Flint and Feather

by Charlotte Gray

  But her excitement came to a crashing end when she reached Calgary on September 19. A telegram from Eva was waiting. Pauline hoped that it would be the news for which she had been waiting since she had left England: The White Wampum had finally been published. She ripped open the envelope—but her face froze when she read the contents. Five days earlier, her older brother had been found dead on the street in Columbia, Pennsylvania. Beverly Johnson, who had been promoted to Superintendent of the Columbia office of the Anglo-American Savings and Loan Association of New York, was said to have died of heart failure, aged forty. By the time Pauline received the telegram, his body had been returned to Brantford. Recognizing that it was impossible for Pauline to get back in time for his funeral, Evelyn Johnson and her mother had gone ahead and buried him at the old Mohawk Cemetery.

  Beverly Johnson gave this photo to Pauline in 1890, and wrote on the back, “Your big brother Bev.” Four years later, aged only forty, he was dead.

  Despite her grief, Pauline knew the Smily-Johnson show must go on: she was under contract. She played the two Calgary shows, then travelled on to Banff, where they were scheduled to spend a night at the Banff Springs Hotel. But her delight in the new sights and sounds of the West had evaporated. Banff’s walls of towering stone and its hot springs were wasted on her. She had a dreadful cold, a snowstorm had blotted out any view of the mountains and she grieved for Beverly. “No-one knew he was ill,” she wrote to Harry O’Brien a couple of days after she heard the news. “It was so sudden, and the shock to me was awful…It was worst while he lay dead, and I in gay gowns, and with laughter on my face and tears in my heart, went on and on—the mere doll of the people and slave to money.”

  Pauline dutifully fulfilled her obligations in Golden, Vancouver, New Westminster, Nanaimo and Victoria, but her euphoria had evaporated. The glistening mountains on each side of the railway track, the elaborate trestle bridges crossing deep gorges through which water thundered, the Illecillewaet glacier (300 feet—91 metres—deep, and 15 miles—24 kilometres—wide)—Pauline was almost blind to the splendours opened up to travellers by one of the world’s greatest engineering triumphs. The effects of grief were most noticeable in the poetry she wrote during the final leg of the tour. Alliteration and doggerel rhythms predominated. A verse about Kicking Horse River included the unfortunate couplet, “It flips its little fingers / In the very face of fate.” Possible the worst piece of poetry that Pauline ever wrote was entitled “Little Vancouver.” It began, “Little Vancouver was born in the west, / The healthiest baby on Canada’s breast,” and went on to describe how

  Motherly Canada nursed the wee youth,

  And brought it a railroad to cut its first tooth.

  And soon it grew out of its swaddling bands,

  To slip from the lap and the old nurse’s hands.

  Smily and Pauline gave the final performance of this tour in Victoria on September 29. The following day, they took the early ferry to Vancouver, where they boarded the eastbound CPR train. Owen Smily tried to keep his partner’s spirits up during the two-week return journey. He knew Pauline played chess, so he acquired a travelling chess set in a folding wooden box. He suggested to her that whoever won the most games before they reached Toronto could keep the set. But try as he might, he couldn’t lose: Pauline’s heart was not in the game. By mid-October, Pauline was back in Brantford, where she accompanied her sister and mother to the Mohawk Cemetery to visit Beverly’s grave.

  Once again, Emily was delighted to have her younger daughter home. But tension between the two sisters quickly erupted. Not unreasonably, Evelyn wanted her sister to take over some of the household duties, while she spent her days at the office job that paid most of her bills. But Pauline had no intention of being sucked into the domestic routine. She wanted to rest, unpack her steamer trunk, sort out her wardrobe and visit friends. Washing windows at Napoleon Street was an abrupt comedown after the action and excitement of the western tour.

  There is no evidence that while she was in Brantford, Pauline made any effort to reacquaint herself with her Indian heritage by going back to the Six Nations Reserve. Her Indian ballads were about the mythology she had learned as a child, rather than the reality of her relatives’ lives. She saw herself as a poet who recited her own work rather than an anthropologist recording native culture. Audiences had already demonstrated that they liked her act as it was—indeed, they were clamouring for more. In notes from Toronto, both Shipman and Smily urged her to build on her successes so far. Within a week, she had packed her trunk and embarked on a two-month tour of Ontario towns.

