Uncovering Canada’s Overlooked Historical Figures and Feats

Lord Strathcona's Horse Royal Canadians regiment moves behind the front line in June 1916. (Library and Archives Canada/Ministry of the Overseas Military Forces of Canada fonds/a000119)

One story above all others has captivated the imagination of Donald Smith, 78, since his student days. To uncover its details, the University of Calgary professor emeritus of history went on a truth-finding mission decades ago.

It’s the story of Grey Owl, who was something of a ne'er-do-well before a major turning point in his life. He met a young Iroquois woman and two beavers—all three of whom he lived with for years thereafter. They inspired his transformation into an influential conservationist and one of the most lauded authors of the 1930s.

Grey Owl’s story is one of three accounts of the lives of historical figures highlighted for The Epoch Times by Canadian historians.

These stories may not be the ones commonly found in history textbooks and high school curricula, but they are among the threads that make up the tapestry of Canada’s heritage.

Loyalist Elizabeth Hopkins

Elizabeth Hopkins was among some 30,000 loyalists who migrated to what is now Maritime Canada (British North America at the time) during the American Revolution. She and others like her did not “fit the narrow stereotypes of either the helpless daughter or the grieving widow,” says loyalist historian Stephen Davidson.

Mr. Davidson recounted Ms. Hopkins’ story in an article for the Loyalist Trails newsletter he shared with The Epoch Times.

She was born in Philadelphia in 1741, and her life first took an unusual turn in 1776 when she was aboard a ship called the Stanley with her first husband, a loyalist marine sergeant. The Stanley battled three French ships off the New Jersey coast, and Ms. Hopkins joined the fray by helping work the cannons.

Her husband was captured and sentenced to death, but she rescued him and helped 22 others to escape, supplying them with guns and leading them all to safety. Her husband later died in battle, and she married again. Her second husband was a loyalist soldier, whom she accompanied into the midst of battle.

After years of fighting in the United States, she boarded a ship bound for the St. John River in Eastern Canada along with other loyalist refugees. She had a young child at the time and was also pregnant. A fierce storm wrecked the ship off the coast of Nova Scotia, killing many of the passengers.

Ms. Hopkins, her child, and her husband, stayed afloat on parts of the wreckage for two days before they were rescued. The fishing sloops that found a total of 68 castaways couldn’t carry them all, so Ms. Hopkins and her family were among those put ashore on an uninhabited island. Ms. Hopkins’s labour was triggered by the trauma and she gave birth on the island—to triplets!

The family eventually made it to New Brunswick and settled there. Her husband later died and she married for a third time, producing 22 children altogether.

This intrepid woman’s battles were not over, however. She was later present at some of the Upper Canadian battles in the War of 1812 (which involved Americans and their allies fighting the British). This means, Mr. Davidson said, that Ms. Hopkins must have travelled by snowshoe with her husband and sons when she was some 70 years old on a famed 435-mile (700 km) march from New Brunswick to Quebec.

“Canadian history has many such heroic women,” Mr. Davidson said.

‘It’s a Charge!’

World War I demonstrated that cavalry didn’t have a place in modern warfare, and it was an ill-fated charge of Canadian cavalrymen that may have proved that point once and for all.

Historian Gerry Bowler highlights the men of Lord Strathcona’s Horse cavalry group as some of Canada’s lesser-known heroes. He shared with The Epoch Times an article published on the Library and Archives Canada Blog about the group’s final charge on March 30, 1918.

Lieutenant Gordon Muriel Flowerdew led the men on a charge against 300 German infantrymen. “It’s a charge, boys! It’s a charge!” Lt. Flowerdew yelled.

So reported the lone survivor of that charge.

The Germans mowed down the cavalry with MG-08 heavy machine guns and the newly invented light machine gun. It was the last major cavalry charge in the war, and of the Canadian Cavalry Brigade.

Today at that location, Moreuil Wood in France, a small memorial commemorates the sacrifice made by the men of Lord Strathcona’s Horse.

Grey Owl

Grey Owl’s four books on the wilderness of the Canadian North earned him renown not only in Canada, but also in Britain.

“All those ... who have come in contact with him, have been much impressed by his knowledge, by his simplicity, and by his manners who are instinctively those of gentleman in spite of his long and almost continuous life in the woods,” said an official at the Canadian High Commission in London during Grey Owl’s 1935 British lecture tour.

