By the mid-nineteenth century, attitudes were changing in Upper Canada’s small towns—although the roads remained unpaved and cows often wandered down the main streets. Successful merchants, lawyers, factory owners and brewers, who rarely saw a non-European face and had never known the grinding hardships and hunger faced by earlier pioneers, thronged the marketplaces and meeting halls. In the backwoods, families scratching a living on pioneer farms were still knit together by mutual need, but townsfolk picked their friends carefully. The well-furnished parlours of those born in England or Scotland and now living in Belleville, Brockville or Hamilton welcomed only those with similar origins. Prejudices spawned in the Mother Country crept across the Atlantic. Few Catholics, Jews or French Canadians were invited to join exclusive male clubs such as the Freemasons, the Odd Fellows or the Orange Order. Everybody despised the destitute Irish who were arriving in waves up the St. Lawrence River. Indians who spoke strange languages and clung to unfamiliar traditions were increasingly unwelcome. And nobody was more alert to social nuance and respectability than Emily Howells’s sister Mary and her husband, the Reverend Robert Vashon Rogers, comfortably ensconced within the elite of Upper Canada’s largest city, Kingston.
Kingston was a city of imposing limestone buildings and stuffy pretensions. It had served as provincial capital between 1841 and 1843. One legacy of its brief pre-eminence was the largest city hall in the province, with a magnificent green dome. Its most important citizens gathered each Sunday under the slender steeple of Kingston’s oldest church, St. George’s, which in 1862 would be elevated to the status of cathedral. There, members of Kingston’s crème de la crème would sing solemn hymns and admire each other’s outfits. Emily’s brother-in-law, Robert Rogers, took his position in Kingston society very seriously. As rector of St. James Church, headmaster of the Midland District School and chaplain of the Kingston penitentiary, he moved in the best circles. His wife, Mary, kept his house and garden immaculately. His son Robert was already a respected lawyer in Kingston, regularly hobnobbing with the rising young politician John A. Macdonald and doing much of the work for the Anglican Diocese. The Reverend Robert Rogers, a short, chubby man with a fussy manner and darting eyes, bore an uncanny resemblance to an obsequious cleric in a Trollope novel as he strolled down King Street, raising his hat to his fellow citizens.
In the summer of 1853, Emily Howells arrived at the Rogerses’ home. It had been many months since Emily’s previous visit, and Mary Rogers was surprised by her twenty-nine-year-old sister’s cheerful good health. Mary knew that the Elliott household had lurched from crisis to crisis, and she had made known her concern about the propriety of Emily’s remaining at the Tuscarora parsonage with her widowed brother-in-law. Adam Elliott might be a man of God, but he was still a man. Never one to resist gossip herself, Mary didn’t want tongues wagging about her own sister. Besides, she thought a young woman of Emily’s accomplishments could do quite well for herself in a garrison town like Kingston. Emily had all the makings of a colonial lady, despite her tendency to be tongue-tied in a crowd. She was well-versed in literature and nimble-fingered at embroidery, and she played the piano with refinement. She would make some lucky officer a delightful wife.
As Mary escorted her sister up the stairs to her bedroom, she caught the flash of emerald and diamonds on Emily’s engagement finger. Surprised, Mary asked where the ring came from. A joyful Emily immediately told her sister her news: George Johnson, of the Six Nations Reserve, had asked her to be his wife. Emily expected Mary to be as pleased by the tale of her great love affair as Adam Elliott—and Eliza before her death—had been. She naïvely believed that Mary and Robert Rogers would be happy to organize her wedding in St. George’s Church. Instead, her news was received even more coldly than George Johnson’s announcement to his parents that he wanted to marry Emily. Mary’s face froze. “An Indian,” she stuttered.
