Flint and Feather

by Charlotte Gray

  In Evelyn Johnson’s unpublished memoir, Pauline and Michael Mackenzie are described as setting off one warm July day on an excursion down the winding Grand River towards the Six Nations Reserve, eighteen miles (twenty-nine kilometres) away. They planned to stay overnight with friends in Onondaga and return the next day. Their parents must have assumed, with the blithe naïveté of middle age, that a canoe was too unstable to allow for much horseplay, so it was

  Michael Mackenzie, future professor of mathematics at the University of Toronto: was he the young man in the locket that Pauline wore throughout her life?

  perfectly proper for the young couple to paddle off together. Judging by the sensuality of Pauline’s poetry, their confidence may have been misplaced.

  It is easy to imagine what an attractive couple Pauline and Michael made that day. She would be wearing her favourite “New Woman” canoe outfit: a saucy tam with a red pompom on her head, a white sailor blouse and colourful kerchief, a blue serge skirt and (most significantly) no corset. Michael would be in a close-fitting cotton sweater and flannel trousers, probably rolled up to allow him to dip his feet into the water. They packed a picnic lunch for the following day and tied two bottles of ale to the stern of the canoe to cool in the water. The canoe trip took a surprisingly long time, and the participants were too absorbed in their conversation to notice what was happening behind them. When their thirst finally reminded them of the ale and they hauled up the string, they were surprised to find only the bottle necks on the line. The bottles had smashed miles earlier.

  Was Pauline sweet on Michael? Mackenzie family legend holds this to be true. Michael was the kind of handsome youth—a blue-eyed Apollo—for whom Pauline always had a soft spot, and his impeccable Anglican background would have appealed to both Pauline and her mother. He was, unfortunately, five years younger than Pauline (one of her most lighthearted poems from this period begins, “I’ve been having a whacking flirtation / With a boy not twenty years old: / And although I am five years his senior, / That ugly fact need not be told”). Perhaps this was the reason that, despite the passion evident in Pauline’s more serious verses, the friendship never blossomed into anything. Pauline’s poetry, as in this passage from “Unguessed,” makes it plain that the object of her affections, consciously or unconsciously, chooses not to recognize that her heart is bursting with love:

  I wonder how you rest

  So calmly when my breast

  Is tortured by the efforts that I make

  To strangle love and keep

  His ensign from my cheek

  To still the passion in my heart just for our friendship’s sake.

  There was no room for serious romance in Michael’s life. At eighteen, he had entered Trinity College, Toronto, on the first Dickson Scholarship in Mathematics. By the time he and Pauline were drifting down the Grand River, he had already won two further math scholarships, plus additional awards for physical and natural science and for mental and moral philosophy. A brilliant academic career beckoned as long as he kept winning scholarships and did not get sidetracked. Money was tight in the rectory, where the motto was “Make Do and T’will Serve.” On lazy summer afternoons, in the gently rocking canoe, he and Pauline probably discussed their dreams: his ambition to attend a great university in the Old Country; her hope of international recognition for her poetry. For Michael, a flirtation with a published poet several years his senior was a boyish escapade—an hors d’oeuvre to the serious business of life. Her Mohawk blood only enhanced her appeal to him. When Pauline reproached him for his preference for older women, he replied, “If two plates of apples were placed before me, and one contained ripe fruit and the other green fruit, which do you think I should choose?” He revelled in Pauline’s attention and enjoyed her lively wit; judging by her poetry, both were swept away by physical passion. But Michael had the ruthlessness of ambitious youth, and, metaphorically at least, he kept Pauline at arm’s length.

  In 1887, Michael Mackenzie graduated from Trinity with top marks. His family recognized his exceptional abilities: an uncle in England agreed to underwrite his further education. Michael left Brantford that summer to spend the next three years studying mathematics at Selwyn College, Cambridge, England. He graduated in 1890 with a brilliant first-class degree but was apparently in no hurry to come home. Instead, he stayed on in England for a further four years to teach at a school in Folkestone, a town on the south coast. In 1888, Pauline published a poem called “My English Letter,” which describes how much she looks forward to “those dear words” on the “folded note” that arrives each month by boat from “the Mother-land.” She has never visited Britain, and she is not particularly eager to do so:

  And yet my letter brings the scenes I covet,

  Framed in the salt sea winds, aye more in dreams

  I almost see the face that bent above it,

  I almost touch that hand, so near it seems.

  Seven years is a long time to wait, especially when there has been no spoken commitment on either side. While Michael Mackenzie was still at Cambridge, he went to Ireland for a holiday with his second cousins, the Nivens, whose family home, Chrome Hill, was ten miles (sixteen kilometres) west of Belfast, on the banks of the River Logan. There he met Maud, a young woman of twenty-four: soon he was crossing the Irish Sea at every opportunity (once he even attempted to row across). Maud Niven found this young Apollo just as attractive as the girls in Brantford had. By 1893, they were engaged; to their families’ satisfaction, Michael and Maud were married on July 6, 1895, in Grace Church, Brantford. Michael Mackenzie went on to teach mathematics at the University of Toronto, ending his career there as a full professor. There is no record of whether he kept in touch with any of his old friends from Brantford, least of all Pauline Johnson.

  But some young man, and Michael Mackenzie seems the most likely candidate, left a permanent scar on Pauline Johnson’s heart. A poem entitled “Close By,” which appeared in Saturday Night in 1889, is a haunting elegy for a lost love:

  Once, many days ago, we almost held it,

  The love we so desired,

  But our shut eyes saw not, and fate dispelled it

  Before our pulses fired

  To flame, and errant fortune bade us stand

  Hand almost touching hand.

  I sometimes think had we two been discerning—

  The bypath hid away

  From others eyes had then revealed its turning

  To us, nor led astray

  Our footsteps, guiding us into love’s land

  That lay so near at hand.

  What then availed the red wine’s subtle glisten?

  We passed it blindly by,

  And now what profit that we wait and listen

  Each for the other’s heart beat? Ah! the cry

  Of love o’erlooked still lingers, you and I

  Sought Heaven afar, we did not understand

  ‘Twas then so near at hand.

  The following year, Pauline reflected on the pain of unrequited love in a letter to her friend Archie Kains, who had recently moved from Brantford to New York City. “Women don’t get rid of these things by putting on their hats and lounging off to the theatre or smoking a consoling cigar,” she wrote. “Girls must grin and bear it in silence, and the fun you enjoy may be so serious to her…If it is the man who loves he may and does speak…if the woman loves what is there for her but silence, assumed indifference, and desolation?”

  Throughout her adult life, Pauline Johnson wore a silver locket. Inside was a photograph of a good-looking young man. She would never part with the locket, nor would she tell her friends the identity of its occupant. We will never know whether Michael Mackenzie was the lost lover. But in 1927, as a distinguished former resident of Brantford, Professor Mackenzie was invited by the Brantford Expositor to write some recollections of his boyhood for a special edition marking the fiftieth anniversary of the city’s incorporation. He wrote fondly of canoe trips down the river, where there wer
e so “many charming spots for lunch or tea.” He singled out for mention, as his favourite companion for such outings, Pauline Johnson.

  8

  THE CANOEING CRAZE 1888–1892

  LIKE most of their Six Nations neighbours, the four Johnson children had grown up with paddles in their hands. As soon as each could sit safely in a small craft, George Johnson had carefully dropped his canoe into the Grand River, then lifted the child into the bow. The older two children never exhibited much enthusiasm for paddling, but Allen and Pauline were instantly at home on the water. While they were still small, they mastered the various paddle strokes that enabled them to skim forwards or backwards across the river, carve an elegant curve through smooth water, steer firmly in the middle of the current or surge through the boiling waves of a set of rapids. Their first solo expeditions, when they were still small, were limited to the broad, fast-moving stretch of flat water in front of Chiefswood. Emily would stand on the shore, white-lipped with anxiety. The old ferryman, Jessie Green, and his passengers were nearby, ready to go to the rescue in case of disaster, but this had no effect on her fear. She only calmed down when she was confident that her children were proficient in and on the water.

