Flint and Feather

by Charlotte Gray

  The population decline was real. Between 1881 and 1915, while the non-native population was booming, the native population dropped from about 108,500 to 103,750. The residential schools were a significant element in the decline. Around one-quarter of the pre-1914 students succumbed to disease, predominantly tuberculosis, during or shortly after their stay at the schools, and the death rates in the schools were becoming a public scandal. At the same time, homesteaders were encroaching upon reserve lands, while Ottawa’s support for native farms had almost dried up. If the “famous race” was dying out, the government in Ottawa reasoned, there was no point in investing too much money in it. It was a policy that turned out to be both wrongheaded and ultimately counterproductive: in the 1920s, the Indian population decline was reversed. But during Pauline’s lifetime, the policy left most native peoples impoverished and demoralized.

  In poetry and prose, Pauline tried to make her audiences see events from a native point of view. “Why do they always call an Indian victory a ‘terrible and bloody massacre,’” she asked in an 1897 article, “and a white victory a glorious defeat of the rebels?” But hers was a balancing act as personally tricky as anything Prime Minister Laurier faced. She would become an instant outcast—“One of Them” for ever—if she overstepped the limits of what non-natives would regard as “good taste” in her protests. She relied on polished manners and good looks to cushion a message that most of her listeners did not want to hear. “My aim, my joy, my pride is to sing the glories of my own people,” she had told Ernest Seton. But by 1900, Indians had been pushed to the margins of public life and the popular image of an Indian had shifted from that of noble Redman to that of a doomed savage. Pauline was one of the few natives who could capture non-native attention. Yet she knew her audiences paid to see a thrilling performance rather than to hear polemics about mistreatment of Canada’s native peoples.

  And Pauline needed those audiences. The constant gnaw of money worries kept her incessantly on the road. She frequently had to turn to friends and patrons for loans or help in finding engagements. “I managed to tide over the momentary difficulty,” she admitted to the Montreal literary critic William Lighthall after he organized some performance dates for her, “but am yet on uneven ground.” When Kate Simpson-Hayes, a Saskatchewan journalist and writer, invited Pauline to stay with her in Regina, Pauline admitted to her lively new friend that a mountain of bills “has made us stare poverty in the face, and now I have to work.” On this occasion, Pauline was lighthearted: “Now you know how alluring your invitation is like—sin, tempting, insinuating, insistent, and I in virtuous chase after dollars, stoically turn my back on it, prayerfully resist it and with bated breath, locked teeth and averted eyes—dash past, resisting the fascination of it and thus gaining a crown of glory—composed of many bank notes and jingling crown of the realm.” But a later letter was suffused with quiet despair: “My debts are a continual source of worry to me…People calling for money daily at the hotel when I have none…My jewelry is not yet out of pawn. I have not a ring to my name. I owe six printers & I don’t know when I can pay them.”

  Perhaps it was uncertainty about her feelings, her future and her finances that drove Pauline into an ill-advised venture in 1900. A century later, only the bare outlines of what happened during this annus horribilis are visible. The first suggestion of an abrupt change in pace came in a letter she wrote to the Honourable Clifford Sifton, federal Minister of the Interior and Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, a few weeks after her Toronto fundraiser for Canadians in South Africa: “Will you grant me one…favour, one that is urgent, and will most greatly assist me at this time when I am financially embarrassed and seeking backing for my proposed Australian tour.” She wanted to borrow $500 against future rents due on Chiefswood. Since the property was on an Indian reserve and she herself was a status Indian, the loan could only come from the Department of the Interior. Sifton duly arranged the loan, which represented Pauline’s share of the rental income for the next three and a half years. It was a significant amount: at least $10,000 in today’s values.

  At the same time, Pauline also sent a handwritten note to the Prime Minister: “My dear Sir Wilfrid, I am taking this liberty of recalling myself to your memory. You will perhaps remember that about three or four years ago I gave some recitations in the drawing room here at one of Lady Laurier’s receptions—I am the Indian girl who writes and recites her own poems. I am arranging a trip to Australia and would beg that you would accord me a brief business interview at some hour tomorrow if the stress of your many duties will permit it.” Laurier took time out of his schedule to see the poet and give her letters of introduction to the governors of various Australian states.

