Flint and Feather

by Charlotte Gray

  BACK in Brantford, Emily Johnson ached to see her daughter. Pauline had written from London, reassuring her mother that she was mixing with the “right” people and making her reputation as a poet. When the Reverend Mackenzie called at Napoleon Street, Emily proudly mentioned that Pauline had dined several times at the London home of Lady Ripon and had attended the theatre with Lady Blake, wife of the Governor of Jamaica.

  Emily longed to question her daughter about things she herself remembered—the kind of everyday details that lodge in a child’s memory and years later come unbidden to the surface. Emily may never have visited the Imperial capital, but she had spent her first eight years in Bristol, another English port. Did barrow boys still hawk steamed winkles, cockles and eels on street corners? Were London’s Bath buns as big, sugary and shiny as the ones baked in Bristol? Were there flower girls selling bunches of lily-of-the-valley to passersby? Had Pauline seen houses with roofs made of straw, or carriages with ducal coronets painted on the doors?

  Pauline’s sister Evelyn watched their mother’s mounting anticipation with exasperation. Emily had been hysterical with worry when Pauline left on the long transatlantic voyage the previous April. Each evening she had made Evelyn join her to sing the hymn “For Those in Peril on the Sea.” Eva knew they would go through the same agitated ritual during Pauline’s return voyage. She would be the one obliged to calm her mother’s nerves until Pauline eventually swept in triumph into the Johnson home, indifferent (in Eva’s opinion) to her mother’s anxiety. So Evelyn sent a wire to Pauline’s Portland Street studio asking her not to tell them when she expected to get home—“Mother would then not have the anxiety I knew she would again experience during Pauline’s homeward voyage.”

  When Pauline finally arrived at Brantford Station on Thursday, July 26, 1894, Eva had managed to keep her sister’s travel plans so secret that no one met the returning heroine. The complex dynamics of the Johnson household, in which the two women competed for their mother’s approval, were further strained by Pauline’s next move. She was scarcely through the door when she announced that she was leaving three days later on a new tour with Owen Smily. She wanted to build on her London success, and replenish her empty purse. Pauline’s determination to stay in the public spotlight appalled her mother. Emily Johnson had always disliked the idea of her daughter appearing on the stage; in her opinion, performing in public was simply vulgar. She saw no glamour in Sarah Bernhardt and Ellen Terry. She had always assumed that once Pauline had achieved her ambition of finding a London publisher for her poems, she would settle back into her Brantford home. Meanwhile, a spurt of jealous rage surged through Evelyn. Once again, Pauline was going to flit off for new adventures while Eva remained to cope with the cramped day-to-day existence of Napoleon Street.

  As soon as she reached home, Pauline arranged a photographic portrait session to show off her London finery.

  Much of Pauline’s brief Brantford visit was spent in press interviews and in courtesy calls on the prominent citizens who had given her such a generous send-off. Brantford Expositor readers learned that their local celebrity had reached new heights of poise: “She is the picture of good health and spirits,” the reporter noted, “and in that charming manner, peculiarly her own, chatted most pleasantly of her experiences in the great city of London.”

  A series of photographs taken at this time capture how breathtakingly attractive Pauline appeared when things were going right for her. The portrait session was probably prompted by Pauline’s desire to be photographed in her new London finery. One photograph depicts her as the complete debutante in her creamy brocade silk dress from Barker’s, a diadem perched in her thick, curly hair. A second portrait shows a laughing young woman in an audaciously feathered hat, with a nosegay of sweet peas pinned to a velvet jacket. In each photo, Pauline looks younger than thirty-three. Almost iridescent with joie de vivre, she is voluptuous and sensual. Pearly teeth, lustrous eyes, a tiny waist and velvet-smooth skin—an observer might easily assume that Pauline owed both her looks and her self-possession to membership in Canada’s British-born elite.

  The irony is that while Pauline (who always loved dressing up) had acquired some of the glamorous wardrobe of an upper-class Englishwoman, her resistance to being identified exclusively with that elite had been strengthened in London. Much of her success there had been due to her identity as “Tekahionwake.” But when Pauline loosened her corsets and stuck an eagle’s feather in her hair, she wasn’t simply play-acting in a bid for attention. She was juggling two identities so that she could pay homage to her father’s heritage and politely challenge thoughtless stereotypes. Soon after her return from England, she met the naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton, who was just starting to make a name for himself as an artist and author. In her first conversation with Seton, she was even fiercer in her championship of native peoples than she had been in her letter to Archie Kains a few years earlier. “Never let anyone call me a white woman!” she told Seton. “There are those who think they pay me a compliment in saying that I am just like a white woman. My aim, my joy, my pride is to sing the glories of my own people.”

