There;s a nice article about Grey Owl?Archie Bellamy this morning with some images and facts I never heard. I think you will enjoy it.
The 1930s eco-warrior who inspired David Attenborough and The Queen, only to be unmasked as a hoaxer and ‘pretendian’ — but his message still rings true
In late 1935 one of the hottest tickets in England was to attend a lecture given by an imposing figure of a man, tall, hawk-nosed, dressed in buckskin and wearing magnificent feathered headgear on his braided hair who, once a beaver trapper in Canada, had reinvented himself as an ardent conservationist. By the time Grey Owl had stepped off the Empress of Britain in Southampton on October 17th he was already a popular author with three books and numerous articles to his name.
His Damascene moment, according to Grey Owl’s account in Pilgrims of the Wild (1935), came when, after trapping and killing a mother beaver, he was haunted by the cries of the kittens which resembled the sounds of human babies. The following day, piqued by the protestations of his wife, Anahareo, a woman of Mohawk Algonquin descent, he went back to rescue and adopt the babies.
From that moment he railed against the cruelty of beaver trapping, a timely volte-face as numbers of beavers, valued for their waterproof pelts and castoreum, a yellowish secretion used for perfume, had plummeted to dangerously low levels in Canada. ‘Every word I write, every lecture I have given or ever will give’, Grey Owl wrote in 1936, ‘were and are to be for the betterment of the Beaver people, all wild life, the Indians, and half-breeds, and for Canada, in whatever small way I may’.
Now you probably know as much as I do about this story and the fact that this hawk=nosed scot was no native but this might surprise you:
Grey Owl’s lecture tour of England attracted around 250,000 people, including the Attenborough brothers, Richard and David, who queued outside a Leicester theatre for five hours to hear him. Grey Owl went on to touch their adult lives, David being inspired to become one of Britain’s foremost naturalist and conservationist while Richard went on to direct the biopic, Grey Owl, in 1999, starring Pierce Brosnan, although he claimed that it was an article in Country Life by George Winter commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Grey Owl’s death that reminded him of his childhood encounter.
And this photo I hadn’t seen before either:
That man was lying about his ancestry but telling the absolute truth about beavers. Go read the whole article. It even has a nice photo of him as a soldier. Click on the headline to read the entire article.