  Where did Pauline’s renewed energy, and talk of an Australian tour, come from? The trigger for this burst of ambition was a new manager. Charles H. Wuerz was a German-born impresario from New York who dropped into Pauline’s harassed existence like the answer to a prayer. “My new manager is gradually pulling me out of the worst of [my debts],” a relieved Pauline told William Lighthall on May 5, 1900. “On the 15th I go to Montreal and in the meantime my manager will go ahead and hunt up a nice place for me to live.” Lighthall had suggested that Pauline join him and his wife for a trip up the Saguenay River. “I cannot say yet about that long trip to the Saguenay,” she replied. “I hope I will be working too hard to take it, much as I desire to go.” Instead, she and Wuerz took a trip to the pretty Quebec resort of Ste-Agathe-des-Monts in the Laurentian Mountains at the end of the month. Wuerz then organized an extensive tour in which Pauline was booked into every fishing village and one-horse town in the Maritimes. He printed lavish posters advertising “Miss E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake) in Her Unique and Refined Recitals of Her own Works. Canada’s Foremost Comedienne and Poetess. Pathetic. Dramatic. Patriotic. Endorse and Applaud Her.” He designed new letterhead for Pauline, which announced Miss E. Pauline Johnson’s “Tour of the World” under the “Direction of Mr. Chas. H. Wuerz.” Lastly, he spent a considerable amount of Pauline’s money advertising her forthcoming appearances in the Halifax Herald.

  Pauline dutifully filled most of her bookings, although in June she fell ill with exhaustion and remained confined to a Halifax hotel room for twelve days. By mid-August she was in Charlottetown. In early September she was in Shediac, New Brunswick, and by the end of the month she had reached St. John’s, Newfoundland. Newspaper reviews of her recitals were good, but Pauline’s heart sank as summer drew to a close, the temperature dropped and the days shortened. Her schedule required her to criss-cross the Maritimes in increasingly brutal weather, on every branch line and ferry in service. In one Newfoundland fishing village, there was no audience because goats had eaten the playbills off the noticeboards. In New Brunswick, en route from St. Stephen to Fredericton, she found herself snowed in for an entire day at McAdam Junction, where there was nowhere to buy food. She busied herself with crocheting purple pansies that she intended to give as Christmas gifts and chatting to a fellow passenger who generously shared her lunch with the stranded celebrity. The conversation took Pauline’s mind off the fact that her Fredericton concert would be cancelled but she would still have to pay for the hall. A few weeks later, the ferry from Prince Edward Island to Cape Tormentine was frozen into the Northumberland Strait for six days. Once again, she was unable to fulfill her bookings but forced to swallow the costs of the cancelled recitals.

  Laura Wood, the wife of a prominent New Brunswick businessman, befriended the poet and invited her to drop in to the comfortable Wood home in Sackville whenever she passed through the little town. “I shall always have a picture,” she wrote years later in a memoir, “of a lithe figure, stalking with true Indian grace and freedom on the gray sea sand of the Sydney Bay shore. The wind blowing furiously carried out far behind her a long skein of brown kelp which waved serpent-like and shiny in the gale. Perhaps the thing which impressed it upon my mind was that I knew her heart was heavy with the loneliness of
life. Not long before, her mother had died and besides she had other griefs which were more poignant because they could not be talked of.”

  Pauline came in from her windswept walk and smiled bleakly at her hostess. “I have come to a place today,” she confided to Mrs. Wood, “where I feel that no one is worrying about where I am, and there is no necessity for my writing anyone of my whereabouts, and it is the most desolate feeling in the world.” She told Mrs. Wood that she was thinking of going into vaudeville in New York. Vaudeville represented a hideous drop in status, but at least her income might rise. Mrs. Wood was horrified by Pauline’s predicament: “Improvident as all Indians are, she was in difficulty. I have always heard that she supported an idle and dissipated brother, whom she adored with all her heart.” Pauline may have been sending money back to Allen, although there is no evidence of this. However, Mrs. Wood’s reaction to the idea of vaudeville registered with her: “She saw the shock it was to my feelings to hear this news.” Nevertheless, Pauline replied, “My clergyman urges me not to do this, but what shall I do? I must live.”

