Flint and Feather Read online

  However, 100 letters do not constitute a major resource. (For a previous book, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Lives of Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill, I was able to draw on nearly 500 published and unpublished letters.) I also relied on clippings of articles by and about Pauline, most of which I found in the National Archives of Canada and the William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections at McMaster University. The unpublished memoir by Pauline’s sister Evelyn, in the Archives of Ontario, both supplemented and balanced Pauline’s account of her family and career. And I paid close attention to Pauline’s own compositions, published within her lifetime or soon after her death. Five books bear Pauline’s byline:

  The White Wampum, London, 1895

  Canadian Born, Toronto, 1903

  Legends of Vancouver, Vancouver 1911, reprinted 1997

  Flint and Feather, Toronto, 1912

  The Moccasin Maker, Toronto, 1913, reprinted 1998

  I did not do all the legwork alone: there are several previous books about E. Pauline Johnson on which I was able to draw. Four in particular proved to be extremely useful. Pauline’s first biographer was Mrs. W. Garland Foster, author of The Mohawk Princess: Being Some Account of the Life of Tekahion-wake (E. Pauline Johnson), published in 1931 (Vancouver: Lions’ Gate). Mrs. Foster had the advantage of speaking to people who remembered Pauline; her anodyne account of Pauline’s life is enlivened by their anecdotes. In 1981, Betty Keller published Pauline: A Biography of Pauline Johnson (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre), which first drew my attention to the fascinating story of this talented woman and which included much new research. Sheila Johnston’s Buckskin & Broadcloth: A Celebration of E. Pauline Johnson—Tekahionwake, 1861–1913, a lively compilation of illustrations, photos, contemporary comment and verses, appeared in 1997 (Toronto: Natural Heritage Books). Johnston had located many previously unpublished photographs and poems, which she generously shared. A different approach to Pauline’s life was taken in Paddling Her Own Canoe: The Times and Texts of E. Pauline Johnson, Tekahionwake (University of Toronto Press, 2000), by Veronica Strong-Boag and Carole Gerson. The insights I gained from this scholarly publication, and its bibliography and chronological list of all Pauline’s works that have been traced so far, were invaluable.

  Chapters 1 and 2

  Pauline herself described both her idyllic Chiefswood childhood and her mother’s early life in a series of sentimental articles for The Mother’s Magazine, which were subsequently reprinted in The Moccasin Maker. A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff explored the background of Pauline’s mother in her introduction to the 1998 edition of The Moccasin Maker (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998). The Howells family history is covered in “Thomas Howells of Hay and His Descendants in America” by Geoffrey L. Fairs in The New England Historical and Genealogical Register, volume 134, January 1980, pp. 27–47. Details about the literary life of early-nineteenth-century Bristol are taken from A Passionate Sisterhood: The Sisters, Wives and Daughters of the Lake Poets by Kathleen Jones (London: Constable, 1997).

  Chapter 3

  The authoritative biography of Sir William Johnson remains Mohawk Baronet: A Biography of Sir William Johnson, by James Thomas Flexner (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1979). Fred Anderson covers details of French–Indian conflicts in Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 (New York: Knopf, 2000). Molly Brant: A Legacy of Her Own, by Lois M. Huey and Bonnie Pulis (Youngstown, NY: Old Fort Niagara Association, 1997), is a brief introduction to one of the most interesting personalities of her time. I was also able to draw on the extensive knowledge of Bonnie Pulis herself, who is Interpretive Programs Assistant at Johnson Hall State Historic Site, John-stown, New York. Pauline’s articles about her mother and A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff’s introduction to The Moccasin Maker covered the meeting between Emily Howells and George Johnson.

  Chapter 4

  Evelyn Johnson described her parents’ marriage, the early years in Chiefswood and each of her siblings in her unpublished memoir. In The Mohawk Princess, Mrs. W. Garland Foster explores the tensions facing the young couple.

