Flint and Feather Read online

  Alongside the increased availability of canoes, there was a further reason for the late-nineteenth-century canoe craze that swept the United States and British Isles as well as Canada. A wealthy English barrister named John MacGregor fired the imagination of a whole generation with a series of books he published in London in the 1860s and 1870s about canoeing in Europe, the Baltic, Egypt and Palestine. MacGregor called his European-designed craft a “Rob Roy Canoe,” but strictly speaking, it was a kayak, not a canoe. The ninety-pound, fifteen-foot (forty-kilogram, four-and-a-half-metre) boat had decks fore and aft, and MacGregor used a double-bladed paddle. But it boasted all the advantages of a canoe: it was sturdy and light, and it allowed its single occupant to navigate any form of inland waterway. MacGregor’s books went into countless printings. In common with other Victorian explorers such as David Livingstone, MacGregor was an enthusiastic performer on the lecture circuit, with hair-raising stories of near-death experiences and lantern slide shows of pounding waterfalls and surging rapids.

  MacGregor was messianic about the benefits of paddling. He argued that canoe trips allowed true Christian soldiers to renew themselves physically and spiritually before returning to the workaday battle against the world, the flesh and the devil. Such muscular Christianity struck a nerve in Victorian Britain and Canada, where growing consciousness of the cruel impact of capitalism on the urban poor was spawning such movements as the Salvation Army and the Settlement societies. And when MacGregor decided to found a canoe club in London in 1866, he enlisted Edward, Prince of Wales, as co-founder. (Edward had got the canoeing bug during his 1860 trip to Canada, when the Strickland family presented to him a racing dugout finished with French polish.) Thanks to the Prince of Wales’s support, the club was renamed the Royal Canoe Club in 1873. With both God and royalty on his side, MacGregor’s campaign to promote canoeing could hardly fail.

  Back in Brantford, Pauline Johnson may have been aware of the Rob Roy canoe and the Royal Yacht Club. She certainly knew about the revolution in canoe technology and the rising enthusiasm for canoes. Much of her social life revolved around them. In common with most small Ontario towns situated on water, Brantford had its own Canoe Club (founded in 1877). It couldn’t rival the Toronto Canoe Club (founded in 1880) for size or sophistication, but like the Toronto club it had a handsome fleet of cedar-strip Peterboroughs and an annual summer regatta in which there were both paddling and sailing races. Only men were allowed to enter the single paddle races at the regatta, but Pauline ran down the river path to cheer on those she had taught to paddle in her own Peterborough canoe, Wildcat. Women were allowed to paddle in the bow, with a man in the stern, in the “tandem canoe, ladies and gentlemen half-mile race,” and on September 21, 1889, Pauline and Alick Mackenzie, Michael’s younger brother, won the tandem trophy.

  “The Regatta was the sporting event of the season here,” she wrote to Archie Kains that year, “and of course I was in my element.” Her friends, she confided, “love to see me in my vagabond clothes…my flannel canoeing shirt and tam,” and she was thrilled when they called her “the best boy in the crowd.” It was always a wrench when the days grew cooler and she had to content herself with Brantford’s more conventional social occasions, which required ostrich feathers and evening dresses. Elegant satin gowns, she wrote, revealed “my hideous muscular arms, bare and burnt…Oh well, in a few weeks I will get over it, and will handle a fan as readily as a paddle I suppose.” But Canoe Club activities lasted all year. During the winter months, Club members threw themselves into amateur theatricals, in which Pauline often took the female lead. One year, she helped organize a performance of William S. Gilbert’s On Guard, “a little comedy in aid of the canoe fleet.” It wasn’t only the Canoe Club that benefitted from these performances: Pauline, already a star of the Brantford Players, acquired considerable confidence in front of the footlights as a performer of light verse and comic dialogue.

  Racing was only one element in the canoe craze; recreation was another, and Pauline was equally involved with this. In the late 1880s, she was invited by friends to join a camping and canoeing trip to the township of Rosseau, at the northern end of Lake Rosseau in Muskoka. She quickly discovered that “this gypsy life” was the life “I love best of all.” She would return to Rosseau each summer for the next few years. The summer camping expeditions provided her with both inspiration and material for her poetry.