  Grim humour kept Pauline going until Christmas. On December 6, she appeared at the Saint John Mechanics’ Institute in aid of the New Baptist Tabernacle on Haymarket Square. “The audience expected to find Miss Johnson an impressive reader of her own poetry,” according to the Saint John Daily Sun. “But her remarkable varied dramatic gifts, her power to personate all the characters in humourous stories came as a surprise. Her best known poems have something tragic in them, and there is a great power in her rendering of the Mohawk’s wife who stabbed her Huron abductor while she whispered words of love in his ear. But for much of the evening Miss Johnson kept her audience laughing by her accounts of her own experiences, her description of life and people in various parts of the world, and her representations of some phases of society life.”

  All the unkind reviews, the offhand remarks about “squaws,” the snobbery of Toronto hostesses, the chilly hours on snowed-in trains, were transformed into witty anecdotes for Pauline’s performances. She surmounted the snubs and hardships by using them to her own advantage and getting audiences to share her reactions. She had developed a series of verse playlets, for example, in which she played all the characters. One sketch included an aggressive American matron who deplored the primitive standards of British hotels. Another sketch, “Mrs. Stewart’s Five O’Clock Tea,” was the playlet which she and Owen Smily had worked up about the socially ambitious wife of a Member of Parliament, and which she had rewritten so she could play all the roles. When the guests arrived, Pauline played Mrs. Stewart welcoming each one, then moved into the character of each guest—a pompous railway director from Vancouver, a rough Ontario mining man, a shabby curate and an infant prodigy. She had met the prototype of each character on her travels.

  Despite her exhaustion, Pauline continued to exert her magic—the magic of a performer who was both the smouldering stranger with a feather in her hair and a knife in her hand and the well-bred, soignée lady giving her provincial audience a delicious glimpse of the self-importance of the rich and powerful.

  But grim humour and protean talent were not enough to keep Pauline going indefinitely. Her professional relationship with Charles Wuerz was clearly ill-judged. He had blown the $500 earmarked for an Australian tour on extravagant advertising and an over-programmed tour schedule that neither Pauline’s health nor the climate would allow. By Christmas 1900 she was back in debt and completely exhausted. Moreover, there was a personal side to the relationship with Wuerz that was equally disastrous.

  Once again, there are only the briefest hints of what happened; most of the evidence must have gone up in smoke in Evelyn Johnson’s bonfire of Pauline’s papers. But Charles Wuerz ignited a passion in the poet that Charlie Drayton had never lit. In the Johnson papers in the McMaster University archives, there is a poem in Pauline’s handwriting on letterhead from the Queen’s Hotel in Fredericton, NB, with the date, 190–, incomplete. The two verses, entitled “To C. H. W.,” are a startling and poignant echo of the passionate love poetry that, over a decade earlier, Pauline had written to her blond lover in her canoe:

  In Heidelberg, where you were born

  The sunshine must be fine and rare

  To leave such warmth within your heart

  Such warmth of yellow in your hair,

  To touch your thought and soul with that

  Which neither suns nor stars impart,

  That strange exquisite gift of God,

  That fine and fairy thing called art.

  Did Fate decree your art and mine

  Should weave into a future skein

  When you were born in Heidelberg

  And I was born in Vain?

  In Heidelberg where you were born

  The day dawn must wear strange disguise

  Now it has left its wealth of grey

  And melting shadows in your eyes

  From whose deep sombre beauty all

  Your soul God-given speaks the clear

  Unblemished strength of all your art

  And writes that soul, a soul sincere,

  Did Fate decree your promise hour

  Meet mine of storm and stress and rain

  When you were born in Heidelberg

  And I was born in Vain?