  Chapter 5

  Emily Howells Johnson’s 1855 letter to her husband is in the Brant County Museum and Archives. Pauline’s account of her mother’s life in her articles for The Mother’s Magazine is supplemented by two more articles for the same magazine, published in 1909, entitled “From the Child’s Viewpoint.” She also described some of the Iroquois spiritual beliefs in “Indian Medicine Men and Their Magic” in Dominion Illustrated, April 1892. Anecdotes about the distinguished visitors to Chiefswood appear in Mrs. W. Garland Foster’s The Mohawk Princess and in Marcus Van Steen’s Pauline Johnson: Her Life and Work (Toronto: Musson, 1965).

  Chapter 6

  Pauline’s 1881 letters to Charlotte Jones are held in the D. B. Weldon Library at the University of Western Ontario. Peggy Webling recorded her impressions of the young Pauline in Peggy: The Story of One Score Years and Ten (London, 1924). Details about the early years of Brantford are drawn from Evelyn Johnson’s memoir; from Brant County: A History, 1784–1945, by C. M. Johnston (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1967); and from The Way We Were: Glimpses of Brantford’s Past (Brant Historical Society and CKPC Radio Brantford, 1998). The Brant County Museum contains a reconstruction of a nineteenth-century street in the city.

  Information about the changing legal status of Indians in this and subsequent chapters is drawn from Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens: A History of Indian—White Relations in Canada, by J. R. Miller (University of Toronto Press, 1989) and Canada’s First Nations: A History of Founding Peoples, by Olive Dickason (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1992). For descriptions of Canada’s different peoples, I looked at the 1932 federal government anthropological report The Indians of Canada, by Diamond Jenness (reprinted 1993 by University of Toronto Press in association with the National Museum of Man, National Museums of Canada, and the Publishing Centre, Department of Supply and Services, Ottawa).

  Chapter 7

  Besides the published books by Keller, Johnstone, and Strong-Boag and Gerson, and Evelyn Johnson’s unpublished memoir, I was able to rely on two fascinating new archival sources for this chapter. The first was the Archibald Kains correspondence, donated to the National Archives of Canada by Kains’s grandniece Joan Ritchie of New Jersey, through the good offices of Susan MacMillan Kains of Massachusetts. The second was the Mackenzie Family Memoirs, kindly lent to me by Senator Landon Pearson and Katharine Hooke.

  The anecdotes about Emily gathering a last bunch of pansies in Chiefswood’s grounds and the Reverend Mackenzie’s affection for the song “When Polly and I Were Sweethearts” both come from cuttings held in the William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections at McMaster University.

  Marian Fowler described Brantford’s “New Woman” in Redney: A Life of Sara Jeannette Duncan (Toronto: Anansi, 1983). More information about changing attitudes can be gleaned from Aspiring Women: Short Stories by Canadian Women, 1880–1900, edited by Lorraine McMullen and Sandra Campbell (University of Ottawa Press, 1993).

  Chapter 8

  A number of good books have recently appeared about canoes in Canada. They include Bark, Skin and Cedar: Exploring the Canoe in Canadian Experience, by James Raffan (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1999); Idleness, Water, and a Canoe: Reflections on Paddling for Pleasure, by Jamie Benidickson (University of Toronto Press, 1997); and The Canoe in Canadian Cultures, edited by John Jennings, Bruce W. Hodgins and Doreen Small (Toronto: Natural Heritage Books, 1999). I found particularly useful a pamphlet written by Gerald F. Stephenson entitled John Stephenson and the Famous “Peterborough” Canoes (Peterborough Historical Society Occasional Paper, November 1987). I also found helpful information in Gore’s Landing and the Rice Lake Plains, by Norma Martin, Catherine Milne and Donna S. McGillis (Heritage Gore’s Landing, 1986).

  For background on the Muskoka region I turned to the Rosseau Historical Society’s 1999 publication Ro
sseau: The Early Years; Patricia Jasen’s Wild Things: Nature, Culture, and Tourism in Ontario, 1790–1914 (University of Toronto Press, 1995); John Denison’s Micklethwaite’s Muskoka (Toronto: Stoddart, 1993); and Geraldine Coombe’s Muskoka: Past and Present (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1976).

  Pauline’s articles about Muskoka are in the William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections at McMaster University. The letter from the deputy editor of Outing magazine is in the Trent University Archives. The W. D. Lighthall letters are in the McGill University Library Rare Books and Special Collections.

