Hap Wilson - Grey Owl and Me: Stories From the Trail and Beyond

GREY OWL and ME

GREY OWL and ME

STORIES FROM THE TRAIL AND BEYOND

HAP WILSON

Illustrated by Hap Wilson and Ingrid Zschogner

Copyright Hap Wilson, 2010

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

Copy Editor: Allison Hirst
Design: Jennifer Scott
Printer: Webcom

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Wilson, Hap, 1951
Grey Owl and me : stories from the trail and beyond / by Hap Wilson ;
illustrated by Hap Wilson and Ingrid Zschogner.

Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-55488-732-3

1. Wilson, Hap, 1951-. 2. Outdoor life--Canada. 3. Grey Owl, 1888-1938. 4. Environmentalists--Canada--Biography.
5. Outfitters (Outdoor recreation)--Canada--Biography. 6. Park rangers--Canada--Biography. I. Zschogner, Ingrid II. Title.

GV191.52.W54A3 2010 796.5092 C2009-907449-4

1 2 3 4 5 14 13 12 11 10

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program, and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

J. Kirk Howard, President

Printed and bound in Canada.
www.dundurn.com

Front cover: (top) Grey Owl with beaver kit at Lake Ajawaan, Saskatchewan, circa 1930s. Courtesy of the Barry
Penhale Collection; (bottom) Hap Wilson. Photo by nine-year-old Alexa Wilson.

Back cover: Illustration by Ingrid Zschogner.

This book is dedicated to those who are unafraid
to paddle their canoe against the current,
and who have found humour in all adversity

TABLE OF CONTENTS

THE CANADIAN SHIELD.

Should you ask me, whence these stories

Whence this legends and traditions,

With the odor of the forest,

With the dew and damp of meadows,

With the curling smoke of wigwams,

With the rushing of great rivers,

With their frequent repetitions,

As a thunder of the mountains?

I should answer, I should tell you,

From the forests and the prairies,

From the land of the Ojibways,

From the land of the Dacotahs,

From the mountains, moors and fen-lands,

Where the heron, the Shuh-shuh-gah,

Feeds among the reeds and rushes.

I repeat them as I heard them

From the lips of Nawadaha,

The musician, the sweet singer.

Introduction to The Song of Hiawatha,

1855, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

GREY OWL:
SCOUNDREL OR CHAMPION?

Born September 18, 1888, in Hastings, England, Archibald Stansfield Belaney was the son of a teenage bride and a reprobate father. Raised by two strict aunts, Archie fantasized early on about the true identity of his parents. Intertwining his love of animals and his fascination with the Canadian Indian, young Archie created an imaginary lineage as the Mexican-born son of a Scots outdoorsman and an Apache mother.

Becoming increasingly restless, Archie immigrated to Canada in 1906, at age seventeen, to work as a clerk in a Toronto department store, and to be close to his beloved Indians. He soon took the train north and was taken in by Temiskaming guide and trapper Bill Guppy, who taught him many outdoor skills. Archie found work as a chore boy at one of Dan OConners lodges on Lake Temagami and befriended the Indians at Bear Island.

Archie was adopted by John Eguana, brother-in-law of Chief White Bear, and in 1910 married his niece Angele. He learned to speak Ojibwa phrases, and dropped his English accent. Armed with these newly acquired skills, Archie became adept at both trapping and guiding throughout the Temagami District.

Chief White Bear, Ned White Bear, and Michael Mathias were all great influences on Archie, teaching him the ways of the wilderness trail and how to paddle a canoe. Eguana called him the young owl who sits taking everything in. Archie liked the cognomen and implemented the name Grey Owl for himself.

Only a year later, starting to drink heavily and yearn for his freedom, Archie abandoned his wife and newborn daughter, Agnes, and headed to Biscotasing, where he worked as a forest ranger for the next four years. He took a common-law Mtis wife, Marie Gerard (191314), but she died of tuberculosis soon after giving birth to a son (Johnny). Archie led a troubled life in Bisco, often aggravating the authorities with his knifethrowing antics and heavy drinking.

In 1915 he joined the war effort as a sniper with the 13th Montreal Battalion, Black Watch infantry, and was shipped to France. He was wounded in the foot, and discharged with a disability pension. He had enlisted as unmarried, however, depriving his legal wife, Angele, of any government assistance.

In 1917 he married his childhood sweetheart, Ivy Holmes, to whom he had been reintroduced while recovering from his injuries at the home of his aunt in Hastings. Holmes divorced Archie after refusing to meet him in Canada.

When he returned to Canada, Archie continued to fine-tune his Indian lineage and characterizations by dying his hair and skin. Back in Temagami in 1925, he worked as a guide for Camp Keewaydin, once again taking up with Angele, who soon after had a second child, Flora.

Archie then met nineteen-year-old Gertrude Bernard, a Mattawa Iroquois who worked in the kitchen at Camp Wabikon. Archie Grey Owl was thirty-seven. Gertrude joined him on his trapping line in northern Quebec and talked him into changing his profession to writer/conservationist. Through her influence, Grey Owl began to think more deeply about the plight of the Canadian beaver and to publish his articles about wilderness life.