Flint and Feather

by Charlotte Gray

  Tutelo Heights, the Bells’ home outside Brantford, where Alexander Graham Bell rigged up the first telephone system.

  every tree and fence post he passed. George took off his coat to give him a hand. After Bell had connected the wire to a strange device in his study, he and George joined a group of Brantford worthies in the dining room for lunch. When the meal was finished, the party returned to the study and Bell explained that the wire stretched between his workshop and the Great Western Telegraph office in Brantford, two and a half miles (four kilometres) away. He spoke into a mouthpiece, then watched with delight the expressions on his guests’ faces as they heard clearly the voice of Walter Griffin, the telegraph operator in Brantford, replying. Each took turns speaking to Griffin, who heard every word perfectly. But when it was his turn, George Johnson opted to speak Mohawk. “Sago, ghasha,” he said, whispering to those around him that this meant “How do you do, my cousin.”

  There was silence at the other end, then Griffin said, “I couldn’t get that; repeat it please.” George repeated the Mohawk greeting; Griffin again was stumped. After a couple more exchanges, Griffin said in exasperation, “Well, all I can say is, Professor Bell’s champagne must have been very heady!”

  Another prominent neighbour who turned up at Chiefswood was a tall young man from Doon, several miles up the Grand River. This was the painter Homer Watson, who arrived with a party of teachers from Berlin (now Kitchener) High School. Watson, a self-taught artist, loved to depict the hills, valleys, trees and cattle of Southern Ontario as though it were a rural British scene. (“The Canadian Constable!” Oscar Wilde exclaimed several years later when he caught sight of one of

  By the time she was fourteen, Pauline Johnson knew by heart large parts of Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha.

  Watson’s canvasses.) The artist was captivated by the Georgian architecture of Chiefswood, by the copses of old elms in the grounds and by Emily’s English manners and gooseberry preserve. “The Chief and his cultured wife made us welcome,” he wrote to a friend. “Pauline and her sister sang duets, and then Pauline, a slight, striking-looking young girl, recited some of her verses, which showed much talent.”

  By the mid-1870s, all Emily’s fears that her family would be outcasts had proven groundless. The Johnsons were acknowledged as a leading Canadian family. An envelope addressed simply to “Chiefs-wood” would be delivered promptly by the Brantford post office from anywhere in the province. Distinguished travellers from as far afield as the southern United States angled for invitations to this showpiece house. And in Ottawa, the newly built capital of the Dominion of Canada, successive Governors General were urged to call in at Chiefswood on their vice-regal tours. In 1874, Lord and Lady Dufferin arrived at the Six Nations Reserve to visit the Mohawk Church and watch a war dance. George Johnson was their interpreter, and he played the role of Indian chief for all it was worth. Lady Dufferin noted he was “a clever, fine-looking man…beautifully-dressed in well-made, tight-fitting tunic and breeches of deerskin, with silver ornaments. He looked magnificent on horseback.” The vice-regal party went on to Chiefswood for “a great luncheon and some excellent tea.” Thirteen-year-old Pauline found herself curtseying to a debonair figure who inspected her through his monocle and to a slender woman in a marvellously fashionable hat. Five years later, there was a repeat performance of the war dance, curtseys and an excellent tea at Chiefswood for Dufferin’s successor, the Marquess of Lorne and his wife, Princess Louise, daughter of Queen Victoria.

  George Johnson could never resist an opportunity to dress up—sometimes in native dress, other times in his well-cut European-style suits—and mingle with the mighty. On one occasion, he travelled to Montreal to have his photograph taken by William Notman, the Scots-born photographer who captured all the celebrities of the time with his lens. On another occasion, George attended a theatrical performance in New York City in full Indian costume, decorated with several large medals. At least half the audience was convinced that this splendid figure sitting in a private box was the Czar of Russia. George was also a frequent guest at Rideau Hall, in Ottawa, where his exquisite manners impressed whichever British aristocrat held the position of Governor General of Canada.

  The nineteenth-century ethnographer Horatio Hale (1817–1896), who wrote several articles about the Six Nations Reserve, was a close friend of the Johnson family.

