The Men of the Last Frontier. Grey Evil Owl

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