“ It is the mark of a charlatan to explain a simple concept in a complex way ”

The Charlatans once sang about a North Country Boy and as much as I would like to believe that the song was in reference to Alex Sanders who was born in Northern England, I can find no evidence to support this. If it was it would be rather serendipitous as they would have been singing about one of their bands namesakes, a Charlatan.
For those not in the loop a charlatan is a hack, a hoodwinker, a quack, to put it bluntly a stinking lowdown lair who sets out to fool and, to a much more heinous extent, relieve people of their cash and valuables(be they monetary or emotional).

Alex Sanders, in the grand scale of charlatans, was relatively harmless. Born into a working class family in Birkenhead, Liverpool, in 1926 Sanders would go on to claim that he had physic powers and later in life become the self proclaimed “King of the Witches”, although according to a certain Terry Pratchett “witches don’t go in much for the structured approach to career progression… Witches are not by nature gregarious, at least with other witches, and they certainly don’t have leaders.”

What made Saunders more egregious to the Wicca community was his self promotion and his courting of journalists and anyone that would listen. As most people know ghouls and hobgoblins are notoriously camera shy and one has yet to leave a soundbite for a reputable publication, and this was in evidence when Saunders invited the media to Alderley Edge to witness an old fashioned resurrection. When the press arrived at the magical site, they were faced with a bandaged up figure lay on a stone altar. This figure was then examined by a GP who confirmed that this was indeed a dead body and up to plate came Saunders who invoked a magical spell so powerful that the lifeless corpse had no choice but to sit up and be raised from the dead. Upon seeing this miracle in action the gathered media shrieked(I assume) in horror and ran away back to the big cities to get the biggest story of their careers on to the presses.

If they would have hung around they may have had an interview with the recently reanimated corpse and Sanders where they could have asked such questions as “Where did you get a dead body from and should we call the police?”, “Were you really a dead corpse to begin with?”, “Was that a qualified doctor?” and “One of the words in the incantation sounded suspiciously like jam backwards, would you care to comment on that Mr Saunders?” but they never did and just took everyone and everything at face value.
Years later Maxine Sanders would drop the bombshell that, alas, the resurrection wasn’t real! Shock Horror! The “GP” was a friend of Sanders, the “corpse” wasn’t dead just another friend wrapped in bandages and the powerful incantation was, in fact, a Swiss roll recipe read backwards. By the way this was in the 1960’s so the press were idiots.
Sanders wasn’t terrible compared to some, although he did have a coven and he explained that the reason his coven were all naked and he was clothed in ritual photos was because of witch law(the elder of a coven to be apart from the others and easily identifiable) so maybe he was a wrong un.

Another synonym for charlatan is “snake oil salesman”(before y’all start shouting at me the term was coined at the turn of the 20th century way before women had entered the workplace and before pronouns had to be shown in bio) and although this term was used to describe a plethora of dodgy salespeople(happy now!), it can be traced back to one single hoodwinker Clark Stanley.

SONY DSC

Stanley was a cowboy turned entrepreneur who claimed that he spent time with the Hopi Indian tribe and they had taught him their lifestyle, which included their natural medicines. One of these medicines was the Native American version of Chinese Snake Oil, which by the 1870’s and 80’s was being heralded as a miracle cure for railroad workers. Chinese snake oil had been brought over by the 180,000 Chinease immigrants that were brought to America to work on the great westward expansion of railroads and “civilisation”(I use that word very loosely as the genocide and displacement of the indigenous people of America is not very civilised).

The oil was used by the immigrant workers to sooth their muscles and treat any inflammations they had after a back breaking day working on the Rails and when they started sharing it with their American workers word got out about the healing properties of the oil. This is where Stanley, among others, got in on the act, claiming that his rattlesnake snake oil was just as, if not more, potent than the eastern counterpart. Unfortunately Stanley and his ilk were lairs and had no clue how medicine worked, the Chinese snake oil worked because it contains 20% eicosapentaenoic acid(EPA), which is one of the two types of omega-3 fatty acids most readily used by our bodies(Salmon, which everyone and their mother claims to be one of the best foods to eat for your health, contains 18% eicosapentaenoic acid) and this acid helps muscles, joints and inflammations.
Conversely rattlesnake oil, which due to the lack of Chinese water snakes bobbing about the dry and dusty wild west was used by the hucksters, contains around 8.5% eicosapentaenoic acid but as the standard of medicine at the time was just a step up from leeches, the general public had no idea(In their defence Chinese snake oil was only analysed in 1989 and even then EPA’s weren’t really understood how they helped the body).