  Horatio Hale, a Canadian ethnographer of the later nineteenth century who made a special study of the Six Nations Reserve, was impressed by the reception tendered Johnson: “He was often sent by his people as a delegate to bring their needs, and occasionally their remonstrances, to the attention of the government. If not in all cases successful in such missions his appearance and address always secured him attention and respect. Governors and statesmen received him with courtesy and interest.” And George relished every opportunity to join the exclusive clubs established by British immigrants. By the time of his death, in addition to being a Freemason, he was a member of the Conservative Party, the Order of Odd Fellows and the York Pioneers, and frequently added the letters ue (United Empire Loyalist) to his name.

  With the leading statesmen and scientists of his day treating George Johnson so respectfully, it is no surprise that his youngest daughter idolized him. Pauline’s attitude to her father was always one of unconditional admiration. His frequent absences from home, and the way he left child-raising entirely to Emily, meant that he had the additional mystery of distance. George Johnson could do no wrong in his family’s eyes. He presented an example of manhood which his sons felt they could never live up to and which his daughters looked for, and failed to find, in their beaux.

  Emily never accompanied her husband to grand events in Toronto, New York or Ottawa, although George urged her to do so. She had found her role: she was the angel in the house. In Pauline’s magazine article “My Mother,” she quotes Emily as saying, “My babies need me here, and you need me here when you return, far more than you need me on platform or parade. Go forth and fight the enemy, storm the battlements and win the laurels, but let me keep the garrison—here at home, with our babies all about me and a welcome to our warrior husband and father when he returns from war.”

  Pauline’s account could be read as a description of the self-effacing behaviour of the model nineteenth-century mother. Emily would seem to fit the stereotype of ideal maternity as laid out in an article by Elizabeth Lynn Linton in the August 1870 edition of the British magazine Saturday Review. Mrs. Lynn Linton decreed that the woman at home should be “the careful worker-out of details and the upholder of a sublime idealism,” her maternal influence being “the real bond of family life.” But a more modern interpretation of Emily’s conduct suggests an almost pathological fear of the outside world, and a determination to remain in her “garrison,” where she had complete control. Pauline described her mother as “abnormally sensitive, prone to melancholy.” Agoraphobia probably lurked close to the surface of Emily’s reclusive tendencies and of the suffocating restrictions she put on her four children. The brutal attack on her husband in 1865 would only have exacerbated her neurosis.

  As the children grew older, they came to recognize the shortcomings of their stifling upbringing. In her memoirs Eva Johnson wrote, “We were brought up quietly, played amongst ourselves in our own grounds and garden, and knew little of the outside world. For each of us the first peep at it was a great novelty, and consequently the first love of each of us was unworthy.” Pauline, as usual, was more outspoken than her sister. “An inherited sensitiveness was a perfect bane in our childhood,” she recalled in a magazine article. “We were all shy, which mother conquered in us by having us assume a dignity far beyond our years. We learned from her to disguise our wretched bashfulness with a peculiar, cold reserve, that made our schoolfellows call us ‘stuck-up,’ and our neighbours’ children mock us as ‘proudy.’”

  However, Emily Johnson deserves credit for achieving her goal. The Johnsons were living proof that Indians and Euro
pean settlers could live together in style and harmony. The family photograph album, a heavy volume covered in green leather with an elaborate brass clasp, was filled with the cartes de visite of all those distinguished guests. Bewhiskered gentlemen, frock-coated bishops, haughty women in full-skirted gowns stare out of the small, stiff photographic visiting cards that were wildly popular in the late-nineteenth century and played the role of business cards today. Even Emily’s own sister, Mary Rogers from Kingston, had swallowed her misgivings and now consented to visit. Only a few un-Christian curmudgeons, like the Reverend Robert Vashon Rogers, still shunned the Johnsons. The Reverend Rogers snorted angrily when his younger son, Mansel, decided to spend some months living at Chiefswood in order to learn farming—but he did not stop him.

