Gray Owl

This article describes the historical person; for the film see Gray Owl (film) , for the bird see gray owl

Gray Owl 1936, photograph by Yousuf Karsh

Gray Owl (born September 18, 1888 in Hastings , England ; † April 13, 1938 at Ajawaan Lake), real name Archibald (Archie) Stansfeld Belaney , known in Germany as Laundry-kwonnesin , less commonly known as the Gray Owl , was of English descent Trapper and Writer.

life and work

Childhood and Adolescence in England

Archibald Belaney came from a broken family background. At the age of two, two aunts took over his upbringing and he was treated very strictly. From childhood he felt a great love for the Indians and for nature. Young Belaney made long walks in St. Helen's Woods and other natural areas around Hastings as a boy, imagining himself to be an Indian in the forests of North America. His aunts eventually allowed him to set up a small menagerie in his floor chamber , where he tended various wild animals and impressed his friends with his amazing knowledge of wild animal behavior.

His aunts had hoped that young Archibald would grow out of his crush on Indian life, and after graduating from school they found a job in a timber trade. However, Belaney played various pranks there that eventually led to his dismissal.

After his aunts saw that Belaney did not want to give up his dream of living in Canada , they finally agreed in 1906 to finance his crossing there.

First stay in Canada

Nothing is known about the first months of his life in Canada. He eventually reached Toronto where he accepted a job as a salesman. As soon as he earned enough money to pay for the trip to Northern Ontario , he got on the train and headed north. Here he met the experienced trapper Bill Guppy, who gave young Belaney his first lessons in the art of survival in the wilderness of northern Canada. Eyewitnesses describe Belaney's passion for the life of the "north man" and testify that within a very short time he developed into one of the best "canoe men" in the Temagami district.

Belaney spent a lot of time with the Ojibway Indians of the Bear Island tribe, whose language he learned and from whom he called the Gray Owl (Ind. Wa-sha-quon-asin, also Wascha-kwonnesin, which means “bird who wanders at night ”means) assumed. On August 23, 1910, he married the Ojibway Indian Angele Egwuna. This connection resulted in two daughters.

Gray Owl gradually adopted Indian habits and tried to forget his English childhood. When asked, he stated that he was the son of a Scottish father and an Apache mother. He observed with great concern the advance of the "white culture" into the wilderness of Northern Ontario, which raised fears that the Indian way of life would be destroyed.

First World War

When the First World War broke out, Gray Owl volunteered and was seriously wounded in the foot and injured by poison gas during the war near Ypres . By chance he was transferred to a hospital in Hastings, where his aunts took care of him and introduced him to the talented ballet dancer Ivy Holmes. The aunts hoped to finally lead their pupils back to a normal English life. Gray Owl married Ivy Holmes on February 10, 1917, although he was officially still married to Angele Egwuna. Shortly thereafter, Grew Owl returned to Northern Ontario. Ivy, however, dreamed of the stages in London and Moscow and not of the life of a trapper. Gray Owl eventually wrote to her of his still valid marriage to Egwuna, and Ivy Holmes had the marriage annulled.

Return to Canada

After returning from the European theater of war, Gray Owl was even more determined to leave the life of " civilization " behind for good. However, the post-war period was also a time of great economic development for Canada, and civilization continued to advance northward. Excessive trapping threatened to almost completely wipe out the formerly rich beaver populations in Northern Ontario, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to make a living as a trapper.

In 1925, the now 36-year-old Gray Owl met a 19-year-old Mohawk Indian named Gertrude Bernhard. It was love at first sight, and Gertrude, called a pony by her friends, followed Gray Owl to his trappers' hut in the northern jungle. Since Gray Owl was still officially married to Angele Egwuna, he was married to Gertrude in an Indian ceremony. Gray Owl gave Gertrude the Indian name Anahareo, under which she later became world famous together with Gray Owl.

Anahareo disliked the life of the trapper, and the constant killing was very hard on her psychologically. One day, Gray Owl caught a mother beaver and discovered that two young beavers were left behind. Anahareo immediately decided that she had an obligation to raise the young beavers. This episode marked the turning point in the lives of Gray Owl and Anahareo. The young beavers won their hearts, and soon after, Gray Owl made the decision to leave the trapping life behind forever. Instead he dreamed of a beaver colony with which he wanted to save Canada's decimated beaver populations.

The north of the province of New Brunswick would form the core of the new beaver colony. The new location was far from ideal and the couple found themselves in dire financial difficulties. Gray Owl wrote a nature story for the English magazine "Country Life" during the first winter, still posing as a half-blood . To his surprise, the editors of Country Life were delighted with his contribution, and along with a sizable check, Gray Owl received an invitation to write an autobiography.

Recognition as a conservationist and writer

He began writing his first work, "The Men of the Last Frontier" (1931), and also wrote for other British and Canadian magazines. In the meantime, the beavers had built their beaver castle half inside Gray Owl's log cabin and half outside, which enabled intensive observation of the wildlife that Gray Owl wrote about.

Gray Owl's writing was immediately well received in the UK, and the Canadian National Park Service became aware of him. The National Park Service offered him to continue his work as a conservationist within a national park. This would give him almost unlimited time for observation and writing.

Gray Owl first moved with the beavers to Riding Mountain National Park in Manitoba and a short time later to Prince Albert National Park in Saskatchewan . "Pilgrims of the Wild" (1934) and a few other works as well as his short stories under the title "Tales of an Empty Cabin" (1937) appeared here. In the meantime, Gray Owl has been invited twice to long series of lectures in England, where his message about nature conservation was very well received.

Gray Owl died of pneumonia in 1938 at the age of 50 at Beaver Lodge , his cabin on Ajawaan Lake in Prince Albert National Park.

reception

His works - especially the youth book Sajo and their beavers -, published under the name Wascha-kwonnesin , were very popular in Germany in the 1950s.

Sir Richard Attenborough filmed his life in 1999 under the title Gray Owl (also Gray Owl and the Treasure of the Beavers ). Pierce Brosnan plays the title role .

Works

• Men The Last Frontier ( Men of the Last Frontier ) (1931)
• Sajo and her Beaver ( The Adventures of Sajo and her Beaver People ) (1935)
• Little Brother ( Pilgrims of the Wild ) (1937)
• Das Einsame Blockhaus ( Tales from an empty cabin ) (1938)
• In the land of the north winds (1990)

literature

• Walter Bauer : Lascha-kwonnesin, the white Indian. Lamuv-Verlag Göttingen 1995, ISBN 3-88977-426-1 (biographical novel)
• Albert Braz: Apostate Englishman. Gray Owl, the Writer and the Myths. University of Manitoba Press 2016

Web links

• Literature by and about Gray Owl in the catalog of the German National Library
• Works by Wascha-kwonnesin in the Gutenberg-DE project