Figure 1.--Here is a picture taken in 1945 of the first Scout troop my father organied for the boys from Montana and Sierre, including my twor older brothers and one of my older sisters.

Montana was a very small village. As there were not sufficient boys who had an interest in Scouting in Montana, father organized a troop with boys from Montana and the nearby town of Sierre, which is the town below Montana in the Rhone valley. Sierre is the town where one had to get off the train to go up to Montana. This created a problem for the boys who came from far away. To resolve that problem, the meetings were held every Saturday afternoon. The boys from Montana hiked half way down to the valley and the boys from Sierre hiked half way up the mountain. There was an ideal place to hold the troop meetings, which were always held in the outdoors--snow or no snow. The boys here are all Scouts, the Cubs who normally wore their caps are not in the photograph. Note that there are two girls in the photograph. Scouting at the time was still separated, Scouts for the boys and Guides for the girls. One of the girls here is my sister. She was our Cub pack Akela. (The other girl with the dark hair was not my sister, but another girl working with our Cub pack. The sister who is 3 years older then I and my self are not in this picture.) This was the "older" generation. Leaders for Cub Scouts including the women wore the Scout uniform. The sister who is 3 years older then me, was a brownie and then a girl-scout, but never got involved as a leader. The sister who was 10 years older was our Cub leader and thus accepted by the Scouts. Note that they are wearing Scout and not Guide uniforms. (The Girl Guide uniform was blue.) While Scouting was still separated at the time, many small Scout troops in rural areas accepted girls, relly the beginning of coed Scouting. I do not know, but my guess is that the reverse was not true. I doubt if any Boy Scouts joined Girl Guide units. This was even more pronoubced with Cubs.

Sources

Voute, Tom. E-mail message, May 24, 2006.