"Native's False Nobleman"

Macmillan of Canada had reissued Wilderness Man, the biography of Grey Owl which was first published in 1973. It was written by Lovat Dickson, Grey Owl's British publisher and his good friend, who was grieved to observe the calumny that was heaped upon Grey Owl when the public learned that he was not Indian.

Dickson, who died in 1987, regarded the fuss about Grey Owl's race as so much sensational trivia. As he said often: "Whether he was Indian or not is not important. The fact is that he tried to get recognition for the Indians, not as characters in western novels but as people who have special attributes which should be treasured throughout Canada. As such, Grey Owl was a walking symbol of the Canadian Indian."

Grey Owl was also the champion of the beaver and other animals and was internationally famous as a conservationist. During the last decade of his life he wrote voluminously for nature magazines on both sides of the Atlantic, and his half-dozen books became best sellers. Two of these, The Men of the Last Frontier, first published in 1931, and Tales of an Empty Cabin (1936) have been reissued in paperback by Macmillan at $5.95 each.

Grey Owl was born Archibald Belaney on Sept. 18, 1888, in his grandmother's house in Hastings, a resort town on the English Channel coast. His father, George Belaney, had found that running the family business was tiresome and went to the United States to find some easy money. He returned four years later with a young pregnant wife and disappeared again after the birth of his son whom he left in the charge of two maiden aunts.

His aunts wanted Archie to grow up as a proper middle class gentleman, but he had other interests. He was fascinated by North America and the American Indians whom he wished to emulate not as "noble redskins" but as people who had sensibly come to terms with their environment.

At an early age he came to regard the North American wilderness as his natural home and he read every book he could find about the Indian way of life. He started living like an Indian, making the most of the wooded areas around Hastings where he hunted and fished, prepared his food over an open fire, and slept under the stars as often as he could.

Such things understandably upset his aunts. They loved the boy but could not help but think that this obsession with Indians was at least unhealthy and could well be downright wicked.

Years later, when Belaney had become a famous writer, he tried to make amends by dedicating one of his books: "To an aunt to whom I must give credit for the education that enables me to interpret into appropriate words the spirit of the forest and the feelings of its inhabitants."

Belaney was in his 18th year when he arrived in Canada, stepping on shore at Halifax on April 6, 1906. Within four months he was in Northern Ontario where he worked as a trapper and a wilderness guide. He let his hair grow long, wore buckskins and blended perfectly with the other trappers in the region. At the outbreak of war in 1914 he joined the Canadian army and saw service in France, where he was seriously wounded and gassed.

On his return to Canada, he went through the ancient ritual of becoming a blood brother of the Ojibways and was given the name Grey Owl which he made internationally famous.

At this time, too, he was becoming uneasy about trapping. The war had left him with a revulsion to killing but he did not know how he could survive without trapping. He eventually found a way with the help of a young Mohawk woman whom he met in the summer of 1925 while she was working as a waitress at a lodge on Lake Temagami where he was a guide. Anahareo was 19 and he was 36, but the mutual recognition of kindred spirits was immediate. They were married in 1926.

In 1972, Anahareo published Devil in Buckskins, a delightfully frank account of her 12 years with Grey Owl, in which, among many other things, she tells how she helped Grey Owl overcome his fear of abandoning trapping. She took every opportunity to point out that many people would be eager to read his wildlife notes which he regularly compiled for his own use. She stressed that he could make as much money writing as he could by trapping. Grey Owl did not believe this, but he was forced to try when it became apparent that the beaver in Northern Ontario had been trapped almost to extinction. He admitted that he was astounded not only to find that people would pay for his writing, but also that so many would pay handsomely to hear him speak.

His lectures were much in demand, not only in Canada but also in the United States and overseas. After the publication in England of Pilgrims of the Wild in 1934, he made two lecture tours of the main British cities that were highly successful because, with his long hair, aquiline nose and beaded buckskin clothing he looked every inch a "noble redskin."

His second tour of England culminated in a command performance at Buckingham Palace where he captivated the Royal Family, especially the two young princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret.

Meanwhile, Grey Owl had also won the approval of the officials of Canada's National Parks system who appointed him a warden in Riding Mountain National Park in Manitoba. This meant establishing beaver colonies in the protected environs of the park and releasing mature young animals in the wild.

When he needed more space for this work, Grey Owl was transferred to the Prince Albert National Park in Saskatchewan. It was there that he died, in his 50th year, on April 13, 1938. The cause of death was given as "extreme exhaustion," which is believable when we learn that he had just returned from an extremely arduous lecture tour of the United States.

The day after his death, the popular outdoors columnist for the Toronto Star, Gregory Clark, revealed to an astonished world that Grey Owl did not have a drop of Indian blood in his veins. Clark assumed an attitude of righteous indignation, using such epithets as "dishonest schemer," "charlatan" and "cruel hoax," and he accused Grey Owl of not only deceiving the Canadian public but also of "shamelessly abusing the trust of the friendly Indian people."

