The First World War swept Archie up into the Canadian army where he was happy to serve as a humble infantryman until a leg wound saw him returned to England to convalesce not far from where he was born. Archie reconnected with his family, seeing his aunts and his younger brother, Hugh, and a childhood friend, Ivy Holmes, whom he would marry in February 1917. He underwent the final stages of therapy for his war wound in the ensuing months, and the couple decided that he would return to Canada to set things up for them and that Ivy would follow. Archie sailed for what had become his true home in September of that year. Ivy waited for almost four years before learning in a letter from Archie that he had a previous marriage. She filed for divorce on the grounds of bigamy in 1921.
Invalided out of the army because of his injuries, and having returned to his Native friends, Archie had resumed his earlier life of trapping, packing, and guiding, all skills at which he had become remarkably proficient. He was an expert shot with a rifle, something that had served him well in the war, was also equally impressive at knife throwing, and had a reputation as a hard-drinking troublemaker who would, on at least one occasion, have to make himself scarce for fear of being arrested for causing a disturbance. But, notwithstanding the boisterous, even wild life of a wilderness man, Archie had been nursing his private desires to become a writer. At least one friend of the period shortly before the First World War recalled that Archie had confessed the wish to become a writer, and had even read passages that he had jotted down. One of the ironies of all this was the fact that Archie was someone who had put maximum effort into becoming an “unlettered” child of nature, albeit given to his own brand of storytelling and yarn-spinning. He had all the charm of a folksy literacy that served to conceal a sound education in a good English grammar school and a well-read upbringing at the hands of a particularly determined aunt — in short a background that would help to make him somewhat at ease in the sophisticated world of critics, publishers, public lectures, and literary readings. A newspaper piece on Grey Owl published some forty years after his death quipped, tongue-in-cheek, that Grey Owl spoke good English for an Ojibway. When he began to write, the mask of a simple wilderness man fell away and echoes of, and references to, Shakespeare, Longfellow, Bunyan, Emerson, and others betrayed the true cultural antecedents of this unassuming and self-imagined “Indian.”
When Pilgrims of the Wild was published by Hugh Eayrs at Macmillan in 1934, Grey Owl had already established himself as a successful writer whose earlier work had impressed British and American critics with “the power this unknown Indian had at conjuring up the reality and excitement of life in the woods.”1 But the tales he told, first in The Men of the Last Frontier (1931), and would later tell in Tales of an Empty Cabin (1936), were, eventually, supportive material that had grown out of the amazingly successful lecture tours (most so in England) that had made Grey Owl’s name and international reputation. Pilgrims of the Wild came in the middle of the six-year-plus span that embodied his career as writer, lecturer, wilderness icon, and conservationist-in-residence at Riding Mountain and Prince Albert National Parks in the Canadian Prairies. The conservationist potential of Grey Owl had caught the eye of Canadian government agencies, national railways, and forestry associations. Grey Owl’s early attempts at writing had appealed to the editors of the prestigious British publication Country Life and had found favour with the publishers of Canadian Forest and Outdoors, for which he had produced a goodly number of short articles, writing for them almost until his last days.
Pilgrims of the Wild is, however, a special and very different kind of writing. Usually identified in reference works as an autobiography, it is, in truth, more of an autobiographical reflection on only part of Grey Owl’s life, and is concerned in its modest echoes of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress with the story of a quest that had grown out of a realization that the unbridled exploitation of nature for crass profit would spell disaster for humanity. In that sense, and viewed from today’s experience and perspective, Grey Owl was stunningly prescient. The Canadian government, or more exactly its agency then known as National Parks of Canada, had twigged to the value of Grey Owl’s message and had co-opted him to its policies of promoting and protecting wilderness areas. Using Grey Owl’s special interest in saving the beaver from extinction, the Parks people made his efforts part of their official goal of preserving wildlife for the benefit of tourism and recreational fishing and hunting.2
Grey Owl often had whiskey jacks descend upon him in search of food.
The key person who emerges at this point in Grey Owl’s life is a young Iroquois girl, Gertrude Bernard, who hailed from Mattawa, Ontario, and whom Grey Owl had met when she was working as a waitress at a lodge on Lake Temagami. She was nineteen and Grey Owl was thirty-six. It was a short but intense courtship, with Gertrude sufficiently captivated by the tall, enigmatic individual who was as adept with his canoe as he was at playing the piano in the hotel that she became his companion and followed him on his trapline. Many years later she would tell her own story in My Life with Grey Owl (1940), published as Devil in Deerskins in 1972.
Undoubtedly, Gertrude was a pivotal presence at a critical stage of Grey Owl’s life who, feeling that Gertrude Bernard was somehow too ordinary-sounding and, very likely, not “Indian” enough, fashioned a name for her out of her ancestry among Mohawk chiefs on the reserve near Montreal, which the Bernard family had left, giving up their Native status as a result. Thus, Grey Owl compounded the name Anahareo by which Gertrude became known. As she tells it in the story of her life with Grey Owl, it was due to her that Grey Owl spared the lives of two beaver kittens whose mother had been caught in one of his traps. The two baby beavers, barely weaned and destined to be named McGinnis and McGinty, played a crucial role in converting Grey Owl from an animal-trapping, fur-skinning wilderness man to a beaver-protecting conservationist cum naturalist delivering his message on the world stage. This is the personal pilgrimage, the story of how it all came about, that is at the core of the narrative of Pilgrims of the Wild. Clearly, for Grey Owl, the process of growing into a committed environmentalist became a near-religious experience — from the large theme of conversion, to the slough of despond, to abandonment and loss, to the emergence on the bright highlands of achievement — that had profound and devotional meaning.
The beginnings of Grey Owl’s public career are almost laughably modest. Somewhat at loose ends, faced with a major decline in animal life in his familiar territory, and having given up on his life as trapper and guide, Grey Owl, Anahareo, and the two orphaned beavers drifted towards a remote and thinly settled area of Quebec some two hundred miles east of Quebec City and tucked into a corner almost on the border with New Brunswick. It was Lake Temiscouato that beckoned them, but more specifically Lake Touladi and the tiny settlement of Cabano where they were viewed with not unkind curiosity as les sauvages. By then Grey Owl’s outward appearance was very much that of a real Native and certainly not that of the theatrical Hollywood “Indian” that became the stock-in-trade of his public appearances on the lecture circuit. Nor were his circumstances anything like the celebrity status he was destined to enjoy a few years later. Eric McLean, a columnist writing for Montreal’s Gazette on October 2, 1988, some fifty years after Grey Owl’s death, left a vivid account of the man’s first public appearance. He wrote: “Then I met Grey Owl, or Wa-sha-quon-asin, to give him his Ojibway name, I was about 10 years old at the time, and he and his wife, Anahareo, were earning a bit of money as dishwashers in one of the summer hotels at Métis Beach on the Gaspé.” A little further on in his article McLean gave us an eyewitness account of what must have been Grey Owl’s very first public lecture. McLean recollected:
Anahareo poses with a beaver kitten that she and Grey Owl had adopted.
They had cleared out the dining room to seat a large audience, and Grey Owl and his wife stood behind a table at one end. He talked in a low, quiet voice (he expressed himself very well in English), walking slowly back and forth like an animal in the bush. I can still remember his hair drawn back in two long queues that framed his gaunt, lined face,