At first, according to her daughter Pauline’s account of the episode, Emily misinterpreted her sister’s reaction. “Yes,” she laughed. “Handsome, noble and the kindest man who ever lived. Wait till you meet him tomorrow.” But this time, the look on Mary’s face was unmistakeable. Mary was horrified that a “girl of your upbringing” would dream of marrying a non-European. In the Kingston of 1850, marriages to Indian women were frowned on but reluctantly accepted; the notion of marriage to an Indian man, however, triggered a torrent of nasty stereotypes about helpless females corrupted by savages. Emily, taken aback, protested that George’s family was equally shocked because he was marrying a non-Indian, but this just added to Mary’s outrage. Mary was furious that any “wretched Indians” should consider themselves too good to marry someone born in England—someone, moreover, whose sister had married one of the leading churchmen of the colony. How could Eliza Howells Elliott have allowed an Indian to flirt with her little sister? Mary had no time for any talk of Indian titles or chieftaincies. Her voice grew even shriller as she anxiously anticipated what the Reverend Robert Vashon Rogers would say.
When Robert Rogers returned home, Mary’s fears proved justified. The news propelled her husband into a frenzy of outraged Victorian respectability. He retired to his study, then issued a summons to his sister-in-law to appear before him. Drawing himself up to his not-very-impressive height, he ordered Emily to pack her things, leave his home and never darken his door again. He spat out his disgust at the idea of a union between a woman such as her and “the red race.” “And if you have children,” he added, “they shall never associate with mine.” Emily Howells was unceremoniously bundled out of St. James’s parsonage. Mary tried to cushion the blow by pressing several yards of beautiful lace into her sister’s hands. Emily, white-faced and trembling, added it to her parcels and walked away down the street.
On previous visits to Kingston, Emily had become acquainted with Jane Harvey, wife of a regimental quartermaster. Jane was as generous as the Rogerses were snobbish. When Emily gave a tremulous knock on the Harveys’ door, Jane opened it immediately. She swept the weeping Emily up in a warm embrace, issued a series of oh-lordy-lordy clucks when she heard how the Rogerses had behaved and promised the young woman that she and her “young Hiawatha” would have a lovely wedding and a cosy wedding breakfast. The following day Jane Harvey made the arrangements for a marriage ceremony to take place in the little limestone church of St. Mark’s, on a hilltop in Barriefield, across the Cataraqui Creek from Kingston. Then she sent her brother to meet George Johnson, due on the Toronto steamer at Kingston docks that afternoon, and to steer him away from the parsonage and towards a hotel for the night.
George Johnson and Emily Howells were married on August 27, 1853, in front of the Harveys and several of their friends. Emily, a
George Johnson and Emily Howells obviously enjoyed sitting for their wedding portrait: George always loved to dress up, while Emily clutched a ceremonial tomahawk and glowed with happiness at her new domestic security.
few brown curls peeping out from a demure white bonnet, looked like a mouse as she lifted her dark wool skirt to step through St. Mark’s Gothic doorway and into the church’s cool interior. In contrast, George Johnson strutted like a peacock under the vaulted roof. White gloves in hand, he was dressed in a frock coat of pale grey broadcloth with grosgrain trim, a starched collar and silk cravat, a silver sword and a tasselled sash. Earlier that morning, a man had accosted him outside his hotel and told him that an Indian chief was rumoured to be getting married in Kingston that day; did this well-dressed stranger know where the ceremony was to take place? The Kingstonian obviously hoped for an exotic parade of buckskinned and feathered Indians wielding tomahawks; he may not even have realized that he was speaking to a Mohawk. George courteously directed him to St. George’s Church, “where the ceremony,” he told the enquirer, “was expected to take place.” Then, chuckling at his own careful deployment of the truth (he had, after all, expected to be married at St. George’s), he himself made his way to Barriefield.
As George and Emily s
tood in front of the altar of St. Mark’s Church, the minister supervised their exchange of vows and then offered some bland advice that was probably his standard sermon for weddings. “A married couple must pull together like a yoke of oxen,” he intoned. If each pulled in a different direction, the load would never be drawn forward, he warned. Did the newlyweds need such advice? Hardly. Both were outcasts. Already shunned by their own relatives, they knew they probably had only each other to rely on in the years to come. Their marriage meant that George’s family had lost its claim to a hereditary title and Emily had lost her status as an Englishwoman. From now on, she and her children would be classified as Indians, although they would never be accepted on the reserve as Mohawks. Emily clung to George with the feverish dependence of a woman bruised by too many rejections. George lovingly stroked her hair, torn between happiness that at last they were wed and sadness that his parents were not there to see it.