  On her first trip, in 1888, Pauline and her friends (probably members of the Brantford Canoe Club) disembarked at Muskoka Wharf Station along with several dozen other dusty vacationers from the triweekly express train from Toronto. On that hot August afternoon, Pauline gazed in wonder at “this rockbound, fir-covered Muskoka with its exquisite lakes and their myriad islands” stretching as far as the eye could see. Only the toot-toot of a steamer’s whistle reminded her that she should be helping load luggage (including canoes, sails, tents, fishing rods and iron cooking pots) onto the Kanozha, one of the Muskoka Navigation Company’s fleet of lake steamers. Once passengers and possessions were aboard, the steamer pulled away from the

  At Port Calling, in the Muskoka region, city dwellers could rent anything from a small canoe to an elegant steam launch.

  wharf and nosed its way north across Lake Muskoka towards Port Carling, where passengers would change onto the steamers that plied the shores of lakes Joseph and Rosseau. Captain Henry, on the bridge of the Kanozha, entertained his passengers by telling them to watch out for wildlife: black bears, he informed them, could often be seen on the shore, and one season the Kanozha had run down two deer that were swimming across the lake.

  The Muskoka region, 120 miles (193 kilometres) north of Toronto, had been “discovered” less than twenty years earlier. In the 1860s, the area around Lake Muskoka, Lake Joseph and Lake Rosseau had been regarded as wild, inaccessible and far too rocky to attract settlers. But when the new railroad opened in 1875 connecting Toronto to the southern tip of Lake Muskoka beyond Gravenhurst, the region quickly became a fashionable summer playground. It attracted families anxious to escape from the city, sportsmen eager to hunt and fish, amateur botanists keen to “botanize” and canoeists who wanted to explore its crystal-clear waters and deep bays. The dramatic scenery of “The Highlands of Ontario,” as its promoters called the region, was extolled in advertising brochures and newspaper columns throughout eastern North America, and tourists flooded in. Many were up-and-comers in Toronto’s professional class; by the 1890s the published lists of cottage owners, along with weekly reports on who was staying at which hotel, read like a Who’s Who of Toronto society. But there were plenty of humbler holidaymakers who enjoyed the bathing, berry-picking, sketching and churchgoing summer routines.

  On that first trip, Pauline hung over the steamer rail, admiring the cottages and resort hotels scattered along the shores of the three major lakes. Some of the cottages were simple clapboard fishing shacks; others, such as the one owned by the retail king Timothy Eaton, were grand stone buildings with sweeping verandahs and boat-houses full of skiffs and canoes. “One expects to see almost everything in Muskoka—from a palace to a bivouac, from a prince to a pauper,” observed Pauline. Once into Lake Rosseau, she was captivated by the scenery: “How different is this stern, rock-girdled lake to our own beloved river—the dear old Grand that purrs away in its nest of velvet hills…These waters and shores are filled with a vastness of character that our own native river can never hope to attain.”

  Since Rosseau township was the steamer’s last call, it was evening by the time the Brantford party arrived there. The sight that met their eyes was enthralling. Despite the fact that of all the Muskoka resorts, Rosseau was the farthest from Toronto’s Union Station, in those years it boasted the region’s most lavish hotel. Monteith House was a three-storey lodge built in 1886 and boasting a roller-skating rink, a tennis court, extensive stables and accommodation for servants. It was stuffed with animal trophies (including the skin from a 1,600-pound—725 kilogram—polar bear) because
John Monteith, the owner, was a passionate hunter. Many of the trophies were displayed in the hotel’s “Indian Room,” which also featured a birchbark wigwam. On warm summer nights, the gentle glow of Chinese lanterns along the hotel’s porch and the tinkle of the piano in the ballroom were magical.