  13

  WHERE DO YOU GO FROM HERE? The White Wampum 1895–1896

  PAULINE’S life was now dominated by her tour schedules. After a series of appearances in Ontario in late 1894, she and Owen Smily did a second western tour in early 1895. They took a brief break around Toronto, then they were off again—this time to Quebec, Vermont and the Maritime provinces. The following year they made a wide sweep across the northern United States, drawing audiences in Michigan, Indiana, Ohio and Iowa. There were return engagements “by popular request” in the heartland of Ontario, and further trips out west. One day, Owen Smily sat down at a piano and improvised a musical answer to the question they were asked most frequently:

  Where do you go from here?

  Say! Where do you go from here?

  We hear the same old question

  Wherever we may appear.

  The barber as he shaves us

  Remarks with an accent queer,

  “Fifteen cents, t’ank ‘e sah!

  Where do you go from here?”

  And sometimes we go to a hotel

  In trembling and in fear,

  Perhaps they don’t like “show people”,

  And want us to “go from here”.

  And when we go to heaven

  St Peter looks out with a leer:

  “Oh yes! I know you’re show people.

  Say, where do you go from here?”

  They appeared in theatres, hotel dining lounges, “Opera Houses” (as dusty little halls were grandly titled), church basements, schoolrooms, drill sheds and drawing rooms. In cities they treated themselves well, enjoying the comfortable mattresses and substantial dinners provided by Montreal’s Windsor Hotel, Grand Rapids’s Morton House and Ottawa’s Russell House. But in places like Chapleau in Northern Ontario or Carman out west, there was little choice. They lugged their heavy trunks into ramshackle frame hotels with wide verandahs, and often shared their bedrooms with cockroaches, bedbugs and rats. Meals were 25 cents, beds 25 cents and drinks 5 cents each or six for a quarter. In 1895, Pauline wrote to Harry O’Brien from the Windsor Hotel in Montreal: “The hotel is as usual, big, dull, ponderous. The waiters proud in their majesty and refusing to run even for a ‘quarter.’ Tuesday, however, we leave for the small towns, where we shall probably long for the Windsor again…Horrors! What a life.”

  The pattern of their one-night stands was always the same. They would walk over to the hall where they were booked, to check that the organizers had done their job with promotion and ticket sales. They would ensure that the stage was secure and the lights were adequate. They would shake out their costumes and hang them in whatever oversized closets were euphemistically described as their “dressing rooms.” (At Schreiber, Ontario, they changed in the barbershop next to the hall. In Rossland, BC, they changed behind a screen of Hudson’s Bay blankets in a corner of the hall.) Then they would return to the hotel for dinner. In Toronto or Vancouver, oysters, venison, “supreme

  Like many of the venues in which Pauline performed, the Opera House at Grand Forks, British Columbia, was less opulent than its name implied.

  de volaille” and ice cream were offered on the engraved menu. But the choice in more rough-and-ready hostelries, rattled off by ill-trained waitresses, never varied: “Termater soup, roas’ mutton, roas’ pork, dressed heart, tin’ salmon, pie, tea blacker green, coffee, glass’a’milk’ a’water.”
After dinner, they would stroll back to the venue. Pauline would change into her buckskin outfit for the first half of the evening, while the excited buzz of conversation and the scraping of seats in the auditorium filtered backstage.

  By and large, the content of the Johnson–Smily show remained the same throughout their partnership. Owen would open so he could warm up the audience with a couple of comic monologues and ensure that even the most fidgety, inattentive spectators were settled in their seats. Then Pauline, the acknowledged star of the partnership, would glide onto centre stage and recite a couple of stirring Indian ballads, such as “As Red Men Die” or “Ojistoh,” in her low, melodious voice. She usually followed up with a canoe poem or one of her popular verses about nature. There would sometimes be a musical interlude, provided by locally hired (and unreliable) talent. In the second half of the programme, Pauline, now in corset and satin, might recite a few more nature verses and Owen sing some popular music hall songs. The evening would end with a jointly written, jointly performed skit, such as “Mrs. Stewart’s Five O’Clock Tea,” about the wife of an MP from a small town who tries to make a splash in Ottawa social circles by giving a tea that will be the envy of every Ottawa hostess.

