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Silver Buffalo Award

distinguished service award of the Boy Scouts of America

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJul 28, 2026
Entity authorityQ7515877 ↗
Source-derived summary

The Silver Buffalo Award is the national-level distinguished service award of Scouting America. It is presented for noteworthy and extraordinary service to youth on a national basis, either as part of, or independent of the Scouting program. The award is made by the National Court of Honor and the recipient need not be a registered member of Scouting America.

Award

The award consists of a silver buffalo (American bison) medal suspended from a red and white ribbon worn around the neck. Recipients may wear the corresponding square knot, with a white strand over a red strand, on the Scouting America uniform.

Using the United States military as the model, silver awards are the highest awards in Scouting America.

History

The Silver Buffalo Award was created in 1925 based on the Silver Wolf Award of the Boy Scout Association. The buffalo pendant was designed by A. Phimister Proctor. A red-white-red ribbon bar was introduced in 1934 for informal uniform wear. In 1946, ribbon bars were replaced by the current square knot insignia.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Silver Buffalo Award” is distinguished service award of the Boy Scouts of America. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Silver, Buffalo and Award, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1925, 1934, 1946—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, Silver, Buffalo and Award is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “distinguished service award of the Boy Scouts of America” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7515877. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1925, 1934 and 1946.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Silver Buffalo Award”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Silver Buffalo Award primary sources, Silver Buffalo Award archive and Silver research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Silver Buffalo Award” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.