By 1936 the dream of a lonely English boy playing Indian in the woods behind his house in Hastings had come true: Archie Belaney had become Grey Owl – Wa-sha-quon-asin – He Who Walks By Night. When he walks on stage in packed auditoriums and begins to lecture, the audiences sit up and listen, enthralled by his depiction of the Canadian wilderness and entertained by his films of beavers at work and play. And at least for a while they share his concern for the "vanishing frontier" and the plight of the creatures that live in it. His simple message – You belong to nature, not nature to you – becomes a call to protect what is left of the Canadian North against the encroachment of civilization.
With three best-selling books under his belt and a fourth underway, Grey Owl conceived of a new project: He would make two trips into the bush, one in winter on showshoes and the other in summer by canoe – and he would take a cameraman along. Through the five "beaver" films made between 1930 and 1935, he had discovered the power of motion pictures in promoting his ideas – see When a Pilgrim of the Wild met a Cameraman of the Wild: The collaboration between Grey Owl and W.J. Oliver. And now he wanted to share his experiences in the bush in the same way, projecting the films while speaking on stage during the upcoming lecture tour in Great Britain.
But Grey Owl faced some serious challenges. The first was his physical condition. After his arrival in Canada in 1906 at the age of seventeen he had spent much of his time in the bush, performing physically demanding activities. But since taking on the position of "caretaker of animals" with the Parks Branch in 1931, his life had been largely sedentary, mostly occupied in writing. The 1935–1936 lecture tour of Great Britain had also taxed his health and the injury he had sustained to his foot in WWI still bothered him. Would he be equal to the demands of travel in the bush?
The second problem was money. The Parks Branch had paid for the five beaver films, but by 1936 he was thought to "indulge too freely in liquor" and his reputation, as an unofficial spokesman for the Branch – its "eloquent Indian" so to speak – was in peril. One particular incident probably put the final nail in the coffin of his request for funding: The noted photographer Yousuf Karsh had organised a dinner in his honour in Ottawa, at which he was supposed to meet a group of influential government officials. However, instead of being present at the dinner, talking up his film project, Grey Owl was "raising a drunken row in the bar". James Harkin (the Father of National Parks) was forced to defend Grey Owl, writing to the government's Assistant Deputy Minister "I am sorry to hear that Grey Owl has been indulging too freely in liquor. As a matter of fact, with so much Indian blood in his veins I suppose that it is inevitable that from time to time he will break out in this connection."[1]: 156–157 In the end Grey Owl's London and Toronto publishers, Lovat Dickson and Hugh Eayrs, put up $1000 each for the winter film, and he eventually paid for the summer film out of his own pocket. To Eayrs he wrote "This picture is the dream of my life, & neither
Parks nor financial considerations are to stop me."[1]: 174
Bert Bach
The third problem was the cameraman. The last four beaver films had been shot by his friend, the noted cameraman and photographer W. J. Oliver. But Oliver was off shooting a big-game hunting expedition in Kenya, so the Ontario-based cameraman B. J. (Bert) Bach was taken on in his place. According to Gerald G. Graham, "Bert Bach was another of the gifted, but generally unknown, pioneers of Canadian motion picture technology."[2]: 131
Grey Owl was accompanied on the trips by his third (and final) wife, the French-Canadian Yvonne Belaney (née Perrier), whom he married in December 1936 after his final breakup with Anahareo. (Grey Owl and Anahareo were never married under Canadian law.) "Yvonne proved the perfect helper for Grey Owl. Quickly she learned to snowshoe and although new to winter travelling, loved it, even the camping out in Abitibi in sub-zero temperatures." Grey Owl was not in such good shape: "[I]n one or two shots he looks as though the work entailed was rather too much for him... By all accounts, Grey Owl was all in at the end of the day.”[1]: 173–174
There is some uncertainty about the intended titles of the films. Grey Owl's biographer, Donald B. Smith, gives the titles as simply "The Trail – Winter" and "The Trail – Summer". In a letter to his Canadian publisher, Grey Owl added the words "Men Against the Snow" and "Men Against the River", but later crossed out the word "Winter". In any event, the final version of the title of the winter film, as presented in the film itself, is "The Trail – Men Against the Snow".
The use of "men" in the title is a curious choice of words for Grey Owl. He intended the title of his first book to be The Vanishing Frontier, but the publisher, Country Life, changed the title to The Men of the Last Frontier without consulting him. He was angry about this, writing:
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. ... I speak of Nature, not men; they are incidental, used to illustrate a point only.[1]: 115
This liberty with the title, among other things, led Grey Owl to leave Country Life in favor of the newly formed publishing house, Lovat Dickson Ltd. of London, which handled the rest of his books in Great Britain. So it is odd that he chose this wording for the titles of the films.