Stanley, like most “entrepreneurs” of the time, travelled the country selling his snake oil with a travelling show which would probably have included musicians, puppeteers and performers of all kinds. When Stanley stepped up to the stage to shill his placebo he would use the ol’ razzle dazzle, relying heavily on how fearsome a creature the rattlesnake was and use a plant in the audience to be miraculously healed in front of the crowd. After many years of selling his hooky goods up and down the country Stanley was finally caught out in 1917 when a consignment of his snake oil was seized by the US government, and after studies it was found to include mineral oil, red pepper, camphor or turpentine (apparently for the medicinal smell) and 1% oil which, quell surprise, wasn’t even snake oil it was cow fat. Stanley was fined 20$ (429$ in todays money) for “misbranding” his product by “falsely and fraudulently represent[ing] it as a remedy for all pain”, Stanley didn’t deny this and this led to the other shysters in the faux medicine game to label their products with the ingredients used or use such phasing as “known as snake oil” or “for years called snake oil but does not contain snake oil.”
This was the beginning of the end for medicine shows and quacks like Stanley as Louis Pasteur had recently made his breakthrough with germ theory and modern medicine, with real trained doctors, was starting to gain traction in more populated areas of America pushing the frauds into hick communities to try and sell their wares to the uneducated. Thank goodness that doesn’t happen any more…cough ivermectin cough

Shills, quacks and hoodwinkers are universally bad people but could there be a charlatan that has actually done good in the world? Kinda.
In the mid 1930’s Grey Owl took to a Leicester school hall stage to give a speech on conservation in the Canadian forests and mountains and how deforestation and animal extinction is a worldwide problem not just a local issue. In the hall two brothers listened in rapture as Grey Owl explained he had worked as a logger and a trapper in Canada for many years but due to him being a half Apache Native American, something didn’t sit right with him taking away from nature without giving anything back. He went on to tell the story of his epiphany, he killed a mother beaver leaving her young kittens all alone in the world and upon hearing their anguished calls he adopted them and set out on his life conservationism.
The brothers sat opened mouthed taking in everything Grey Owl said and these stories would have to have had some impact on them and their future lives. The children were called Attenborough and David went on to become the voice of nature and his elder brother, Richard, would go on to direct Grey Owl’s biopic in 1999. I wasn’t there(regardless of how old people think I am!) and the above is artistic licence but Grey Owl and that day must have had some impact on the boys with what they both went on to achieve in their lives.

But how could such an eloquent and passionate man as Grey Owl be any kind of fraud or faker? Well for a start his real name was Archibald Stansfeld Belaney, he was born in Hastings, England, attended Grammar school and hadn’t stepped foot outside of England until he was 18 years old and if you hadn’t guessed already, he had no Native American ancestry. What he did have was a fascination with all things related to the indigenous peoples of the Americas, not just the romanticised stories about the native peoples but their oneness with nature and their environment.
When Archibald set foot on Canada’s shores in 1906 he got a job in a retail shop in Toronto but he got itchy feet nearly straight away and longed to explore the great expanse beyond the burgeoning city. By the time WW1 started, Belaney had been living in the bush for nine years and he was pretty much right away using his made up lineage of having a Scottish father and an Apache mother, having grown up in Mexico and the Southwest of America before moving up to Canada. Belaney joined the Canadian Army in 1915 and served for two years easily fooling his brothers in arms into believing that he was part Native American with one saying “…saw him squirm up muddy hills in a way no white man could. He had all the actions and features of an Indian…. Never in all my life did I ever meet a man who was better able to hide when we would go out onto No Man’s Land.”

By 1925 and after many years living and working in the Canadian wilderness he went all in with his Grey Owl transformation. This was expedited when he met Gertrude Bernard(Belaney would call her Anahareo a derivative of her Great-great-grandfathers name), almost half his age at 19, who was of Algonquin and Mohawk ancestry and she was the catalyst of Belaney saving the beaver kittens in the story that he told at the Attenbourghs school. In 1929 Belaney had his first article on conservation published in the English publication Country Life and a year later he was published in a Canadian periodical called Canadian Forest and Outdoors. He would go on to write many articles under his name of Grey Owl and by 1932 W. J. Oliver was putting Grey Owl in front of the new fangled invention that was the motion picture camera. Grey Owl would go on to do many, many lectures in Great Britain, Canada and the USA, with his final tour where he gave 138 lectures (one of these was to King George VI and the young and upcoming Princess Elizabeth) in a three month period being his final undoing. After the tour Belaney retired to his home, Beaver Lodge on Lake Ajawaan in Saskatchewan, to recuperate from the massive exhaustion that the tours and travelling had placed on him, alas on the 13th April 1938 Grey Owl passed away at the age of 49 and this is where the trouble of his legacy started.

Both sides of the Atlantic tried to claim him as their own yet neither side knew about his ancestry shenanigans with his publisher Lovat Dickson spending months trying to disprove the fact that he was an Englishman with no Native American heritage. Anahareo, who was just as oblivious as everyone else, went on to say “I am an Indian and have spent all my adult life in the woods, yet never have I met one who so sincerely loved and appreciated the wilderness as [Grey Owl] did.”

In today’s climate Grey Owl will, rightly or wrongly, most likely be defined by his cultural appropriation but, again rightly or wrongly, he did it for(I assume) altruistic reasons and a romantic idea he had had since childhood of living in a way that he wanted. Mans had a dream and a hope when he was a boy, went on to live his best life, made a difference to hundreds if not thousands of people and saw loads of beavers into the bargain, can’t fault the lad.
He was a bigamist and had little to no contact with the children he sired but word count and that…