by Grey Owl
That you changed the title shows that you, at least, missed the entire point of the book. You still believe that man as such is pre-eminent, governs the powers of Nature. So he does, to a large extent, in civilization, but not on the Frontier, until that Frontier has been removed. He then moves forward, if you get me. I speak of Nature, not men; they are incidental, used to illustrate a point only.
Also Country Life had rewritten Belaney’s prose to be “less colourful,” as they said in their introduction, to Archie’s fury. For his next bestselling books, Archie left Country Life and went to another publisher, Lovat Dickson, a Canadian from Alberta who founded his own publishing house in London in 1932, and who became Belaney’s loyal friend, defender, and biographer, as well as his long-time publisher, first at Lovat Dickson & Thompson and then as the director of Macmillan and Company. Still, the original Country Life edition of The Men of the Last Frontier is a striking production, with endpapers reproducing Belaney’s sketches of Indian clothing and artifacts, and many photographs of the Canadian wilderness of the time, with descriptive captions by the author, the black-and-white snapshots of mountains and streams adding to the impression that the wilderness is indeed majestic, pristine, and doomed.
The Men of the Last Frontier is not really about men, beyond a few brief character sketches, and is not typical of the later Belaney. Nowhere in the book does the narrator pretend to be an Indian. He is rather our experienced and conscientious guide into the wild, pointing out to us, the tourist, what it is about the northern forest world that makes it worth saving. There is no “plot” per se. Each chapter gives us a locale to explore, or typical wilderness situations: getting lost in the woods, braving the winter, shooting treacherous rapids. Our guide can be amusing about his own personal failures roughing it in the bush, but there is also a grim, Scots, overarching gloom about the struggle to keep the natural world intact: “Side by side with the modern Canada there lies the last battle-ground in the long-drawn-out, bitter struggle between the primeval and civilization,” he warns. Civilization is “the fringe of burnt and lumbered wastes adjacent to the railroads,” and civilization is winning.
Retreating to the woods, the American Henry David Thoreau, almost a century earlier, meditated on the fate of nature, but his Walden is infused with the optimistic breath of American transcendentalism and ends with spring regenerating the land. Belaney is more the skeptical Canadian, although precise and poetic as Thoreau in his observations of nature: The North in winter is a moonscape where “the cold grips the land with the bite of chilled steel” and “trees crack in the frost like scattering rifle-fire.” He describes the northern lights, “swaying in a lambent, flickering horde to the tune of the unheard rhythm that rocks the universe.” Some of the literary vocabulary seems dated today: the forest as cathedral, the goblin dances of sprites, the Grim Spirit of the Silent North, et al. Also the recurring elegiac tone can seem all but Victorian, although laments for a nation are a time-honoured Canadian genre.
Also Canadian is the narrator’s immense sympathy with real animals. Grey Owl knows his beavers and respects their wildness. A British author might have dressed Miq and Maq up in little clothes and set them to tea; an American might symbolically hunt them down; the French would have them moralize in rhymed couplets. But Belaney reflects the reality of the natural world as experienced first-hand, in the tradition of the best Canadian nature writers, from Susanna Moodie, Anna Jameson, and Catharine Parr Traill to Roderick Haig-Brown, Ernest Thompson Seton (whom Belaney knew and admired), Sir Charles G.D. Roberts, and Farley Mowat. In the best sections of The Men of the Last Frontier — I’d pick anything with animals or Indians, or set in a canoe — Belaney’s prose is rich, accurate, fresh, and original: much as he may have hated his studies, he owed much to the Hastings Grammar School.
Grey Owl with his beloved beaver Jelly Roll at Prince Albert National Park in Saskatchewan.
