The Mohawk elders knew that young Johnson, who had mastered the English tongue as well as most of the languages of the Iroquois, could be as valuable to them as to the British. They consented to make him a “pine-tree chief,” which meant he was appointed for life only. He became the speaker of the Six Nations Council, with the name Sakayengwaraton. The name translates as “the haze that rises from the ground on an autumn morning and vanishes as the day advances.” It didn’t take Johnson’s colleagues long to shorten this splendid appellation to the nickname “Smoke,” or to refer to the great orator, behind his back, as “the Mohawk warbler.”
John “Smoke” Johnson was canny. With a pine-tree chieftaincy under his belt, he made an advantageous marriage. His wife, Helen Martin, belonged to one of the fifty noble families of the Iroquois Confederacy, the families which held hereditary chieftaincies. Helen’s mother, Catherine, had her own intriguing history. She had been born Catherine Rolleston, daughter of Dutch settlers near Philadelphia, but as a young girl she had been captured by Mohawks during a skirmish in the War of Independence and had been adopted by a chief. Although her parents came from Holland and she spoke English, Catherine had no interest in emulating Molly Brant and straddling two worlds. She married a young Mohawk named George Onhyeateh Martin, and appears to have been happily absorbed into the Mohawk nation. During the long trek from the Mohawk Valley to the Grand River Reserve in the late 1780s, Catherine Rolleston Martin hid in the bundle on her back the silver communion service sent by Queen Anne to the Mohawks in the early years of the eighteenth century. She passed on neither a hint of her Dutch upbringing nor a word of English to her daughter Helen, who became Pauline Johnson’s grandmother.
John “Smoke” Johnson and Helen Martin Johnson had six children. The childhood of these youngsters differed little from that of their parents and grandparents. They ran barefoot through the woods and learned to hunt and paddle as their ancestors had done in their lost lands to the south since time immemorial. The Six Nations Reserve, established less than thirty years earlier, was still for the most part uncleared wilderness. Tall forests of white pine and oak, and thick scrub of tamarack and muskeg, were rich in game—white-tailed deer, passenger pigeons, quail, woodcocks, wild turkeys—to supplement the diet of cornmeal and berries. Over-hunting had almost wiped out the beaver population around the Great Lakes, but there was plenty of other quarry for hunters who wanted to sell pelts to the Europeans—black bear, muskrat, fisher and marten.
The Iroquois peoples planted corn and root vegetables in the cleared patches of earth around the scattered settlements of roughly built wooden houses. Willow trees lined the banks of the Grand River, and porcupines snuffled through the undergrowth, allowing women to continue the traditional crafts of basket-making and quillwork. Trading links developed fast between the reserve and the steadily growing immigrant settlements in the surrounding areas. Mohawk and Onondaga women arrived at the markets of Hamilton, Brantford, Port Dover or Port Burwell to trade cornmeal, embroidered moccasins and baskets for products shipped in from England, including iron pots, cloth and silver trinkets. Iroquois men would appear with venison, freshly caught salmon or muskrat pelts, and barter them for guns, gunpowder and whiskey.
Although European and Iroquois settlers did not mingle socially, there was plenty of room for all in the 1820s and 1830s, and it was an easy co-existence. Outside Kingston and Toronto, both natives and immigrants in Upper Canada relied on the land for their living. Most of the British were at least as poor in worldly goods and formal education as the Iroquois; there was little difference between the two groups in their living conditions. Almost everybody lived in wooden houses with smoky fireplaces, root cellars and sleeping lofts. European settlers respected their native neighbours’ local know-how. Most were eager to copy their hunting and trapping skills and to learn from them about medicinal plants and vegetable dyes. They adopted their means of travel: snowshoes in winter, canoes in summer. Besides, shared loyalty to Church and Crown united these diverse British subjects. Every Sunday, John “Smoke” Johnson would take his children along to the little whitewashed Mohawk Chapel near Brantford, where he would read the Ten Commandments to the congregation. As one of the few Iroquois who spoke English fluently, he often interpreted the sermon, given each Sunday by a cleric who had been sent across the Atlantic by the missionary association called, with the arrogance of imperialism, the “Society for Converting and Civilizing the Indians.” While John “Smoke” Johnson translated the clipped English phraseology into the melodious singsong of the Mohawk tongue, his children would gaze at the shiny silver communion service that their grandmother had carried to Canada all those years ago.
The second child of John “Smoke” Johnson and Helen Martin Johnson was born on October 7, 1816, and named George after the British monarch, King George III. When George Henry Martin Johnson was still a boy, it was evident that he had inherited many of his father’s finer qualities. Straight-backed and self-assured, he had an easy grin and a quick wit. He also had a gift for languages, so his parents sent him away to school in the neighbouring town of Brantford, where he boarded with another Mohawk family. Soon he spoke English well enough to substitute for his father as interpreter at the Mohawk Chapel.
