Grey Owl - Early Conservation Work

Early Conservation Work

In 1925, then 37-year-old Grey Owl met 19-year-old Gertrude Bernard (aka Anahareo, or Pony), a Mohawk Iroquois woman who was to be very influential in his life. She encouraged him to stop trapping and to publish his writing about the wilderness. They had a passionate eight-year affair, beginning with their Anishinaabe wedding ceremony. Through her influence, he began to think more deeply about conservation. Anahareo encouraged his writing and influenced him by saving and raising a pair of beaver kits.

After accompanying Grey Owl on a trapline, Anahareo attempted to make him see the torture that animals suffered when they were caught in traps. Anahareo could not convince Grey Owl until his pivotal moment of conversion from trapper to conservationist occurred involving beavers. According to Grey Owl’s Pilgrims of the Wild, he hunted down a beaver home where he knew a mother beaver to be and set a trap for her. When the trap caught the mother beaver, Grey Owl began to canoe away to the cries of kitten beavers which greatly resemble the sound of human infants. Anahareo begged Grey Owl to set the mother free, but he could not be swayed from his position because they needed the money from the beaver's pelt. The next day, Grey Owl went back for the baby beavers which the couple adopted, making the beginning of his gradual transformation from trapper to conservationist. As Albert Braz stated in his article St. Archie of the Wild, "Indeed, primarily because of this episode, Grey Owl comes to believe that it is "monstrous" to hunt such creatures and determines to "study them" rather than "persecuting them further"."

Grey Owl's first journal article, "The Falls of Silence", was published under the name A.S. Belaney in Country Life, the famous English sporting and society magazine. He also published articles on animal lore as Grey Owl in Forest & Outdoors, a publication of the Canadian Forestry Association. He became increasingly known in Canada and the United States. In 1928, the National Parks Service made a film, Beaver People, featuring Grey Owl and Anahareo, which showed them with two beavers which they had taken in as kits and raised after their mother was killed. Grey Owl wrote twenty-five articles for Canadian Forest and Outdoors magazine between 1930 and 1935, published while he was in the midst of writing his first book.

Grey Owl’s first book called The Men of the Last Frontier was published in 1931, and it traced the devastating story of the beaver as well as posed some very valid concerns about the future of Canada and its forests. Beaver pelts had become such a hot commodity in Canadian industry that the beaver was on the verge of extinction when Anahareo helped Grey Owl understand the desperate need for protecting the animal instead of trapping it. According to Grey Owl in The Men of the Last Frontier, trappers swarmed to the forests in higher numbers then ever before in 1930 because of the beaver’s scarcity, and he argued that the only way to save this animal was to remove all of the trappers from the forests. This was an extremely difficult feat however because their pelts were so valuable and the job economy was so poor in the 1930s that Grey Owl described their role in the economy as this: “beavers were to the north what gold was to the west”. Though much of his focus in his writings were on the beaver, Grey Owl also believed that this animal could be used as a symbol for the disappearing future of Canadian wilderness in a broader sense. Grey Owl believed that Canada’s wilderness and vastly open nature was what made it unique from other countries of the world, and this was disappearing at an extremely fast rate due to consumerism and the modernist emphasis on capital. Grey Owl also discussed in The Men of the Last Frontier how the Canadian government and logging industry were working together to project a false image of forest preservation in order to gain possession of Canada’s forests and rid them of their resources, burn down what remained, and attempt to replant “synthetic forests” in their places. Grey Owl’s The Men of the Last Frontier was a call of desperation for the people of Canada to awaken from their immobility and resist against the destruction of their country as the forests were being turned into deserts for profit. Grey Owl's conversion from trapper to conservationist, his first book The Men of the Last Frontier and the journal articles he had published in Forest & Outdoors, as well as with The Canadian Forestry Association was only the beginning of his fame. These endeavours lead to interest from Parks Canada in creating a film about Grey Owl and his pet beaver as a way to promote ideas of conservation.