The Indians flit through the book, amused, friendly, but often endowed with a mysterious otherness, as our guide notes the sobering presence of charred bear skulls and moose shoulder bones. Chapter 10, The Trail of Two Sunsets, is a thoughtful analysis of the condition of the modern Native, beginning with the flight into Canada from Custer’s Last Stand (“the ill-advised fiasco”). Belaney speaks with concern of a people he knows, his hunting companions, his friends; he talks considerately of their integrity and courage, but also acknowledges the “attendant degeneracy” of Indians adopting the white man’s ways, the struggles, the paradoxes of tribal life in an urban world. Although “left to his own devices in civilization the Indian is a child let loose in a house of terrors,” he remains “the freeman of a vast Continent, the First American.” Belaney praises the Native spiritual gift as an “almost Oriental mysticism” in a passage reminiscent of Seton’s somewhat over-the-top view of the “red-man” (a term Belaney disliked) as the spiritual heir to Socrates or Jesus. Nonetheless, The Men of the Last Frontier is not an “Indian book.” The tribes are a phenomenon of the vanishing frontier, like the lakes and woods: noble, splendid, but threatened. This first book is not part of the Wa-sha-quon-asin Native masquerade, and in fact was sweetly dedicated to his English aunt in Hastings.
As celebrity began to settle in on Belaney after this first book, he slowly became imprisoned by his Indian persona, pushing himself hard to stay in character and in costume, speaking mock-Ojibway, resorting to hair dye for the black pigtail and henna makeup for the (pale) face. Pony left him, fed up with his absences and drinking, and he impulsively married again, to a beautiful French-Canadian girl, but he never settled down. Travelling constantly, as if pursued by demons, Grey Owl experimented with film and made several excellent movies, documenting his life in the North but exhausting himself in a two-week-long film shoot of a canoe trip down the Mississagi River. He toured Canada. He toured America, theoretically the land of his birth. He toured England and got in trouble with the BBC for his blunt views on fox hunting. He met other celebrities and was welcomed by Governor General Lord Tweedsmuir, John Buchan, Canada’s other popular author. He knew royalty and made money: it seemed on the surface a rich and productive career, but he was living a lie. Fuelled by alcohol, he fought with his friends and was belligerent to strangers: about U.S. Customs, where the blue-eyed Indian was questioned keenly about his past, he ranted “I was the only true American on that ship.” Journalists were beginning to wonder about those pale eyes, his elegant prose style, his classical education. A man in a bar called him a fake. The Department of Indian Affairs in Canada began investigating his background.
Drained, ill, and alone, he at length retreated to the Ajawaan Lake cabin in Prince Albert National Park, Saskatchewan, where he died on April 13, 1938, at the appallingly young age of forty-nine. It was pneumonia, they said, but the man was simply used up. A few weeks later the North Bay Nugget, an Ontario newspaper, broke the story they had long been sitting on, exposing Belaney’s Anglo Sussex past. There was plenty of evidence, including that missing toe from the war years. Now the whole world knew the truth.
Today, some eighty years afterward, the Indian play-acting seems harmless, even admirable, and even at the time, Grey Owl was not pilloried. We were fooled, read the headlines, more amused than horrified. Whether a Scot or Ojibway or half-breed, he had written good books and entertained, and he was celebrating the Indian and the wilderness in an honest and popular way. He well served the beaver, he charmed the young, and brought a man of the wilderness into a Depression that needed a hero. His deception still fascinates, as in the recent book, Great Canadian Imposters (part of an “Amazing Stories” series). The Caucasian secret identity is also the key to the plot of Richard Attenborough’s 1999 movie Grey Owl, replete with stunning photography of the radiant Quebec woods and offering an idealized hero, pure of heart, word, and deed, but troubled within. A very white Pierce Brosnan, looking like Richard Nixon, enacts the hero, uncomfortable in pigtails and deerskins, pretending to be a white man pretending to be an Indian. The actress
playing Anahareo is forced to deliver lines like: “Why do I have to do the loving and leaving?” Everybody seems miscast, including the beavers.
Whatever its authenticity, Grey Owl’s Indian act filled a need of the day, which was also met by Pauline Johnson paddling her canoe and lecturing in beads (she had Mohawk blood but was hardly a Savage Princess), or Chief Buffalo-Child Long-Lance, of mixed blood from North Carolina, who outrageously played the Native chief in Alberta and got away with it. Ernest Thompson Seton’s Indian obsession led to the Woodcraft Movement and his college of Indian wisdom in New Mexico. There had been, through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a long tradition of Indian epics (Hiawatha), Indian operas (Natoma by Victor Herbert), novels (Ramona), classic photographs (Edward Curtis), Indian love calls (When I’m calling you — ooo — ooo), and a rich legacy of Hollywood westerns, all the way up to Little Big Man, A Man Called Horse, and Dances with Wolves.
