From 'The World’s Greatest Lover' to 'The Happy Jogger': The people who walked across Canada before Terry Fox

From 'The World’s Greatest Lover' to 'The Happy Jogger': The people who walked across Canada before Terry Fox

Some cross-Canada trekkers were, like Fox, raising awareness for a cause, others were accused of being frauds

When Terry Fox set off to run across the country, he inspired millions with his dream of curing cancer and his call for others to pick up where he left off after a recurrence of his own illness forced an early end to his Marathon of Hope in August 1980.

Fox may be the most famous person to attempt to cross Canada on foot, but he wasn’t the first.

This weekend, as millions of people around the world prepare to take up Fox’s torch and run to raise money for cancer research, here are the stories of some other cross-Canada trekkers.

One of the earliest, Percy Beresford Greathead, planned to walk not only across Canada but around the world.

Born in England in 1862, Greathead led a colourful life. He was educated in Belgium, lived in the West Indies, South and Central America, and moved to Winnipeg to work as a translator after being mistaken for Jack the Ripper in Whitechapel.

On March 2, 1895, he left Vancouver carrying nothing but a clean pair of socks, a revolver, and some chewing tobacco.

On his solitary travels through the wilderness, he evaded a wild cat by jumping off a cliff, landing safely in moss and brush below. Awakened one night by a grizzly, he put a bullet in its head and ate it the next morning for breakfast.

Greathead had his closest shave when a train came barreling towards him on a narrow railway bridge over a ravine.

“Quick as chained lightning,” he said, “I swung myself over the side and hung there suspended in space until the train had passed by…. I doubt not that during that time some of my hair turned grey.”

He arrived in Halifax on March 27, 1896, and marked his achievement by emptying a bottle of water he had filled from the Pacific Ocean into the Atlantic.

The one problem with Greathead’s incredible story is that he was the only person telling it, and he may not have been a reliable narrator.

An Ontario newspaper announced his arrival in Ottawa in September 1895, only to publish a follow-up a month later calling him a “fakir and fraud” who had run out on his debts in Winnipeg after serving a prison sentence for forgery.

Later cross-country walks were monitored more closely.

Billing himself as “The World’s Greatest Lover,” Burnest Heard pushed an oil drum in front of him the whole way to prove he didn’t hitchhike.

When Charles Burkman and Sid Carr set out to walk from Halifax to Vancouver in 1921, the Halifax Herald offered to sponsor them in return for the right to publish their daily updates from the road.

The publicity attracted others with a taste for adventure, and soon the 1921 walk turned into a race.

Father-son duo Jack and Clifford Behan reached Vancouver first, on June 11, but young married couple Jennie and Frank Dill, who left Halifax a week after the Behans, finished the hike most quickly.

The Dill’s 134-day time was declared “a world’s record” by the Herald and created a sensation, not least because it had been achieved by a woman.

Wolves, winter and frostbite: Why 2 Nova Scotians walked to Vancouver in 1921

Frank, in fact, credited Jennie with setting the pace. Before they left Halifax, she had reportedly told him not to worry about the walk “because if he got tired, I’d pick him up and carry him.”

Soon, cross-Canada hikers began using their journeys to raise awareness of social issues.

In 1923, nearly sixty years before Fox’s Marathon of Hope, two other leg amputees walked to advocate for Canadians with disabilities.

Calgarians George Hincks and Marshall McDougall had lost their legs to battlefield injuries during the Great War. Hincks said they were trekking from Calgary to Ottawa "to prove that an amputation case has as much stamina as the average citizen who has not lost a faculty."

The forgotten trek across Canada of two WW I veterans who were amputees

Cross-Canada walkers from Greathead onwards financed their journeys by selling picture postcards of themselves or giving talks along the way.

Hincks and McDougall used their lectures to describe how disabled Canadians were shut out of the job market. Hincks himself had been unemployed for three years, and, according to historian Eric Story, the men placed the onus on their able-bodied audiences to overcome their prejudices and stop judging by appearances.

Hiking on crutches eventually rubbed their feet, hands, and underarms raw, and the pair were forced to call off their walk in western Ontario. Hincks, like Fox, stopped in Thunder Bay.

Four decades later, Ken Weldrick also crossed the country for disability rights.

Calling himself “The Happy Jogger,” the 23-year-old child welfare worker ran from Vancouver to St. John’s to raise awareness and funds for Canadians with intellectual disabilities.

In larger cities like Toronto and Montreal, he said, yhe associations for people with intellectual disabilities "have a lot of money, and the patients can get the care they need. But in the other parts of the country, there are not enough funds coming in.”

Weldrick mostly slept outdoors and followed a routine of running for half an hour, resting for five minutes, then running again.

Undertaking the trip in the middle of winter, he was hospitalized in Manitoba for two months after suffering serious frostbite to his face, hands, and feet. He lost all his toenails as a result.

By the time he reached St. John’s on July 1, 1975, supporters had pledged about $7,000 directly to local charities for people with intellectual disabilities.

There are people walking across Canada right now. Though it may be a pastime almost as old as Confederation, the prospect of crossing this great continent on foot hasn’t lost any of its appeal.

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Ainsley Hawthorn, PhD, is a cultural historian and author who lives in St. John’s.