  Perhaps Charles Wuerz was already married, as Betty Keller suggests in her biography of the poet. Perhaps he was a swindler who took advantage of Pauline’s financial gullibility. Perhaps Pauline, as she approached her fortieth birthday and with the Drayton debacle behind her, was so emotionally vulnerable that she recklessly and thankfully sank into the arms of an attractive blond German who promised to look after her. The Heidelberg verses imply a passion that was consummated, despite the reputation for moral probity that Pauline so carefully nurtured. She recognized that the relationship was bound to be short-lived; in a poem written at Easter 1900, called “Morrow Land,” she anticipates grief tomorrow even as she enjoys passion today:

  In Morrow Land there lies a day,

  In shadows clad, in garments grey,

  When sunless hours will come, My Dear,

  And skies will lose their lustre clear,

  Because I shall be leagues away.

  Has Fate no other kindlier way,

  No gentler hands on me to lay,

  Than I to go, than you to stay

  In Morrow Land?

  And O! These days will be so dear,

  Throughout the cold and coming year,

  This Passion Week of gold and grey

  Will haunt my heart and bless my way

  In Morrow Land.

  Her instincts were correct. Charles Wuerz disappears from the record at the end of 1900. And for three months, so does Pauline.

  The missing three months in Pauline Johnson’s life have sparked endless speculation. She was clearly distraught and exhausted, and she may have had some kind of physical or psychological breakdown. A rumour circulated around the Six Nations Reserve that she had a baby in this period. Certainly, the nine months that elapsed between Easter 1900, when she wrote about “this Passion Week” in “Morrow Land,” and her disappearance at the end of the year are ominous. Yet given her age and the fragile state of her health, a pregnancy seems improbable. More likely, the vivacious and determined Pauline Johnson had simply reached the end of her tether. She had never given herself time to come to terms with the end of her engagement to Charles Drayton. The loss of her mother still haunted her: the sealed envelope remained unopened in her jewellery case. Now Pauline’s unresolved tensions boiled over. She stared down the years ahead and realized she was on her own.

  Consciously or unconsciously, Pauline Johnson had chosen the lonely and uncertain life of a travelling poet rather than marriage. Such a life was hard enough for any middle-class woman in the early twentieth century, when most of her sisters were tiptoeing around in hobble skirts, leaning heavily on the arms of gentlemen. It was doubly hard for Pauline. Notwithstanding the chirpy optimism of h
er poem “Canadian Born,” she could see that racism was on the increase in Canada and that Indians were amongst its first targets. She had to acknowledge the corrosive prejudices developing against women of mixed parentage like herself and her fictional heroine Esther. She wanted to celebrate the double legacy of Indian and British culture, but she constantly risked being stranded between races. It was a recipe for psychic conflict, and sure enough, at this point in her life she tumbled into a black pit of “sunless hours.” Where she spent the first three months of 1901 remains a mystery. But Charles Wuerz left a wound that did not heal. Pauline never published either of the poems he inspired.

  Homeless and penniless, Pauline had few material resources to fall back on in 1901. But she did have talent and loyal friends. And she had a gritty resilience that allowed her to turn the page and begin a new chapter in her life.

  “My dear fond friend,” she wrote to Frank Yeigh on April 1, 1901, from a modest hotel in the Eastern Ontario railway town of Havelock,

  Now—when I wrote you—or rather wired you not to bother about that loan I was begging of you, I felt like an escaped convict—independent, free—everything that is glorious, albeit that I am in a network of tragedy—too sad for human tongue to tell—Now, could you without great inconvenience lend me the half of that amount I was so frantic about last week. That is—fifteen dollars to be repaid in a month’s time—you could never quite imagine just “where I am at” or you would forgive me writing and asking this.

  Here I am, in Holy Week in Havelock, an economical town to pray in—also to eat in, and I shall be here all week…Someday, when I see you again, I shall tell you all of it, and grasp your good warm hands and congratulate you from my true Indian heart…Will you write me here—do—if you can spare that little fifteen dollars, you will do more than churches, nor yet priests can do for me and yourself in the great Hereafter.