As William Johnson left behind him the thriving seaport of New York City, where he had landed, and made his way northwest, he quickly discovered that the European veneer on the New World in the late 1730s was, in fact, paper-thin. The thriving markets and welcoming inns quickly faded out. William rode alone along rough tracks, ducking to avoid the treacherously low branches of huge oaks, maples and firs. The impenetrability of the surrounding thick bush was a revelation. Occasionally the trail rose and he found himself in a clearing at the top of a hill, from which he could gaze out at an unending panorama of dark forest. Bird calls and the noise of animals rustling or crashing through the undergrowth were all that broke the silence.
Such a gloomy vista would only have depressed anyone accustomed to the stimulation of London society or Dublin’s literary circles. But William Johnson, a refugee from Irish poverty who knew he must make his own way in the world, embraced the challenge. His uncle’s commission was a spur for his own ambition. The large, lumbering young man realized that the key to future wealth was control of the lucrative fur trade. In addition, he soon saw that his most important potential allies in the region were not the indigent Germans, scratching a living from the land, or the arrogant Dutch burghers in Albany, cheating Indian hunters by exchanging shoddy European goods for their lustrous harvest of furs, pelts and hides. The people who really understood the vast landscape of thickly wooded hills and fast-flowing rivers were the Indians.
The first glimpse of Indians for most Europeans was usually of the most helpless representatives of tribal society: the beggars hanging around the forts and towns built by newcomers to the New World. Like beggars anywhere, they were an unimpressive sight. William saw men sitting motionless in the sunshine, wrapped in dirty blankets and covered in bear fat, with their greasy hair cut in strange styles. Obscenities characterized their broken English, since they had learned the language from foul-mouthed traders. “Some of them wear a bead fastened to their noses with a thread hanging down to their lips,” sniffed a British army officer who visited the Mohawk Valley. The women wore men’s shirts and blankets impregnated with bear grease, and worked bare-breasted in the fields with their babies strapped to their backs on cradleboards. Most of the Indians took little notice of Europeans except to pester them for food and drink. Europeans had quickly learned that if they plied the Indians with rum and brandy, the natives became so drunk that, ignorant of the consequences, they would sign away title to their ancestral lands.
William Johnson, however, did not judge by appearances and was not blinkered by cultural prejudices. In later years he acknowledged that the only way to understand Indians was through “a long residence amongst them, and a desire of information in these matters superseding all other considerations.” Within months of building his own log cabin in the Mohawk Valley, he had moved beyond superficial impressions. He made the effort to get to know the leaders of the various Iroquois peoples who travelled across his uncle’s land. He learned that five related Indian nations made up the Iroquois nation and that they had established for the thickly wooded central valley of the continent a sophisticated system of government. Some time during the sixteenth century, two hundred years before Johnson’s arrival, the five nations had established a formal federation. Known as the Iroquois Confederacy, the federation viewed its territory as a longhouse (the traditional home for several families in Iroquois culture), with each nation occupying a room around its own fire. In the east, the door of this metaphorical longhouse opened on the Hudson: the Mohawks were the keepers of this door. Next, as the trails wove westward through the thick bush, came the Oneidas, the Onondagas, the Cayugas and, at the other door on the Genesee River beyond the Allegheny Mountains, the Senecas. By the time that Johnson arrived, a sixth nation had joined the Confederacy: the Tuscaroras. Compared to most of the dozens of different native groups scattered over the northern half of the continent, the Iroquois peoples were cohesive, well organized and unusually sedentary. The economic and political stability of the Iroquois Confederacy, now often called the Six Nations, had given its members some resilience against the greedy incursions of French and British armies and settlers. They were effective forest fighters and highly skilled traders. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s famous poem about the Onondaga hero Hiawatha, written in 1855, reflects the European view that the Iroquois peoples were the elite of the New World. The Mohawks, who occupied the most eastern parts of the territory and were the first native people Johnson encountered, were regarded as the leaders of the Confederacy.
Johnson set about earning the trust of his Mohawk neighbours. He broke the monopoly on the fur trade that merchants in New York and Montreal had managed to establish, and which had depressed the prices paid to the Iroquois. He lent the native peoples money, gave them generous gifts in their own manner, enjoyed their feasts and their friendship. He threw himself into their rituals: he danced at their weddings and appeared at the conferences of the Iroquois Confederacy dressed and painted like a warrior himself. He founded schools so that they would learn English as well as their own languages, and he built churches in which they could practise the rituals of the Church of England. He translated the Anglican prayerbook into a phonetic version of their language, and he paid for the education of Mohawks so that they could have their own priests.
Johnson’s energy and enthusiasm made him irresistible to those around him. A great bear of a man by the time he was middle-aged, he dominated every event he attended. One such event was a tribal gathering on the shores of the Niagara River in the summer of 1758, when an Anglican priest officiated at the baptism of babies born the previous winter. Of course Johnson was there, decked out in Mohawk finery. A young Mohawk woman, Mary Tekahionwake, came forward with her newborn son for baptism. At the point in the ceremony when the priest asked Mary her child’s name, the young mother hesitated for a moment. A loud voice boomed out: “Give him my name!” It was none other than Johnson, who also insisted on being the child’s godfather. So the priest made the sign of the cross on the child’s forehead and gave him a name that enfolded within its noble rhythms two cultures: Jacob Tekahionwake Johnson. Pauline was his great-granddaughter.
Back in England, the periwigged officials of the court of King George II were less enthusiastic about Johnson’s friendship with the New World’s native peoples. Most Europeans simply couldn’t comprehend a truly open relationship with Indians. They didn’t trust the “noble savages” from whom they had purchased the land for their colonies and with whom they conducted sporadic and bloody territorial squabbles. They were uneasy about the power base Johnson had built in the Mohawk Valley. However, government officials had to admit that Johnson’s warm relationship with the Mohawks in pre-revolutionary America worked to their benefit. The settled regions of the North American continent regularly erupted in skirmishes between French and English troops and their native allies. Johnson’s friendships amongst the Iroquois never undermined his diehard loyalty to the monarch back home, and his links with them guaranteed their equally firm attachment to British interests. The alliance that Johnson created between Iroquois and British would have long-lasting consequences.
During the years that the youthful William Johnson was establishing his kingdom in the wilderness, he defended British interests against constant incursions from les Canadiens in New France, north of the St. Lawrence River, and their Algonquin allies. In 1755, French troops had crossed the St. Lawrence River and tried to invade the British-held Mohawk Valley. Thanks to Johnson’s Mohawk allies, the invaders were turned back at the Battle of Lake George. This victory effectively shut the French out of the northern American colonies. News of this victory “echoed through the colonies, reverberated to Europe” and, according to a jealous rival of Johnson’s, “elevated a raw, inexperienced youth to a kind of second Marlboro.” (The first Duke of Marlborough had been the victor of the decisive Battle of Blenheim, fifty-one years earlier.) The colonial rulers in England knew they must reward this patriotic frontiersman, even if
he was a little too wild for British tastes. He was appointed Superintendent of Indian Affairs north of the Ohio Valley, and made a baronet—one of only two Americans during this period who were so honoured. (The other one was William Pepperell, who in 1745 had led a large army of New Englanders to help Johnson’s uncle, Peter Warren, capture the French fortress of Louisbourg in Nova Scotia.)
In his later years, Sir William Johnson lived in a ménage that sounds like a cross between a gentlemen’s club and a summer camp. Peacocks strutted in the garden of his spacious Georgian mansion, five miles (eight kilometres) north of the Mohawk River and thirty miles (forty-eight kilometres) west of Albany. Iroquois and European friends were always welcome. It was a non-stop open house at Johnson Hall, according to contemporaries who lavished praise on his hospitality, books and fine furnishings. “The freer people made, the more happy was Sir William,” wrote Thomas Jones, a New York judge who was a frequent visitor.
After breakfast, while Sir William was about his business, his guests entertained themselves as they pleased. Some rode out, some went out with guns, some with fishing tackle, some sauntered about the town, some played cards, some backgammon, some billiards, some pennies, and some even at nine-pins. Thus was each day spent until the hour of four, when the bell punctually rang for dinner, and all assembled. He had beside his own family, seldom less than ten, sometimes thirty. All were welcome. All was good cheer, mirth and festivity. Sometimes seven, eight, or ten, of the Indian sachems [chiefs] joined the festive board.
Johnson’s own appetites were legendary: he loved carousing until dawn and was rumoured to have fathered 700 children. There were plenty of light-skinned babies with Sir William’s pale eyes in the communities surrounding Johnson Hall. Pauline’s great-grandfather, Jacob Johnson, was sometimes assumed to be Sir William’s illegitimate son as well as his godson and namesake.
By the time Sir William Johnson died in 1774, he was famous throughout British North America. He had huge land holdings: 600,000 acres (about 24,000 hectares) of what is now New York State. His Iroquois friends had proven to the British that they were crucial military allies who could defend British territories overseas. And Sir William had shown his Iroquois allies that it was possible for Europeans and Indians to live in harmony. Sir William Johnson’s strong commitment to the equality of nations shaped Iroquois attitudes to the British for the next century. On the Six Nations Reserve in 1861, the year Pauline Johnson was born, the Iroquois still clung to the assumption that they could happily co-exist with Europeans.
The harmony between colonists and Crown crumbled during Sir William’s later years, however. And within three years of his death, the first skirmishes of what would become the War of American
Independence had broken out. Sir William’s power lingered on mainly in the person of Molly Brant, sometimes known as Mary Brant, who had lived with Sir William for fifteen years. Molly was a full-blooded Mohawk, whose name in her own language was Gonwatsijayenni, meaning “someone lends her a flower.” She became Sir William’s second wife (in an Iroquois rather than Christian ritual) in about 1759, bore him eight children and was the formidable chatelaine of Johnson Hall.
Molly Brant straddled two worlds in the same way that Pauline Johnson would a century later. She carried in her person the self-respect of a native woman who belonged to a matriarchal society where women had considerable status. “One word from her is more taken Notice of by the five Nations than a thousand from any white Man without Exception,” wrote William Claus, a Pennsylvanian whom Johnson had befriended. At the same time, Molly moved easily in colonial society. She displayed real flair in the way she combined European and native dress, wearing, for example, green velvet leggings below a well-cut wool jacket from London fastened with the silver brooches specially exported from Britain as trade items for Indians. Her wardrobe included both silk-lined wool cloaks and Hudson’s Bay blankets; sometimes she wore leather shoes, and at other times she preferred beautifully sewn moccasins decorated with quillwork. She could move silently through the forest, and she would also ride sidesaddle like an aristocratic Englishwoman.
Most important, Molly Brant emerged from her husband’s shadow to become a leader of the Mohawks in her own right. Together with her younger brother Joseph, she urged her fellow Mohawks and the rest of the Six Nations peoples to remain loyal to the Crown. This time, though, the enemy was not the French settlers and their Algonquin allies north of the St. Lawrence River, but the American revolutionaries pushing up from the south. Molly’s loyalty was an invaluable asset for the British, who depended on the Iroquois to hold the territory north of the Mohawk River. She became the chief conduit between the British authorities and the Iroquois. But as revolutionary troops overran the Mohawk settlements in 1777, she was forced to admit she had chosen the losing side. She fled northward from the lands of the Iroquois longhouse, where her family had lived for generations, taking her children and her black slaves. For years, she hoped she would be able to return to the splendour of her old life in the Mohawk Valley, but her lands were seized by American revolutionaries while the ink on the Declaration of Independence was still wet.
Molly Brant finally settled in Kingston, on the north shore of Lake Ontario, in a house built for her by the British government. She was much better off than most of the Loyalists forced to move north when their lands were occupied by the Revolutionary army. An annual pension of 100 pounds was settled on her “in consideration of the early and uniform fidelity, attachment and zealous Services rendered to the King’s Government by Miss Mary Brant and her Family.” She was a frequent guest of General John Simcoe, who became the first Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada in 1791, and his wife Elizabeth. Her six daughters, of mixed Irish-Mohawk parentage, were each regarded as a “catch.” Of the five who married, three became the wives of British army officers, one married a physician, and one wed John Ferguson, member for Kingston in the Legislature of Upper Canada.
Jacob Tekahionwake Johnson—Sir William Johnson’s godson and Pauline’s great-grandfather—was as loyal to the British Crown as Molly Brant, and like her, he suffered for it. In the late 1780s, Jacob, then about thirty years old, was one of 448 Mohawks, alongside about 1,200 other Iroquois, who followed Molly Brant’s younger brother, Joseph, and fled north to escape the American revolutionaries. A long, sad line of Iroquois, bearing as many of their possessions as they could, slowly snaked out of the Mohawk Valley towards those territories that the British had managed to hold on to. In a flotilla of small boats, the Indians crossed the Niagara River. But the example of Sir William Johnson lived on: the British Crown gave the same generous welcome to these refugees as it had given to Molly Brant. A huge tract of land had been purchased from the Mississauga people and was now granted to “His Majesty’s faithful allies…the Mohawk Nation and such other of the Six Nations as wish to settle in that quarter to take possession of and…enjoy for ever.” The Grand River grant to the Six Nations consisted of nearly 570,000 acres (230,000 hectares) of prime agricultural land; twelve miles (nineteen kilometres) wide, it stretched from the source to the mouth of the river.
Over the next hundred years, the Six Nations Reserve provided a solid economic base for the 1,700 Iroquois who had elected to move north. (Another 4,000 had made peace with the Americans and stayed in the Mohawk Valley.) Since the original grant was far more extensive than the Iroquois required, it gradually dwindled in size. Joseph Brant sold chunks of it to raise funds for his followers; the British government bought more acres to ensure land development by European settlers. But the Iroquois never forgot that the reserve was their reward for military services rendered rather than their ancestral hunting ground. The King had treated them the same way as he had treated others on whose military services the British depended. Other Loyalists from the American colonies who arrived in the 1780s, and British officers who had been pensioned off after the end of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe in 1815, were also offered free land in Upper Canada as a reward for services rendere
d.
Little is known of Jacob Johnson’s years in Upper Canada, other than the fact that in 1792 he became the father of a boy, whom he named John after the only legitimate son of his godfather, Sir William Johnson. But John Johnson, Pauline’s grandfather, was an important figure in her childhood. In the military tradition of the Mohawk people, he became a fierce warrior in defence of British interests. He was only twenty when he followed Joseph Brant into battle during the War of 1812 and fought the ragtag American army at Queenston Heights, Lundy’s Lane and Stoney Creek. John Johnson never flinched from taking enemy lives or from risking his own, and in later years his grandchildren loved to hear of his exploits. “Have you killed many men, grandfather?” Pauline, as a child, would ask as she leaned against the old man’s knee. With a toothless grin, he would reply, “No, not many, baby, not many, only four or five.” His youthful bravery verged on recklessness. His grandchildren’s favourite tale concerned the time when, under cover of darkness, he and another young man from the reserve silently paddled across the swiftly flowing Niagara River, crept ashore on the American side and set fire to the ramshackle lakeside town in which enemy troops were billeted. Amongst his contemporaries in the Six Nations on the Grand River Reserve, he was known as the man who razed Buffalo.
John Johnson had a certain aura about him that both his own people and the British recognized. The colonial government, always eager to cultivate its Indian allies, was smart enough to see that it could use this wiry young warrior to cement ties with the Iroquois. The Johnson family had no special standing on the reserve, but the British pushed the Iroquois Council to elevate John’s status.
The Council leaders were not averse to being pushed. They too recognized the potential of a young man who was committed to his own people as well as to British interests. John Johnson might be a loyal British subject, but he was no sycophant. In 1840, at a historic assembly of Ontario native peoples, he encouraged his fellow Indians to cooperate in demands for land title. He also urged the Ojibwa to refer to the British governor as “Brother” rather than “Father” to promote a relationship of equality. Moreover, John was skilled in the traditional Iroquois art of oratory. In the oral culture of the Iroquois, eloquence was the people’s literature: its metaphors painted the skies and the forest; its cadences were their music. When John Johnson rose to speak at public gatherings, a deep hush would fall as he lifted his voice in a spellbinding singsong rhythm that mesmerized listeners.
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