Métis Beach was a summer resort destination for well-to-do anglophone families from Montreal, and Grey Owl’s first lecture attracted the attention of prominent Montrealers who arranged for him to appear in Montreal, an important early step in what was destined to become a meteoric career as iconic Native carrying the message of conservation and the preservation of natural ways and Native life.
In the last few years of a tragically foreshortened life, Grey Owl served as a poster figure for Canada’s National Parks, appearing in films and showing numerous visitors around Beaver Lodge, his log cabin on the lake in Prince Albert National Park in Saskatchewan, which would become his final resting place. He acted (perhaps self-appointed but nevertheless powerfully effective) as a spokesman for Native people, saying, “We each belong to our kind. Be proud to be an Indian. Remember the Indian has nothing to be ashamed of in his national history. Many useful things, articles of equipment, nature and travelling lore and much wisdom has been given by the Indians to the white race, even as the whites have given much to us.”
Towards the end, Grey Owl was swept up in a gruelling round of public speaking, always drawing packed halls, especially in England, where his message seemed to resonate with greatest effect. His books enjoyed an equal popularity, with Pilgrims of the Wild going into numerous printings. He appeared in large cities and smaller towns, frequently speaking to standing-room-only audiences, and was summoned to a command performance before the Royal Family at the end of which, bidding farewell to King George VI, Grey Owl said, “Goodbye, brother, I’ll be seeing you.” As his publisher, friend, and biographer Lovat Dickson would recount it, “They put a cross over his grave at Beaver Lodge in Saskatchewan. It bore two names, Archibald Stansfeld Belaney along one arm, and Grey Owl along the other. Years later the cross would be removed by the federal government, and another substituted, one which would simply say GREY OWL.”3 The rest, as the man said, “Is in the Book.”
Grey Owl and his beaver Jelly Roll starred in several films produced by the National Parks Board of Canada.
Notes
1. Hugh Eayrs (1894–1940) was the near-legendary head of the Canadian branch of the international publisher Macmillan. Somewhat similar to Grey Owl, Eayrs came to Canada from England at the age of eighteen and entered the service of the Macmillan Company of Canada, rising to become its head in 1921. He did much to promote Canadian literature and was a steadfast friend and supporter of Grey Owl.
2. J.C. Campbell, to whom Grey Owl dedicated Pilgrims of the Wild, was dispatched by James Harkin, the commissioner of National Parks, early in 1930 to Cabano, Quebec, to see Grey Owl and recruit him for Harkin’s long-standing policy of promoting wildlife and wilderness preservation. Campbell arranged for Grey Owl and his beavers to be filmed so as to make a vivid argument for conservation. This initiative was picked up by the public press, and soon newspaper articles began to appear about an “Indian” campaigning for the protection of the beaver. This helped greatly in the making of Grey Owl’s public persona, which succeeded so dramatically in his lecture tours and guaranteed the sale of his books.
3. Lovat Dickson (1902–1987) was born in Australia and educated at the University of Alberta before moving to England where he became part of the literary community in London, working as a writer and editor. In 1932 he founded his own publishing company and took on Grey Owl as one of his authors, a move that, as he tells it, made him a lot of money. He eventually joined Macmillan in London as an editor and wrote two biographical studies of Grey Owl, the first, Half-Breed in 1938, and the second, Wilderness Man in 1974.
The present text of Pilgrims of the Wild is based on the Laurentian Library paperback reprint version of the original edition published by Macmillan of Canada in 1934. Grey Owl had a reputation for being protective of the tone and style of his writing, and this has been essentially respected in this edition with the exception of minor corrections of spelling and usage that have been made silently in this instance. No attempt has been made to modernize anything in Grey Owl’s text to bring it up-to-date with contemporary sensibility. This applies in particular to the use of the word Indian. Grey Owl disliked the term Red Indian, which was in wide use in his time, and felt that it was too suggestive of the “dime novel and blood-and-thunder literature.”
Good wine needs no bush. This glowing narrative by my friend Grey Owl scarcely requires a word of mine to bid people run and read. To those in Canada who know merely the bare outline of Grey Owl’s achievement in our western country, his own story in detail of his magnificent work (the phrase is mine — he would disagree with it) will be sheer delight. To those beyond our borders it will come, I fancy, as a revelation alike of a character as lovable as he is unusual, and of sights and sounds and scenes which will entrance them. But his story will speak for itself.
I may be allowed to say one or two things, by way of explanation, of the narrative and the man who wrote it.
This is Grey Owl’s book. It appears between these covers precisely as he wrote it. His publishers in Toronto, London, and New York have suffered no hand to touch it. Written in the Wilderness (a capital W for you, Grey Owl!) he loves so well, in the time he could spare from his Little People and their care, it came, copied into typescript, to me. Grey Owl’s eye was on it, page by page, to watch that from pen and ink to typewritten copy no word, no phrase, even no slightest punctuation mark should have been introduced into what was, in every particular, his own story. “It may be doctored by nobody,” said Grey Owl. “It is to be published, if it is worth it, just as I wrote it. It is my work, good or bad, and nobody else’s. Nobody else is going to tamper with it.” He was, of course, quite right. To attempt to shape, to edit, to dress such a story as this in any way whatever, would result in robbing it of its simplicity and its beauty. Grey Owl wrote his own story. Nobody else could write it. Nobody else has written it. Nobody else may, in any way, seek to varnish it. This is to be said because all sorts of wild legends have grown up about him, about his first book, The Men of the Last Frontier, and about this, his second.
The, to me, delightful sketches which are reproduced in this volume are also Grey Owl’s own work.
I can think of few books more revealing of their writer than this. The very essence our Canadian hinterland is in these pages because Grey Owl is so completely of it, and one with it. All his years, but for the briefest of intervals, have been spent in his beloved Wilderness. He loves it with a deep and abiding love. Somehow it is part of him and he part of it. “The only way I can live happily,” he says, “is wandering over the face of the Wilderness.” He is almost missionary about it. Nothing delights him so much as to try to communicate to those who don’t know them at first hand something of his own affection for our forests and lakes and streams and those who dwell in them. He will forever be restless till every last one of us shall come to know for ourselves the loveliness which he knows. He would have us all be in truth “Pilgrims of the Wild.”
Grey Owl was born in 1888 of Scotch and Indian parentage. He went to England for a little, and returned to this side quickly thereafter, taking part in the Cobalt silver rush of 1905. He was then, as he has been ever since (but for the space of his war service), a canoeman and packer. He never forgets his great debt to the Ojibway Indians. He was still a youth when he was adopted into their tribe. It was they who named him Grey Owl because of his habit of nocturnal travelling. He learned their language. From them he derived his forest lore. He lived their nomadic life. Early becoming one of them, he feels that they are his people and that all he is and has he owes to them. They taught him to love Northern Ontario and to think of it as his homeland.