A circular announcing Grey Owl’s lecture at Toronto’s Massey Hall in 1938.
It is probable that Belaney’s Cree and Ojibway friends knew all along that he was faking it, but why would they sabotage their champion? A lot of people — aunts, journalists, buddies, critics — suspected. What distinguishes Belaney now, and what saves him from being a period curiosity, is the work itself. His five books are solid literary achievements, quite readable, although not yet, scandalously, canonized as CanLit. His most popular titles — Pilgrims of the Wild, The Adventures of Sajo and Her Beaver People — sold well at the time and are still in print. He was an evocative prose stylist soaked in the English classics: The Men of the Last Frontier is buttressed with echoes and epigraphs from Robert Louis Stevenson, John Bunyan, the Bible, the Greeks, Lord Byron, Alfred Tennyson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. His life is a paradox. On one level he seemed driven to relive his own father’s sad biography, with the drinking, brawling, and abandoned families. By the end, Archie had acquired at least four wives, perhaps five, as well as several children. Yet somewhere along the way, wastrel Archie became a creative force in the world, a charismatic performer, and a writer with an important message.
We now, more than ever, have to heed his warning, delivered long before Greenpeace or Al Gore or PETA. Grey Owl forcefully reminds us that we are creatures of the natural world and cannot trifle with our environment. In this first book, he has no hopes that we will listen. The epilogue of The Men of the Last Frontier shows us a forlorn white man and an Indian, looking out over farms, foresters with axes, skylines, massed machinery, and smokestacks belching a “dark canopy” over all. Belaney tells us flatly that “all wild life is over.” This in 1931! What would he have made of today’s oil spills, melting glaciers, flash floods and forest fires, clear-cuttings, polluted waters, declining fish stocks, trashed oceans, climate change, poisonous greenhouse emissions, the scandal of our environmental indifference? Across the Alberta border, not far to the northwest of Grey Owl’s Prince Albert lakeside cabin, now stretch the black domains of the Athabasca Tar Sands.
“The Canadian romance of nature is over,” Grey Owl tells us long ago in his poetic and timely first book. Protect it, or lose it, he warns. We have done our utmost to lose it, but perhaps the time has finally come to attend to the message of this strange, self-destructive, deplorable, but somehow magnificent fake. It was Grey Owl’s gift to see both the darkness and the light in the probable fate of the natural world, and in this, his first book, The Vanishing Frontier (as it should have been called), he begins a lifelong argument to persuade us to look after our salvation as a species and as a planet, and to do it now.
Further Reading
The essential biography of Grey Owl is Donald B. Smith’s splendid From the Land of Shadows: The Making of Grey Owl (Western Producer Prairie Books, 1990) to which I am much indebted. It is in paperback (GreyStone, 1999) and is a must-read. For a good shorter version of the life, Jane Billinghurst’s Grey Owl: The Many Faces of Archie Belaney (GreyStone, 1999) is well worth a look. Lovat Dickson’s early biographies, Half-Breed (P. Davies, 1939) and Wilderness Man (Macmillan of Canada, 1973), are a bit dated but still enjoyable and informative, by the man who was Belaney’s publisher after Country Life and who knew him well. There is a wealth of other materials: a photography book of Grey Owl country, a prose poem, appreciative essays, memoirs, and several biographies.
Later books by Grey Owl after The Men of the Last Frontier include his entertaining bestseller Pilgrims of the Wild (Dundurn Voyageur Series, 2010), which dramatizes the beavers and includes a valuable biographical introduction by Michael Gnarowski. The Adventures of Sajo and Her Beaver People, long a children’s favourite in many editions, is nonetheless a satisfying read for adults. (The title is Sajo and the Beaver People in the United States.)