Clark and all the other journalists who poured calumny on Grey Owl ignored the fact that Grey Owl had been adopted into the Ojibway nation in a day-long ceremony that was far more colorful than the tepid little ceremony by which immigrants are granted Canadian citizenship, but was every bit as significant. Anahareo maintains that Grey Owl never claimed to be a full-blooded Indian but went along with the publicity in order to get his message across. As she said: "I have never heard of anyone who actually though he could improve his status by pretending to be Indian."

The fact is that this great man, whose extraordinary genius was devoted to warning mankind that it can destroy its environment only at its peril, its environment only at its peril, will be remembered in history as Grey Owl. The books he left us are treasured as the works of Grey Owl. And his grave in the magnificent Prince Albert National Park is visited every year by pilgrims, many of whom were born after his death but revere him for his achievements.

His grave is adjacent to the beaver lodge built on Lake Ajamaan by Grey Owl and Anahareo which is preserved in their memory. His grave is marked by a simple wooden cross which bears the name Grey Owl and the dates 1888-1938.

Marcus Van Streen, of Brantford is a freelance writer.

There have been several times in the last five years, says Anahareo, widow of the famous naturalist Grey Owl, when she has felt "to hell with living." Her eyes are cloudy from cataracts, and her hands ache with the pain of arthritis.

And then, last November, Anahareo (accent on the last "a") started a campaign to save two pesky beaver. Only two, but the cause was a clarion call to everything she had stood for in the past, and her afflictions were forgotten on the spot. "I've got something to live for now," she declared at the time. "I can get my teeth into something - because I'm going to save those beaver."

The beaver had been accused of damaging trees and a wharf in the Kamloops, British Columbia suburb of Dallas. The beaver were causing the damage so they could build their lodge more efficiently, said the critics, who were all in favor of having the pair done away with. Nonsense, Anahareo replied; and in a flurry of letters to the Kamloops city council, the Kamloops News and other B.C. newspapers, she enlarged: "I'm appalled that the city council has given permission to trap the beaver on the Thompson River in Dallas... I strongly submit that killing these two beaver is not the humane answer... why close the door to the barn now? Leave the lodge till spring, the beaver then will move on their own accord, or the Fish and Wildlife department can step in and relocate them."

Thanks to Anahareo's letters and the support they provoked, the Kamloops council decided to withhold permission to trap the beaver, and when last sighted the pair was still there.

A tiny woman, Anahareo can be as scrappy as a heavyweight, and issues like the Kamloops beaver send her flying out of her corner punching. "She has run into the wind all her life; she is still bucking the wind," observes Dawn Richardson, the 47-year-old daughter of Grey Owl and Anahareo.

Anahareo's scrappiness is tempered by an unmistakable air of dignity. She hesitates to take any credit for the role she played in converting Grey Owl, a trapper, into a dedicated defender of wild life, but she was the little noticed spark that sent him spiralling to fame. Through his lectures and books on wildlife, Grey Owl brought to many a better understanding of the need to preserve our wilderness.

Only recently has Anahareo begun to come into her own. Last October the Paris based International League of Animal Rights admitted her into its Order of Nature - primarily for her influence on Grey Owl. She is only the second person so honored by the league. The first was Dr. Albert Schweitzer, the humanitarian, and he received his honor posthumously.

Born in Mattawa, Ontario in 1906, Anahareo is a direct descendant of Iroquois chiefs. At the age of 4 she lost her mother to tuberculosis. Shaken by his wife's death, her father shuttled her sister and two brothers off to other relatives. Anahareo was given to her 95-year-old "Big Grandma." "She took the devil out of me," Anahareo grins. She also gave her granddaughter her first lesson in Indian history and in how to tell right from wrong and why. But by the time Big Grandma was 99 and Anahareo was 9, a shrewish aunt and her family had moved in. To counteract her aunt's domineering ways, Anahareo's devil returned. Often she would crawl out of her bedroom window and escape for a day in the woods. She still laughs when she remembers the time her uncle caught her playing hooky. "He was 6-foot-4 - big and mad and coming at me." Not knowing what was going to happen next, she grabbed a nearby axe and flung it at him, screaming, "You big, black s.o.b.!"

Eventually her father gathered his wayward daughter and the rest of his brood under one roof. To fill her youthful summers. Anahareo worked as a helper at various resorts. In the summer of 1925, when she was 19, she met the 36-year-old Grey Owl, a tall, long-haired, buckskin-clad guide, at a resort on Lake Temagami in Ontario. She fell in love with him at once, an he in turn was captivated by the beauty of the young Mohawk girl.

