Pauline had a variety of well-developed survival strategies. One was to immerse herself in her career as an artiste and as a champion of Indian nobility. Another was to find for herself powerful protectors who would both respect and help her. In the newly opened West, the most powerful person in many of the raw clapboard towns was the commander of the local detachment of the North-West Mounted Police. In the twenty-five years since 300 young recruits marched west to stamp out the illegal whiskey trade, this red-coated police
In isolated detachments across Western Canada, the North-West Mounted Police were the symbol of order and the authority of the Dominion government.
force had acquired its own mythology. Its men revelled in their reputation as heroes who had pacified the Indians, busted the bootleggers, stared down the Americans and brought law to the frontier.
The realities of Mountie behaviour were often less splendid than the mythology suggests. The force had more than its share of thugs and bullies within its ranks, who were repeatedly (but ineffectively) disciplined for brawls, drunkenness and harassment of Indians. But by the end of the century, the NWMP (which had been formed originally as a short-term measure) was a significant presence throughout the Prairies and the Rockies. Over a thousand Mounties were spread out in nearly seventy detachments. Some detachments, like those at Crow’s Nest and Dunmore, consisted of a sole constable; at the Regina headquarters, there were close to 200. Their duties included border patrols, provision of escorts for visiting bigwigs, military drills, erection of barracks and stables, distribution of food and seed to both Indians and settlers, and putting out prairie fires. By all accounts, they were an impressive bunch. “We have very few men,” one commissioner boasted in the annual report, “who cannot ride day in and day out their fifty miles. In physique we are second to no force in existence.”
In January 1899, Pauline arrived in the tiny community of Duck Lake in the middle of a blizzard. There was no possibility of continuing her journey in such foul weather, but the town’s hotel was overflowing. Pauline threw herself on the mercy of Mrs. Hooper, wife of Reverend Lewis Hooper, who was in charge of the local NWMP barracks. This was not the first time she had stayed in the home of a Mountie officer, and it would not be the last. Her reputation both as a top-drawer performer and as a woman of irreproachable character preceded her, so she was a welcome guest. Women like Mrs. Hooper usually yearned to talk to a female visitor from the East, and Pauline always made herself extremely agreeable. “My dear Mrs. Higginbotham,” she wrote to another of her hostesses. “I do not know of any home that I have ever entered as a stranger that I have left with the regret I have twice felt as I drove away from your hospitable doors. You are always so good to me, and I am so much at home with you all it is like leaving old, old friends when I come away each time.”
Pauline did more than avail herself of Mountie hospitality. From now on, she contributed to the force’s heroic mythology. In poems and stories, she highlighted the courage and even-handedness of its members. In Saltcoats, she had seen a young trooper fling open the door of the hotel saloon, “his bridle across his arm, cheeks that peculiar white of frozen flesh, his eyelashes frost fringed and gummy with ice.” He was in determined pursuit of evil cattle thieves; ignoring his frostbite, he had stopped only because he needed a new mount on which to gallop off into the bitter cold. The hotel-keeper, in Pauline’s stirring account, shook her head sadly: “That boy will kill himself.…He thinks of nothing but his horse and his duty.”
One of the most popular of Pauline’s performance pieces from 1899 was her paean to Mountie magnificence, “The Riders of the Plains.” She always introduced this piece of Kiplingesque bravado by telling the story of its origin. At a dinner party in Boston she had been asked, “Who are the North-West Mounted Police?” When she replied that they were the pride of Canada’s fighting men, the arrogant Bostonian quipped: “Ah! Then they are only some of your British Lion’s whelps. We are not afraid of them.” When Pauline told this anecdote to her Canadian audiences, they registered the same outraged patriotism that she had felt at the time. They nodded approvingly at Pauline’s poetic rejoinder, loving every word of its chest-thumping indignation, its cheap alliteration, its imperialist bluster:
These are the fearless fighters, whose life in the open lies,
Who never fail on the prairie trail ‘neath the Territorial skies,
Who have laughed in the face of the bullets and the edge of the rebels’ steel,
Who have set their ban on the lawless man with his crime beneath their heel;
These are the men who battle the blizzards, the suns, the rains,
These are the famed that the North has named the “Riders of the Plains”,
And theirs is the might and the meaning and the strength of the bulldog’s jaw,
While they keep the peace of the people and the honour of British law.