  Chapter 9

  I enjoyed reading works by and about Canada’s post-Confederation poets and the stirring of literary nationalism for this chapter. I began with Chapters 28 and 29 in one of my favourite books, Sandra Gwyn’s The Private Capital: Ambition and Love in the Age of Macdonald and Laurier (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1984), and then turned to the following sources: Songs of the Great Dominion: Voices from the Forests and Waters, the Settlements and Cities of Canada, edited by William Douw Lighthall (London, 1889); “The Singers of Canada,” by Joseph Dana Miller in Massey Magazine (May 1895); Poteen: A Pot-Pourri of Canadian Essays, by William Arthur Deacon (Ottawa, 1926); E. K. Brown’s On Canadian Poetry (Toronto: Ryerson, 1944); The Oxford Companion to Canadian History and Literature, by Norah Storey (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1967); The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English, edited by Margaret Atwood (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1982); and Canadian Poetry from the Beginnings Through the First World War, edited by Carole Gerson and Gwendolyn Davies (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1994). For information on the Fréchettes, I read Annie Howells and Achille Fréchette, by James Doyle (University of Toronto Press, 1979).

  Pauline’s first Toronto recital was covered in the Globe, Monday, January 18, 1892, and in Saturday Night, January 23, 1892. Frank Yeigh recorded his own adulatory but inaccurate memories of the occasions in “Recollections of Pauline Johnson,” The Western Home Monthly, October 1924, and “Memories of Pauline Johnson,” The Canadian Bookman, October 1929.

  Chapter 10

  Reports of Pauline’s recitals that appeared in newspapers including the Globe, Saturday Night and the Boston Herald are held in the William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections at McMaster University. Enthusiastic descriptions by her contemporaries of Pauline in her early thirties appear in O. J. Stevenson’s A People’s Best (Toronto, 1927) and Hector Charlesworth’s Candid Chronicles: Leaves from the Notebook of a Canadian Journalist (Toronto, 1925).

  In The Imaginary Indian: The Image of the Indian in Canadian Culture (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp, 1992), Daniel Francis discusses the stereotypes of Indians that Pauline tried to combat. Dr. Melanie Stevenson at McMaster University provided me with information about Buffalo Bill and the Wild West shows. Pauline’s correspondence with William Scott is in the W. L. Scott Papers at the National Archives of Canada. Her correspondence with Harry O’Brien is in the Queen’s University Archives.

  Chapter 11

  I was able to picture London through Pauline’s eyes thanks to several books of old photographs, including Felix Barker’s London in Old Photographs, 1897–1914 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995); John Coulter’s London of One Hundred Years Ago (Stroud, UK: Sutton, 1999); Kensington and Chelsea in Old Photographs, by Barbara Denny and Carolyn Starren (London: Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, 1995); and Shaaron Whetlor’s The Story of Notting Dale: From Potteries and Piggeries to Present Time (London: Kensington & Chelsea Community History Group, 1998).

  I drew information about the characters that Pauline encountered from John Lane and the Nineties, by J. Lewis May (London, 1936); Giles Walkley’s wonderful volume, Artists’ Houses in London 1764–1914 (Aldershot, UK: Scolar Press, 1994); and As We Were: A Victorian Peepshow, by E. F. Benson (1930; Penguin Classics, 2001). Details of Hamilton Aidé’s salon came from an unpublished letter from Pauline to L. W. Makovski, quoted by Betty Keller, from various dictionaries of biography and from his obituary in London’s The Times. I learned much about the turn-of-the-century theatre scene from two engaging biographies: Lillie Langtry: Manners, Masks and Morals, by Laura Beatty (London: Chatto & Windus, 1999) and Marie Lloyd: The One and Only, by Midge Gillies (London: Gollancz, 1999). I found the Gazette and Sketch interviews with Pauline, and the Alma-Tadema anecdote (from a clipping dated 1899), in the William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections at McMaster University.

  My account of London’s literary scene was coloured by Bernard Bergonzi’s essay “Aspects of the fin de siècle,” in The Victorians, edited by Arthur Pollard (London, 1969), and by England in the 1890s: Literary Publishing at the Bodley Head, by Margaret D. Stetz and Mark Samuels Lasner (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990).

