Brantford boasted two daily papers (the Brantford Courier and the Daily Expositor), its own rail link to the States (the Buffalo and Brantford Railway, opened in 1854), a Philharmonic Society and a Mendelssohn Society, and its own wine-making business, which claimed to be Canada’s first winery (Major J. S. Hamilton, proprietor). There were plenty of other thriving little manufacturing towns located on land once owned by the Iroquois in the Grand River Valley—Elora, Waterloo, Berlin, Galt, Paris, Guelph—but Brantford was confident that it was biggest and best, and it didn’t care who knew it.
Pauline was not particularly interested in the factories on the edge of town, with their chimneys belching out smoke night and day. She could not care less about the prosperous professional men who discussed accounts payable and receivable over roast beef in the Kerby House. But she was extremely interested in the plate-glass windows (newly installed at the astronomical cost of $300 per store) of the merchants along Colborne and Dalhousie streets. At Frank Cockshutt’s Dry Goods Store, Pauline could gaze at soft silks, woollens, cottons and linens; if she ventured inside, she might try on gloves and bonnets. At Lester’s Candy Store, she could buy 5 cents’ worth of snowflake marshmallows or handmade lollipops. At Robertson’s Drug Store, she and Jeanie Morton debated the merits of Pompeiian beauty powder (60 cents a packet) or “bloom”—a rouge that cost 60 cents for a small pot. She could buy her mother a small jar of Dr. Chase’s nerve food, with a picture of snowy-haired Dr. Chase on the lid. At Hawthorne’s Sporting Goods, she could point out her brothers in the prominently displayed photographs of winning lacrosse teams. And she regularly called in at Mason and Risch’s Music Shop to pick up sheet music for Bev. He was particularly fond of the newest dance tunes.
Pauline spent only two years at Brantford Central Collegiate; even by late-Victorian standards of girls’ education, her schooling had been skimpy. In 1877, she triumphantly graduated from the school—and then came down to earth, and to Chiefswood, with a bump. Once she had left ink-stained desks and chalky blackboards behind, she no longer had any excuse to linger on weekday afternoons in Brantford. She was now expected to spend her days helping her mother at home, making only occasional forays away from her family. But Chiefswood began to seem more like a cage than a haven; she hankered after the hissing gas lamps and colourful bustle of the Market Square. The traditional way of life of her father’s people and the quiet harmony of her parents’ home lost their charm. Most of Pauline’s Mohawk cousins still lived in simple wooden houses with dirt floors; none of her Brantford schoolfriends came from such humble dwellings. The Johnson relatives on the reserve continued to eat a diet of corn soup supplemented by roasted guinea fowl, rabbit or squirrel—the same diet that immigrant pioneers had once enjoyed. But middle-class Brantford families turned up their noses at such fare. They preferred stuffed partridge followed by English custards at their Sunday lunches after church. Several of the girls Pauline had known at the little school on the reserve were already mothers; they all wore drab woollen gowns rather than satin and lace. None of them pored over the photogravures in Canadian Illustrated News to see what Queen Victoria’s daughters were wearing, as Pauline and her friends did. Pauline knew that the only women other than herself from Six Nations whom her Brantford friends might meet were the pipe-smoking Cayuga elders selling live chickens, apples and corn in the market, or the unsmiling Oneida women who went door to door in the more affluent parts of town selling tin pails of wild raspberries.
