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The Great Adventure

Claiming to be of Scottish and Apache ancestry, and an adopted member of the Ojibwa nation, Archie Belaney from Hastings, England achieved fame throughout the English-speaking world in the 1930s as a conservationist and, according to the press of the time, a “modern Hiawatha”. In his book From the Land of Shadows Grey Owl biographer Donald Smith suggests that “The Great Adventure” was penned by the naturalist in April or May of 1931 shortly after his arrival at Beaver Lodge Lake in Riding Mountain National Park. In it Grey Owl relates his early efforts to establish a beaver colony in the Temiscouata region near the town of Cabano and at Metis-sur-Mer in eastern Quebec, and his subsequent move, at the behest of Commissioner Harkin, to the new park at Riding Mountain as the “caretaker of park animals.” Grey Owl also tells the story of how he erroneously suspected that a passing trapper had killed “Jelly Roll” and “Rawhide,” his two tamed beavers, and describes his subsequent journey west with the two kits to Manitoba. It would appear that portions of “The Great Adventure” were later used by Grey Owl as the basis for a chapter in his 1935 autobiography Pilgrims of the Wild, although according to Donald Smith certain key details were altered in the later version. Smith also notes (p. 259) that a copy of “The Great Adventure” is located in the park library at Prince Albert National Park in Waskesiu, Saskatchewan. The Grey Owl file from Riding Mountain has been deposited with the National Archives of Canada in Ottawa. Manitoba History would like to thank Parks Canada and Riding Mountain National Park for permission to publish “The Great Adventure.”