Sketch of the High North by Grey Owl from Pilgrims of the Wild
The winter film was shot in March, 1937, near Doucet in the Abitibi area of Quebec, where Grey Owl spent some winters trapping in the 1920s, sometimes in the company of Anahareo (Gertrude Bertrand), his longtime Algonquin Mohawk companion. His autobiographical book Pilgrims of the Wild covers this period of his life.
Opening with a scene of men on snowshoes working with dogs to move heavy loads through difficult terrain, the film quickly dispels the layman's idea of effortlessly gliding over an expanse of pristine snow yelling "mush!" to the dogs. The travel, in deep snow, uphill and downhill, was hard work for men and dogs. Bert Bach contributed more to the filming than just camera work: "[He] had to break trail in deep soft snow for the dog team by falling forward, with arms outstretched, to compress the light powder."[2]: 132
The next scene shows the group making camp for the night, which required digging a deep hole in the snow and prepping a huge quantity of firewood. In the same area, Anahareo, a "town Indian", had her first experience of camping in the bush when she accompanied Grey Owl on the trapline in the late winter of 1926:
Grey Owl and Anahareo, Lake Ajawaan, Saskatchewan
At the end of the day's tramp we came to a heavily wooded bay, and there Archie said brightly, 'Here's a good spot to spend the night.' I received this news with gladness and looked sharply around for the refuge that was to harbour us for the night, but all I could see was a world of snow and trees, so I said, I can't see it.'
'Can't see what?' Archie asked, as he took the big axe from the load. 'Where we're supposed to stay tonight,' I answered in a wee small voice, because I was beginning to have some suspicions. He had said that we would sleep out, but I hadn't thought that he'd meant it literally. I thought he'd only meant that we would spend the night away from Pony Hall – well, it just never dawned! But here he was, digging with his snowshoe, making some kind of hole. Surely he doesn't expect me to sleep in that, I thought. Archie said, 'You'd be a lot better off if you got in here and did some digging too. It'll keep you warm till we get a fire going.'
Feeling that I was digging my own grave, I did as he said. I eventually got up enough courage to ask, 'What are we supposed to be doing?' Archie threw me a long, wondering look. 'We're getting the camp up,' he answered, and went back to his shovelling.
'The camp is down – there?' I exclaimed, aghast. This ridiculous presumption brought forth gales of laughter. Then he asked me to pack the snow as he shovelled it out. I got down on my knees and began patting the snow with my mittened hands. 'No, not that way! Stamp it down with your snowshoes,' said Archie, somewhat hopelessly.
What we were actually doing was excavating a pit large enough for two beds, the grub-box, and an eight-foot fire. This excavation was the depth of the snow, normally seven feet. Even after packing it down, the snowbank that encircled us was six feet high. This served as an efficient wind-break.
What with the toboggan sheet (a tarpaulin) overhead as a shelter, and a carpet of boughs, I was surprised at how comfortable a sleeping-out camp could be.[3]: 43–44
At the end of the film, in a scene perhaps reminiscent of his last book, Tales of an Empty Cabin, Grey Owl mysteriously snowshoes off alone into the woods, bound for an empty cabin. Arriving at the cabin, he finds "a message written on birchbark in the picture writing of the Indian". The author is not a student of traditional First Nations writing practices, but has it on good authority that this scene is not without some truth: Such symbols could have served for simple, practical purposes – such as warning about a falls around the next bend of the river – but were unlikely to have been used as depicted in the film. Grey Owl was not above resorting to colourful embellishments of Indigenous practices when it suited him.
The editing of the film was not without its difficulties, as the assistant of Grey Owl's Canadian publisher experienced:
Grey Owl and Yvonne stayed in Toronto for two weeks to edit the winter film with Bert Bach. In Hugh Eayrs’ absence, Ellen Elliott tried to help Yvonne look after the worn-out prophet whose thirst problem was already well known at the Macmillan office. As Ellen wrote in a note to Lovat Dickson on April 14: “It was much too long for everybody concerned. ... He has to be taken care of twenty-four hours a day.” Yvonne, she added, “couldn’t leave him for five minutes, and since his idea of spending time in the city is to sit in his hotel room and pour quarts of beer down his throat, you can imagine what a bright time she had.”[1]: 173
Notwithstanding these obstacles in its making, here is the winter film:
The observant reader will have noticed that the film has narration and music. How is that consistent with the use Grey Owl intended – as backdrop for his lectures? The explanation is that this is not the original silent film that Grey Owl made, but a pimped up version produced by Booth Canadian Films for theatrical release. Grey Owl's first three beaver films had suffered a similar fate: Working for Associated Screen News, the director Gordon Sparling transformed The Beaver People and The Beaver Family into Grey Owl’s Little Brother, while Strange Doings in Beaverland became Grey Owl’s Strange Guests.