Consciously or unconsciously, Pauline realized that the Six Nations Reserve, including Chiefswood, was being left out of the booming growth visible in places like Brantford, London and Hamilton. In the rest of southwestern Ontario (as Upper Canada had been named in 1867), European- and American-born entrepreneurs were building manufacturing plants on credit, expanding their businesses on borrowed money and shipping goods south into the States or east to the Mother Country. But there was no such commercial explosion amongst the Six Nations, largely because of new laws that remoulded relations between non-natives and Indians. In 1857, the legislature of the Province of Canada had passed the Gradual Civilization Act, which had the express purpose of absorbing native peoples into European-settler society and culture. Traditional communal land-holding practices were modified. Indians had to demonstrate their capacity for British citizenship by proving themselves debt-free and of good moral character (a test many British settlers would not have passed) before they would be entitled to hold land freehold and to enjoy other rights of citizenship. In the meantime, Indians would have “protected” status, which meant that they were treated as wards of state, like children. Native leaders had made it clear that they did not welcome the Gradual Civilization Act, but worse was to come. In 1860, Britain transferred jurisdiction over Indian matters to the legislatures of its British North American colonies. Responsibility for native affairs was now in the hands of a land-hungry settler society rather than the lofty (but ostensibly impartial) rulers of Imperial Britain. Sir William Johnson’s ideal of harmonious cohabitation had been overtaken by a policy of assimilation.
The assimilation approach was strengthened by an avalanche of further Indian Acts, whose primary goal was to speed up settlement in the north and west of Canada. The Dominion government was eager to convert nomadic peoples like the Cree and the Blackfoot to Christianity, settle them on reserves and teach them to farm (and, incidentally, to release land on which new immigrants might homestead). The policy was unpopular with native peoples throughout the Dominion. It made no sense at all for the Six Nations, who had been farming alongside non-native neighbours ever since they had arrived within the past century. The new legislation throttled enterprise on the Grand River Reserve, which by now had shrunk to one-tenth the acreage of the original land grant. Thanks to the various new laws, Indian self-determination was eroded. Pauline’s Iroquois relatives, and Pauline herself, were now non-citizens, under the supervision of an Indian Agent—usually a spit-and-polish military type who treated his charges like irresponsible conscripts. The heirs of Joseph Brant were locked into subsistence farming because their new legal status denied them access to capital.
Relations between native and non-native communities deteriorated as rapidly as the native standard of living. The last threat of an American invasion had fizzled out with the collapse of the 1866 Fenian raids. From then on, the Six Nations had no value as military allies for politicians in Westminster, Ottawa or Toronto. Nor had the Iroquois retained the novelty value of being “noble savages.” Thanks to intermarriage and the adoption of European dress, many of the reserve’s residents were indistinguishable from other Canadians. The Six Nations’ Indian Agent had to issue special certificates of identity so that they might claim their right to travel half-fare on the railways.
Leaders of the two communities maintained cordial relations: George Johnson continued to be treated with respect by the Mayor of Brantford, and the chiefs of the Six Nations, in ceremonial dress, always participated in royal parades and banquets. But in less exalted circles, a gulf yawned. Brantford girls would no longer come out to Chiefswood as maids or governesses, because European immigrants would no longer work for Indians. New immigrants, still pouring into the area, greedily eyed the undeveloped, well-forested lands within reserve limits. Violence flared. At one point, a group of Iroquois attacked with pitchforks a newly arrived British family who were squatting on the eastern bank of the Grand River, close to Chiefswood. Intimidated by the simmering hostility, in 1883 the parishioners of Adam Elliott’s old church, St. John’s, decided to move their place of worship from the Tuscarora village to the centre of the reserve lands, across the river. The old church was torn down; the fittings were sold and a black walnut prie-dieu that George Johnson had given the church in Adam Elliott’s day ended up at Chiefswood.
Struggling to find their own footing in society, the four Johnson children uneasily watched what was happening. Even without the tension, they would never have been content to remain on the reserve, stu
ck within a slow-moving farming community. It is hardly surprising that all four, and particularly Pauline, initially opted for the non-Indian world. They could see that a stigma was increasingly attached to having native blood, and they heard people of mixed blood contemptuously dismissed as “breeds” (for “half-breeds”). But all the Johnson children continued to take pride in their Mohawk heritage. None of them would ever dream of deliberately “passing for white,” although Beverly and Pauline, in particular, could easily have done so.