These are the men of action, who need not the world’s renown,
For their valour is known to England’s throne as a gem in the British crown;
These are the men who face the front, whose courage the world may scan,
The men who are feared by the felon, but are loved by the honest man;
These are the marrow, the pith, the cream, the best that the blood contains,
Who have cast their days in the valiant ways of the Riders of the Plains;
And theirs is the kind whose muscle makes the power of old England’s jaw,
And they keep the peace of her people and the honour of British law.
In her recitals in each small Prairie town, Pauline would include a few digs at the force in the repartee that spiced up her programme. She would speak about the courage of young troopers who confiscated whiskey from outlaws and cattle thieves, then speculate aloud on where the confiscated hooch ended up. But the Mounties in the audience always chuckled as loudly as everyone else. After all, the chorus of their unofficial theme song made the same point:
Then pass the tea, and let us drink,
We guardians of the land,
You bet your life it’s not our fault,
That whiskey’s contraband.
Pauline’s unabashed admiration for both Mounties and Indians seems an ironic contradiction of current attitudes to Western Canadian history. From today’s perspective, the North-West Mounted Police was the force that ensured native submission to non-native rule, enforcing laws that robbed Indians of their traditional way of life and kept them corralled within their reserves. Yet to Pauline, steeped in her father’s Loyalist history and her mother’s British education, the Mounties were upholders of Imperial rule and manly virtues. Increasingly anti-American, she celebrated the Mounties because they defended the weak against the strong, and Canadians against the Yankees. Besides, in a young nation like Canada, there was a hunger for unifying myths that, onstage, she was happy to feed. Western audiences enjoyed “The Riders of the Plains” as much as, ten years later, they would relish Robert Service’s “The Shooting of Dan McGrew.”
By late 1899, Pauline had been touring almost non-stop for over a year. In Prairie settlements and mining camps, she was treated for the most part with awed respect, and her show was always well-attended. The Cranbrook Weekly Herald reviewer gushed about her graceful movements and charming appearance during her British Columbia stops: “Her compositions are in nature’s own language and she displays the true poetic instinct in the grouping of ideas and her rhythmical combination of words.” At Manitou, a little town in Manitoba, she filled the Methodist Church on two consecutive nights.
Sitting at the front of the admiring Manitou audience was the young wife of the local drugstore owner, who in a few years would herself be as well known as Pauline. Nellie McClung, the future advocate of women’s rights and temperance, was swept away. “Pauline was at the zenith of her power and beauty,” recalled McClung in her memoirs. “[Her] advertising had shown only the Indian girl in her beaded chamois costume and feather headdress, so when a beautiful young wo
man in white satin evening dress came out of the vestry door and walked to the platform, there was a gasp of surprise from the audience.” Pauline began her show with “The Song My Paddle Sings” (“Pure music,” thought McClung) and then changed into buckskin for her Indian ballads. “I think Pauline must have been an actress of great
Raised on a Manitoba homestead, Nellie McClung (1873–1951) would become a fierce advocate for temperance and women’s rights, as well as a bestselling novelist.
power,” wrote McClung, who never forgot the blood-curdling moment in the programme when an Indian maiden stabbed a treacherous non-native man. The following day, McClung and her sister-in-law called on Pauline at her hotel, the Cassin House: “She was the first great personage we had met, and we knew it was a time for white gloves and polished shoes.” The two young women invited her to Sunday dinner, and Pauline graciously accepted. That afternoon, as a bitter winter wind whistled down Manitou’s Front Street, the McClung family sat entranced by Pauline’s stories of Iroquois history, of the Mohawk Chapel, of her own struggles to get published. “The shutters creaked in the blast,” McClung recalled. “But we were living in another world, touching the hem of our own romantic past.”
