Legendary guide Henry Braithwaite was 84 years old when he had his first — and only — accident in the woods. Alone in the deep forests of central New Brunswick, he tripped over a log. His shotgun went off, blowing several fingers clean off.
He bandaged the hand himself and walked 60 miles to the nearest town for medical attention, sleeping two nights on the forest floor along the way. After recovering, he decided it was finally time to retire.
It was the end of the career of one of the province’s most storied guides.
Braithwaite had learned the ways of the forest from the very best — the legendary “Sachem Gabe” himself, Gabriel Acquin, now recognized as a Canadian National Historic Person.
Gabe — as he was always known — wasn’t particularly eager to train a white person in the traditional Wolastoqiyik ways. Especially not a 13-year-old boy who, by his own account, was rather annoying, relentlessly pestering Gabe to teach him the secrets of the forest.
But Gabe needed help. He’d been hired to guide Lieutenant-Governor John Henry Thomas Manners-Sutton on a hunt and required another assistant. Reluctantly, he agreed to bring the boy along.
Things got off to a rough start. Young Henry Braithwaite forgot the Lieutenant-Governor’s all-important personal keg of rum and had to trudge back through the snow alone with a toboggan to retrieve it.
When he returned, rum in tow, he was elated to hear Manners-Sutton cheering him on.
“I tell you I was a proud boy,” Braithwaite recalled. “I thought they were cheering me then. Afterwards, I thought maybe it was the keg!”
Gabe later agreed to take Braithwaite under his wing.
He later bragged that Gabe once told him that he was the first ever white person to properly call a moose with a birchbark horn. He learned to track animals, even across hard, dry ground.
Braithwaite made his life in the woods.
He started as a cook in logging camps, became a timber cruiser marking cut zones, and eventually rose to fame as a master guide to the rich and eccentric. His clients ranged from American industrialists and writers to British aristocrats — including one particularly fussy Englishman who insisted on bringing a bathtub into the bush.
Braithwaite was spoken of in glowing terms by some of New Brunswick’s finest literary minds, including William F. Ganong, who declared, “He is not only the most expert of woodsmen and hunters, but a courteous gentleman as well.” Charles G. D. Roberts dedicated his book ‘Red Fox’ “To Henry Braithwaite, Master of Woodcraft.”
Eagle-eyed Backyard History readers will recognize Henry Braithwaite's name. He was the guide to reporters Frank Risteen and Frederick Irland when they ventured deep into the wilderness of the Miramichi region in 1895 and encountered the man they believed to be the famous "Dungarvon Whooper," a person commonly believed to be a ghost story. Even Henry Braithwaite found that encounter unusual, though, saying of the mysterious hermit: “Well, I’ve been in these woods most of my life, and he beats me!”
Old age didn’t slow him down. Henry Braithwaite continued solo trips deep into the wilderness, sometimes lasting months. At 80, on one such expedition, he caught pneumonia.
Fifty miles from the nearest town, the Telegraph-Journal’s Ian Sclanders reported, he “made himself a huge pot of broth from the shank of a deer and spread his blankets in front of the fire so he could reach out and throw a log on it. For a fortnight, he fought a brave battle against death in that lonely, isolated cabin. When he partly regained his strength, he started out of the woods to get medical attention.”
Unfazed, he kept on for another four years. Only after the shotgun accident did he finally retire.
“A man who would blow his own fingers off ought not take sports out hunting,” Braithwaite glumly told Sclanders. “I finally admit, I am getting old; getting very old.”
But retirement brought something unexpected — a complete reevaluation of everything he had stood for.
Braithwaite didn’t think it was shameful to admit he was wrong, explaining: “I have never permitted myself to get the idea into my head that I knew it all. On the contrary … I am always learning.”
He devoted his final years to becoming a ferocious advocate of forest conservation.
“I have been at the death of hundreds of moose, caribou and deer, I have trapped and killed over 100 bears, but if I had any choice in the matter, I would rather stand by and watch them,” he wrote in the Telegraph-Journal in 1925.
He turned against the very industry that had sustained him — wealthy tourists pouring into New Brunswick to hunt. He feared they were driving the province’s wildlife to extinction.
His proudest early hunting memory had been shooting a caribou, which he celebrated every year like a birthday. But by then, caribou were long extinct in the province — hunted out, he believed, by British soldiers before Confederation. Now, he feared American tourists were about to do the same to moose, bears, and salmon.
“Moose are growing scarce,” he warned. “I fear my old friend the black bear will never be left in peace. … Our most prized fish [salmon] I fear figures more prominently in tourist literature than rivers.”
“New Brunswick has much to offer the outdoor people of America, and they are welcome to visit … But they must be prepared to rigidly observe the health of the forest.” Braithwaite declared.
He pushed for sweeping reforms: bans on netting salmon, protection for female moose and calves, stricter enforcement of game laws, tariffs on salmon exports — and, most controversially, a salmon fishing moratorium on the St. John, Tobique, and Restigouche Rivers.
He defiantly defended his stance, stating: “Ask a farmer if they kill off their best bulls and breed from their scrubs … Surely New Brunswick people have as much intelligence and business sense to [protect] our beautiful scenic attractions as well as our opportunities.”
He proposed that artificial salmon pools be built for recreational fishing purposes to allow wild salmon numbers to recover.
On New Year’s Eve, 1927 — just 12 days before his 87th birthday — Braithwaite dressed to the nines and went out celebrating in Fredericton. He stayed out dancing nearly until dawn, finally arriving home around 5 a.m. He lay down to sleep and never woke up.
“Uncle Henry had done more, perhaps, than any other man to make known to the world New Brunswick’s prowess as a big game hunter’s paradise,” wrote the Daily Gleaner in his obituary.
After Henry Braithwaite’s death, it eventually became clear he’d been right.
That same year, New Brunswick banned grouse hunting — the first of several desperate steps to save its collapsing wildlife populations. Hunting fees were introduced but quickly slashed after political and public backlash.
Meanwhile, animals vanished. By the early 1930s, even beavers and porcupines were near extinction. Moose had almost disappeared.
In 1937, the province finally admitted it was in crisis. Strict new hunting limits were imposed. Moose, considered by some to be a symbol of New Brunswick, were protected by a full moratorium — “until numbers recovered.”
A decade earlier, Henry Braithwaite had called for a five-year moratorium to allow moose numbers to recover. By the time his call was heeded, moose numbers had become so precarious that recovery took thirty years. It would not be until the 1960s that they had recovered enough to allow moose hunting to resume again.