"There was always something extraordinary about him," she remembers. "He didn't compare at all to the other men I knew." Although his teasing manner could leave her flustered and angry, she accepted his invitation to join him on his trapline near Forsythe, Quebec. Their stormy courtship culminated in marriage in 1926 under the blessing of a Lac Simon Indian chief.

A trapper's life in the bush, she soon found out, was tough. Snowshoeing 40 miles a day and struggling to haul - with a leather tumpline slung around her head - loads of 100 pounds and more were part of her new life. So was the hand-to-mouth existence. "We were broke most of the time, but I felt a terrible love for him," she remembers.

There were times when Anahareo must have driven her husband close to distraction. She would think nothing of standing up in a fully loaded canoe, which Grey Owl couldn't understand, and she would chat and laugh on the trail, which he couldn't stand. "I don't know how he took it," she once confined to Dawn, their daughter. "I did so many stupid things," But his maturity counter-balanced her impulsiveness, and the hardships they tackled served to strengthen their relationship.

Beneath her cheerful naivete, however, undercurrents seethed. Love wasn't enough to hide the revulsion she felt toward his trapping. While he was apathetic to the suffering animals, she openly revealed her anguish; sometimes she criticized him to his face.

"I figured it was the animal in him," she says now. Nevertheless, to please him, she, too, took up trapping. After all, it was his life and their business.

But in March 1928, a starving lynx that had gnawed its flesh in a hopeless effort to free itself made Anahareo swear off trapping for good. As Grey Owl explained in his 1935 book, Pilgrims of the Wild, his own conversion was slow, "fraught with many mental upheavals and self-examinations." And he gave his wife credit for making him come to grips with "my woeful shortcomings." Her agony over each death forced him to get a "clearer vision" of their lifestyle. His turning point came later that spring when she rescued two beaver kittens, McGinnis and McGinty, whose mother Grey Owl had trapped. His general indifference finally crumbled when McGinnis affectionately staked a claim on him. he gave up trapping forthwith.

Thus deprived of their livelihood, they were at times near starvation. Grey Owl's meagre pension cheques from World War 1 and the goodwill of storekeepers in extending credit barely kept them afloat. In the fall of 1928 they moved near Cabano, Quebec, determined to increase the beaver population that they had for two years done their best to deplete.

Later that year, angered by an inaccurate article on wolves in a naturalist magazine, Grey Owl began writing from his vast knowledge of the wilderness. In 1930, the federal government took notice and offered him a job as a naturalist in Manitoba's Riding Mountain National Park. The park was unsuitable for raising a beaver colony, so the government assisted in relocating Grey Owl and Anahareo to Ajawaan Lake in Saskatchewan's Prince Albert National Park.

The birth of Dawn in 1932 was one of the highlights of their lives. The feisty Anahareo wasn't so happy with Grey Owl's constant writing. "It was like living with a zombie," she says. The zombie was grinding out classics like Pilgrims of the Wild and The Beaver People.

Monotony set in. No more exciting days on the trail; no new challenges to conquer. Bored and restless, Anahareo packed up, took Dawn, and visited Prince Albert. In the spring of 1934, driven by a desire to strike it rich prospecting, Anahareo left Dawn with friends, loaded up a 16-foot canoe, charged $900 in supplies, and headed up the Churchill River. For a year and a half she tramped and paddled over 600 often treacherous miles, sometimes sick and always lonely. "I had to go," she says, then adds quietly, "but you don't leave you child like that."

Grey Owl, tied down to the beaver colony and his writing, was angry at first, then envious. "For a week after I heard you had gone I was all worked up," he wrote her. "It stirred the old bush fever up so bad, I could not sleep and hardly was able to eat."

His books and articles, capturing worldwide attention, took him on a lecture tour of England in 1935. The binding adventures they once shared were gone; her vitality and youth strained to be free for good. After 11 years together, they parted friends in November 1936. On April 13, 1938, Grey Owl died from a combination of pneumonia and exhaustion from his celebrity tours. The last person he called for was Anahareo.

The next day, scandal erupted in the English press, Grey Owl, the famous Indian naturalist, was really an Englishman. In truth, Archie Belaney had come to Canada to forget his origins and had made himself as much like an Indian as possible. The Ojibwa had named him Wa-Sha-Quon-Asin, "he who walks by night," or Grey Owl.

Anahareo, accepting him at face value on their first meeting, knew nothing of his English past. "To me, he was an Indian, and one of the best men I had ever met."

In 1939, she married Eric Moltke Huitfeldt, a Swedish count. They had a daughter, Katherine, and later moved to Calgary, then Canmore, where Eric worked in the construction trade. Except for the occasional school lecture or TV appearance (admonishing women of the "real cost" of their fur coats - the trapped animals' suffering), Anahareo faded into obscurity. When Eric died in 1963, she moved closer to her daughters in B.C., then settled in Kamloops. She lives in a modest trailer, and the only bush she ever sees is 26 miles away, at Dawn's home.