Palisades

I had just become a Boy Scout admittedly years latter than the rest, and had just made Tenderfoot like making corporal in the army, when they disbanded the troop and replaced it with Explorers. Guess the sixteen boys in my town were getting older and were pre-baby boomers. This may have been freshman or sophomore in high-school of which the only thing I can remember is several outings we undertook. We camped in a swamp. We went to a Jamboree in Wisconsin and we went to the Mississippi Palisades on the east side of the Mississippi River near Savanna, Illinois, except I thought and still seems like it was on the Iowa side. Maybe I got it confused with Mark Twain Tom Sayer's town on the west of the Mississippi River.

What was there ? A high speed two lane road close to the Mississippi River and between high steep cliffs; and where there cut into the Palisades, and perpendicular a narrow valley about a house-lot wide and deep, containing two to three camp-sites, a man's John and a woman's Jane.

There was Hegel, Smitty, Thor, Murry, GlenD, Baldwin, Badger, myself and if anyone else I don't remember, and two councillors of a car each; and I believe it was two outings separated by a year apart in which the first outing was the incidents of the dog and the cave.

The camp-site was a slit in the rock ravine, and both trips we were in the back, very narrow with steep over-grown green slopes either side. The first morning we awoke there was a stray dog in camp. I believe we had pancakes because the dog had a few.

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