George Johnson’s Brantford sojourn allowed him to make valuable connections with British authorities. When the firebrand William Lyon Mackenzie led a rebellion against the colonial government in Upper Canada in 1837, there was no question where Mohawk loyalties lay. George Johnson stood proud beneath the Union Jack and was recruited as a despatch rider to Allan Napier MacNab. MacNab, a Hamilton lawyer, was amongst the most zealous in the suppression of the uprising. (For a brief period in the 1850s, MacNab was Premier of the United Canadas.) George Johnson’s reputation as a young man to watch shot up. The Cayugas, one of the six nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, presented him with a tomahawk inlaid with silver, as a token of their admiration for him.
In 1838, when George was twenty-two years old, a new minister arrived at the white clapboard mission church at Tuscarora. The Reverend Adam Elliott was a tall Scotsman of devout intent and impossibly shy disposition. At first, he was uncertain how to treat the young Mohawk who translated his sermons so gracefully. But George’s easy manner and quiet self-assurance soon put Elliott at ease. He invited George Johnson to stay with him at Tuscarora parsonage, and despite Adam Elliott’s reticence, a father–son relationship blossomed between the gawky Scotsman and the lithe young Indian. Together they criss-crossed the reserve, visiting the separate communities of Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, Senecas and Tuscaroras. Each people still spoke its own language (although the tongues were sufficiently similar that they could understand each other). George would switch effortlessly between the native tongues and English as he translated the clergyman’s words of comfort to the sick and dying or spread the gospel to those who still resisted baptism (the Onondagas, in particular, had not abandoned their traditional beliefs). Duty done, the two men would then stick to English as they tramped along the rough corduroy roads, discussing Christian doctrine and Canadian politics until they reached the next needy soul. George seemed to have a special gift for comforting anybody afflicted with smallpox. Most people shrank from contact with the killer disease, but George showed no fear. He would shake hands with sufferers, even though his skin often stuck to their suppurating sores. His fellow Indians were awed; they did not know that while in Brantford, George had been vaccinated (or “salivated,” as it was then known) by a London-trained physician.
Adam Elliott’s friendship with George Johnson was unaffected by the parson’s marriage to Eliza Beulah Howells in 1839. Soon Eliza was as fond of her husband’s protegé as Adam himself was. The Elliotts’ first child, Mary Margaret, was born in 1840; three years later, Henry Christopher arrived. The Mohawk boarder was a boon to Eliza. George had none of the British male’s discomfort with bawling infants, and was always ready to take a fractious toddler off her hands for a slow, soothing str
oll through the woods.
By now, George Johnson knew how to move smoothly through European society. He wore European clothes, spoke English flawlessly and modelled his behaviour and values on those of his mentor, Adam Elliott. Nobody could find fault with George Johnson’s manners. The combination of a charming personality and the manners of a British gentleman won him almost complete acceptance in the larger world. George’s position and income meant that, unlike many of the young men in pioneer townships, he could afford a wife and family.
With the birth of her third child, Charles O’Reilly, in 1845, Eliza was more than happy to welcome her shy little sister Emily, who arrived from Pittsburgh to live at the parsonage and help Eliza with the growing family. Soon Emily was joining the two older children and George for their strolls in the woods. George’s courtesy and gentle manner continued to attract Emily, who was nine years his junior. Given Eliza Howells Elliott’s own fondness for George Johnson, the minister’s wife cannot have been in the least surprised to watch the steady growth of affection between him and her younger sister.
A few months later, George caught typhoid fever. The sound of his retching and groaning terrified Adam Elliott, who knew that his wife’s health was frail and his young children were vulnerable to such a devastating infection. So he asked Emily, who was much sturdier than her sister, to nurse the young man. It was a situation made for romance: as Emily bent solicitously over George, he stared up at her pale skin and blue eyes and fell in love. In later years, Emily’s daughters revelled in the story. This was the “real beginning of the love match between my mother and father,” Eva recorded in her memoirs. Safe within the four friendly walls of the Tuscarora parsonage, George and Emily failed to recognize that their romance might horrify both their families.
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FOR RICHER, FOR POORER, FOR BETTER, FOR WORSE 1845–1861
AS both Molly Brant and Catherine Rolleston had demonstrated, marriages between Europeans and Indians were neither unusual nor unacceptable in eighteenth-century North America. For Europeans, the rigid conventions of class-ridden societies back home evaporated once they were settlers in frontier communities. The Iroquois, for their part, had successfully absorbed into their peoples any number of non-Indian women captured during skirmishes. And the Mohawks had a very particular status within Upper Canada. Valuable military allies and beneficiaries of a huge land grant, the heirs and followers of Sir William Johnson and Molly Brant had every right to consider themselves equal to the other Loyalists who had streamed north half a century earlier.
Nevertheless, when George Johnson’s parents heard he wanted to marry a non-Mohawk, they were taken aback. Their objection centred not on any feelings about race but on a much more tangible issue: power. George’s mother, Helen Martin Johnson, had inherited through her own mother and grandmother one of the most important positions on the Six Nations Reserve: she was a hereditary clan mother of the Wolf Clan of the Mohawks within the Iroquois Confederacy. All members of the Iroquois Confederacy belonged to the Wolf Clan, the Tortoise Clan or the Bear Clan. These clans crossed tribal lines and were an essential element in the harmony between peoples. As a clan mother, Helen Martin Johnson participated in discussions within the clan and among the Iroquois peoples on land allotments, disputes, public games, welfare of the elderly and sick, and compensation for crimes. The clan mothers decided who should be pine-tree chiefs and which hereditary chiefs should be the leaders of the ruling Confederacy Council. Helen Martin Johnson had the right to address the ruling Council when it met in the Six Nations Council House at Ohsweken. Council members paid attention to her words. Her hereditary position gave her far more status and authority than George’s father had in his role as pine-tree chief—a position he could not pass on to his children.
