It was the kind of story often found in the dime novels and boys’ adventure magazines that were so popular around the turn of the 20th century, when the heady days of the Wild West were still part of living memory and the frontier of the Canadian north was still an exotic reality.
It was a heroic tale that saw a man alone pitted against the savage forces of nature; a story that might have come from the pen of Jack London. But this story wasn’t fiction, and the central figure was from Guelph.
Harold Ernest Fennel (Harry to family and friends) was born in Guelph in 1886, the youngest of the four sons of Thomas and Hagail Fennel. Guelph city directories for the 1880s and 1890s show a Thomas Fennel, labourer, living at a succession of different addresses – Verney St., James St., Mitchell St. - indicating the family moved around a lot.
According to a letter written by his mother years later and published in the Mercury, Harry was a tough kid; a “reckless boy” who often got into trouble trying to protect others. She said, “I was always afraid he would shoot somebody or do something desperate if he heard a man insult a girl or anything of that kind. He was always too ready to take the part of others whom he thought couldn’t protect themselves as well as he could.”
About 1906, Harry moved to Denver, Colorado, with his mother and one of his brothers. He was employed for a while as a teamster for a coal company. But Harry Fennel evidently had something of an adventurous spirit and wanted to see other places.
In August of 1911, he headed for Kansas to join the itinerant working men who were following the wheat harvest. Then, when the grain crop was in, he went back to Canada; not to Guelph, but to the wilderness country of Hudson Bay.
Fennel and a partner named Morley Wilson had decided to try their hand at fur-trapping – a rough way to earn a livelihood even for experienced woodsmen. The documentation we have concerning their expedition does not say just where they were on Hudson Bay’s long coastline, which was still a far-off, frozen wasteland in the minds of most Canadians.
The provincial maps of Quebec, Ontario and Manitoba had only recently been extended to the shores of the great bay, and a large part of the coast belonged to the region of the old Northwest Territories now called Nunavut. The would-be trappers could have been anywhere along that wide expanse of frigid land and small, isolated communities, but were most likely on the western shore.
Fennel and Wilson were living in a cabin in the bush. One night in December they went to a dance held by some Metis people in a nearby settlement. It was late when they left, and another man who had a sleigh and a team of horses offered them a ride to their cabin. There were also several girls in the sleigh.
Part of the way down the trail, the people realized they were being chased by a pack of timber wolves. Fennel knew the horses pulling a sleigh full of people through snow didn’t have a chance of outrunning the wolves. He had his rifle, so he made one of those decisions his mother would have called reckless.
He jumped out of the sleigh and told the others to make a dash for the cabin while he held off the wolves. Wilson and the other man protested. They said they’d stay and help Fennel fight the wolf pack. He begged them to get going and “not take chances with the girls.” He said he was dressed warmly enough to withstand the night’s cold until dawn. Then, he said, the wolves would go.
As the driver urged the horses to run, Fennel climbed a tree.
The fleeing party heard rifle shots as they raced along the trail. They reached the safety of the cabin, and throughout the night they heard gunshots. In the morning, all was quiet.
Wilson and the other man returned to the place where they had left Fennel. Nine dead wolves littered the bloody snow. The bodies had been partially devoured. Three wolves were still alive and snarling. Wilson and his companion shot two of them and the lone survivor ran away.
They found Fennel barely alive. His clothing had not been enough to protect him from the intense cold overnight, especially considering he was in a tree and not moving very much. He was unable to walk, so his friends had to help him into the sleigh.
Back in the cabin, Fennel’s companions tried to warm him up, but he fell ill, possibly with pneumonia. The nearest doctor was 95 km away and they had no way of contacting help.
Fennel drifted in and out of delirium. In a spell of lucidity, he told Wilson to contact his mother and tell her he was dead. Fennel told Wilson her address in Denver, but Wilson had nothing to write with and he forgot it.
Finally, the young adventurer from Guelph lost his struggle with illness, and died.
Wilson made his way to his home in Regina, Saskatchewan, and wrote a letter to the Denver Post, which Fennel had told him his mother subscribed to. He described what had occurred up in the Canadian north and asked the Post to pass the sad news on to Mrs. Fennel.
It had been about four months since Hagail had last heard from Harry. She’d known only that he was somewhere in northern Canada. After learning of her son’s death, she told the Post that her grief was softened by her pride in knowing that he had died fighting to save the lives of others.
“He never feared death, and I always expected something would happen to him,” she said. “It helps a whole lot to know that he died a hero.”
The Denver Post published the story of Harry Fennel’s fight with the wolves. It was subsequently carried by newspapers across the United States and Canada, including the Guelph Mercury, where it appeared on Jan. 24, 1912.
Perhaps somewhere Harry’s story caught the eye of Jack London.
