From the Land of Shadows: The Making of Grey Owl

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

When Lovat Dickson wrote his fine biography of Grey Owl, Wilderness Man
(Macmillan, 1973), he had, as well as a personal acquaintance with his
subject, the “genius for discovery of a remarkable researcher, Donald
Smith,” whom he acknowledged as “my mainstay in writing this
book.” Smith, then a Ph.D. candidate, is now a professor of history at
the University of Calgary, and after what he refers to as an
“obsession of more than twenty years,” he has completed his own
biography of Archie Belaney—the Englishman who, as Grey Owl, became
one of the most celebrated field naturalists and writers that Canada has
known.

Smith’s meticulous account reminds us again that truth is stranger
than fiction. Could one plausibly invent this story? Here is an English
boy who is abandoned by his parents, is raised by two spinster aunts,
emigrates as a teenager to Canada, lives in the Ontario wilderness,
marries an Indian woman with whom he subsequently has two children, has
a child by another Indian woman, marries an English actress/dancer,
abandons her to return to the Canadian wilds, and gradually transforms
himself into being accepted as the son of a U.S. Apache Indian. He
subsequently becomes a world-renowned author, dines with celebrities and
political leaders, charms the Royal Family at Buckingham Palace, packs
lecture halls in three nations preaching a conservation ethic that was
decades ahead of its time, dies of exhaustion immediately after
returning to his Saskatchewan wilderness cabin from a lecture tour, and
is mourned by millions, including two more wives of the postwar years.
Hours after his death, the truth about his origins was on front pages,
but so extraordinary was the personality of this man that many who were
very close to him (including Lovat Dickson) refused to believe it.

Dickson wrote his biography with a novelist’s flair and produced a
highly readable, fascinating book; “my account is based on
documents,” he said, but his work, aimed at the general reader, is
almost without documentation. Smith’s book cannot be so faulted; the
reader who cannot let an endnote pass unchecked may weary of the
constant references. Some of it is academic overkill. Do we really need
the Encyclopedia Americana citation that gave the author the population
of Peterborough, Ontario, when Grey Owl visited there? Is it necessary
that an endnote tell us the wording of the high-school diploma earned by
a young woman whom Grey Owl had helped as a child? Do we really gain
from a note giving us the service number of a man (mentioned only once)
who knew Grey Owl when both served in the Canadian army?
Acknowledgments, notes, and bibliography take up 92 pages—more than a
quarter of the book.

Smith presents Grey Owl as a “troubled, insecure man” lost in “a
fantasy world of his own making, one which would totally devour him,”
and attributes this emphatically to “the poison within him from his
childhood.” Yet he was a man obsessed with spreading a message of
environmental protection, at great risk to his health and to disclosure.
Smith shows that any number of people could have come forward at the
height of Grey Owl’s fame and exposed him as Archie Belaney; even a
North Bay newspaper had the story, but did not use it. That he was never
uncloaked, Smith believes, was mostly from respect for his powerful and
important message.

To this reader of Grey Owl’s books, Smith’s study was generally
absorbing, if sometimes overly detailed and digressive. But for a
general reader who may want to read one biography, Lovat Dickson’s
Wilderness Man is the recommended choice.