George Johnson’s mother made little impression on those who did not know her well. Unlike her husband and son, she had not adopted European ways. Small and unsmiling, her black eyes expressionless, she made no effort to learn English and she still wore the traditional leggings and tunic of her people. In the market square in Brantford, or on the porch of the Tuscarora parsonage, she would sit cross-legged on the ground, a blanket pulled tight around her shoulders, staring silently at those around her and smoking a small carved pipe.
Her own family, however, knew she was a woman to be reckoned with. She had already faced down her fellow leaders in the community in order to secure an important role for her son George on the reserve. When her brother died in 1843, she had stood up amongst all the Iroquois chiefs and proposed her son to replace him as a member of the Iroquois’s top decision-making body, the Council.
The chiefs objected that as an official interpreter, George Johnson’s primary loyalty was to the colonial government, and that this responsibility compromised any claim he might make through his mother’s family. They argued that a salaried official of the colonial government would be in conflict of interest if he also assumed the responsibility of a chief. The position of interpreter gave George a lot of influence: though he was still in his twenties, he already acted as liaison between the colonial authorities and the Council. He represented the colonial government at the semi-annual distribution of gifts from the British government to the Six Nations. Moreover, his eagerness to speak at meetings did not sit well with the non-Mohawk chiefs. He was too keen to play a prominent role at ceremonial events (he looked magnificent in the fringed buckskin tunic and leggings stitched with countless quills that he wore for these occasions, and he knew it). The chiefs were uncomfortable with the fact that George’s father, John “Smoke” Johnson, was already a pine-tree chief. As a rule, sons never succeeded fathers on the Council, because they were likely to vote as a block. If George combined the roles of official interpreter and Council member, they argued, excessive power would be concentrated in Johnson hands.
But Helen Martin Johnson had stood firm. She told Council members that they could depose a chief in the event that he did something wrong, but they could not refuse to appoint someone for fear he might do something wrong in the future. Eyes blazing, she warned them that if George Johnson was not appointed, they would end up with no member: she refused to appoint a substitute. The Council members shifted uneasily on their seats; they murmured amongst themselves. They knew that she would not budge. So they accepted her son as a chief. Amongst his fellow chiefs, he was known as “Onwanonsyshon.”
After this victory, Helen Martin Johnson turned her mind to the question of whom her son should marry. The choice was important politically: after her own death, her daughter-in-law would inherit the powerful role of clan mother. Helen selected a young woman from another Mohawk family who would bring credit to the Johnson name. But her careful plans were wrecked by George’s announcement that he wanted to marry Emily Howells rather than his mother’s candidate. Helen had no particular feelings about Emily, but George’s choice appalled her because a non-native woman could not become a clan mother.
Sixty years after the event, Pauline Johnson published her own fanciful description of the encounter when George announced his choice of bride. Helen Martin Johnson, according to Pauline, exclaimed incredulously, “But your children, your sons and heirs—they could never hold the title, never be chief!” George winced, but held his ground as stubbornly as his mother had held hers in the Council on his behalf. He insisted he was going to marry Emily. Then he quietly left his parents’ house and walked back along the forest path to the parsonage, back to the “fair young English girl whose unhappy childhood he had learned of years ago, [with her] lips that were made for love they had never had.” Meanwhile, continues Pauline’s account, George’s mother “folded her broadcloth about her, filled her small carven pipe and sat for many hours smoking silently, silently, silently.” The breach between mother and son appeared unbridgeable.
Even allowing for Pauline’s taste for melodrama, this account captures the emotional intensity that had developed between the Mohawk youth and the shy young English immigrant. The intensity was
enough to make George betray his family.
George and Emily could not get married straightaway, because in the next few months a series of tragedies hit the Elliott household. Between November 1847 and August 1848, an epidemic of scarlet fever swept through the community. Despite Emily’s tireless nursing, Adam and Eliza’s three youngest children all died (a fourth child, Emily, had been born after Emily came to live at the parsonage). The following year Emily’s skills as a nurse were again called into service when tuberculosis, the scourge of nineteenth-century Canada, struck her sister Eliza. Within months, Eliza Howells Elliott had joined her children in the Tuscarora graveyard. The following year, the devastation of Adam Elliott’s family was complete. Tuberculosis also took the life of his only remaining child, his eldest daughter, Mary.
At this point, it became inappropriate for the rector’s unmarried sister to be living in the parsonage with him and his Mohawk interpreter. The moment had arrived for George and Emily to announce their engagement. But Emily quickly discovered that in the eyes of some members of her own family as well as the citizens of Upper Canada’s small towns, she was betraying her British blood as recklessly as George Johnson had broken faith with Mohawk tradition.
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