  By the time Pauline was a teenager, she was a supremely skilful canoeist. Naturally athletic, she had inherited her father’s sense of style, particularly when anybody was watching. Her bow stroke was long and quick; when she knelt in the stern, she could turn the blade of the paddle with a quick twist of her wrist to counteract the canoe’s inclination to move in circles. She knew how to lean forward at the end of a stroke so that her body did most of the work and her arms remained stiff. She steered the canoe from either side and either end, with little apparent effort. She could use the gunnel as a fulcrum to lever the paddle out of the water to recover her control. She knew how to angle the canoe against the wind and how to squat flat on her heels so she didn’t catch the wind. She had the balance of a ballerina, the strength of a gymnast.

  What she most enjoyed, however, were the moments on the water when her adrenalin surged—when she was racing Allen or his friend Hugh Hartshorne, for example, or when whitewater foamed before her. “There is nothing in life that sends me as crazy as a rapid,” she once admitted. “My brain goes aflame when I see the distant white-caps, my heart pulses wildly with the first faint music of waters galloping madly over their rocky obstructions, singing, surging, laughing their endless reckless poetry—the world holds no such music for me as the cool calling of waters that my bow will kiss and conquer before the hour is over.” The erotic thrill in Pauline’s tone is unmistakeable.

  Whenever she had a spare hour or two on a bright afternoon,

  In her canoe Wildcat, Pauline would often drift dreamily down the Grand River.

  Pauline would paddle off in Wildcat, her elegant cedar-strip canoe. “My canoe…takes the place with me of a cigar to a man,” she wrote Archie Kains, adding coquettishly, “I wish you were here. I would run you down the rapids today and we would put up a sail in the quiet water beyond. It would be perfect.” In later years Douglas Reville would recall, “To know her best was during one of the canoeing trips she loved so much.”

  It was Pauline’s good fortune that her skill in the traditional Indian means of travel coincided with the canoeing craze. In the 1880s and 1890s, canoeing was as fashionable amongst the young and affluent as snowboarding is today. There were various reasons for the enthusiasm: the increased wealth and leisure available for the urban middle class; the urge to escape the smog and noise of industrial cities and enjoy the back lakes; the romantic possibilities (as Pauline and Michael Mackenzie had demonstrated) of canoe expeditions. The chief reason, though, was technological. During the 1860s, settlers in and around the Peterborough area of Ontario successfully adapted European boat-building techniques to Indian canoe design. The result was the cedar-strip canoe—easily manufactured, light, sturdy and ideally suited to Canada’s lakes and rivers.

  When Pauline Johnson was growing up at Chiefswood, most of her father’s friends and relatives used canoes as their principal form of transport on the Grand River. Canoes, both dugout and birchbark, had been developed centuries earlier by North American Indians and were the ideal vessel for a vast continent in which the major thoroughfares were waterways. The slender boats, the shape of which has always been some variation on an elongated slice of melon, could be manoeuvred through any type of water—shallow streams, island-studded lakes, fast-flowing rivers. They could be turned upside down and used as shelters at campsites. Birchbark canoes could be lifted out of the water and carried (“portaged,” as early French settlers said) past rapids. Native canoes exemplified the skilled workmanship of their makers. They were also art forms that symbolized the harmonious relationship between their creators and the land that supplied the materials.

  The type of canoe used depended on where a particular band lived. Birchbark canoes were made in the regions in which birch trees (Betula papyrifera) were common in the forest. The birch belt was an irregular strip of land that stretched from Newfoundland to the lower end of British Columbia and covered the territory of several Indian peoples, including the Beothuk and the Miqmaq on the east coast and the Algonquin nation in the centre of the continent. The canoe-makers began by carefully peeling the paper-like bark from the tree trunk in large sheets, then securing it to skeletons of ribs crafted from roots or branches that had grown naturally curved. The birchbark sheets were pinched together fore and aft and sewn together at the joins. The seams were painted with pitch to waterproof them.

  The second type of native canoe, popular in regions outside the birch belt, was the dugout. A large tree (usually pine, cedar or basswood) was hollowed out, then its sides softened with hot water so that strong thwarts could be inserted between them to splay them outwards. Once the sides had been moulded to the desired curvature, the hot water was emptied out and the shell allowed to dry. According to George Johnson, Pauline’s father, Iroquois warriors always rubbed the prows of their canoes with the brains of muskellunge because it made them glide through the water even faster in a race. The Haida, Nootka and Coast Salish peoples on the west coast all constructed massive and magnificent dugout cedar canoes, often more than forty feet (twelve metres) long, which were decorated in brilliant colours and were solid enough to face ocean waves. More modest dugouts were in common use in central Canada by the Mississauga Indians. The Iroquois nations were not particularly known for canoe construction; dugouts were the most common craft on the Six Nations Reserve when Pauline was growing up.

  Early European settlers acquired both birchbark and dugout canoes from native peoples, and quickly learned to rely on them as Indians always had—for exploration, travel, fishing and hunting expeditions, even recreation. John Moodie, who arrived in the Peterborough area northeast of Toronto in 1834, bought a cedar dugout from the local Chippewa and fixed a keel and sail to it. His wife, the British-born writer Susanna Moodie, described in Roughing It in the Bush the pleasant sails they took together on Lake Katchewanooka. She also wrote about the expedition that they made in a birchbark canoe to Stony Lake, several miles distant.

  But both dugout and birchbark canoes were laborious to make, and each had serious disadvantages from the European point of view. The dugouts were heavy to lift over portages and often clumsy in appearance; Susanna Moodie’s nephew George Strickland admitted that his first attempt “looked more like a hog trough than a boat.” The birchbark canoes were much lighter, but they were flimsy because the birchbark skins were easily punctured. “Every bark canoe carried on board a pitch pot and pitch,” The Field, the favourite magazine of Britain’s huntin’ and shootin’ set, explained in 1880, “and when the paddler struck a sunken rock or snag…he had to paddle ashore as quickly as possible, light a fire, melt the pitch and repair the leak. This, to say the least of it, was rather awkward and trying to the temper, especially if it happened while trying to get within shooting distance of a fine large buck.” Moreover, the supp
ly of birchbark began to dry up during the nineteenth century as settlers crowded into North America.

  One of the first to experiment with new ways to construct canoes was a mill owner in Peterborough. John Stephenson had trained as a blacksmith, and he was proficient with both metal and wood. He was also a keen huntsman who was tired of shouldering a heavy dugout over portages between the lakes around Peterborough. In the late 1850s, he began to experiment with bentwood constructions. It is possible that he got the idea from an unusual bentwood Indian canoe brought from the Pacific Ocean by the great map-maker David Thompson several decades earlier. Or perhaps Stephenson simply started playing around, seeing if he could treat wood like metal. First, he built a mould that looked like an upturned boat, with the exact dimensions of the ideal canoe. Next, he steamed straight strips of hardwood until they were flexible, and bent them over the mould, attaching them with nails, in the same way he attached iron hoops to wooden staves when he was making barrels in his mill. Last, he nailed thin, wide basswood boards lengthwise at right angles to the steam-bent ribs and sealed the seams. When the complete canoe was assembled, it was gradually worked free from its mould and the nails were clenched on the inside.

  By 1861, the year of Pauline’s birth, Stephenson’s board canoes were participating in canoe races around Peterborough, and customers were snapping up every canoe he could produce. Soon other local craftsmen started making bentwood canoes, and the Peterborough region became known for its canoes. Another British immigrant in Peterborough, William English, purchased a mould from Stephenson and went into production. At Lakefield, where the Stricklands lived, a former Quebecer, Thomas Gordon, began building cedar-strip canoes. At Gore’s Landing, twenty miles (thirty-two kilometres) south on Rice Lake, a burly young Irish shipwright named Daniel Herald was working on a different prototype for a planked canoe: a double-walled, ribless craft in which a sheet of waterproofed canvas was sealed between two layers of thin planks. By 1880, canoes from Peterborough were turning up all over the world. Various models were sent to exhibitions as far afield as Philadelphia, Paris and Australia; in 1883, one of Dan Herald’s Rice Lake canoes won a gold medal at the Fisheries Exhibition in London. During these years, a seventeen-foot (fivemetre) “Peterborough” craft would arrive at Whiteley’s Department Store in Bayswater or Cordings’ Sporting Goods Store in Piccadilly, London, with five progressively smaller “Peterboroughs” nestled inside. Since transoceanic shipping charges were calculated by bulk size, this procedure allowed great savings in costs. On the canoes’ arrival, the shopkeepers would fit the decks and thwarts into place.