When thou art near
The sweetest joys still sweeter seem
The brightest hopes more bright appear
And life is all one happy dream
When thou art near.
At the same time, she kept up her reading in contemporary literature. She still loved the favourites of her youth—Tennyson, Longfellow, Byron and Keats—but her taste now ran to some of the more florid late Victorians. She declared herself a devotee of the poet Algernon Swinburne, on the strength, one assumes, of his metrical skills and his association with Pre-Raphaelite artists and writers such as Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris. She could not have known that by the time she was old enough to read his verse, this strange little red-haired man was an alcoholic obsessed with incest, lesbianism and flagellation. Pauline was also addicted to the lush novels of the period. She admitted to Lottie that on the train home from London, “I buried my fevered brain and thoughts in Under Two Flags and forgot for a while the existence of anyone but the conductor and Ouida’s hero.” This novel, published in 1867 by Louise de la Ramée under her pen name Ouida, was a melodramatic romance of fashionable life. Even in her own day, Ouida found her forty-five novels parodied by critics, but as G. K. Chesterton remarked of her, “It is impossible not to laugh at Ouida, and equally impossible not to read her.” The distinguished Canadian critic Pelham Edgar, who headed the Department of English at Victoria College, Toronto, from 1912 to 1938, admitted in his memoirs that as a young man, “I developed great fondness for Ouida. Under Two Flags was a book I could not put down.”
Louise de la Ramée had yearned from youth to see her name in print, and Pauline Johnson was no different. One of Pauline’s Brantford friends was a young man named Douglas Reville, who worked for the Brantford Courier and who would later marry Jean Morton. Pauline suggested to him that he should publish “My Jeanie.” Douglas said the poem deserved a bigger readership, so he sent it on to a New York magazine, Gems of Poetry. Pauline was ecstatic when the poem, retitled “My Little Jean,” was published. She felt that she had found her métier when three more of her verses appeared (one under the pseudonym Margaret Rox) within the next few months. However, the publication of “My Little Jean” did not provoke a roar of applause for the arrival of an important new poet. Gems of Poetry had a tiny circulation—too small to pay its bills. In 1885, it would go out of business.
But Pauline scarcely noticed the demise of Gems of Poetry. A far greater crisis had engulfed the Johnsons. The 1865 attack on George Johnson had shown all too clearly that his position as chief go-between for Indians and the civil authorities was fraught with difficulty. Pauline’s parents had done their best to smother the memory of George’s bloody injuries, but the threats intensified as tensions between the Iroquois and European settlers grew. By the 1870s, unscrupulous residents of both Brantford and the Six Nations Reserve were flouting the law banning alcohol on the reserve with increasing recklessness. And timber prices rose steadily, which made timber merchants greedy for the reserve’s stock of black walnut and oak trees.
George redoubled his efforts to catch the criminals who were supplying Indians with whiskey and stealing their lumber. Eight years after the first skirmish, he was again attacked on a lonely road. This assault was more severe: six European men wielding clubs knocked him to the ground, broke his ribs, knocked out his teeth, then shot him and left him for dead. But the bullet only grazed him, and he managed to drag himself to a local farmhouse. Once again, a devoted and terrified Emily nursed him through the long weeks of recovery. From now on, his neuralgia recurred even more frequently and he suffered constant attacks of erysipelas, a virulent staphylococcus infection that caused ugly red blotches on the face and high temperatures. The infection was nicknamed St. Anthony’s fire because sufferers were often afflicted with such a burning fever that they felt as though they were being consumed by flames. John Richardson, the Canadian author of Wacousta, which was one of Pauline’s favourite books, had died of erysipelas in 1852. No remedy existed for the disease before the development of antibiotic medications.
Despite George’s health problems, the crusade against the bootleggers obsessed him. He limped along the forest paths for hours, trying to see where trees were being felled or caches of liquor hidden. Wincing with pain, he rose in Council meetings and implored younger chiefs to join him. He knew he could rely on Mohawk support, but he also knew that the Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca chiefs had started to whisper that he was simply a puppet of the Dominion government. Still, to his children he remained the genial paterfamilias who regretted his frequent absences on important business. Only Emily realized he was a broken man.
