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,