As the four Johnson children reached adulthood, they remained a tight little group, although the differences between them became more obvious. Bev was a tall, good-looking young man—“the handsomest man in all of Canada,” according to his sister Eva. After he graduated from Hellmuth College, he got a job with the Mutual Life Insurance Company in Hamilton. His colleagues there were often unaware of his Mohawk blood, since his skin was pale, his eyes grey-blue and his thick hair brown rather than black. In company Bev was awkward, but when he was at a piano or on a stage he shone. He could play any tune, from Chopin to Sullivan, and he loved to take the male lead in productions by the Garrick Dramatic Club in Hamilton. Girls flirted with Beverly,
As adults, the Johnson siblings [L to R: Pauline, Beverly, Allen and Eva) formed a close-knit group as they navigated between two worlds.
but even his sisters found him remote. He was secretive about his family to colleagues and about his social life to friends.
Evelyn seemed remote to people outside the family, too. She tended to hunch her shoulders, press her lips together and keep her own counsel. She dressed in starchy white or dull black gowns, and always disappeared in a crowd. She never found it easy to make new friends. Her family knew that Eva’s cool exterior came from lack of confidence and an obsession (instilled by Emily) with the need to be “proper.” Eva played the organ at church each Sunday and helped Emily provide dainty teas for visitors to Chiefswood. Unlike her siblings, she made an effort to keep in touch with old friends on the reserve, such as the Styres and Buck families. She knew that people found her pleasant but stuffy compared to her extroverted younger sister; she once overheard an acquaintance remark, “You’ll like Eva, but Pauline you’ll love.”
As the two girls entered their twenties, the truth of this remark became painfully obvious to Eva. She had one intense relationship with a young native man, but she broke off their engagement when she heard a rumour that her fiancé was too fond of the bottle. Nobody else ever proposed to her. Meanwhile, male admirers—Indian and immigrant—flocked round her younger sister. Pauline once quipped, “Eva is like the sun, she dazzles the men. I am like the moon, I drive them crazy.” The young men who congregated at Chiefswood these days always seemed more interested in going crazy than in being dazzled. Eva tried not to resent Pauline’s looks and popularity, but she was sensitive to every slight and never forgot a grudge. Her sensitivity made for a lifetime of prickly relations between the sisters.
Mohawk features predominated in the looks of both Evelyn and her younger brother, Allen: they were dark-skinned and dark-eyed, with what Eva described as “straight black Indian hair.” In many ways, Allen was the most easygoing of the four Johnsons. His brother and sisters berated him for his lie-abed laziness; he admitted in a letter to a friend, “Procrastination is one of my worst faults.” Peggy Webling, a young Englishwoman who met the Johnsons in the late 1880s, described him as “handsome in his dark, stealthy way, and he danced divinely.” He had few ambitions, but luckily his father had useful contacts. When Allen left school, his father managed to get him a job as a cashier in a Hamilton warehouse owned by Senator James Turner, a family friend. Allen immediately joined his brother in the Garrick Dramatic Club and the Hamilton lacrosse club, and took up rowing. He was not as good-looking as Bev, but he was more popular with Pauline’s girlfriends because he was more fun. “The Brantford girls,” recalled Peggy Webling, “used to call him the Black Prince.”
Pauline finally made her visit to her friend Charlotte Jones in London in the fall of 1881. “I do not exaggerate,” the vivacious twenty-year-old wrote to her hostess in October, “when I say that of all the visits I have ever made, my first to you will ever rank among the most enjoyable and I only regret that when you come to Chiefswood I will be unable to entertain you as handsomely as I would wish.” Over the next few months, Pauline also made visits to her cousin Katie Howells in the village of Paris, fifteen miles (twenty-four kilometres) from Chiefswood, to relatives in Wingham and Hamilton, and to friends in Goderich, on the shores of Lake Huron. Her brothers, twenty-five miles (forty kilometres) away in Hamilton, often invited their pretty sister to visit. They escorted her to performances at the local theatre, and to At Homes given by the wives of Hamilton’s wealthy manufacturers. A sharp observer with a good ear for accents, Pauline would behave beautifully in Hamilton’s best drawing rooms, then perform wicked imitations of her hostesses as soon as she was back in her brothers’ digs. “My boys are always so good to me,” she wrote to Lottie. “They drove me about and took me on the Bay sailing and made me sit for new photos, for which they paid, and otherwise were adorable.”