  Monteith House, of course, was far beyond the means of Brantford Canoe Club members. The canoeists more likely chose Rosseau because it was also home to the four Ditchburn brothers from England. William Ditchburn was a vigorous Rosseau-booster: he was the village postmaster, his wife headed the Women’s Auxiliary and his brothers and sons built, sold and rented rowboats, skiffs and canoes. Until the Ditchburns moved their business to Gravenhurst some years later, Rosseau was a magnet for those who loved messing about in boats. There were plenty of spots along the shoreline, between birches and pines, on which visitors could pitch camp and enjoy the “gypsy life” in this wilderness paradise. Pauline’s group camped on a promontory about half a mile (just under a kilometre) from the village, close to a cottage called Camp Knockabout owned by Mr. and Mrs. Walter Wilkes of Brantford, who chaperoned the party. The group would return to Camp Knockabout for all its subsequent Muskoka excursions.

  Pauline Johnson had none of the snake-phobic fastidiousness of the stereotypical Victorian lady; she loved life in the outdoors. Not for her the ruffled linen blouses and tea gowns required for a sojourn in a resort hotel. She preferred to cram her bags with the candles, canned meat and coarse grey blankets required for a month of sleeping rough. No repast was more appetizing, in her opinion, than one cooked over an open fire: “The tin coffee-pot may have all the ashes of a thousand camp-fires clinging to its smoky sides, the butter may be garnished with myriads of brown pine-needles, the marmalade may be excavated from its primitive wide-mouthed glass bottle by means of a steel knife-blade, the canned beef may be warm and shapeless, the slices of bread ragged and huge, but ah! the deliciousness of it all, out under the giant forest trees.” After dinner, if someone produced a banjo, she was the first to lead the singsong. At night, she was never more content than when under canvas, listening to “the far-off calls of herons winging their late passage through the night, the gentle wash of waves along the stony shore, and the toss, toss, toss of a loosely-moored canoe on the ripples.”

  At Rosseau, where the Brantford group both paddled and sailed their canoes, Pauline was an enthusiastic athlete. “It is a nice thing to be a lady canoeist,” she noted. “All the men in the camp revere you, and if you are a very good paddler they may do the honour of imposing on you…When a long cruise is on the programme, you are sought by every masculine member of the camp, and the honour of your company begged, nay, supplicated for.” Pauline was not afraid to flaunt her expertise or to tease male companions when they were ham-fisted. She described how she knelt in the stern “while a handsome, lazy affair in white flannels decorates the bow. He sings, while you shoot through a score of eddies…With a great deal of floundering and bungling he gets the mast up and excavates the sail from under the thwarts. You tell him several times just how to fix the whole business and he does it exactly the opposite way, then you beach the bow and walk up to the deck, stepping meanwhile over his big shoes and telling him he is a great stupid.”

  She was too smart, though, to forgo all the delights of being the maiden lolling “gracefully in the bow, with all the cushions.” She was happy to let some “dear, athletic college boy” take her off in a canoe in which a mast had been erected and a sail unfurled. “Oh! the deliciousness of a sail on a hot August day,” she wrote in a newspaper article about one such trip, when someone named Sam held the tiller. “To lie back in utter sloth, and with half-closed eyes watch the canvas fill overhead, while your taut little canoe cleancuts the water, its bow lined with bubbling foam, the cooling swish of water beneath the gunwales that parts to the aggressive little keel…The gale blew steady now…Faster and faster we flew, our bow splitting every wave it caught square…[Sam asked] if I was ‘scared.’ Not I; I had been in worse things than a Muskoka gale in a canoe.”

