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Dictionary of Miramichi Biography

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BRAITHWAITE, HENRY A. (1840-1927)

BRAITHWAITE, HENRY A., woodsman, trapper, and sportsmen's guide and outfitter; b. near Fredericton, 12 Jan 1840, s/o Alfred Braithwaite, a native of England; m. Sarah Flinn, a native of New Brunswick; d. Fredericton, 2 Jan 1927.

Although he was the province's most famous non-Indian woodsman and was the subject of a biographical sketch in 1937 in Prominent People of New Brunswick, little is known concerning Henry Braithwaite's origins or the earlier decades of his life. After his death in 1927 his birth date and his father's name and country of origin were reported to the vital statistics office by his daughter Harriet (Braithwaite) Culligan, of Fredericton, but his mother's name was not recorded. Nothing is known about his father except his name, but he may have been connected with an Englishman named William Braithwaite, who was a director of the Nashwaaksis Manufacturing Co. This firm had a grist mill, brewery, smithy, and cooperage at Nashwaaksis in 1837. However, William Braithwaite died in Liverpool, England, in 1838, at age forty-six, and the company was bankrupt by 1841. The Braithwaite surname has not been noted in the York County census of 1851 or 1861, and it is not known who cared for Henry Braithwaite during his infancy or with whom he lived as a child and youth.

It has been stated that Braithwaite moved to Penniac, N.B., at age seven. From his boyhood years he followed the life of a woodsman, having as his mentor the legendary Maliseet guide Gabe Acquin. His first official guiding duties came at age twelve when he acted as Acquin's assistant on a hunting trip taken up the Nashwaak River by Lieut. Gov. J. H. T. Manners-Sutton. On that occasion he proved himself to be a young man "of grit and determination who could be trusted to do the right thing in an emergency." Guiding did not provide him with a livelihood, however, and he also worked as a laborer, as an assistant on land surveying jobs, and in different capacities in the lumbering industry. He enjoyed surveying and cruising but regretted having once taken a full-time job with a lumber company. "Six years of my life I lost, working in the woods for another man," he stated, "when I might have been living my own life." Afterwards, he was self-employed as a hunter and trapper, and later as a sportsmen's guide and outfitter.

Braithwaite may have been engaged on the survey of the boundary line between York and Victoria counties in 1873. In any event, he built a woods trail which followed this line in part, north fifty miles from Stanley, N.B., to the headwaters of the Little Southwest Miramichi. He hunted in this area from 1873 onward. In 1883, when Edward Jack conducted land surveys around the Little Southwest lakes, Braithwaite had an "old hunting camp" at the foot of a nine-mile-long body of water known as the Crooked Deadwater. This was the home base of his trapping operation, and his lines reached out from there towards Rocky, Clearwater, and Burnthill brooks and the Dungarvon and Renous rivers. Along the lines, he built windproof lean-tos with stone fireplaces for use in stormy weather or for overnight lodging.

Braithwaite hunted in the fall, trapped beaver, otter, sable, and other animals whose pelts were marketable in the winter, and hunted and trapped bears in the spring. For some years, bears were the most profitable part of his business. In the 1880s there was a growing market for bear pelts in England, as furriers attempted to meet the demand for the bearskin busbys which were being adopted as part of the dress uniforms of various army regiments. In a good season a skilled trapper could take thirty or more bears.

At the start, Braithwaite worked with a single assistant. It is thought that for about two years his helper was a Maliseet Indian. He then hired Arthur Pringle, a young man from Stanley. Later he employed several men and maintained a network of more than twenty camps. Pringle stayed with him for about twenty years, until the market for bear pelts began to decline. He then struck out on his own, as a hunter and guide in the Bald Mountain area of the Northwest Miramichi.

In the 1890s the hunting and fishing sports industry emerged in New Brunswick, and because of his unparalleled knowledge of a vast region of the province rich in both salmon and big game, 'Uncle Henry', as Braithwaite was known, was in the vanguard of its development. When the New Brunswick Guides' Association was formed in 1899 he played a leading role in it. In 1902, for use with visiting sportsmen, he leased the fishing and hunting privileges on Timothy Lynch's huge timber limits on the Southwest Miramichi. At this time he was one of the best known sporting guides in North America, thanks largely to the many magazine articles in which he was mentioned or featured. Among the more notable publications to show an interest in him were Forest and Stream, which carried an article entitled "Hunting with Henry Braithwaite" in February 1902, and Scribner's Magazine, to which the journalist Fred Irland contributed several articles, beginning with one called "Sport in an Untouched American Wilderness," in September 1896.

It was Braithwaite who introduced the wealthy New Yorker George D. Pratt to the Holmes Lake area of the Miramichi and guided such international trophy hunters as Martin Bladen, Lord Hawke. "I've had 'em," he stated, "lords and dukes from England and millionaires from the United States, more than I can ever remember. Some of them were the best of sports, some were not."