News of the interracial marriage, and the displeasure of the bride’s relatives, rippled through Upper Canada’s close-knit elite. By the time the steamer on which George and Emily were travelling from Kingston reached the docks at Toronto, a crowd had gathered. Many of the gawkers wished the young couple well; a group of women presented Emily with a bracelet made from the braided locks of their own hair, fastened with a cameo. George, as usual, was gracious and poised before the crowd. But Emily climbed as quickly as possible into the carriage that was to take them home to Tuscarora.
For the first two years of their marriage, the Johnsons remained with Adam Elliott at Tuscarora parsonage. George was determined that Emily’s life should be no different than if she had married a European man. His first gift to her was the epitome of middle-class British taste: a silver tea service, including teapot, coffee pot, sugar bowl, milk jug and slop bowl, which had been displayed in the Crystal Palace at the Great Exhibition, held in London that same year. Adam Elliott presented Emily with initialled silver spoons, pearl-handled knives and forks, and a dress length of brown satin. Like her husband, Emily Howells Johnson was determined to pre-empt her critics by outdoing them in any display of manners; she would entertain in the same dainty style as any of Brantford’s young wives. Only the set of placemats made of doeskin and embroidered with the tribal designs of the Six Nations in porcupine quills suggested an additional dimension to the Johnson marriage.
Eleven months after the wedding, Henry Beverly Johnson was born. The birth of the Johnsons’ first child prompted an important reconciliation. A small figure wrapped in a Six Nations blanket—white, with a black stripe at each end—appeared at the front door of the parsonage. Helen Johnson wanted to see her grandson. She bent silently over the cradle, scrutinizing the baby’s thick black hair, pale brown skin and grey-blue eyes. She gave an approving nod, then spoke to her son in Mohawk. George’s face split into a wide grin as he told Emily that his parents now recognized her as their daughter. Helen presented Emily with the tiny moccasin that had been her own child’s first shoe. In Pauline Johnson’s account of the reconciliation between her mother and grandmother, the moment throbs with emotional significance: “For a second the two women faced each other, then Emily sat down abruptly on the bedside, her arms slipped about the older woman’s shoulders, and her face dropped quickly, heavily—at last on a mother’s breast.” All the other women important to Emily had either died or rejected her; finally, a maternal figure embraced her. Helen’s initiative reassured the young couple that the fiercest critics of their controversial marriage might eventually embrace them. There is no evidence, however, that Emily ever renewed contact with her own father. Henry Howells died in New Jersey in 1854.
George had begun planning his own mansion even before his wedding. Across the fields from the parsonage, he had bought 200 acres (80 hectares) of wooded land situated between the Grand River and the Brantford-to-Caledonia road. The house, with its two arched entrances and its broad walnut stairway, gradually took shape during George and Emily’s first two years of marriage. It was solidly built: the planks were laid horizontally, rather than vertically, and three tons of iron nails were used in its construction. There were four rooms on each of the two main floors, and a roomy attic lit by sky-lights. The main rooms all had fireplaces and there were five chimneys on the roof. A local cabinetmaker constructed walnut lintels, trim and mantelpieces, as well as a large sideboard for the dining room. The house had the most modern conveniences of the 1850s: pulleys for the sash windows, folding doors between the dining room and parlour, and a system of bells linking each room with the kitchen. The slope between the house and the river was cleared of many of the old elms and walnut trees to allow a view of the water. Separate barns for cows and horses were constructed behind the house, a double-walled ice house was built near the river and a vegetable garden was planted near the summer kitchen.
A century and a half after its construction, Chiefswood remains an inviting home. Although it has been neglected and derelict during periods of its history, its clean lines and beautiful walnut woodwork have retained their dignity. Its double front doors pique a visitor’s interest in its past. When the Johnsons lived there, it exuded the cosy warmth of any Victorian family household. George and Emily chose heavy red curtains and a black carpet with roses for the parlour, and imported wallpapers for all the rooms. Engravings of Indians and of George’s hero, Napoleon Bonaparte, and photographs of Johnson relatives hung on the walls. Two carved ottomans covered in green silk and a large walnut rocking chair stood in the parlour. Little china ornaments, Indian quillwork and arrangements of dried flowers cluttered every mantelpiece and table top. And George shocked his friends with his extravagance by purchasing a big square rosewood piano for the parlour, so that his beloved could accompany herself as she sang his impossibly sugary favourite English song, “Oft in the Stilly Night.” George could afford such purchases, thanks to his earnings from the colonial government plus his income as a chief.
