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

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.