting should develop; he was deeply committed to the ethos of Scouting and saw West as a city lawyer and simple administrator (Beard had similar views of West) and challenged West's authority. Seton was forced out in 1915 and his writing removed from the BSA's handbook. However, the outdoor spirit of Seton and Beard are key influences upon the BSA even today. Many did not like to work with West. Also, he was not beyond embellishing a story for the good of the cause, such as the legend of the Unknown Scout.

In spite of these problems, West persevered in building the BSA into a large, highly respected national organization, that either absorbed or outgrew the similar competing organizations in the early days of Scouting in America. Without his skills, this would not have happened. He established Scouting Magazine and was editor of Boys Life for over 20 years. In 1921, he allowed an experimental Order of the Arrow to be established nationally.

Dr. West served on the World Scout Committee of the World Organization of the Scout Movement from 1939 until 1947 and was honored by international Scouting with the Bronze Wolf award. He is buried in an untended grave in Valhalla, New York.