Braithwaite was a teacher of woodlore, especially to younger guides, but his best known pupil was the writer Charles G. D. Roberts, to whom he taught the ways of animals in the wild, and Roberts dedicated one of his stories to "Mr Henry Braithwaite, master of woodcraft." Braithwaite did not share Roberts's literary talents, but he penned a number of shorter pieces on hunting and fishing for the sporting magazines and newspapers, an example of which is his article entitled "Characteristics of Bears," which appeared in the Family Herald and Weekly Star in 1924.

For a long time, Braithwaite's activities enjoyed the sanction of New Brunswick politicians, who saw that he was bringing in revenue and creating employment. Controversy swirled about him later, however, when he came into conflict with the New York sportsman Arthur Robinson, who had built a lodge on Holmes Lake. In 1907 he had Robinson charged with killing game out of season. When this charge was not sustained in court, Robinson had the same charge brought against him. In magistrate's court his personal culpability was not proved, but he admitted that an American sportsman whom he had guided shot a caribou out of season. For failing to prevent or report this he was convicted and fined in 1908. The judgment was overturned on appeal in 1909, but the provincial government then suspended his guide's license as "punishment" for his having had Robinson charged. Since future revenues from Robinson and other wealthy sportsmen were at stake, and large egos had been wounded all around, it would not be easy to determine the rights and wrongs of the dispute.

In the fall of 1913 Braithwaite had the big game hunter Henry Edwyn King-Tenison, the 9th Earl of Kingston, as his guest, and when they came out of the woods for Christmas, friends gathered to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of Braithwaite shooting his first caribou. At the event, Kingston presented him with a purse of $600 which had been contributed by Canadian, American, and British sportsmen. Congratulatory telegrams were read, including one from Fred Irland, then of the Congressional reportorial staff in Washington, which was addressed to "Henry, King of Guides and Prince of Men."

By 1913 Braithwaite was seventy-three, and his position as New Brunswick's leading outfitter for visiting sportsmen had already passed to William ("Harry") Allen of Penniac, who was twenty-one years younger. Allen had also been involved in the industry from the start and was a charter member of the Guides' Association in 1899. He surrounded himself with a corps of guides who were among the best in the business, and although he had hunting and fishing camps at different locations in the province, he made the Cains River, which was then one of the great trout streams of eastern Canada, into a mecca for discriminating anglers. He had much success in attracting American sports writers, in particular, including Rex Beach, Irving Cobb, Grantland Rice, Damon Runyon, and Ring Lardner. He even brought Cecil B. DeMille to New Brunswick, not to catch salmon or game, but to roam the woods with a movie camera.

In later years, when he was no longer guiding sportsmen, Braithwaite often trapped and hunted alone for months at a time. In the winter of 1914-15 he went into the woods for six weeks. In 1920, when he was eighty, he was away so long that a search party was sent to find him, which it did, in a camp twenty-six miles north of Holtville, alive and well. He retired around 1922 after discovering that he could no longer negotiate the tote roads and traplines safely.

Much of what was written about Braithwaite in the popular press during his lifetime was sensational in content and tone. A more reflective piece is one based on an interview which he gave to Kate Miles a year or two after he retired. "There is nothing about his personal or physical appearance," she stated, "except the eyes which are so alive and bright, to proclaim seventy years spent in the open. He seems no more ill at ease in the quartered oak and plush upholstery of his daughter's parlour than would any man who has his own pet arm chair or rocker in some snug corner. But when one searches deeper and listens to the quiet philosophy of the man, then one realizes that he is different. There is more than a touch of Thoreau about him....A simple directness, a scorn of subterfuge, [and] a penchant for accuracy that is almost an obsession reflects the natural environment and the companionship of the dwellers in the silent places."

Braithwaite Lake, in Stanley parish, derives its name from Henry Braithwaite, and in 1969, what had previously been known as County Line Mountain, on the York-Northumberland boundary, at the head of the Little Southwest, was officially named Braithwaite Mountain. He was survived in 1927 by two daughters, both of whom were married and living in Fredericton.



Sources

[b/d] official death records / Advance 14 Aug 1902; Advocate 21 Aug 1907, 12 Jul 1910, 6 Jan 1915, 9 Mar 1920, 16 Mar 1920, 4 Jan 1927; Allen; Braithwaite biog. data; Daily Gleaner 26 Dec 1913; Dolan; Gleaner 11 Apr 1837, 23 May 1837; Griffin; Jack, E.; Miles; PPNB; Pringle; Royal Gazette 27 Feb 1839; Scott; World 18 Nov 1908, 24 Feb 1909; Wright; Young

Remarques

There is a lengthier sketch of Henry A. Braithwaite, by W. D. Hamilton, in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Vol. XV, 2005.


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