  Chapter 12

  Ernest Thompson Seton described his first encounter with Pauline in his introduction to The Shagganappi, the collection of Pauline’s stories published in 1913 after her death. Pauline and her partner Owen Smily described their first transcontinental train journey in “There and Back by Miss Poetry and Mr. Prose,” which appeared in the Globe, December 15, 1894.

  The excitement of train travel in the 1890s is caught in two contemporary accounts: Edward Roper’s By Track and Trail: A Journey Through Canada (London, 1891) and Douglas Sladen’s On the Cars and Off: Being a Journal of a Pilgrimage Along the Queen’s Highway to the East, from Halifax in Nova Scotia to Victoria in Vancouver’s Island (London, 1895). Pierre Berton celebrated the CPR’s singular achievement in completing the track in The Last Spike: The Great Railway 1881–1885 (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1971), while Clark Blaise explored the impact of the railway on society in Time Lord: The Remarkable Canadian Who Missed His Train and Changed the World (Toronto: Knopf, 2001).

  Reliable, up-to-date sources on the Plains Indians in the late-nineteenth century are scarce. In addition to works cited by J. R. Miller, Olive Dickason and Daniel Francis, I looked at Sarah Carter’s Lost Harvests: Prairie Indian Reserve Farmers and Government Policy (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990) and The Face Pullers: Photographing Native Canadians 1871–1939, by Brock V. Silversides (Saskatoon: Fifth House, 1994).

  Chapter 13

  Two lively accounts of the lives of travelling performers are Peggy Webling’s Peggy: The Story of One Score Years and Ten (London, 1924) and Walter McRaye’s Pauline Johnson and Her Friends (Toronto: Ryerson, 1947). I also benefitted from an exhibit at the Perth Museum in the summer of 2001 entitled “On Stage in Perth,” featuring the Marks Brothers. Charles G. D. Roberts’s comments on Pauline appear in The Collected Letters of Charles G. D. Roberts, edited by Laurel Boone (Fredericton: Goose Lane, 1989).

  The changing face of Toronto is depicted in Immigrants: A Portrait of the Urban Experience, 1890–1930, by Robert Harney and Harold Troper (Toronto: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1975). Artist John W. L. Forster’s comments on Pauline appear in Under the Studio Light: Leaves from a Portrait Painter’s Sketch Book (Toronto, 1928). The anecdote about Pauline’s views on money comes from an article that her friend Jean Stevinson wrote in the Calgary Herald in 1932. The Wetherell letter comes from the J. E. Wetherell Papers in the University of Toronto Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library. The figure quoted for a schoolteacher’s salary appears on page 194 of Canadian Women on the Move 1867–1920, edited by Beth Light and Joy Parr (Toronto: New Hogtown Press/OISE, 1983).

  Chapter 14

  Much of the material on the Drayton romance comes from Betty Keller’s biography. I found additional material in the Drayton Papers at the Archives of Ontario and in Gore’s Landing and the Rice Lake Plains, by Norma Martin, Catherine Milne and Donna S. McGillis (Heritage Gore’s Landing, 1986). Henry Drayton was the kind of smug, successful lawyer who was often caricatured anonymously, most notably in The Masques of Ottawa, by “Domino” (Augustus Bridle) in 1921 and in Bigwigs: Canadians Wise and Otherwise, by R. T. L. (Charles Vining) in 1935.

  Two of the many enjoyable histories
of Winnipeg that I read were Christopher Dafoe’s Winnipeg, Heart of the Continent (Winnipeg: Great Plains, 1998) and James H. Gray’s Red Lights on the Prairies (Toronto: Macmillan, 1971). The best sources on the North-West Mounted Police were The New West: Being the Official Reports to Parliament of the Activities of the Royal North-West Mounted Police Force from 1888–1889, reprinted in the Coles Canadiana Collection in 1973, and The Great Adventure: How the Mounties Conquered the West, by David Cruise and Alison Griffiths (Toronto: Viking, 1996). Pauline’s letter to Mrs. Higginbotham is in the Vancouver Public Library. Nellie McClung described her first encounter with Pauline, who subsequently became a friend, in her 1945 memoir, The Stream Runs Fast: My Own Story (Toronto: Allen).