By the time the Johnsons moved into the house in 1855, Beverly had been joined in the nursery by Eliza Helen Charlotte Johnson, who was always known as Evelyn or Eva. Three years later, Allen Wawanosh was born, and in 1861, Emily Pauline completed the Johnson family.
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THE MODEL FAMILY 1861–1876
EMILY was thirty-seven when Pauline was born. The stress of her courtship was far behind her, and she had developed enough feistiness to display a touch of irony about reactions to her marriage. “All my friends are delighted to see me,” she wrote to George while visiting relatives elsewhere in Upper Canada. “They say I look as well as ever and ‘just like old times.’…I do not see that I am treated with the least disrespect because I am the wife of an Indian Chief.”
The Johnsons settled happily into a busy family life, and into the mythology of their own marriage. Deeply devoted to each other, Emily and George were determined to show the world that an interracial union could work.
Emily encouraged her children, who were born on Indian land and were wards of the British government, to take pride in their Indian heritage and in “that copper-tinted skin which they all displayed.” When they were little, the children frequently visited their Johnson relatives on the reserve. Wide-eyed, they sat quietly at their grandmother’s kitchen table, listening to stories about spirit-healers, medicine men, faith-keepers and ghosts. Most conversation was in the Mohawk tongue; although Emily and George’s children never learned to speak their father’s language, they did learn to understand its soft rhythms and guttural sounds.
A deep spiritualism suffused the reserve, and the Johnson children unconsciously absorbed it. The Mohawks were devout members of the Anglican Church, and the Johnsons regularly attended the little church close by in Tuscarora where Uncle Adam Elliott remained rector. A few Sundays each year, they would travel by carriage the ten miles (sixteen kilometres) to the Mohawk Chapel when their father was asked to read out loud the Ten Commandments in his own tongue. But not all the Iroquois had been converted to Christianity. The traditional rituals sti
ll current amongst some of their neighbours fascinated George Johnson’s children. They nagged their grandparents to describe again the “false face” masks that the Tuscarora used in their celebrations. They gazed with fearful curiosity at the longhouses where the Onondaga people gathered for their twelve festivals marking the seasons of the year. Each February when the Onondaga celebrated the “Dance of the White Dog,” many of the children on the reserve—including the occasional Johnson—hid nearby. They listened to the wild beat of the drum and to the dance rattlers, and they tried to catch a glimpse of the dead white dog that would be carried in, decorated with wampum, beads and porcupine quill embroidery.
When she was still small, Pauline watched a medicine man treat a neighbour with a high fever. The medicine man, wrapped in a buffalo skin and wearing a carved wooden mask, moved slowly around the sickroom, swaying from side to side and chanting with “a peculiar nasal intonation.” Then he tossed a shovelful of ash over the patient and turned the man’s family and friends out of the room. Within hours, the man had recovered. Pauline was deeply moved by such sights. “The practice of employing these men,” she wrote years later in an article for the Dominion Illustrated, “is not by any means confined to the Pagan: the belief in charms and witchcraft is a prevalent one among many of the educated as well as civilised Indians. Love charms, medicine charms—they all exist in the faith and imagination of a people whose greatest charm lies in their exquisite beliefs, their seeing of the unseen and their touch of the poetic nature.”
At the same time, Emily schooled her children in the rigid comportment of well-brought-up British children. Self-doubt and inhibition were never far from the surface with Pauline’s mother, whose own upbringing had left the scars of abuse and a residue of British prejudice. She was so determined that her own children would never give anyone cause to reject them that she insisted on flawlessly correct behaviour at all times. Her green eyes held within them an infinite capacity for stricture: she chastised not with sharp words, but with a piercing gaze. She impressed upon her children that they were a blend, as Pauline wrote, “of the better qualities of…the two great races from whence” they came. But she did not teach her children to defend themselves: “My mother’s philosophy was, ‘If I lose my place by the selfish crowding of others, I at least have the higher satisfaction of knowing that I have not been the selfish one.’” Such training laid the foundation for a corrosive passivity in three of her children.
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