Grey Owl, as he is commonly known, was born Archibald Stansfeld Belaney on 18 September 1888 in Hastings, England, just down the road from the town of Battle, where William the Conqueror defeated King Harold at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Grey Owl was a popular writer, public speaker and conservationist. Though an Englishman, in the latter years of his life he passed as half-Indian, claiming he was born in Mexico, the son of a Scottish man and an Apache woman. With books, articles, films, and public appearances promoting wilderness conservation, he achieved fame in the 1930s, culminating in a Royal Command Performance at Buckingham Palace on 10 December 1937, when he lectured to King George VI and the young princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. He was always concerned about the vanishing Canadian wilderness and the need to protect what was left of it.
Archie was raised by his aunts and grandmother in Hastings, the family having deemed his mother and father unfit parents. A shy and awkward boy, he was fascinated by the Indigenous peoples of North America. He dreamed of one day living among the “Indians” in the Canadian wilderness. In pursuing his dream, Archie immigrated to Canada in 1906 at the age of 18. He first established himself as a woodsman and trapper, before rising to prominence as an author and lecturer many years later. He was at home in the Canadian bush and known as a skilled canoeist. Having himself renounced trapping, he was particularly concerned about the plight of the beaver, which by the 1920s had been trapped almost to extinction. He was renowned for his ability to befriend and live with beavers.
An important influence on Archie was his Algonquin-Mohawk companion, Gertrude Bernard, commonly known as Anahareo. Their meeting at Camp Wabikon on Lake Temagami in 1925 was the start of a tumultuous relationship that lasted until 1936. It was she who encouraged him to give up trapping and begin writing. His first success as a writer was the article “The Passing of the Last Frontier”, published in 1929 in the English magazine Country Life.
In January, 1931, Archie, now fully adopting the persona of Grey Owl, gave a sensational talk at the annual convention of the Canadian Forestry Association in Montreal. Dressed in native regalia, he spoke while the film The Beaver People ran in the background. In 1931 his first book, The Men of the Last Frontier, was published. Three more books would follow: Pilgrims of the Wild (1934), Sajo and the Beaver People (1935) and Tales of an Empty Cabin (1936).
Through his writings Archie became known to Parks Canada, which gave him a position as “caretaker of park animals”, first at Riding Mountain National Park in Manitoba and then at Prince Albert National Park in Saskatchewan. His views on wilderness conservation reached audiences beyond the borders of Canada, bringing attention to the over-exploitation of natural resources and the urgent need to develop respect for the wilderness.
Shortly after his death in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan on 13 April 1938, at the age of 49, Grey Owl’s real identity was revealed. Sadly, the Canada that Grey Owl so loved only remembers him now, if at all, as a “Pretendian”. But his message is as relevant today as it was in his time: You belong to Nature, not it to you.
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The North lost a good woodsman, one of its very best, when he passed on. And more men of the Grey Owl stamp are needed, urgently needed, if the animals, the birds, and the forests themselves are to be saved from destruction by commercial interests, by lumber companies who in these money-first-no-sentiment-in-business days would slash the heart out of every beauty spot between here and Hudson Bay.
Bill Guppy "The King of all Woodsmen"
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I am an Indian and have spent all my adult life in the woods, yet never have I met one who so sincerely loved and appreciated the wilderness as Grey Owl did.
Anahareo