  Like many men before and after him, Seton was swept off his feet by this glowing young woman. He shared the poet’s love of nature; when he was growing up in Toronto, he had camped out in the city’s ravines and (in his own words) “played Indian.” Now he was enthralled by the romantic image Pauline presented in her speech and her person. He gave her a necklace of bear’s claws. Twenty years after their first encounter, he set down his memory of the “shy Indian girl…developed by white-man training [into] the alert, resourceful world-woman.” She explained to him, he recalled, that “Ours was the race that gave the world its measure of heroism, its standard of physical prowess. Ours was the race that taught the world that avarice veiled by any name is a crime. Ours were the people of the blue air and the green woods, and ours the faith that taught men to live without greed and to die without fear.”

  North American natives fascinated Ernest Thompson Seton, who as a child had “gone native” and camped in a Toronto ravine for days at a time.

  When it came to extolling native nobility, no one could beat Pauline Johnson for hyperbole. She had now firmly incorporated her Mohawk heritage into her off-stage persona. Yet she was on shaky ground when she rhapsodized about her people or her race. She knew that there were as many different Indian bands in North America as there were nations in Europe. In her 1892 article “A Strong Race Opinion,” she had reproached non-native writers for bland generalizations about generic “Indian maidens.” But she herself was completely unfamiliar with the culture, politics and way of life of native peoples beyond Ontario’s borders.

  However, her forthcoming tour would change that. She was going to travel 3,000 miles (4,800 kilometres) and enjoy one of the most exciting experiences of the era: a journey across the width of a vast continent on the curving steel rails that the Canadian Pacific Railway had completed for passenger trains only eight years earlier. The transcontinental railway was reshaping Canada both physically and psychically. The West had always existed in the national imagination as a vast, unexplored wilderness of immeasurable potential wealth. But now it was accessible—to promoters, to settlers, to tourists. It was developing a voice of its own in national debates. It held out endless possibilities of new beginnings for the rejected, dispossessed or frustrated. For Pauline, the opportunity to go west was especially intriguing. The trip would take her through the vast open spaces over which native peoples had roamed for centuries—Ojibwa and Plains Indians very different from her own Iroquois forebears.

  After a strained weekend with her mother and sister, Pauline packed her valise and steamer trunk and took the train to Toronto. Her new manager, Ernest Shipman, had arranged a rendezvous for Pauline and her partner the following day. The Johnson–Smily act now had a professional manager because Pauline’s old friend Frank Yeigh was too busy with his boss at Queen’s Park, Arthur Hardy, MPP, to study train timet
ables and correspond with theatre managers out west. Shipman had scheduled an ambitious tour for his stars. It began with a performance in Orillia on August 1 and ended two gruelling months later with a show in Victoria, British Columbia. Pauline and her partner were to perform four or five nights each week, in a different venue almost every time, as they travelled west.

  The CPR’s transcontinental train began its westbound journey at Montreal. Toronto passengers could join the train at one of three points. The most direct route was to take a train north to North Bay, on Lake Nipissing, and meet the CPR train there. The cheapest and most complicated route was to travel by steamer across Lake Huron from Owen Sound to Sault Ste. Marie, double back on the slow-moving eastbound train to Sudbury and then connect there with the westbound transcontinental train. The third, most luxurious alternative was to take the steamer all the way to Port Arthur (now Thunder Bay), near the northernmost point of Lake Superior, and pick up the train there. Shipman, who put cost above comfort, had booked his duo on the second route. So after their Orillia performance, Smily and Pauline took a train west to Owen Sound and boarded a steamer that would thread its way through Georgian Bay, past Manitoulin Island to port, up to Sault Ste. Marie. As Pauline leaned against the rail and

  Massive CPR locomotives thundered across the continent, equipped with bells to warn of their advance, cow-catchers to clear stray animals and spotlights to pierce the dark.

  watched the pink granite islands of Georgian Bay slip by, she felt a pang of nostalgia for her beloved Lake Rosseau. She knew her Brantford Canoe Club pals were enjoying their annual vacation.

  Sault Ste. Marie, which straddles the rapids on the St. Mary River below the southern tip of Lake Superior, offered welcome distractions. Founded in 1668 as a Jesuit mission, the town had subsequently become a North West Company trading post. But Pauline and her partner were less interested in the historic fort than in the modern technology on view. Smily stared in amazement at the complicated engineering of the four American locks that allowed shipping to pass between Lake Superior and Lake Huron. He disembarked from the steamer so he could watch vessels of every shape and size, many of them loaded with ore from northern mines, manoeuvre through them. A weather-beaten captain informed him that more tonnage passed through these locks than through any other locks in the world, including those on the Suez Canal.

  Pauline was far more interested in the rapids alongside the locks. The roar of the surging, white-capped water as it thundered round rocks and through narrow channels was intoxicating. She persuaded a local Algonquin guide to run the rapids with her in his birchbark canoe and enlisted a photographer to record the event. As the canoe careered through the water, the guide yelled an eerie, blood-curdling shriek of “Hi! yi! hi! yi!” which echoed along the shore and terrified onlookers. In an account of the adventure that she and Smily wrote for the Globe under the coy byline “Miss Poetry and Mr. Prose,” she admitted that her “reckless taste for this sort of water-tobogganing” meant that she nearly missed the train to Sudbury. She arrived at the dock “out of breath, just in time to swing gracefully (perhaps) on the last car as it moved out.” It was worth it, she insisted: she had caught “some music from the rapids as well as a fine large cold in the head.” Determined to make this tour as lucrative as possible, she quickly got out her pen and composed “The Leap of the Ste. Marie”:

  Lend me your happy laughter,

  Ste. Marie as you leap;

  Your peace that follows after

  Where through the isles you creep.

  Give to me your splendid dashing,

  Give your sparkles and your splashing.

  Your uphurling waves down crashing,

  Then, your aftermath of sleep.

  The train to Sudbury crept along the rails; passengers joked that it would be faster to walk. When the track cut through the granite of the Canadian Shield, ochre and russet stains on the rocks gave some hint of the mineral wealth—nickel, copper, iron—that lay beneath the bush. Everywhere Pauline looked in the August sunshine, she could see either smouldering bushfires or blackened areas of burnt forest. Once again, she reached for her pen, to celebrate the fireweed: the “sweet wild flower [that] lifts its purple head” and hides the scars of forest fires. By the end of the journey, she intended to have enough verses to form the core of a second published volume. She also planned to write some articles for the CPR to use in its promotional material.

  At Sudbury, the platform was thronged with bearded, booted, slouch-hatted miners. Hungry for investors who might put money into their mining claims, they clustered around the debonair Owen Smily, with his English accent. But the grizzled hustlers realized he was penniless as fast as he recognized their “seams of gold” as glittering but worthless iron pyrite. The good-natured banter continued until, to their great relief, Pauline and Smily heard the long, low wail of an approaching locomotive.

  When the two travellers clambered aboard the CPR Pullman car, they gasped at the space and luxury inside. Until now Pauline’s experience of rail travel had been based on Ontario’s smaller railways and England’s Liverpool–London route. The design of carriages on most of these railways was based on the design of the stagecoaches they had replaced. There was usually no communicating corridor between carriages, and passengers sat facing each other on benches that were at right angles to the tracks. Local Ontario trains, which offered quicker and cheaper transport than travel by road, were usually hot and crowded. The great transcontinental trains, in contrast, were designed on the same principles as the luxury steamers that coddled wealthy passengers during ocean crossings. William Cornelius Van Horne, the CPR’s General Manager, had personally designed the sleeping cars and parlour cars to ensure maximum comfort and aesthetic appeal. Van Horne, a powerfully built man who had recently received a knighthood, considered no detail too small for his attention. He instructed his draughtsmen to make all doors, berths, windows and furniture large—or, as he put it, “fat and bulgy like myself.” As Clark Blaise, biographer of the CPR’s Chief Engineer, Sandford Fleming, has written, “The size and power” of the great steam locomotives “encouraged a swagger, a certain Gilded Age social and economic flamboyance, a cigars-and-brandy, god-like, frontier-pushing presumption of entitlement.”

  The Pullman saloon car, Pauline discovered, was lined with beautifully carved mahogany, upholstered with green plush and liberally fitted with bevelled mirrors and brass fixtures. The floor was richly carpeted and the ceiling high; the seats were upholstered in red velvet and the plate-glass windows were large. At one end of the saloon car there was a retiring room for ladies and a tiny bathroom with a washbasin and mahogany-seated lavatory. At the other end was a smoking room, which a few brave women had dared to invade despite ostentatious disapproval from some of the gentlemen. At night, the sofas turned into lower berths, and upper berths were unhooked from the ceiling. The porter then made up with clean linen as many of the twenty-four berths as were required. Every saloon car had its own porter; Pauline noticed that all the porters were, in the parlance of the day, “coloured.” Each porter’s job was to ensure that his passengers had all the towels and water (for drinking and washing) they needed. When a passenger was ready to disembark, the porter would energetically brush the dust off the passenger’s coat until his battered victim proffered a decent tip.

  When Pauline had got herself settled and her baggage stowed, and the locomotive had uttered a long, low exhalation as it left Sudbury’s station, she set out to explore her temporary home. From the platform, she had admired the huge iron locomotive and she had seen the coal car, the mail car and the baggage cars. Now she found, beyond the saloon car, “the colonists’ car,” which was filled with large, noisy families and piles of shabby baggage. Here, newly arrived immigrants made up wooden berths with their own bedding and cooked their own food on a little iron stove. The smell in this car was indescribable, thanks to the crowding, the glowing stove and the steamy weather outside. “There is such a variety of nationalities
to be found in the colonial cars,” Pauline noted. “’Arry’s from England, Murphy’s from Ireland, Sandie’s from Scotland…but Chinamen seem to be in the majority most of the time.” The CPR itself had been responsible for the surge of immigrants from China in the 1880s; without an army of more than 10,000 Chinese labourers, the company could never have fulfilled its contract to build a coast-to-coast railway within four years.

  Pauline also discovered the dining car, where passengers could enjoy breakfast, luncheon or dinner for 75 cents a meal. This was even more like luxury steamship travel. Stewards in blue uniforms with brass buttons served locally caught fish (trout and whitefish near Lake Superior, salmon around the Rockies and on the west coast), lamb cutlets, fried chicken, veal cutlets, buckwheat cakes and eggs in every style. Van Horne, whose own appetite was legendary, kept an eye on the menus, insisting on fresh produce and good desserts—“Deep apple, peach and etc. pie should be the standard in the pastry line.” CPR dining cars never stayed with a train for the entire two-week Montreal-to-Vancouver journey. After a white-coated chef had prepared a day’s meals, his car was uncoupled at the next convenient station, to be cleaned, restocked and coupled to the next train coming the other way. In theory, the outward-bound locomotive would pick up a fresh dining car in time for the following day’s breakfast. But Pauline heard plenty of horror stories about trains delayed by snowdrifts and landslides, which meant no dining car at breakfast time and passengers going hungry for hours. She got into the habit of taking hard-boiled eggs with her on transcontinental journeys.

  The train steamed across Northern Ontario, pausing at thirty-six small stations before the next major stop, Port Arthur. Some of these tiny clearings in the forest, such as Biscotasing and Missanabic, had originally been Ojibwa fishing or hunting camps. Others were merely wood and water depots, with a couple of shanties for labourers working on the line. From Port Coldwell, the track ran alongside Lake Superior. Everything about the endless expanse of water was on a far grander scale than the Canadian rivers and lakes further south that Pauline knew. Superior’s mighty headlands were covered in giant cedars; immense boulders lay along the shoreline. Boat traffic was minimal, and signs of human habitation rare. But soon the grain elevators, warehouses and wharves of Port Arthur came into view. Smily and Pauline walked up the hill above the town while the train refuelled. The air was still and the streets were empty. “It was only after we commented on the hush that seemed over everything,” Pauline noted, “and in the search for some expression that would fittingly describe it, had hit upon the phrase ‘Sabbath calm’ that we realised it was the seventh day.” The majestic silence prompted Pauline to write a poem that would appear in the Globe under the title “Benedictus”: