Flint and Feather

by Charlotte Gray

  Pauline Johnson used her mother’s life history as the basis for a four-part series of semi-fictional articles she wrote in 1908 for The Mother’s Magazine, an American publication. Wallowing in every miserable detail with Dickensian fervour, Pauline described her grandfather as “a very narrow religionist, of the type that say many prayers and quote much Scripture, but he beat his children—both girls and boys—so severely that outsiders were at times compelled to interfere. For years these unfortunate children carried the scars left on their backs by the thongs of cat-o’-nine-tails when he punished them for some slight misdemeanor. They were all terrified at him, all obeyed him like soldiers but none escaped his severity…[The stepmother] was of the very cold and chilling type of Englishwoman…She took no interest in [her stepchildren], neglected them absolutely…[S]he saw that all the money, all the pretty clothes, all the dainties, went to her own children.”

  Pauline described a particular incident when the second Mrs. Howells accused Emily, who was about ten years old, of stealing a cookie. When Emily denied the charge, her father gave her a brutal beating and sent her to her room. Emily was evidently a spunky little girl—“high-tempered,” in her own phrase. On her release, she stuck to her story that she had not stolen the cookie. Her father beat her again, although his wife urged him to aim his blows at the child’s body rather than her head. Still Emily insisted on her innocence, so her father gave her a third beating. Finally Harriet Howells said magnanimously, “Don’t whip her any more; she has been punished enough.”

  This tale of assault has a ring of truth to it, although how much Pauline Johnson exaggerated the Cinderella details of her mother’s life is open to question. “Spare the rod and spoil the child” was a popular maxim in nineteenth-century homes, and Pauline’s older sister Eva did not mention any severe beatings in her own account of Emily’s life. Moreover, Eva deplored Pauline’s approach to family history, insisting that Pauline “never got history accurate” because “she always branched out into thoughts of her own [and]…always developed a story to suit herself.” Both Pauline and Eva ignored another aspect of their grandfather’s behaviour. Henry Howells was a schoolmaster, with an ample library and a commitment to education. In addition to the beatings, he gave his children a love of learning. He ensured that his children had a knowledge of the classics of English literature, including the poetry that had been so fashionable in the England he had left behind. Emily was an avid reader, and well acquainted with Romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Byron. She bequeathed to both her daughters, especially Pauline, her own attachment to early-nineteenth-century English verse.

  As a young woman, Emily Susanna Howells was frequently lonely and unhappy.

  Nevertheless, it is clear that Emily Howells was a forlorn child. In the classic pattern of abused children, she blamed herself for both her mother’s death and her father’s neglect, presuming that she was unloved because she was unlovable. She learned to hold her tongue and keep a tight rein on her own feelings. “She conquered her temper very early in life—completely subdued it,” Pauline noted. “I can never recollect having seen her more than ‘irritated’ or ‘annoyed.’” Instead, she began to sink into melancholy, which exasperated her parents further. So she learned to show the outside world the façade of a quiet, well-read, self-possessed young woman with beautiful English manners. Inside, however, she was a churning mass of insecurity. Emily never came to terms with her own sense of abandonment, or with her anger at the cruel cards that fate had dealt her. Throughout her adult life, she was incapable of spontaneity or the clear expression of her own emotions.

  During these years, the ever-growing Howells family lived first near Columbus, Ohio, and later in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It is possible that Henry Howells also took his family back to Bristol for a few years before finally settling in Eaglewood, New Jersey. He appears to have supported the household by setting up schools wherever he lived, but his daughter recalled most vividly his efforts in Ohio to help slaves. For all his cruelty to his own children, his Christian conscience was deeply troubled by the practice of slavery, and by the assumption that one man might own another. He sternly admonished his children to pray for the blacks and to pity the poor Indians, although his compassion did not preclude the view that his own race was superior to others.

  Henry’s Christian outrage at the practice of slavery was shared by the majority of Americans in the industrialized states of the northern United States. The pressure to emancipate American slaves was swelling rapidly during the 1830s and 1840s. Slavery had been abolished in Britain in 1807, and in British colonies in 1833, and political leaders on both sides of the Atlantic decried its continuation in the Old South. Both Columbus and Pittsburgh were strongholds of abolitionists and important way stations on the escape route to Canada, the one known as the Underground Railroad. Once a slave reached Canada, he or she was beyond the reach of American law. Henry took considerable risks in aiding and abetting runaway slaves: at one time he had twenty-one slaves hidden in his attic. Emily’s older brother Thomas would dress up as a labourer and drive a cart, on which was piled old furniture, across Columbus. Slaves would hide in the armoires and chests and in the drawers of bureaus. In later years Henry Howells made much of his abolitionist courage, in a tone that suggests his granddaughter Pauline inherited her gift for hyperbole from him. “Mobs composed of hundreds attacked my house by night and day with rails, tar and feathers and weapons of death to take me,” he wrote.

  When Emily Howells was at home, she was treated as little better than a kitchen maid in a household in which babies were more plentiful than cash. In February 1842, when Emily was seventeen, her stepmother, Harriet Joyner Howells, died, having borne Henry at least another six children. Within a year, Emily’s father had taken as his third wife Hannah Kell, the maid who had accompanied the family from England ten years earlier and who had nursed Harriet on her deathbed. Hannah would have five children, bringing the total of Henry Howells’s progeny to twenty-four.

  By now, fortunately, Emily had discovered a few avenues of escape. She went to stay for extended periods with three of her older sisters, each of whom was married to a clergyman. Her sister Maria had married a Reverend McCandlish of Wooster, Ohio. Her sisters Mary and Eliza were across the border in Canada. Mary’s husband, the Reverend Robert Vashon Rogers, had settled in Upper Canada. The Rogerses lived for a few years in the rough little lumber town of Bytown (renamed Ottawa in 1855) before moving to the much more dignified city of Kingston around 1836. Eliza, the sister closest in age to Emily, also married a clergyman. In 1839, Eliza Howells became Mrs. Adam Elliott and joined her husband in Tuscarora, Upper Canada, where he was an Anglican missionary with the Six Nations on the Grand River Reserve, south of Brantford.

  The routes Emily took on visits to her sisters were well travelled. Traffic flowed back and forth across the US border with the briefest stop at customs; nobody was required to produce any kind of travel document. Many families, both of native and of European origin, had relatives on both sides of the border. Stagecoaches made regular stops at inns for refreshments and changes of horses and to deliver mail. Sailing vessels offered the opportunity to admire distant shores and enjoy lake breezes in the scorching summers.

  Nevertheless, the journeys of several hundred miles from her father’s house to her sisters’ homes must have unnerved young Emily. She had to spend the first day in a stagecoach rattling over the dusty road from Pittsburgh to Erie, on the south shore of Lake Erie, and the second day on the lake, where ships were frequently caught in vicious storms and driven onto sandbars. In 1848, the first bridge was built across the Niagara River, allowing Emily to make the whole journey by stagecoach. But stagecoaches were cramped, uncomfortable vehicles; a shy young woman could easily get crushed into a corner as the coach lurched in and out of the ruts on the road. And penniless Emily would have to provision herself for a two- or three-day journey before she left home. Once she arrived in Upper Canada, her route varied according
to which sister she was going to see, but it always involved at least a day’s further travel along rough roads. Eliza Elliott was closest, and therefore the Six Nations Reserve was the most frequent destination.

  Emily made her first visit to her sister Eliza when she was about sixteen, soon after the latter’s marriage in 1839. Eliza Howells had always been Emily’s friend; only five years older than Emily, she had done her best to protect her younger sister from parental wrath. To reach the Elliotts’ parsonage on the Six Nations Reserve, Emily took the stagecoach to Brantford, then took a local conveyance from Brantford through the forest. This was Emily’s first sight of the uncleared bush which, once the shoreline of the Great Lakes was left behind, stretched for miles in Upper Canada. Although the triangle of land bounded by Lake Huron and Lake Erie was the most densely populated area in Upper Canada in the 1840s, settlements were small and scattered. Acres of virgin forest remained to be cleared. The ten-mile (sixteenkilometre) journey to Tuscarora through ancient elms and maples took three hours. The horse-drawn cart trundled slowly along the corduroy track, in which tree trunks were laid side to side to counter the heavy mud that jammed the cartwheels every spring and fall. Staring up at the dense foliage that arched over her, Emily imagined she was travelling down a splendid English avenue to some great estate. When she arrived at her destination, she was surprised to see not some magnificent house, but a small frame cottage with green shutters, a shady verandah and neat flowerbeds filled with marigolds and roses. Nearby was St. John’s, the little white clapboard church in which the Reverend Elliott ministered to his parishioners. The only other buildings that Emily could see in the distance were a few scattered one-room shacks with untidily tended vegetable gardens next to them.

  Once the cart had come to a full halt, Emily clambered awkwardly down, her gait unsteady after the bone-rattling drive. Her sister Eliza rushed out of the house and hugged her tightly. Close behind Eliza came the Reverend Adam Elliott, a tall grey-haired man who was nineteen years older than his wife.

  Then a third person emerged from the house: a young Mohawk man smartly dressed in European clothes. With obvious pride, Adam Elliott introduced his church interpreter, Mr. George Johnson, to his sister-in-law, and explained that Mr. Johnson lived in the Elliotts’ parsonage. George shook hands politely with the new arrival and enquired in faultless English whether her journey had been comfortable.

  In Pauline Johnson’s description of the first meeting between her parents, Emily was immediately smitten by twenty-nine-year-old George. The “lithe, clean-limbed, erect, copper-coloured” young man was “Indian to his finger-tips, with that peculiar native polish and courtesy, that absolute ease of manner and direction of glance, possessed only by the old-fashioned type of red man of this continent.”

  The naïve English girl struggled to match this sophisticated figure before her with her mental image of Indians, culled from books about noble savages written by armchair travellers in London. According to Pauline, “She thought all Indians wore savage-looking clothes, had fierce eyes and stern set mouths.” Now Emily was face to face with a mild-mannered man dressed in the same outfit—cloth pants, wool shirt, dark jacket—worn by the European immigrants she had seen milling around the coaching inn in Brantford. George’s eyes, she had to admit, were “narrow and shrewd,” but at the same time, she noted that they were also “warm and kindly, his lips were like a Cupid’s bow, his hands were narrower, smaller than her own:…his deportment…was correct in every detail.”

  That evening, the Elliotts, George Johnson and Emily Howells took their seats in the dining room for a formal dinner. The Elliotts’ maidservant brought in a delicious game pie, which contained partridge and venison shot by George that day. Emily could barely keep her eyes off the man who would become her husband. According to her daughter’s highly romanticized account, Emily found that his manners equalled any she had seen in the most aristocratic of European families: “He ate leisurely, silently, gracefully; his knife and fork never clattered, his elbows never were in evidence, he made use of the right plates, spoons, forks, knives; he bore an ease, an unconsciousness of manner, that amazed her.” Her own British-born brother-in-law had no such grace: he clumsily dropped his knife, ate with an open mouth and was awkward and shy in conversation. Compared to Reverend Elliott, George Johnson “gleamed like a brown gem.”

  George Johnson was, without question, a graceful and handsome man. But it was his self-possession, rather than his good looks, that impressed Emily Howells. What took her breath away was not the exotic appeal of an Iroquois, but the gallantry and warmth of his greeting. George’s poise suggested an individual who enjoyed everything that Emily had always lacked—loving parents, a happy childhood, a sense of his own worth, a belief that the world was a friendly place. He was the product of a family background rich in history, pride and tradition: he was a member of the Mohawk nation, which had always considered itself the aristocracy of North American Indians. To a young woman intimidated by a tyrannical father, short on self-esteem and entirely lacking any sense of where she belonged, George Johnson was an irresistibly attractive figure.

  “Pity the poor Indians,” Henry Howells had instructed his daughter. In later years, Emily’s son Allen used to tease his mother that she had pitied one particular poor Indian so much that she had married him. However, there was absolutely nothing to pity about George Johnson. It was Pauline Johnson’s mother, Emily Howells, who was the pathetic creature. George Johnson rescued her from an uncertain future. But Emily brought into her marriage the neuroses and needs of an unhappy childhood.

  3

  THE LEGACY OF SIR WILLIAM JOHNSON 1738–1845

  WHEN Pauline Johnson was growing up on the Six Nations Reserve, many of her parents’ friends had European names, like Moses, Hill or Buck, alongside traditional Iroquois names. Sometimes families took European names when they were baptised as Christians; in other cases, the names were the result of intermarriage with a non-native, or to accommodate the European immigrants’ notorious inability to pronounce unfamiliar tongues. But the Johnson name was special. It originally belonged to a man who, almost alone amongst the non-natives of his time, accorded to the Iroquois the respect that was their due. Sir William Johnson lived in eighteenth-century colonial America. Pauline Johnson’s pride in “the red race,” as she liked to call Indians, owed much to the story of this exuberant character who is often described as “one of the greatest frontiersmen of all time.”

  In his day, Sir William Johnson was one of the wealthiest men in the colonies, thanks to his shrewd investments in the fur trade and the settlement of present-day New York State. However, he was not remarkable because he was rich—the New World was easy pickings for Old World strategists bent on acquisition. What sets him apart from his contemporaries is that from the moment he stepped on American soil in 1738, he treated the continent’s indigenous inhabitants as fellow human beings. He was one of the few Europeans who mastered the Mohawk tongue, and his friendships with the Iroquois peoples were based on mutual benefit rather than his own self-interest. The

  Sir William Johnson (1715–1774) was known to the Iroquois as “Warraghiyagey,” which means “a man who undertakes great things.” Boisterous and blunt, he did not appreciate the way that fashionable painter John Wollaston deliberately “improved” his figure in this 1751 portrait.

  Mohawks, amongst whom he was best known, returned his friendship and respect. They adopted him as a Mohawk and named him “Warraghiyagey,” which means “a man who undertakes great things.”

  Perhaps William Johnson’s sympathy for native Americans, who were gradually being pushed away from their ancestral lands, reflected his own humble origins. He too was born on the social and geographical margins of British power, and he had watched his family callously brushed aside because of their poverty and strange accent. He was born just outside Dublin in 1715 into a shabby genteel Irish family who depended on rich relatives to give them a helping hand. Young William was lucky:
he had a distinguished uncle, Peter Warren, a Royal Navy officer who had acquired land in the American colonies. In 1738, Warren commissioned his twenty-three-year-old nephew to cross the Atlantic and develop his land holdings, which lay along the Mohawk Valley between Lake Ontario and the Hudson River.

  Johnson’s uncle had never set foot himself on the 14,000 acres (about 5,500 hectares) he had bought. All Peter Warren knew about his land was that it was on the edge of the wilderness and that it supported some hardscrabble German tenants. The cocky little sea captain assumed, however, that it was like the New England seaboard or the hinterland of New York City, which by the mid-eighteenth century were prosperous lands thickly populated by European immigrants. Cities like New York and Boston were still rough; the houses were mostly jerry-built clapboard affairs on ill-laid foundations, and stray drunks and livestock roamed the streets. Nevertheless, there was a rising middle class of citizens building brick homes and founding gentlemen’s clubs. Captain Warren blithely told his nephew to establish a “plantation,” and promised to send him several slaves as labourers. He himself remained on active duty; in 1745, he was made Governor of Louisbourg after leading the successful siege of the French port on the tip of Cape Breton.