But in larger towns, Pauline now competed with trained singers and actresses, and reviews were more critical. The Vancouver Province critic complained that she shouted too much: “Miss Johnson showed a fault which she seems to have slipped into…that of relying on gesture and forceful delivery for effects of vehemence rather than by more intimate study, obtaining the result through intellectual means and aiding her own cause by the suggestion of reserve.”
All this time, the private Pauline had been coming to terms with the end of her engagement to Charles Drayton. After his mother’s death, Charlie had spent some time back in the bosom of Toronto Society, and his engagement to a Mohawk poet—however “nice” she might be—was beginning to look like a ghastly faux pas. His brother Henry’s disapproval had got to him. According to Betty Keller, he returned to Winnipeg and met Pauline one last time around Christmas 1899. He asked her to release him so that he could marry someone else. Pauline consented with quiet dignity.
On June 18, 1900, at the Church of the Messiah on Avenue Road, Charles Drayton married a young woman of whom his older brother (who was best man) must have heartily approved. Lydia Howland was the daughter of H. S. Howland, a former Mayor of Toronto who was President of the Imperial Bank of Canada, and the granddaughter of Sir William Howland, who had been Lieutenant-Governor of Ontario. Within a few years, the Charles Draytons had moved to Vancouver along with their two young sons, and Charlie had established himself as a pillar of the financial community, a bulwark of the Anglican Church and an upstanding member of the Vancouver Club. “There are no esoteric chapters in his life history,” noted a city directory approvingly. “Diligence, determination and sound judgement have been the salient factors in his career.” Despite his family’s early fears, Charlie Drayton had followed in the footsteps of his respectable father rather than those of his reprehensible Uncle Reggie.
For Pauline, who read a brief notice of the wedding in the Manitoba Morning Free Press, it was not the loss of Charlie’s love and companionship that made the broken engagement so painful. They had spent so little time together that her day-to-day life was barely affected. Instead, their parting spelled the end of her romantic dreams—the death of the sweet optimism of her youth, when young men flocked to her side and offered her their hearts. Charlie had shattered her unconscious assumption that she could marry anyone she liked, that her mixed parentage was no barrier. One poem from this period reflects some of the heartbreak that she suffered. She always insisted that the inspiration for this poem came from the sight of a beautiful young black-robed nun in the churchyard of Winnipeg’s St. Boniface Cathedral laying flowers on the grave of a young unwed mother. The idea of the girl who had been betrayed by a man, and the sight of the nun who had turned her back on worldly pleasures and dedicated herself to celibacy, resonated powerfully with Pauline’s feelings about her own life. Her heart was heavy, and her pen produced one of the most poignant poems she ever published:
My heart forgot its God for love of you,
And you forgot me, other loves to learn;
Now through a wilderness of thorn and rue
Back to my God I turn.
And just because my God forgets the past,
And in forgetting does not ask to know
Why I once left His arms for yours, at last
Back to my God I go.
Would Pauline have enjoyed marriage to someone who turned out to be as conventional as Charles? Hard to know. Yet there survives one final glimpse of Pauline’s own attitude to the affair. After her death, Charles Mair mentioned the broken engagement in an article he wrote for Canadian Magazine. Evelyn Johnson was most offended; “It would have been better to have ignored the incident and left it to the family to explain,” she wrote to an acquaintance. But she admitted that as far as she could see, Pauline bore no scars. “My sister,” she wrote, with obvious distaste for such flippancy, “never hesitated about speaking about the matter to anyone, and constantly joked about it when she met her one-time fiancé in this city where he lives.” Pauline always used her humour to mask the deeper hurts in her life. But perhaps in later years she also recognized, with the benefit of hindsight, that she could never have squeezed herself into the role of Mrs. Charles Drayton.