  6

  SPREADING HER WINGS 1876–1885

  Chiefswood, August 8, 1881

  My dear Lottie, I received your very kind letter asking me to go and visit you…I am pleased to have such a prospect [and to] accept your hospitality and kindness. I am going up to Goderich the latter part of this week for a very short visit to some friends there…I have just written to Katie asking her when she is going up to London which I suppose depends on when you return from Burlington. I hope you are having ever such a nice time there—tho’ I believe it is rather quiet there…

  IF there was one thing that twenty-year-old Pauline Johnson found difficult, it was too many “rather quiet” intervals in her own life. As she sat at the table in her Chiefswood bedroom gazing out at her mother’s kitchen garden on a sticky summer afternoon, she thought with envy of her friend Charlotte Jones’s life in London, Ontario. She was impatient to take up Lottie’s kind invitation. Lottie could walk out of her front gate on Maitland Street and within minutes be window shopping on Dundas Street. On a sunny afternoon, Lottie could stroll down to the River Thames and listen to the strains of Souza marches wafting from the ornamental bandstand nearby. When Pauline was staying with her, Mrs. Jones might take the two young women to the newly opened Grand Opera House, at the back of the massive Masonic temple, to see whichever travelling theatre company was putting on Uncle Tom’s Cabin this year.

  Pauline, in contrast, was stuck deep in the country, with absolutely nothing to amuse her. Her mother was fussing in the kitchen and her father, as usual, was away. Pauline’s only relief came from visits to friends and cousins who lived within a few hours’ train journey of Chiefswood. She particularly enjoyed such visits if, as in Lottie’s case, there was a good-looking brother in the house as well: “I wish you would tell your brother I am in a good humour now. Please Lottie dear, write to me soon. I am so lonely down here in the country and your letters always cheer me up.”

  Pauline had grown into a very attractive young woman. Slim and petite, with bronze glimmers in her thick mane of curly brown hair, she glowed with health these days. There was always a spring in her step and a smile hovering around the corners of her full lips. In public she could seem as aloof and cool as ever, but amongst friends her deep-set grey eyes sparkled with life and her throaty voice dominated conversation. She was very conscious of her appearance: she knew that delicate blues and pinks flattered her complexion, and she spent hours sewing tight-fitting blouses, trimming hats and pressing satin skirts. Her mother’s lacquered jewellery box was an irresistible source of hatpins, bracelets and brooches. She particularly liked the Indian-trade silver brooches bequeathed by her Mohawk grandmother; she wore them at her neck to fasten the high-fitting fichus and ruffs which were all the rage at the time and which set off her heart-shaped face to such effect. It was, though, her physical grace as much as her dainty appearance that struck observers. She was at home in her skin in a way that few of her contemporaries were. “She even lies upon the ground with more grace and ease than any other woman,” commented Peggy Webling, an English visitor to Brantford. There was “no touch of self-consciousness in the stretch and curve of her lithe body, the arms and throat sun-kissed to the colour of bronze.”

  Emily often wondered where her younger daughter’s spirit and self-confidence came from. During Pauline’s early teens, it had been a different story. At fourteen, Pauline seemed too timid and frail to be sent away to school in London like Beverly and Evelyn. Beverly and Allen had already demonstrated to their parents their unhappiness at the Mohawk Institute. So George and Emily decided to send their two youngest children to Brantford Central Collegiate on Sheridan Street, an imposing brick building which was the largest of the town’s public schools. Allen and Pauline would be almost the only children from the reserve at Central Collegiate, and since Brantford was too far from Chiefswood for them to journey back and forth each day, the two youngsters would have to spend the weeknights with family friends near their new school. Pauline stayed in the household of David Curtis, a customs inspector, who had three unmarried daughters and ran a boarding house for students.

  During Pauline’s first weeks in Brantford, she didn’t make many friends. At fourteen, she was a prim little thing with her thick hair scraped back into a tight braid and a suspicious expression on her face: “My mother knew I had every evening to myself [and] that young men boarded in the same house; but the one coat-of-mail which she clasped about me when she left me in the city was, ‘Allow no liberties; it is not aristocratic.’ Consequently I was a very lonely, isolated girl…away from home for the first time, for I carried this creed with me as far as women were concerned as well as men, and even women don’t care for a chilling, haughty, reserved young miss, who is continually on the lookout to snub them for approaching intimacy.”