  The Camp Knockabout crowd swam, sailed and fished during their three-week vacations. On Sunday evenings most of them struggled into their cleanest outfits and rowed over to Rosseau’s clapboard Anglican church, with its gothic windows and belfry, for evensong. They accompanied Mr. and Mrs. Wilkes on frog-catching expeditions; Mrs. Wilkes produced a sizzling platter of fried frogs’ legs for tea, and Pauline asked for a second helping of these “broiled dainties.” They explored the woods behind Rosseau, and met some Chippewa Indians from the Parry Sound Reserve. Pauline’s description of the encounter suggests she felt no sense of kinship; her reactions could have been those of any member of the Brantford Canoe Club: “[The Chippewas] are selling quaint little bark baskets and canoes embroidered in porcupine quills. They speak very good English, and were most courteous and obliging in filling special orders for us. Of course our host took out his omnipresent ‘hawkeye’: photographing is as prevalent here as la grippe was at home last winter. Someone is always calling us to ‘Stand still please.’”

  Pauline was a tomboy, but Muskoka also appealed to her solitary, lyrical side. Her picturesque surroundings, she admitted, “calmed me into a reverie that was almost akin to pain.” She loved to “luxuriate in the great heart of Nature.” She would paddle out alone, drinking in the “velvet air” and silently rehearsing the words that would shape into verse the dramatic scenery and her emotional response to it. Or she would walk off and hide amongst the rocks by the water’s edge so she could scribble her thoughts on paper. At home in Brantford during these years, she was writing nature poems which make specific seasons and scenes act as metaphors for larger human experience. Much of this poetry reflects the Muskoka landscape, and the exhilaration that its untamed beauty roused in her.

  She wrote about “The pine trees whispering, the heron’s cry, / The plover’s wing, his lullaby.” She wrote a poem called “Moonset,” the first line of which is “Idles the night wind through the dreaming firs.” In “Bass Lake, Muskoka,” she suggests the landscape is too poetic in itself for language: “The littleness of language seems the flower, / The firs are silence, grandeur, soul and power.” In “Under Canvas, in Muskoka,” published in November 1888, she captures the intoxicating pleasure of an evening in camp, surrounded by wilderness:

  Some northern sorceress, when day is done,

  Hovers where cliffs uplift their gaunt grey steeps,

  Bewitching to vermilion Rosseau’s sun,

  That in a liquid mass of rubies sleeps.

  The scent of burning leaves, the camp-fire’s blaze,

  The great logs cracking in the brilliant flame,

  The groups grotesque, on which the firelight plays,

  Are pictures which Muskoka twilights frame.

  And Night, star-crested, wanders up the mere

  With opiates for idleness to quaff,

  And while she ministers, far off I hear

  The owl’s uncanny cry, the wild loon’s laugh.

  Pauline’s imagination was fired by the grandeur of Muskoka’s rocky cliffs, vast starlit skies and empty shores, which dwarfed its human visitors. There are echoes of the Romantic poets, familiar to her since childhood, in these poems, but she also identified deeply with the natural elements: earth, wind, rain, fire. Perhaps it was the sensibility of an exuberant and creative young woman, or perhaps it was her deep roots in the aboriginal tradition of living within the soft rhythms of the land, that prompted her to pen such lines as

  Soulless is all humanity to me

  Tonight. My keenest longing is to be

  Alone, alone with God’s grey earth that seems

  Pulse of my pulse and consort of my dreams.

  One of her most successful poems of this period appeared in Saturday Night in 1889. Entitled “Shadow River,” it describes Rosseau’s famous beauty spot: a hidden creek in which, as an 1886 guide to the area promised, “the surface is as motionless as glass and everything is duplicated in marvel
lous detail, each leaf and branch having its reflected counterpart even more distinct than it appears itself.” Pauline found Shadow River bewitching, and she longed to show it to her closest friends. “I dream and dream the whole day long,” she wrote to Archie Kains in 1890, “and sometimes find myself wishing for you as a comrade during my canoe trips up Shadow River.” The poem combines close observation of the natural world with respect for a mighty landscape. Pauline begins by painting an exquisite picture of “opal tinted skies” reflected in “the sapphire floor,” and of the borderline between water and air so fine that the keenest vision could barely see it. Then she acknowledges that “The beauty, strength, and power of the land / Will never stir or bend at my command.” And, in a pattern that was starting to characterize much of what she wrote, she ends on a poignant, personal note:

  For others Fame

  And Love’s red flame,