Pauline’s father suffered a third assault in 1878 when he was walking home from the Council House. This time, the scars from the attack were more psychological than physical—his assailant was an Indian whiskey buyer. George Johnson was now under attack from his fellow chiefs and menaced by European and Indian petty crooks. His health went downhill rapidly. He lost his joie de vivre and his appetite for public life. In February 1884, he reluctantly attended a reception in Brantford for the newly appointed bishop, the Very Reverend Baldwin, at Grace Church. When he left the meeting to ride home, a chilly rain began to fall. By the time he reached Chiefswood, he was drenched to the skin and his teeth were chattering. As his fever intensified, he started raving incomprehensibly in Mohawk, the tongue of his birth, then he lapsed into unconsciousness. Within a week, his life was over. He was sixty-eight.
George’s two sons had not been given sufficient warning to reach home before he died. The rest of the family—Emily, Evelyn and Pauline—stood by George’s deathbed, listening to one of the most haunting sounds of North America echo up and down the Grand River. A young man from the Six Nations Reserve knelt close to the water’s surface to sing out the ululating death cry. The wail rippled through the dusk, propelled from one Indian settlement to the next. Chief George Henry Martin Johnson, Onwanonsyshon, was gone.
The funeral was a splendid affair. The casket, covered by a Union Jack and piled high with wreaths, was carried from the Brantford train terminus to the Mohawk Chapel on a black horse-drawn hearse. The three most prominent chiefs from the Six Nations Reserve, along with George’s fellow Masons and Odd Fellows, walked slowly behind it, followed by a large crowd of Brantford’s citizens. At the graveside, five Anglican clergymen read the funeral service in English from their prayerbooks. The funeral mourners from the reserve then stepped forward and launched into the haunting atonal mourning chants that had accompanied native burials for centuries.
In late-Victorian Canada, a widow rarely attended her deceased husband’s funeral. Emily remained at Chiefswood, with Pauline’s friend
The Mohawk Chapel, built in 178s, was the first Royal Chapel in the world belonging to native people, and the final resting place of both Captain Joseph Brant and Pauline’s father, George Johnson.
Jeanie Morton (by then Reville) keeping her company. In the Mohawk cemetery, Beverly, Evelyn, Allen and Pauline, their faces impassive as they suppressed all emotion, stood a little apart and watched the scene. To an outsider, the shared grief of Indians and Europeans might have suggested that the dreams of Sir William Johnson, John “Smoke” Johnson and George Martin Johnson had been realized, that the two communities co-existed happily, respecting each other’s traditions and contributions to community life. But nothing could be further from the truth. George Johnson’s funeral marked the death of the old ideal. Canadians of European origin had already adopted the assumption, enshrined in government policy, that the “red race” would quietly, and conveniently, die out.
7
WAVE-ROCKED AND PASSION-TOSSED 1884–1888
ALTHOUGH George Johnson had been in poor health for years, his death was a dreadful shock. Life without him was unthinkable for his widow. The most immediate problem for Emily was the loss both of George’s government salary and of any income from the reserve. George had left Emily an annuity, but it was too small to cove
r the maintenance costs of Chiefswood in the years ahead. A more fundamental issue for Emily was her own ambiguous status. If she had to leave Chiefswood, should she stay on the reserve or move into Brantford? By law she was a registered Indian, and her relations with her husband’s family were friendly. Yet she had never felt that she belonged amongst the Mohawk people. She remained relentlessly English in her attitudes and aspirations.
Pauline’s brothers had already left home and moved beyond the confines, both physical and psychological, of the Six Nations Reserve. Beverly, now thirty, was making a good career for himself in the rapidly expanding insurance industry. After a few years in Hamilton with Mutual Life, he had taken a job in Montreal with New York Life, as head cashier in the Canadian head office. Allen remained in Hamilton. He too was working in the insurance industry, but at twenty-six he still showed little enthusiasm for his nine-to-five job—he preferred being a man-about-town. Both boys tried to help their mother by sending her any cash they could spare, but it was Pauline’s twenty-eight-year-old sister, Evelyn, who took the responsibility of providing her mother with housekeeping funds. Immediately after her father’s death, Evelyn asked the local Indian Superintendent for a job in his Brantford office, and she was soon installed there as a filing clerk.