Grey Owl feeds a beaver a jelly roll in 1931. (Public Domain)

His first book, “The Men of the Last Frontier,” begins with a contemplation of “the face of Nature as it was since the Beginning.”

“A deep slow-flowing river; silent, smooth as molten glass; on either bank a forest, dark, shadowy and mysterious,” he writes.

In his lectures, he spoke of Canada’s forest lands as her greatest asset, one to be protected, said Mr. Smith in a podcast for the Ontario Historical Society.

Much of Grey Owl’s story was uncovered by Mr. Smith through his investigations. He told The Epoch Times that among the 21 historical figures he has featured in podcast episodes, Grey Owl is one of the most “colourful characters.”

Grey Owl was a troubled young man before his rise to fame. He was a World War I veteran who numbed himself with alcohol. He found solace in the wilderness and with a family of Anishinaabeg who allowed him to stay with them on their trapping grounds so long as he stayed sober.

In 1925, he met a young Iroquois woman, Anahareo. They decided to trap together, but when they caught a mother beaver, leaving her two kits helpless, Anahareo pleaded for Grey Owl to help her care for them.

This event influenced Grey Owl to begin his crusade for conservation, Mr. Smith said. He and Anahareo married, and the beavers lived with them. Grey Owl became a conservation officer in Saskatchewan’s Prince Albert National Park and lived in a log cabin known as Beaver Lodge.

The beavers built their lodge both outside and inside the cabin, thanks to a connecting underwater tunnel, Mr. Smith said in the podcast.

When Grey Owl died, it was discovered that he was not half Apache as he had said, but rather an Englishman who adopted an indigenous identity. Mr. Smith went to England to interview his family and friends, and also spoke with Anahareo and others who knew him in Canada.

“He was a troubled youth,” Mr. Smith said. Though Grey Owl was not truly indigenous but only pretended to be, that shouldn’t overshadow the good conservation work he did, Mr. Smith said. He is seen as instrumental in saving the beaver.

Grey Owl—or Archie Belaney, to use his birth name—learned the Ojibwe language and adopted an indigenous way of life out of a deep connection with it and potentially a desire to escape his real roots, Mr. Smith said.

“He was an orphan, raised by two maiden aunts. It’s England, it’s 1900, kids at school gossip that one of the aunts is his mother,” Mr. Smith said. He was a “troubled man with many contradictions,” he said, but a great conservationist.

To sum up his sketch of Grey Owl’s life, Mr. Smith referred to what he wrote for the Dictionary of Canadian Biography: “The story of Archie Belaney’s rise to international fame is remarkable. Having led a life without purpose and direction, in his forties he transformed himself. As Grey Owl, he became the prophet of a vitally important message. Sometimes individuals on the fringe of society see critical issues more distinctly than those in the centre. He saw one truth clearly, the need to work for the conservation of the environment to preserve Canada’s forests and wildlife. He was decades ahead of his time.”

Grey Owl and his wife, Anahareo, sit together near Lake Ajawaan in Saskatchewan, circa 1933–34. (W. J. Oliver)

The Value of History

There were many other lesser-known but equally captivating figures in Canada’s past. One of them was Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, a newspaperman of 1920s Western Canada who gave his readers a rare window into indigenous life. Another was Nova Scotia loyalist Walter Bates, who was the first Canadian to have an international bestselling book, “The Mysterious Stranger” (1817).

Christopher Dummit, a history professor at Trent University, said one of the under-appreciated stories of Canadian history is how we won a parliamentary system from the British.

“We did it without fighting, for the most part. We did it by kind of convincing the British that we should be in charge,” he said in an interview ahead of Canada Day last year.

The past is both “foreign and familiar,” he said. He likened exploring Canada’s past to exploring the culture and traditions of a different country. They are “both ours and not ours,” he said. This is part of what fascinates him about the study of history.

Patrice Dutil, a historian and professor at the Toronto Metropolitan University, said Canada’s unique characteristics are what motivated him to delve into the study of history.

“We are a remarkable society and I’m endlessly looking for ways to explain why,” he said via email. “Our roots are French, English and Indigenous but our reality today is multicultural and spread across a vast territory. We’ve never had the ingredients to be a coherent people, and yet we succeed.”

Many Canadians throughout history have made this possible, Mr. Dutil said. “I only wish Canadians were more familiar with their extraordinary history of brave women and men who created a country out of nothing and made it one of the most successful on the planet.”