The theatrical release leaves much to be desired. For starters, the ending makes no sense: Grey Owl has been out with comrades for days in harsh conditions and then abandons them to go to a cabin. Why? Then he receives a message: Old comrades are on the way. Which comrades? The ones he just left behind? It's hard to make sense of this.
Another gaff, perhaps a minor one, occurs when the narrator, unable to distinguish between spruce and pine (the former being the predominant species of tree in northern Ontario and Quebec), has Grey Owl entering a "pine forest". This mistake would have irritated such a consummate woodsman as Grey Owl, whose story "The Tree" was devoted to the life of a jack pine. In fact the scene recalls his words in The Men of the Last Frontier, where he describes the traveller being "surrounded, hemmed in on all sides, by apparently endless black forests of spruce, stately trees, cathedral-like with their tall spires above, and their gloomy aisles below".
Selected intertitles of Grey Owl's 1937 winter film
Given the shortcomings of the sound version, we are lucky that the original silent version of the winter film has been preserved in the Donald B. Smith Grey Owl collection at the Library and Archives Canada.
After a lengthy introductory intertitle, the film opens with a shot of dogs pulling a toboggan at breakneck speed over packed snow. It's too bad there isn't a "making of" film about the film, since it must have been quite a feat for Bert Bach to operate the camera in pre-GoPro days on the speeding toboggan!
The second intertitle then unrolls, which explains the significance of the "Empty Cabin" to Grey Owl: "[It] was, once, to this lone Indian, a palace of dreams." Grey Owl then treks into this empty cabin, where he discovers a message from old comrades: They are on the way with supplies. They will meet him at Turtle Lake, and then the trip will begin. This sequence of events, taking place near the start of the film rather than at the end, makes perfect sense.
The opening of the film credits an unknown "Hudic Pictures". It is possible the name derives from Grey Owl's publishers (HUgh Eayrs and Lovat DICson), who were in talks with Bert Bach about forming a joint venture to exploit Grey Owl's films. Nothing came of this idea, but perhaps the name was an abortive attempt in this connection. In a memo to Hugh Eayrs, Grey Owl suggested the opening should credit "Messrs. Eayrs and Dickson", and the author has changed the film to respect his wish. The background of this shot is a sketch by Grey Owl that appeared in Pilgrims of the Wild entitled "The pageant of the High North marching as in an avenue of ghosts".
The reader is invited to compare the silent and sound versions of the film and enjoy the many scenes that were cut from the sound version:
Sketch of canoemen by Grey Owl from Pilgrims of the Wild
The summer film was shot in early June, 1937, in the Mississagi Forest Reserve, an area Grey Owl knew well from his trapping and fire ranging days during his years in Biscotasing before and after his service in WWI. In the summers of 1920 and 1921, he worked as the deputy forest ranger in the Forest Reserve. "Here Archie was at his best, on the five three-week tours through the huge reserve, checking on the summer ranger stations situated 50 to 60 kilometres from each other."[1]: 70
A ranger who worked under him at this time commented:
The deputy chief loved the wilderness.He insisted that these town-raised college men carefully check all camping sites for fire and also work on the trails, keeping up the portages to the different lakes in their district, allowing access in case of a fire. He told them they must never drink in the woods. While he pressured them to work hard, he was fair and “really wasn’t the driver or taskmaster he pretended to be”.[1]: 70
Grey Owl's big hopes for the summer film are evident in this passage:
You see canoes driven at high speed over great lakes whose shores are black with pines; you see dark cavernous forests of huge trees untouched by the hand of man. Men trot over portages under mountainous loads; canoes, inverted on men’s shoulders, pass through the wood for all the world like huge running beetles on two legs. You watch while camp is made, discover how we cook and eat in primitive ways. You are made to realize the consummate skill and the unconquerable daring of trained canoemen as they drive their light, frail craft down miles of rapids, each a seething vortex of thundering white water in which canoes reel and plunge and stagger and careen, leaping to the rhythmic throbbing of the drum-fire of the rapids.[1]: 177–178
Grey Owl engaged someone known from his Bisco days to act as guide, Alec L'Espanol, whom he described to Hugh Eayrs as "a fine man, a full-blooded Indian, a first-class guide and a very old friend" – adding "He is a first-class cook also." Grey Owl was particular about his choice of crew, writing "[W]e do not want a short squatty Indian with a moustache." He was also particular about the canoe he was to use, which he bought and had shipped to Bisco – "a 'guides special' 16 foot canvas covered canoe from the Chestnut Canoe Co., Fredericton, New Brunswick".