  As Pauline’s confidence as a performer grew, so did her gift for barbed comedy. Her sense of humour and her ear for accents were given full rein. One of her favourite anecdotes concerned a Scots clergyman in a town near Winnipeg who told her that he could not possibly attend her recital because he had to take in cabbages and turnips that night to escape the frost. Deadpan, she went on to relate to her audience how she said to him, “’Then you must be a vegetarian.’ ’I’m nae vegetarian, I’m a Presbyterian,’ he replied.”

  Smily and Pauline usually left town before any reviews appeared in local papers. Comment was consistently admiring through the 1890s. “The two artistes more than sustained their well known reputations in all of their selections,” according to the Orillia Times. Vancouver’s Daily World gushed that the Johnson–Smily evening “could hardly have been more interesting. Miss Johnson possesses a strong personality and her wonderful elocutionary and dramatic powers combined to give a perfect rendering of her graphic descriptions of Indian life…Even if Mr. Smily were not an effective mimic and had not a fine stage presence, a well-trained voice and marked musical ability, his selections would be funny in themselves…his efforts were greeted with continuous rounds of applause.” In Indiana, the Terre Haute Express reported that the programme provided by the Johnson–Smily combination was “a delightful one from beginning to end.” Vancouver’s Daily News-Advertiser declared that “the talented poetess…charmed her audience by her wonderful facial expression, beautiful voice and perfect elocution, receiving loud applause and encores for every selection she gave.”

  There were plenty of other “show people” on the same circuit; the CPR transcontinental train had opened the West to all manner of entertainers as well as to homesteaders and tourists. The talent ranged from blackface troupes to illusionists, from full-throated bird impersonators to full-chested operatic contraltos. Violinists, cartoonists, comedians, lecturers—in the pre-movie period, travelling shows filled the halls. Agnes Knox of St. Mary’s, Ontario, declaimed Browning throughout America. Norah Clench played the violin and Jessie Alexander cracked jokes across the breadth of the continent. Harold Jarvis performed sailors’ jigs and the Fax brothers (Jim, Sim, George and Rube) sang wink-and-nudge vaudeville songs. One of the most popular attractions in North America was the Marks Brothers of Christie Lake, Ontario, who called themselves the “Canadian Kings of Repertoire.” From 1870 onwards, the five brothers (two more had left the show after only a couple of years) promised their audiences “mellerdramas and stage villainy…many startling novelties, one hundred new sensations, time-tried favourites…and a record of promises fulfilled.” With their Prince Albert coats and handlebar moustaches, these five farmer’s sons claimed to have entertained more than six and a half million North Americans before they hung up their top hats in 1920.

  Yet Pauline Johnson was special. She was the only poet reciting her own verse, and she was the only recitalist who had learned how to control her audience through sheer skill and force of personality. When performing before dignitaries such as the Governor General’s entourage in Ottawa, she stunned spectators with her aristocratic hauteur and (to use a Victorian term of approval) exquisite “daintiness.” In Montreal, the great railway magnate William Van Horne himself invited Pauline to lunch with him in his Westmount mansion. (Pauline adored his combination of down-home charm and elevated taste. “‘They put up something very good’ as the out-west senator said,” she wrote to Harry O’Brien. “His pictures are glorious. Rousseau, Corot, Doré, Reynolds—all the great names.”) In small towns with a surfeit of saloons, she employed different tactics. Rowdy young thugs at the back of the hall would frequently interrupt shows with their own chorus of wolf whistles, jeers and shrieks. “When I see a crowd of boys having a good time in the gallery I am always sorry…,” Pauline began stiffly on one such occasion, before giving a wicked grin and continuing. “Yes, I always wish I were among them.”

