Of these various group activities, the running-games belong properly to the pre-gang stage of the boy’s existence. The normal instincts of the little boy incline him to the individualistic games, of which tag and hide and seek are the type, in which the player acts for himself against the one who is “it.” The transition to the coöperative “group games” of the gang age not infrequently takes place by way of running-games of the prisoner’s base and relievo type, in which, though the game is still fundamentally individualistic, there is nevertheless some sort of loosely organized side.
Running being a deep-seated impulse of all young life, the formless running-games of childhood tend to hold over into the gang age. Thirty-one of my sixty-six gangs, or practically half of them, reported that they still clung to their pre-adolescent sports. Tag, hide and seek, and relievo are the favorites, being represented in twenty-one, fourteen, and twelve gangs respectively. Hoist the sail, chase, leap frog, and run-sheep-run, appear in five gangs or more. Some twenty other games, a few of them apparently local inventions, are mentioned at least once. Oddly enough, some of the oldest stand-bys of childhood, such as puss in the corner, blind man’s buff, and follow the leader, appear in but two gangs at most, while tops, marbles, and kites figure not at all. Only two gangs—more’s the pity—play hare and hounds; partly, let us hope, because of the limitations imposed by the city streets rather than altogether because of deficient wind and stamina in the city-bred boy.
Of the group games—of games, that is, which presuppose an organized side, a leader, rules, apparatus, and some sort of playing-field—baseball, as might be expected, comes easily first. Fifty-one gangs play baseball, of the fifty-three which devote themselves to group games. Football comes next, with thirty-six. Hockey and basketball make a bad third and fourth, with nine each. Cricket appears in six gangs. If, then, we lump together the cricket-playing and baseball-playing gangs, as we may fairly do since they are both bat-and-ball games of essentially the same type and really alternates of one another, we arrive at the significant fact that all normal boys, at the age when they have the native impulse to form gangs, have also the native impulse to hit a quick-moving object with a club. The precise significance of this conjunction, and the part which it ought to play in the boy’s education, will appear later.
Of swimming, also, and the minor sports of boyhood, of smoking and drinking and playing cards, I shall have more to say in another place. For the present we are concerned only with such activities as arise from the great fundamental instincts of the gang age.
Of these, next in importance to the group games come the so-called tribal industries,—hunting, fishing, building boats and rafts and sailing them, going to ponds or into the woods, building huts and playing Indians,—the various uncivilized occupations, in short, with which the savage tribes of the world fill the greater part of their lives.
On this point the most entertaining witnesses are the boys themselves. I quote, therefore, their own accounts.
“Played Indians in the woods. Went fishing after perch and pickerel. Went berrying. Got a pail full, then ate them.” “Went fishing and shooting. Each of us had a gun. Played cards in the woods. Met out in the woods back of an old barn. Sundays, went on a trip into the country.” “Went camping out. Stayed for a day or two. Made a boat. Went bathing, fishing for perch and pickerel.” “Went fishing. Had a tent in the woods for one month. Went boating.” “Went fishing. Went to woods on Sundays. Built bonfires. Went hunting.” “Went fishing for pickerel and perch. Went hunting for gray squirrels, pheasants, quails, rabbits, foxes. Shot three foxes, one silver fox. Had a shanty in the woods.” “Made boats and rafts to hold ten or twelve fellows. Twenty-three of us hired a tent for five days in woods.” “Played Indians. Made up two parties. One party captured others and put them in a hole. Met in a shanty or clubhouse in the woods.” “Had a tent and a dugout a quarter of a mile out in the woods. Stayed out five nights. Slept in a barn.”
A FOOT-BALL GAME BETWEEN CITY GANGS
The crosses indicate the leaders