For the role of the Indian, Daniel Francis’s The Imaginary Indian: The Image of the Indian in Canadian Culture (Arsenal Pulp, 1992) is stimulating, as is Betty Keller’s account of the Mohawk princess, Pauline Johnson, Pauline (Douglas & McIntyre, 1981). Cheryl MacDonald’s Great Canadian Imposters (James Lorimer, 2009) is more scholarly than its title suggests and includes a short biography of Chief Leroy, as well.
Ernest Thompson Seton’s last chapter in The Book of Woodcraft and Indian Lore (Doubleday, 1921) offers a sixfold “Message” from Indian experience (as the prophet of outdoor life, the beautiful, the sacred) with comparisons of Native philosophy to the thought of Socrates and Jesus, among others: the cult of the idealized Indian at its most intense.
The Richard Attenborough movie Grey Owl (1999) is available on DVD. The photography is exceptional. I recommend Anahareo’s lively Devil in Deerskins (New Press, 1972), if it can be searched out. I met her at the book’s launch and found her alert and delightful company. My own Wilderness Writers (Clarke, Irwin, 1972) talks about animal-story writers. See also Margaret Atwood’s Survival (House of Anansi, 1972).
THE MEN OF
THE LAST FRONTIER
ORIGINAL PUBLISHER’S NOTE
The publisher feels that a short foreword is necessary in offering this book to the public.
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 Ojibways, and his proper legal style. He trekked, in his early twenties, into Canada and followed the life of a bush Indian, trapping, fire-ranging, and guiding. During the Great War, he enlisted in the 13th Montreal Battalion, became a sniper, and saw service in France. On his return he took up his old life as a trapper, but presently found his chief interest in the preservation of the beaver, which was on the verge of extinction, and his efforts in that direction have been recognized by the Canadian Government. He tried his hand at writing an article on Canadian Wildlife, and his letters to his publisher, from time to time, were so original, so full of the local colour of his surroundings, that, in 1929, the suggestion was made that he should write this book. Difficulties have been many, both for author and publisher. The book was written in many camps, often the author was a hundred miles from the nearest post office, and frequently weather conditions made any journey impossible. His MS., by no means always easy to follow, was further complicated by the fact that it had been typewritten by a French-Canadian who knew little English.
Among the pile of letters and MS. which, in the course of time, accumulated at the publishers, were several rough but extraordinarily vivid sketches drawn by the author in pencil on pages torn from an exercise book; one of these is reproduced here and others appear as the end papers of this book.
At Grey Owl’s own request, and because the publisher felt very strongly that much of the value of his work lies in its individuality, the editing of his MS. has been reduced to a minimum and alterations have only been made to clear possible ambiguities or where a phrase would have read to
o strangely. This will explain to any reader who may find the author’s language anywhere unnatural that the fault does not lie with Grey Owl.
Dedicated as a tribute to my aunt, whom I must thank for such
education that enables me to interpret into words the spirit of the forest, beautiful for all its underlying wildness
PROLOGUE
A deep slow-flowing river; silent, smooth as molten glass; on either bank a forest, dark, shadowy, and mysterious.
The face of Nature as it was since the Beginning; all creation down the eons of unmeasured time, brooding in ineffable calm, infinite majesty, and a breathless and unutterable silence.
So it has lain for countless ages, dreaming, dwelling on the memories of untold tales no longer remembered, wise with the wisdom of uncounted years of waiting.
Overhead an eagle manouevres in the eye of the sun, and in the shadows on the shore an otter lies asleep.
Far-off in midstream appears a tiny dot, growing larger and larger as it approaches, and presently a bark canoe, yellow as an autumn leaf; and floating as lightly, speeds by. The sun glints sharply at regular intervals on paddles swung with swift and tireless strokes, by six brown, high-featured savages. Eagle feathers bob in unison, copper-hued backs bend and sway, driving forward the fragile craft, high of prow and stern, with a leaping undulation that is the poetry of motion.
In the centre stands a white man, bedizened with the remnants of the lace and ruffles of the courts of Europe. His cheeks are hollow and his frame gaunt. His skin is streaked with blood from the bites of myriad flies, but he recks not of it; his burning gaze is fixed ahead: Westward, Westward, from whence the river flows.