Pretty and vivacious, nineteen-year-old Pauline had plenty of male admirers.
Back at Chiefswood, Pauline persuaded Eva that they both simply had to enrol in dancing classes taught by their friends Emily and Mary Curtis, which necessitated new dresses and overnight stays in Brantford. She promised her closest friend, Jeanie Morton, that if Jeanie took the morning train from Brantford to Onondaga station, Pauline would meet her and carry her bags for the mile-and-a-half walk to Chiefswood. She flirted with a succession of young men, about whom she wrote with ingenuous enthusiasm to Lottie. In 1881, she mentioned to Lottie that “We had a fancy Londoner with us for a few days…Hugh Hartshorne—and he was quite taken with the idea of me spending a few days with you and says he lives quite near you.” The following year, she told Lottie that “I hear quite frequently from David and about three weeks ago he sent me his photograph.” But David, whoever he was, had competition. Pauline went on to write that “Bert Beddoe is in Toronto…and he asked after me. So he has not forgotten the wild girl that made him play ‘drink’ one night and decorated that little ale bottle of Labatts with a ribbon! I would like to meet him again so much.”
There were long periods, however, when Pauline had no excuse to leave home. In the early 1880s she would while away summer afternoons in a canoe, drifting dreamily between the Grand River’s willowlined banks, or surging through its churning rapids. The Grand River was a source of never-ending fascination to her; she loved to spot mink and muskrat along its banks, to gaze up at the hickory and but-ternut trees arching over the water, to pick wild grapes along the shoreline. She was a skilful canoeist, which gave her an added attraction to any young men who might be around. “I have an engagement to take a young fellow out in my canoe,” she wrote Lottie Jones in 1882. “Said boy is a teacher and can only get out Saturday and as he is particularly fond of Nature, he asked me to take him—for I have a habit of going out in my canoe up the river by myself.”
Pauline was careful to keep her flirtations secret from her mother. Emily Johnson made it clear to both her daughters that she would tolerate no talk at Chiefswood of “beaux, fellows or spooning.” Her attitude to marriage was extraordinarily conflicted, considering her own much-vaunted marital bliss. On the one hand she assumed her daughters would marry—indeed, she shared the widespread assumption that it was the only future for a respectable young woman. On the other hand, she found discussion of the emotional aspects (or even worse, the physical side) of marriage distasteful. She was so determined to keep her daughters pure that she preferred to keep them ignorant. When the family physician, on a social visit to Chiefswood, detected Emily’s reluctance to raise the subject and tried to raise it himself, Emily was appalled. “Doctor, you never step into this house but you begin that foolish topic,” she snapped at him. “You seem never to talk of anything but love and marriage, love
and marriage.”
It seems unlikely that Pauline allowed her mother’s inhibitions in this area to smother her own curiosity. She had long since learned to rely on books and friends for hard facts. In any case, she was in no hurry to settle down. The boys were a diversion from her not-so-secret ambition: she wanted to be a writer.
With her mother’s encouragement, Pauline had always loved reading poetry. Emily Johnson took great pride in telling friends that when Pauline, aged about eight, had been asked whether she would like some candies from Brantford, she had replied, “No, bring me verses.” Emily herself, like many educated women in the nineteenth century, had tried her hand at composition. In the Brant County Museum’s collection of Johnson papers, there is a fragment on which is written, in a cramped and spidery hand, “To dear George,” and which contains the poignant lines,
Linger not long!
Though crowds should woo thy staying,
Bethink thee: can the mirth of friends, though dear,
Compensate for the grief thy long delaying
Costs the heart that sighs to have thee here?
Like her mother, Pauline would scribble verse whenever she found herself with pen and paper in hand. She composed poems for family occasions and for her school friends’ autograph albums. Pauline’s early verses bore the same stamp of Victorian sentimentality, rife with anachronistic language, as did her mother’s. When she was eighteen, for example, she wrote a throbbing testament of friendship to Jean Morton, entitled “My Jeanie”:
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