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  VOYAGEUR CLASSICS

  BOOKS THAT EXPLORE CANADA

  THE MEN

  OF THE LAST

  FRONTIER

  GREY OWL

  INTRODUCTION BY JAMES POLK

  Copyright © Dundurn Press, 2011

  Introduction copyright © James Polk, 2011

  Originally published by Country Life Limited in 1931.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

  Project Editor: Michael Carroll

  Copy Editor: Matt Baker

  Design: Jesse Hooper

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Grey Owl, 1888-1938

  The men of the last frontier / by Grey Owl ; introduction

  by James Polk.

  Also available in electronic format.

  ISBN 978-1-55488-804-7

  1. Canada, Northern--Description and travel. 2. Canada,

  Western--Description and travel. 3. Natural history--Canada.

  4. Frontier and pioneer life--Canada. 5. Indians of North America--

  Canada. I. Title.

  QL791.G7 2010 917.19 C2010-902301-3

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and Livres Canada Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program, and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

  Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

  J. Kirk Howard, President

  Printed and bound in Canada.

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  In the amphitheatre of the dusky hills, where is silence, unbroken and absolute, a hush that has held sway since time began …

  INTRODUCTION

  BY JAMES POLK

  Published in 1931, The Men of the Last Frontier was Grey Owl’s first book, the kickoff to an unparalleled international career as a Native celebrity, a bestselling writer, and a popular lecturer on preserving the wilderness. On December 10, 1937, a mere six years after his first book, he reached the top, invited to speak to King George VI, Queen Elizabeth, and the two princesses in a private audience at Buckingham Palace. This command performance lasted three hours and concluded with the world’s most celebrated First Nations figure shaking hands with the king, calling him “Brother,” and wishing him luck.

  The Men of the Last Frontier was welcomed by almost everyone in a Depression-weary Britain. As London’s Times rhapsodized: “It is difficult to recall any record of the great North so brilliantly and lovingly handled.” The surprised and surprising publisher was the upmarket and tweedy British magazine Country Life, which, in a ham-fisted introduction to the first edition, seems to be nervous about inflicting a wild Canadian onto civilized readers. If Grey Owl’s language seems “unnatural,” the editors warn, “the manuscript has not been easy to follow,” and one must remember that it was produced in bad-weather conditions and “typewritten by a French-Canadian who knew little English.”

  It should be explained that the author is a half-breed Indian, whose name has recently become known throughout the English-speaking world. His father was a Scot, his mother an Apache Indian of New Mexico, and he was born somewhere near the Rio Grande forty odd years ago. Grey Owl is the translation of his Red Indian name, given to him
when he became a blood brother of the Ojibway, and his proper legal style.

  A drawing by Grey Owl from the original Country Life edition of The Men of the Last Frontier.

  Almost none of the above information is true, although supplied by the author himself. Grey Owl’s father was indeed of Scottish descent, but his mother, Katherine (Kittie), was never an “Apache Indian.” Instead, she was a shy, fifteen-year old English barmaid. The author was not born “somewhere near the Rio Grande” but several thousand miles away in the prim seaside resort town of Hastings, Sussex, on the English Channel. Grey Owl’s real name was Archibald Stansfeld Belaney, he had enjoyed a privileged British upbringing, and possessed not one drop of aboriginal blood.

  George Belaney had been the dissolute black sheep of a respectable line of Scottish farmers and businessmen, a feckless drunk who, very soon after his son’s birth, skipped out on the young mother and fled to the colonies, much to the family’s relief. Tall, handsome, clever, and alcoholic, George had already abandoned one family before Archie and Kittie, after passing his younger days squandering the family fortune. He apparently was to die later in a bar brawl in the United States, and was never a U.S. Army scout in the West — another of his son’s fantasies. Kittie Belaney, the teenage mother, unskilled and impoverished, gratefully gave up Archie to the care of his aunts, Carrie and Ada, who had been horrified at the wastrel example of their brother. There had been men of distinction in the family, notably a cleric who had written on animals and against vivisection. (There had also been a doctor charged with poisoning his wife.) The aunts clothed Archie in gloves and an Eton suit; they looked after his education in a good school; they indulged his interest in bringing home animals — snakes, birds, hares — in the hope that he might grow up to be a scientist and not take after Dad. It did not quite work out that way.

  In old photographs, Archie looks the very picture of a starched Victorian schoolboy, but he was not much interested in his good school, or church attendance, or even friends and games. Instead, he preferred to live on fantasies of adventure, of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Shows and other current mythologies of the Far West: Hiawatha, James Fenimore Cooper. Throughout adolescence it seems that young Belaney, abandoned by his father and mother, grew into a loner who preferred the woods and his animal pets to sporting with chums — unless it was playing at Red Indians, which in some sense he did for the rest of his life. He left school before graduation, and after a failure clerking at a local lumberyard, began pestering his aunts to let him go to Canada. Always persuasive with women, Archie was allowed to go, and at seventeen, arrived in Canada in 1906, eager for northern derring-do and finding instead Toronto, then a no-nonsense, mercantile city of five hundred thousand hard-working souls.

  For a time, Archie sold men’s haberdashery at Eaton’s Department Stores, marking time until he could head to the wilderness, to Cobalt, Ontario, where a silver mine was opening up dreams of wealth and employment to many Canadians. Jobs and money were not at all the stuff of Belaney’s dreams: instead, he found what he wanted: the forest primeval, where Native people flourished in the pine-scented fresh air among savage rocks and pure lakes. He picked up some work around the camps to get along and learned the fur trapper’s trade, but preferred to spend time with his newfound Ojibway friends, drinking too much and getting into fights. He even began learning some of the Ojibway language, if, it appears, quite imperfectly. The Indians seem to have put up with him. He married a lovely young Ojibway girl, Angèle, and there was a child, and then two children. Then Archie abandoned his whole young family, moving on — his father’s son, after all.

  With the Great War, a restless Belaney enlisted; first, apparently, in Montreal (he immediately deserted, he later said) and then more definitively in Halifax, where he joined the 13th Battalion of the Royal Highlanders of Canada — later to be the Canadian Black Watch. He served briefly in France but got shot in the foot, a war wound that sent him back to an English hospital and recovery from an amputated toe. At home in Hastings the aunts were attentive, but it seemed as if life had come full circle, back to dreary civilization, with its small lives and little glory. He married an English rose named Ivy without bothering to mention his Native wife or the children, then took off alone for Canada, promising to send for his bride when things got settled. Ivy waited in Sussex for four years, by which time her wandering husband had written, confessing bigamy, whereupon she, sensible English girl, sued for divorce. Archie did not contest.

  Rootless in Canada, mostly jobless, Archie spent much time around Biscotasing and other rough Northern Ontario towns, trapping, drinking, and brawling; but also entertaining the gang with his tall tales and his alleged “ancient Indian songs,” made up on the spot. He was beginning to dress like an Indian, and with his long Scots Belaney face, his shiny black hair braided in pigtails, his patrician hawk nose, his complexion duly tanned, the buckskin fringe and the moccasins and feathers, he could and did pass. He created an Indian name, Wa-sha-quon-asin, which he said meant “Grey Owl” in Ojibway. (Linguists suggest instead that it’s “White Shining Beak.”) “He Who Walks by Night” was another preferred nickname: we are not far here from Fenimore Cooper and the Boys’ Own Annual. Playing the Red Indian, Belaney could be insulting and snappish with uppity whites. He was fast becoming a local character, a faux-Indian wreck.

  Nobody around Bisco would have believed that in twelve years “Archie Grey Owl” would be revered everywhere as a famous author, friend to the beaver and the Indian, preaching the gospel of the great wilderness to the king and queen of Britain. How did it happen?

  Grey Owl in full First Nations regalia in Niagara Falls, Ontario, in July 1937.

  Grey Owl’s salvation, as he later acknowledged, was a young, frisky, and beautiful waitress named Gertrude Bernard, by far the most appealing figure in Belaney’s wayward biography. She was nineteen years old and at least partially Indian: Iroquois, with a Mohawk grandmother, despite her stout Anglo name, but Grey Owl soon changed “Gertie” to Anahareo, another quasi-Native manufacture. She stuck with her own nickname, Pony, and with common sense and strength of character somehow managed to transform Archie, slowly, at age thirty-six, from a colourful northern screw-up into a wilderness hero, writer, and performer. At first Anahareo went fur trapping with Archie, but the iron jaws of the traps, the agonies of the ensnared prey, disturbed her deeply. She played upon Archie’s feelings for animals and his concern for the beaver, which was then being overhunted. In The Men of the Last Frontier, Grey Owl defends the cruelty of trapping: since animals are naturally cruel to one another, they deserve the cruelty of the trap, he says. One can imagine Anahareo’s response to this. Such weak solipsism vanishes by the later chapters when the couple finds and adopts the beaver kits who are too cute not to live and who will become prototypes for the classic characters in Belaney’s later The Adventures of Sajo and Her Beaver People.

  Trapping had become abhorrent to both of them, and in fact it was now illegal for Archie, given a new Ontario rule that only genuine status Indians could set traps. Drifting around the north, the couple with their beaver pets moved into Quebec, all the way eastward to the New Brunswick border, living in tents and off the land, and somehow making do. With the wolf at the door and Pony’s promptings, Archie began writing stories and articles about the wilderness, and later, at Métis Beach, on Quebec’s St. Lawrence River, a resort town for English Montrealers, he drummed up the courage to lecture in Indian gear on his experiences, albeit desperate and petrified. (Public speaking made him feel, he said, like “a snake who had swallowed an icicle.”) The tourists loved him. The beaver kits were adorable, and their handler was a gifted storyteller who looked like everyone’s fantasy Indian: tall and hatchet-faced, in moccasins, braids, and occasionally even a feathered (Plains Indian) war bonnet. If we can now detect the Scottish genes writ large in his long, dour face and blue eyes, he convinced many, who saw what they wanted to see: a Noble Savage turning gracefully in his beads and fringe, J-strok
ing a canoe packed with a fat beaver.

  Left to right: Unidentified person, Grey Owl, Anahareo, and Sir Charles G.D. Roberts at Riding Mountain National Park in Manitoba in the fall of 1931.

  The Métis Beach lectures and the magazine articles became the genesis of The Men of the Last Frontier, and the entire Quebec episode marks the turn in Belaney’s fortunes. He attracted a sponsor, Harry Spence from Montreal, who promised financial support for further sustained writing. His local fame inspired a Canada’s Parks Branch commissioner to think about showcasing this eloquent Indian for publicity purposes, as a conservationist and tourist attraction in the newly created Riding Mountain National Park in Manitoba. Thus Belaney was suddenly offered a Parks job, salaried and stable, manna from heaven in Depression Canada, 1931. As the Montreal Star noted, Grey Owl “clearly knows the ways of both the white and red man,” which was true enough, and moreover “has a vocabulary that would put many of his paleface brethren to shame.”

  The fledgling writer sent much of his early work to Country Life, a magazine he no doubt remembered from his Hastings childhood, and a curious choice for nature writing. However, the magazine’s posh readers devoured the articles about pines and breezes and pure lakes in a threatened northern paradise, and wanted more. With promises of book publication, cheques in the mail, the beneficence of National Parks, and contented beavers slapping their tails on the lake, Grey Owl buckled down to assemble a long piece. Anahareo restlessly came and went, shut out, as she loudly and often complained, by his absorption in paper and pen. Finally, at age forty-three, wild, hard-drinking man of the woods Archie Belaney put together The Men of the Last Frontier, his long, beautifully written meditation on Canadian nature, with its prophetic warning about the dangers of civilization: the trappers, developers, miners, railways, and woodcutters that threatened our last Eden.

  Ever consistent in its meddling, Country Life decided to change Archie’s original title, The Vanishing Frontier, without bothering to inform the author. The author was not best pleased, as he wrote the publisher: