At the same time, he buffed up his biography. He was now the son of a Scottish father and a half-Apache mother, born in Mexico but since accepted as an honorary Ojibwa.
On the outbreak of World War I, Belaney joined the Canadian Black Watch—as an Indian. He earned the respect of his comrades for his exceptional marksmanship and knife-throwing skills, and for his uncanny ability to move undetected across no-man’s-land. He became a sniper but was wounded badly in his foot. After it developed gangrene, he was sent back to England to recuperate. There, in 1917, he met and married his old Hastings sweetheart, Ivy Holmes. The marriage lasted for five years till Ivy found out about Angele and divorced him for bigamy. Belaney, by then honorably discharged from the army and with a disability pension, headed back to Canada and the great outdoors. He made no attempt to contact Marie Girard, or his first wife, Angele Egwuna (although he never divorced her).
By 1925 he was living with Gertrude Bernard, a beautiful Iroquois woman eighteen years his junior, whom he renamed Anahareo. It was Anahareo who seems to have put the idea into Archie’s head that killing animals for money wasn’t a good thing. With her encouragement, he began instead to write for the Canadian press about life in the wilderness. By the early 1930s, he had become a naturalist for the Canadian National Parks service. The couple lived in a cabin on a lake in central Saskatchewan with Rawhide and Jellyroll, their two adopted beavers, whose lodge took up almost half the cabin.
During this period Grey Owl became famous as the first environmental activist to achieve an international following. A sequence of books about his life with Anahareo followed, and in 1935, at the request of his publisher, Lovat Dickson, the Canadian who ran Macmillan in London, he began a high-profile lecture tour of England. Dressed in full Indian headdress and buckskin, Grey Owl was dubbed the modern Hiawatha. The tour was a huge commercial success, but the workload put a strain on his relationship with Anahareo. In 1936 she moved out with their small daughter, Shirley Dawn, while Grey Owl entered into another bigamous marriage with a medical assistant called Yvonne Perrier. At their wedding in Montreal, he used the name Archie MacNeil, to fit in with his supposed Scottish heritage.
A second international lecture tour saw him mobbed by crowds wherever he went. He was invited to Buckingham Palace to meet the young princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret, and gave a royal command performance, attended by the young Richard and David Attenborough, both of whom later said that the experience had a significant influence on their careers. (Sir David was captivated by the naturalism, and more than sixty years later, Lord Richard was to make a movie of Grey Owl’s life.) Though now a celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic, Grey Owl’s triumph was short-lived. After an intense schedule of more than two hundred lectures, he returned to his cabin in Canada in 1938 suffering from exhaustion and died of pneumonia shortly afterward.
Within weeks of his death, newspapers began to unearth Grey Owl’s true identity. It wasn’t an edifying picture. The latter-day Hiawatha was an English bigamist who had dyed his hair and his skin to appear more authentic. He had walked out on at least four women, fathering children by three of them. Several native Canadians had clearly been aware of his true identity—or at least his racial origins—but it seems they kept quiet about it: He was such a fine ambassador for their way of life and the land they wanted to protect. Anahareo, the woman to whom he had been closest, always maintained she had never doubted his story. The initial shock was hard for his friends to take. Lovat Dickson, who at first valiantly tried to defend Grey Owl’s reputation, was forced to concede that he, too, had been fooled: “We had been duped,” he wrote in
But when the dust had settled, people began to reassess his reputation. In 1940 Anahareo published a remarkably positive autobiography, reminding Grey Owl’s huge fan base just how much good he had done. He had cared nothing for money; he had used his fame only to help raise awareness of the threatened habitats of his friends: the beavers, eagles, and bears.
Did Grey Owl’s deception really matter? There is something magnificent in his refusal to conform to modern life. And his achievements, at least, were real: He lived an authentic life among native Canadians, his knowledge of their lore and culture second to none. Most of all, his work as a conservationist changed the thinking of an entire generation:
The voice from the forests momentarily released us from some spell. In contrast to Hitler’s screaming, ranting voice and in contrast to the remorseless clanking of modern technology, Grey Wolf’s words evoked an unforgettable charm, lighting in our minds the vision of a cool, quiet place, where men and animals live in love and trust together.
No one captures the double life of the impostor better than Archie Belaney. On the one hand, an abandoned child, seeking refuge in the company of animals and dreaming of being a Red Indian, growing into a man unable to form a stable relationship with a woman; a loner who drank too much and was capable of acts of cruelty, “almost a madman” on occasions. On the other hand, the powerful and admirable hero, the first ecowarrior, whose books and talks offered a new and genuine connection with nature. You can see how two such complex characters inhabiting a single body might easily drive a man to an early grave. But to produce a human being as singular as Grey Owl, perhaps you can’t have one without the other.
The label “impostor” is invariably meant as an insult, and when contemplating the character of a Titus Oates or an Ignacz Trebitsch Lincoln, or Lobsang Rampa’s claim’s to be transcribing the thoughts of his Siamese, it seems well deserved. But it is not easy to judge all impostors so harshly. Surely we all feel a sneaking admiration for the survival strategies of a Cagliostro or a Mary Baker, or a straightforward respect for the heroism of a James Barry. And when Archie Delaney tells us, “My heart is Indian,” we know he is pointing to an inner transformation that is more complex than simple lying. Impostors unsettle us because they remind us how fragile our own identities can be, and how much of our time is spent fulfilling the expectations of others. As the essayist William Hazlitt observed in his
CHAPTER NINE
Once You’re Dead, You’re Made for Life
One may see the small value God has for riches by the people He gives them to.
We could all use a bit more cash. As Spike Milligan put it, “All I ask is a chance to
For almost a hundred years after her death, Emma Hamilton (1765–1815), Nelson’s celebrated mistress, was airbrushed from the official record. She had tarnished the reputation of England’s most glorious hero, something the establishment could not possibly tolerate—even her own daughter refused to