The film treats us to many scenes of canoeing on the Mississagi River, both downstream through rapids and upstream by means of poling. Unexpectedly, we see Grey Owl in the bow of the canoe in the first whitewater scenes, ceding the stern to his "freighter", Antoine Minneweshka. Renowned as a canoeist, Grey Owl would naturally have taken the crucial position as stern paddler, especially in front of the camera. In Grey Owl: The Mystery of Archie Belaney, poet Armand Garnet Ruffo has him explain his decision in these words:
I let Antoine take the stern of the canoe.
You sure? he says. It's your picture.
That's exactly why I want you there, I tell him.
I can see he's glad I gave the steering over
to him. Something he would never say. In front of us
is the gauntlet, a roaring cataclysmic mile of white water,
which my cameraman is to film us swooping down. Even in
the calmer parts of these waters I'm finding difficulty
keeping the canoe under control, let alone
guide us down these thunder-drum rapids.[4]: 166
But Grey Owl couldn't have been as feeble as Ruffo thought, since he is later seen in the canoe alone, first poling upstream, a demanding and tricky exercise, and then taking on the "treacherous Forty-Mile" rapids.
The film also shows scenes of fishing, as well as cleaning and cooking fish on the campfire. Not to be missed is Yvonne's fashion statement at 11:54: Bold yet carefree, her attire – fringed buckskins avec cravate – says this lady is ready for a big night out in Bisco or a relaxed evening around the campfire with the boys. Très chic!
The film shows everything in the passage quoted above except "canoes driven at high speed over great lakes" and
"canoes inverted on men’s shoulders". Sadly, the remaining copies of the film at the Library and Archives Canada are incomplete, with the title, credits and entire first part missing.
Setting off from Biscotasing, Grey Owl's "canoe brigade" would have traversed many lakes and crossed the height of land separating the Spanish and Mississagi watersheds, before reaching the Mississagi River proper. The lakes and portages of this route were undoubtedly the subject of the missing first part of the film. (In the story "The Lost Brigade", Grey Owl described the route to the Mississagi as "seventy-five miles in from [Bisco], including sixteen portages". Canoeists still call this the "Grey Owl Route" and the remains of a cabin he used as a fire ranger still stand on the shores of Bark Lake.)
In the hope that watching a partial reconstruction of the film will be more enjoyable than just plunging straight into the second part, the author has taken the liberty of adding the title, credits and first intertitle, using Grey Owl's own words. The background of the title and credits shots is a sketch by Grey Owl that appeared in Pilgrims of the Wild entitled "The fame of its canoemen was widely known".
The Trail, then, is not merely a connecting link between widely distant points, it becomes an idea, a symbol of self-sacrifice and deathless determination, an ideal to be lived up to, a creed from which none may falter. It obsesses a man to the utmost fibre of his being, the impelling force that drives him on to unrecorded feats, the uncompromising task master whom none may gainsay; who quickens men's brains to shift, device, and stratagem, purging their bodies of sloth, and their minds of weak desires.
— Grey Owl, The Men of the Last Frontier
From an English boy growing up in Hastings to an accomplished backcountry woodsman and trapper in the Canadian wilderness, from the companion of Anahareo and protector of the beaver to a renowned author and lecturer, the story of Grey Owl's strange trail through life continues to fascinate and arouse controversy.
Soon after arriving in Canada in 1906, seventeen-year-old Archie Belaney encountered the veteran bushman Bill Guppy in Timiskaming. (Grey Owl later immortalised Guppy as the "king of all woodsman".) Liking the young Englishman and admiring his pluck, Guppy invited him to live with his family and helped him take his first steps in the bush. Even after he was exposed as a full-blooded Englishman, not the half-Indian he had claimed to be for the latter part of his life, Grey Owl never lost Guppy's admiration:
Grey Owl, Lake Ajawaan, Saskatchewan
And let me say this. If any man well deserved his success, it was Grey Owl. He had lived through it all – the hardship, the terrible cold, the scorching fire, the hunger of the meatless trail, the sweaty toil of the portage, the crossing of thin ice, soaking in snow water, pain of frost-bitten limbs, the toilsome life of the canoe and the paddle, the axe and the tumpline, the empty stomach and the smoky tea – lived through every inch of it for a quarter of a century before ever he spoke of it or wrote it down. The North lost a good woodsman, one of its very best, when he passed on.[5]: 131
— Hal Pink, Bill Guppy: King of the Woodsmen, Life-Long Friend and Tutor of "Grey Owl"
Without the unstinting research efforts of Dale Gervais – including trips through the Ottawa bush to the Library and Archives Canada – this article would not have been possible.
Donald B. Smith provided us the "gold standard" of information about Grey Owl in his biography From the Land of Shadows: the Making of Grey Owl.
