Grey Owl and his life in Temagami
By Doug Mackey, North Bay Nugget newspaper
August 11, 2000
Guests at Dan O'Connor's Temagami Inn on Lake Temagami in the summer of 1907 would hardly have noticed a teenage chore boy named Archie Belaney who had recently arrived from Hastings, England.
Twenty-five years later he was Canada and the Commonwealth's best known writer, lecturer and conservationist and had transformed himself into his new persona, Grey Owl.
In 1999 $40-million dollar film on his life was produced.
Grey Owl's writing is still in print and numerous biographies and articles have been written about him, including two long books in the 1970s when his books were reprinted as a part of the new conservation movement.
By far the best biography is that of Donald B. Smith, a professor at the university of Calgary who studied Grey Owl for twenty years before publishing his definitive profile, From The Land Of The Shadows, in 1990.
Smith believes that Archie's unique personality and genius was created by a combination of a strange English upbringing and his experience in the Canadian wild that "led him to enter a fantasy world of his own making, one which would totally devour him."
For a man who did not make it to his fiftieth birthday he led an incredible life.
Smith quotes from Grey Owl's "masterpiece" autobiography
to show the quality of his writing about the years he spent in Temagami and
elsewhere in the north: "The feel of a canoe gunnel at the thigh, the
splash of flying spray in the face, the rhythm of the snowshoe trail, the
beckoning of far-off hills and valleys, the majesty of the tempest, the calm
and silent presence of the trees that seem to muse and ponder in their silence;
the trust and confidence of small living creatures, the company of simple
men; these have been my inspiration and my guide. Without them I am nothing."
Grey Owl on one of his canoeing excursions. From a copy of an old postcard,
Archie Belaney, born in 1888, was part of a strange family and was raised and educated to love language and music by two aunts. He lived for his animals and his fantasy world of "red Indians."
He left for Canada in 1906 at age eighteen, stayed briefly in Toronto and eventually took the train to Mattawa and on to Temiscaming.
In Temiscaming he met Bill Guppy, a trapper, and wintered with him and his family where he was taught many outdoor skills. The Guppys had a piano and Bill recalled that Archie was "a wizard on the keys, rattling out tune after tune, picking up the songs we sang."
In the spring Archie travelled by canoe with Bill and his brothers to lake Temagami where Bill was a guide and where Archie got work. Archie soon made friends with the Native people of the area, especially those summering on Bear Island two kilometres away near the Hudson's Bay post. He also worked at losing his English accent and learning the local Ojibway dialect.
Archie noticed an attractive Native girl, Angele Eguana, who worked in the kitchen of the Temagami Inn. She only spoke Ojibway but Archie persisted and a friendship soon developed. Angel introduced him to her uncle John Eguana, whose wife was the sister of Chief Frank White Bear, and to Ned White Bear and Michel Mathias, who had a great influence on him.
| continued > | |
| top |
