Читать книгу The Men of the Last Frontier - Grey Evil Owl - Страница 6

Оглавление

In the amphitheatre of the dusky hills, where is silence, unbroken and absolute, a hush that has held sway since time began …

INTRODUCTION

BY JAMES POLK

Published in 1931, The Men of the Last Frontier was Grey Owl’s first book, the kickoff to an unparalleled international career as a Native celebrity, a bestselling writer, and a popular lecturer on preserving the wilderness. On December 10, 1937, a mere six years after his first book, he reached the top, invited to speak to King George VI, Queen Elizabeth, and the two princesses in a private audience at Buckingham Palace. This command performance lasted three hours and concluded with the world’s most celebrated First Nations figure shaking hands with the king, calling him “Brother,” and wishing him luck.

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, given a new Ontario rule that only genuine status Indians could set traps. Drifting around the north, the couple with their beaver pets moved into Quebec, all the way eastward to the New Brunswick border, living in tents and off the land, and somehow making do. With the wolf at the door and Pony’s promptings, Archie began writing stories and articles about the wilderness, and later, at Métis Beach, on Quebec’s St. Lawrence River, a resort town for English Montrealers, he drummed up the courage to lecture in Indian gear on his experiences, albeit desperate and petrified. (Public speaking made him feel, he said, like “a snake who had swallowed an icicle.”) The tourists loved him. The beaver kits were adorable, and their handler was a gifted storyteller who looked like everyone’s fantasy Indian: tall and hatchet-faced, in moccasins, braids, and occasionally even a feathered (Plains Indian) war bonnet. If we can now detect the Scottish genes writ large in his long, dour face and blue eyes, he convinced many, who saw what they wanted to see: a Noble Savage turning gracefully in his beads and fringe, J-stroking a canoe packed with a fat beaver.

Left to right: Unidentified person, Grey Owl, Anahareo, and Sir Charles G.D. Roberts at Riding Mountain National Park in Manitoba in the fall of 1931.

The Métis Beach lectures and the magazine articles became the genesis of The Men of the Last Frontier, and the entire Quebec episode marks the turn in Belaney’s fortunes. He attracted a sponsor, Harry Spence from Montreal, who promised financial support for further sustained writing. His local fame inspired a Canada’s Parks Branch commissioner to think about showcasing this eloquent Indian for publicity purposes, as a conservationist and tourist attraction in the newly created Riding Mountain National Park in Manitoba. Thus Belaney was suddenly offered a Parks job, salaried and stable, manna from heaven in Depression Canada, 1931. As the Montreal Star noted, Grey Owl “clearly knows the ways of both the white and red man,” which was true enough, and moreover “has a vocabulary that would put many of his paleface brethren to shame.”

The fledgling writer sent much of his early work to Country Life, a magazine he no doubt remembered from his Hastings childhood, and a curious choice for nature writing. However, the magazine’s posh readers devoured the articles about pines and breezes and pure lakes in a threatened northern paradise, and wanted more. With promises of book publication, cheques in the mail, the beneficence of National Parks, and contented beavers slapping their tails on the lake, Grey Owl buckled down to assemble a long piece. Anahareo restlessly came and went, shut out, as she loudly and often complained, by his absorption in paper and pen. Finally, at age forty-three, wild, hard-drinking man of the woods Archie Belaney put together The Men of the Last Frontier, his long, beautifully written meditation on Canadian nature, with its prophetic warning about the dangers of civilization: the trappers, developers, miners, railways, and woodcutters that threatened our last Eden.

Ever consistent in its meddling, Country Life decided to change Archie’s original title, The Vanishing Frontier, without bothering to inform the author. The author was not best pleased, as he wrote the publisher:

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.