This left Pauline and her mother in unhappy isolation at Chiefswood. There was no longer money for Pauline’s jaunts to friends in London and Hamilton, or for lavish entertaining if her friends arrived for a visit. And Emily remained catatonic with grief; her deep-set eyes were permanently bloodshot and ringed in dark shadows, and her blue-veined hands trembled with stress. She was unable to make any decision about her future. Chiefswood was the only home she had ever known.
Pauline was also devastated by the loss of her father, around whom the Chiefswood routines had revolved. But she had the resilience of youth and was eager to get on with her own life. She and her siblings all knew that the Chiefswood idyll was over. Eight months after their father’s death, they found a small house in Brantford and persuaded their mother that she and her two daughters would be happier there. A local farmer took an eight-year lease on Chiefswood for $250 a year. Emily accepted the inevitable. But she was still too sad to help with
After Emily Johnson and her daughters left Chiefswood in 1884, the mansion fell into disrepair.
the packing. While Evelyn and Pauline decided which possessions would accompany them and which must be sold, Emily wandered through Chiefswood’s grounds, gathering a bunch of pansies. When everything was finally packed up, she reluctantly climbed into the carriage, the pansies carefully pressed between the pages of her Bible.
As the carriage rumbled down the dirt road towards Brantford, each woman watched in silence as her old home dwindled into the distance. Each was engulfed by the choking sadness that always accompanies departure from a home filled with happy memories. “The last I saw of Chiefswood,” Evelyn wrote in her own memoirs, “was the house, dark, lonely and forsaken, the moonlight casting weird shadows on its lightless panes.”
The three women settled into a small brick house with gingerbread trim on Napoleon Street, a few blocks from Brantford’s Market Square. (The street was subsequently renamed Dufferin Street.) The rooms in the right-hand side of the duplex were poky and dark, with mean little arched windows, but the Johnsons managed to squeeze their most treasured possessions into the cramped new quarters. The
Number 7 Napoleon Street became home to Mohawk heirlooms, Emily Johnson’s books and Pauline’s ambitions.
rosewood Heintzman piano took up almost the entire parlour; on it was draped the red blanket on which the Duke of Connaught had stood in 1869. Other precious Indian artefacts were given pride of place. George Johnson’s scalping knife, with its horn handle and Sheffield steel blade, and the tomahawk presented to him by the Cayugas in 1837 sat on the mantelpiece.
The Johnsons had opted to join the Brantford bourgeoisie as it hurtled towards the prosperity of the twentieth century. But visitors to Number 7 Napoleon Street were left in no doubt that the Johnsons’ Mohawk legacy, rooted in the events of the eighteenth century, was just as important to this family as the latest agricultural invention or Toronto fashion. Nevertheless, ties to family and friends on the reserve gradually withered. Pauline’s visits to Ohsweken became increasingly infrequent, particularly after the death of her grandfather, John “Smoke” Johnson, in 1886. At ninety-two, Smoke Johnson had been the oldest resident on the reserve, and the only remaining chief who could remember Joseph Brant and the War of 1812. Years later, Pauline acknowledged that she had never paid enough attention to the kindly old man’s rambling reminiscences of his childhood: “I shall never forgive myself for letting grandfather die, with his wealth of knowledge, and I did not find out more of what he knew.”
Each morning, Evelyn would dress quickly, pull her dark hair into a tight bun and walk briskly out of the front door and down Napoleon Street. She loved the regularity of her office job, her privileged relationship with Jasper Gilkison, the Indian Agent, and the pitifully small wages paid to her each Friday. Her younger sister had no such structured routine. Pauline frittered away much of her time visiting friends like Jeanie or the Curtises, or attending plays and recitals in Hamilton with Allen. She joined the Brantford Players, the local amateur dramatics society, and she was active at Grace Church, where the Reverend Garland Crawford Gordon Mackenzie, a genial bear of a man, was rector. Just as frequently, though, she found herself sitting morosely in her bedroom, craving a more exciting life. Her efforts to compose poetry with a view to publication were frustrated by constant calls from Emily, who needed help with the sewing, baking, dusting, canning, polishing, cleaning, shopping or cooking. These days, the Johnsons could afford only one part-time laundress to help with the endless housekeeping tasks that women of their period faced. Pauline’s mood cannot have been improved by the endless chatter amongst her friends about “the New Woman,” of which Brantford already boasted a surprising number.