  But it wasn’t in Pauline’s nature to be Miss Goody Two-Shoes for long. Up until then, she had never spent much time with girls her age who shared her interests. She found the experience intoxicating. The shy, frail newcomer with the “aristocratic” façade soon blossomed into a lively and clever young woman who loved the limelight. She shone at English and history, and was a star attraction in school recitals and plays. It was a different story in mathematics, which she never mastered, but she didn’t care—she was too busy making classmates laugh. The graffiti in her school poetry reader suggests a mischievous wit: an “Ode to Duty” has been retitled “Darn the Ode to Duty,” and “Labour,” the title of another poem, has become “Labour is Devilish.”

  It wasn’t simply the inhibitions instilled by Emily’s strictures that evaporated. So did the wariness with which Pauline’s classmates initially approached this stranger from the Six Nations Reserve. Pauline was soon surrounded by a circle of close girlfriends who called her “Paul” or “Pauly.” Prominent within this circle were Jean Morton, a pretty brown-haired girl, and Emily and Mary Curtis, daughters of Pauline’s host. Most of these girls had grown up in the solid white-brick mansions on Brantford’s tree-lined streets; their fathers were successful merchants, lawyers and newspapermen, and their mothers organized church suppers and Sunday school picnics. Pauline often invited them out to Chiefswood for weekends, where they mingled with Eva’s and Beverly’s friends from similar backgrounds in London and (once Bev got a job there) Hamilton. By the time Pauline left Central Collegiate in 1877, she had escaped from her mother’s domination. She had also put a distance between herself and the Six Nations Reserve. Although she loved playing the “Red Indian” to her Anglo-Saxon girlfriends (she brandished her father’s tomahawk in a war dance for them on one occasion, then recited a monologue on the life of Pocahontas), none of her friends was Iroquois.

  Late-nineteenth-century Brantford boasted a handsome town hall and formidable civic pride.

  In later years, Brantford would seem suffocatingly small and sleepy to Pauline Johnson. In her teens and early twenties, however, she was dazzled by the prosperity and sophistication of this little town sixty miles (ninety-five kilometres) southwest of Toronto. Canada had established its new nationhood only a few years earlier, at Confederation, but since 1867 the young country had surged towards industrialization. Brantford was in the forefront of this surge. In 1877, it achieved ci
ty status, and its population had doubled since Confederation to more than 10,000. Thanks to the city’s ease of access, by rail and water, from Toronto, Hamilton, Buffalo and Detroit, its economy was booming. Its foundries, factories, mills, potteries and distilleries attracted a new class of immigrant: blue-collar workers from the northern United States and the British Isles, eager for steady work and steady wages. Loyalty to the Mother Country was combined with Yankee know-how and capital. “Made in Brantford” was stamped on goods that were sent to every corner of the British Empire: Massey-Harris mowers and reapers; Tisdale’s iron stoves; Brant Forde Brand wool blankets woven at the Slingsby mills; Lily White Gloss Starch from the Brantford Starch Works; T. J. Fair cigars.

  Brantford had a boosterish mentality even before its Chamber of Commerce was founded. Along with the neighbouring Six Nations Reserve, it was always on the itinerary for any tour of the colony by British royalty, and it was always ready with brass bands and bunting. In 1860, when Edward, Prince of Wales, came through town, he was served a sixty-dish luncheon at the Kerby House Hotel, on the corner of Colborne and George streets. The Kerby House had been billed as the largest hotel in Upper Canada when it opened in 1854, and His Royal Highness (no slouch as a trencherman) remarked he had never seen such a gargantuan feast. His brother Prince Arthur, the Duke of Connaught, followed him in 1869, and was greeted by the 38th Brantford Battalion and by the local volunteer fire brigade’s hook-and-ladder cart bedecked in flags and ribbons. Five years later, Governor General Lord Dufferin and his wife were met by “guards of honour, both foot and horse, a band and a great crowd.” In 1879, when Dufferin’s successor, the Marquess of Lorne, arrived, an enthusiastic school choir sang a special welcome song.