15
A NETWORK OF TRAGEDY 1899–1901
We first saw light in Canada, the land beloved of God;
We are the pulse of Canada, its marrow and its blood:
And we, the men of Canada, can face the world and brag
That we were born in Canada beneath the British flag.
Few of us have the blood of kings, few are of courtly birth,
But few are vagabonds or rogues of doubtful name and worth;
And all have one credential that entitles us to brag—
That we were born in Canada beneath the British flag.
We’ve yet to make our money, we’ve yet to make our fame,
But we have gold and glory in our clean colonial name;
And every man’s a millionaire if only he can brag
That he was born in Canada beneath the British flag.
The Dutch may have their Holland, the Spaniard have his Spain,
The Yankee to the south of us must south of us remain;
For not a man dare lift his hand against the men who brag
That they were born in Canada beneath the British flag.
PAULINE’S 1897 poem “Canadian Born” summed up the muscular optimism that pervaded the young Dominion of Canada as it hurtled into the twentieth century. British North America had begun the previous century as a handful of small cities clustered on the eastern side of the continent, behind which stretched a vast wilderness that only its indigenous peoples and a few intrepid employees of the Hudson’s Bay Company knew. By 1900, it was a thriving and united federation of seven provinces plus the vast North-West Territories. Its population had risen from fewer than 350,000 to 5.4 million. The CPR transcontinental train, a novelty in 1894 when Pauline took her first trip, was now old news. Urban Canadians were embracing streetcars, telephones, kerosene, electric lights, central heating and indoor toilets. In rural Canada, steam-powered Massey-Harris threshers and barbed wire were making life easier for farmers and homesteaders. Across the Prairies, settlers had abandoned their sod cabins in favour of frame farmhouses and brick-built towns. Prairie housewives were ordering kitchen pots, carpet sweepers, woollen underwear and children’s clothing from the Eaton’s catalogue. Members of the emerging business dynasties (the Eatons and Masseys in Toronto, the Dunsmuirs in British Columbia, the Cunards in Halifax, the Molsons in Montreal) lived in vast mansions and travelled by private railway car. The Toronto Daily Star of May 30, 1900, trumpeted the good news that the average lifespan of a resident of Ontario had jumped by nearly a third since Confederation,
from twenty-eight to thirty-six years. (It is not clear where the newspaper got its figures; a more accurate figure would have been above fifty years.)
But there was a dark side to this breakneck rate of progress. Children as young as ten worked 12-hour days in Toronto’s tobacco factories and Nova Scotia’s coal pits. Women in the Montreal garment industry scrambled to make a living from underpaid piecework. The citizens of Western towns like Regina regularly succumbed to typhoid epidemics, thanks to undrained cesspools. Respectable critics such as Goldwin Smith, who lived in splendour at the Grange in Toronto, promulgated virulently racist views; Jews, he charged, were “parasites” and “enemies of civilization.” On the west coast, Chinese immigrants were required to pay a punitive head tax of $100 and received wages that were half those paid to people of European origin. But Canada continued to be the infinitely desirable Golden Mountain for impoverished peasants from South China and the Promised Land for refugees from Europe’s ghettoes and slums.
The surge of immigration, industrialization and wealth was reflected in a new-found national confidence. The Liberal Prime Minister, Wilfrid Laurier, who had defeated Pauline’s friend Charles Tupper in the 1896 election, personified this confidence. With charismatic assurance, he would predict in 1904 that if the United States had dominated the nineteenth century, “the twentieth century shall be filled by Canada.” A master of the great Canadian art of compromise, Laurier nimbly balanced dual loyalties. He spoke for both English Canada and French Canada; he juggled fidelity to the British connection against commitment to Canada’s autonomy. His balancing act secured national unity, kept him in power for fifteen years and embodied the promise of a new kind of nationality based on common allegiance rather than common identity.
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