The New Woman challenged every principle of female behaviour embraced by Emily Johnson. At the same time, the New Woman opened Pauline’s eyes to revolutionary possibilities. This self-confident archetype believed that she had a right to the same privileges as men—a good education, paid work and outlets for athletic abilities—and to an egalitarian marriage. Heated debate on the justice of these claims filled the magazines and newspapers of British North America. As early as 1873, a citizen of Brantford wrote to the Brantford Expositor to uphold the good sense of women who chose not to marry: “all females do not require a male appendage to drag them through the years.” Agnes Maule Machar, a well-known poet who happened to be the daughter of a former principal of Queen’s University, published a call to arms in an 1879 article in Rose Belford’s Canadian Monthly, in which she argued that women must stop thinking of themselves as handmaidens to their menfolk—a woman must make her own contribution to society. Miss Machar herself was a small, stern woman who never leavened her message with humour. “There is little doubt,” she stiffly informed her readers, “that in the long run women will find themselves permitted to do whatever
Agnes Maule Machar (1837–1927) was a poet and essayist who argued that women should make an independent contribution to society.
they should prove themselves able to do well.” Miss Machar’s arguments quickly provoked the outrage of various male commentators, such as the cantankerous Professor Goldwin Smith, editor of The Week. Smith had fled Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, in disgust when Cornell started to admit women, and had taken up residence in Toronto. History, however, was on the New Woman’s side. Middle-class women were infiltrating not only the universities, but also the professions and the arts, and they were asserting their independence.
Perhaps Brantford was turning out an unusual number of New Women because, as a town on the move, it was always prepared to recognize talent. Or perhaps it was just a coincidence. Whatever the reason, ambitious young women found congenial company in the busy industria
l centre on the Grand River. It was the first city to appoint a female school principal, Emily Howard Stowe. Emily went on to obtain a medical degree in the United States in 1867, and then became the first woman doctor to practise in Canada. In 1877, she founded the Toronto Women’s Literary Club. Her daughter, Augusta Stowe, achieved equal prominence: she became the first woman to gain a medical degree in Canada when she was awarded her MD from Victoria College, Cobourg, in 1883.
The Stowe family lived in Mount Pleasant, just outside Brantford, where a frequent guest was another of Brantford’s female pioneers, Sara Jeannette Duncan. While Pauline was brooding in her bedroom on Napoleon Street, Sara Jeannette Duncan, who was her exact contemporary, had already achieved Pauline’s ambition: she was a recognized writer. The daughter of a prosperous Brantford furniture dealer, she had been christened Sarah Janet, and had exoticized her byline and had poems and articles published in several magazines. In 1886 she became the first woman to be employed full-time by the Toronto Globe, where she wrote under the pen name Garth Grafton. “Careers, if possible,” she wrote in one of her first articles there, “and independence anyway, we must all have, as musicians, artists, writers, teachers, lawyers, doctors, ministers, or something.”
Privately, Pauline may with justice have considered her own poetry superior to Sara’s, but she recognized that Sara had something she
Pauline’s passionate and lyric poetry reflected her strong will.
herself lacked: the confident presumption (common amongst those, like Sara, with ample family resources) that she would always be taken seriously. The two young women moved in the same Brantford circles, but whenever they met, Pauline was intimidated by Sara’s classic good looks, acerbic wit and air of success. Now in her early twenties, Pauline herself was wary of the “New Woman” label. “I hope I am not a ‘Woman’s Righter’ or a masculine Amazon,” she wrote to a male friend, “[just] because I sometimes despise the littlenesses that interest other women. I confess a likeness for certain feminine conventionalities such as five o’clock teas or ‘hen Parties’…but I would everlastingly hate to dine on these things: they are but the peaches and cream that top the roast beef of life.”
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