  She had become a charismatic artiste who had learned how to intrigue and thrill. It was not just that she straddled two worlds, appearing first as an Indian maiden and then as a Mayfair lady. It was also that she combined elements of two different fantasies—earthy and passionate in buckskin for the first half of her programme, ethereal and unobtainable in silk brocade for the second half. She appealed to instincts both gallant and erotic. Which was the real Pauline? Was she a savage free spirit or a fragile maiden? Did she want animal passion or gentlemanly protection? Or, her many admirers must have wondered with an illicit thrill, both? The more sophisticated audiences of Toronto and Vancouver could handle the clash of images. Elsewhere, however, spectators were less comfortable. “Isn’t she savage?” she heard one man say, after a performance in Medicine Hat. “I wouldn’t like her for a wife.”

  But who was the real Pauline? She herself never believed that any of the characters she portrayed on stage really caught her essential self; she knew she was more complex, and less public, than the captivating caricatures she presented. “I never felt it was I,” she wrote to the poet and literary critic John Daniel Logan at the end of her life, “but rather the characters I assumed that the eyes were upon, and under these conditions [my] shyness was non-existent.” She was both Indian maiden and English lady, yet she knew she was on the margins of both the Iroquois community of her birth and the class-ridden society of British settlers.

  As her acting and control improved, Pauline enjoyed performing more. The benefits of this were considerable: her reputation spread, and receipts from the show increased. By now, she and Smily were asking $75 a performance (although the price dropped to $50 if the house was poor). In a two-month tour, she might give thirty performances. This would yield at least $1,000 for each of them (and Pauline, as the bigger star, might have taken more than half the proceeds). After travel, hotel and costume expenses were subtracted, with careful management Pauline might save as much as $500 per tour. In theory, this would cover her living expenses when she was not working, to allow her to rest and write more. Three such tours per year (and most years she spent more than six months on the road) should have permitted her to set aside money for the future. At a period when a schoolteacher earned $50 a month during the school year, Pauline was doing well. But Pauline, as her sister Evelyn constantly complained, was extravagant. She was generous to friends and casual acquaintances, an easy touch for anyone with a hard luck story. When she returned to Brantford, she would shower her family with gifts and fresh flowers. She never saved for a rainy day. “Do you know what I would do,” she once asked a friend, “if I had only two dollars in the world and knew it would be my last? I’d spend half on my body and half on my soul. With one I would buy a wacking good meal and with the other a dozen cut carnations. Then I could die happy looking at my lovely flowers.”

  Pa
uline’s increased renown also gave her a good excuse to keep her Brantford visits brief: twenty-four hours with her mother and sister was enough to make her chafe with impatience. Emily continued to feel uncomfortable that her daughter appeared on the stage, even if Pauline called herself a “recitalist” rather than an actress. However, Pauline explained that recitals, rather than poetry, paid her bills. And she also pointed out that she was finally making the professional contacts for which she yearned. In May 1895, for example, she joined Duncan Campbell Scott, Archibald Lampman and Frederick George Scott, leading poets all, for an evening of poetry reading at Ottawa’s Normal School.

  But Pauline’s love of the melodramatic was starting to taint her artistic reputation. She often let her desire to captivate her audience override her sense of social nuance. In Ottawa, when she was invited to join her fellow poets for dinner at the Campbell Scotts’ house on staid Lisgar Street, she asked if she could wear her Indian costume. Mrs. Scott, who was a towering Boston snob, decreed that it was inappropriate. Pauline’s fellow guest Frederick Scott, a genial Anglican clergyman, was disappointed: “I should have loved to have been able to boast to my grandchildren in my old age that I had once taken a lady to dinner in her buckskins.”

  Moreover, the incessant touring came with a price. Pauline had less time to write poetry, and when she did take pen in hand, the product was suited more to performance than to print. Smily’s style infiltrated hers: she started to compose what her critics regarded as lowbrow entertainment rather than highbrow art. For a woman who insisted she was a poet first and a performer second, this was hurtful.

  The first critical slap in Pauline’s face was prompted by a flippant little ditty entitled “His Majesty, the West Wind” that she and Smily included in the article “There and Back” published by the Globe, about their first cross-Canada tour. Referring to her now-famous poem, “The Song My Paddle Sings,” Pauline had written: