Grey Owl: Champion of the Canadian Wilderness

Grey Owl feeds a baby beaver (Library and Archives Canada - e010792746)

In the early 20th century, a mistaken belief was widely accepted in colonial Canada - as in Australia - that the Aboriginal peoples were a dying race. One 17 year old lad from East Sussex did not go along with that view at all.

A young Archie Belaney (Library and Archives Canada - e010792747)

As soon as Archie Belaney could get away from the spinster aunts who had raised him, he crossed the ocean and journeyed 500km north from Toronto to an island in Lake Temagami where he was welcomed by the Ojibwe people. They taught him their ways - trapping, canoeing, how to survive the winter and to speak their language. Archie had found his spiritual home and later wrote that his native mentors had 'pulled back little by little the magic invisible veil of mystery from across the face of the forest, that I might learn its uttermost secrets.'

The longer Archie stayed in the North working as a fire ranger, trapper and guide, the more he grew to love the wilderness and the more closely he identified with its native inhabitants, marrying first an Ojibwe woman in 1910 and later pairing up with a feisty young Mohawk girl nicknamed Pony. He adopted the name Grey Owl, conferred the name Anahareo on Pony, began to braid and dye his hair black, and invented an alternative autobiography that included an Apache mother.

Adopting both the name and lifestyle, Grey Owl began to dress the part too (Library and Archives Canada - PA-122479)

He became incensed when hordes of newly arrived chancers were destroying the land by over-hunting and over-logging. Influenced by Anahareo's horror of cruelty, he allowed her to bring back two orphaned beaver kittens to rear by hand in their cabin. That was his road-to-Damascus moment and he made it his mission to save from possible extinction the beaver and other forest creatures. An enlightened National Parks Service of Canada supported him in setting up a beaver colony and in giving him a starring role in conservation films.

Grey Owl's passion for conservation lead to a celebrity status around the world (Library and Archives Canada - e010861686)

The books that Grey Owl wrote such as Men of the Last Frontier became bestsellers. The writings of this poacher-turned-gamekeeper have been described as love songs for the wilderness, and turned him into a celebrity.

Invited to give lectures around Britain, he felt that he must look the part, and dressed like a textbook Indian brave. Among his mesmerised audience in Leicester in 1936 sat the ten-year old David Attenborough, already fascinated by the animal kingdom, and his older brother Richard who six decades later would make a feature film Grey Owl. No doubt Archie's ego would have been flattered by the casting of Pierce Brosnan as Grey Owl (although the real stars are the beavers).

Grey Owl made it his mission to save the beaver and other forest creatures (Library and Archives Canada - e008300732)

It is telling that a small town journalist who had uncovered Archie's true origins chose not to unmask him because he knew it would undermine his valuable work for the environment.

The day after his premature death in 1938, Grey Owl's story was revealed as a hoax. Even if his assumed identity was a fantasy, his championing of the wilderness was passionate and genuine. Partly thanks to him, the magnificent forests and pristine waterways of northern Ontario and the rest of Canada still exist for adventurous travellers to explore.