Flint and Feather

by Charlotte Gray

  “Now I know you know what is feminine,” Pauline wrote to Lighthall. “So can you tell me if the ‘Indian Stores’ in Montreal are real Indian stores, or is their stuff manufactured? I want a pair of moccasins, worked either in coloured moose hair, porcupine quills, or very heavily with fine coloured beads, have you ever seen any such there?…If you see anything in Montreal that would assist me in getting up a costume, be it beads, quills, sashes, shoes, brooches or indeed anything at all, I will be more than obliged to know of it.”

  Pauline sent the same request to the Hudson’s Bay Company in Winnipeg. A company clerk replied that they could supply her with an entire outfit, including moccasins and a buckskin top and skirt, plus cuffs, collar and belt decorated with beads, moose hair and porcupine quillwork. Pauline immediately sent off a money order. As soon as the parcel from Winnipeg arrived at Napoleon Street, Pauline retreated upstairs to her bedroom. The two-piece buckskin outfit was fringed at mid-calf to show a red lining. The neck was round and, by 1892 standards, cut daringly low. When Pauline tried the outfit on, she was disappointed with what she saw in the mirror; it was both drab and lacking in style. Hearing her sister on the stairs, she called to Eva to come and see. Eva took one look at Pauline’s bare arms, visible through sleeves of buckskin strips, and agreed that the costume would not do. “After contemplating the dress for a few minutes I said to Pauline: ‘Why not leave one sleeve the way it is and make the other of the wild beast skins you have?’” Eva recorded in her memoirs. “Pauline thought a moment, then said, ‘That is exactly what I shall do.’” She cut off the left sleeve, then attached some rabbit pelts to the left shoulder of the bodice; the pelts hung demurely past her elbow. She decorated the front of the costume with the silver trade brooches she had inherited from her grandmother, and tied to the waistband her father’s hunting knife and a Huron scalp that had belonged to her grandfather. Finally, she threw over her shoulder the scarlet blanket on which the young Duke of Connaught had stood in 1869 next to George Johnson for his induction as a chief into the Six Nations.

  Once again she gazed at her reflection in the mirror. This time she was satisfied. The costume, with its asymmetrical sleeves and glittering silver decorations, combined shapely femininity with exotic appeal. The skirt was daringly short and the bodice audaciously low, but buckskin leggings and the appropriate necklace would deflect charges of immodesty. And the costume’s loose fit had an additional advantage: Pauline would not have to lace her corset too tight while she wore her new outfit. This would allow her to take deeper breaths and to project a stronger voice.

  A few days after this dress-up session, Pauline received a note from William Lighthall suggesting she mention her costume requests to the poet Charles Mair. Mair lived far out west, in Prince Albert, where he was employed by Ottawa as an immigration officer for the Department of the Interior. Pauline already knew of Mair, who in 1886 had published a long verse play about the War of 1812 entitled Tecumseh: A Drama. Mair’s view of Indians was entirely sentimental: he romanticized the dead Indian leader Tecumseh, but showed little sympathy for the living Indian and Métis people around Winnipeg and on the plains. Most moderates in Central Canada regarded him as a hothead. His contempt for the Métis had helped provoke the first Métis uprising in 1869, during which he was briefly imprisoned by Louis Riel. In 1885, he was part of the force sent west to suppress the North-West Rebellion. But Pauline had a naïve reverence for anybody who took aboriginal history seriously. All she knew of Mair was his verse play, which she admired for its portrayal of the Indian chief as “A tameless soul—the sunburnt savage free—Free, and untainted by the greed of gain.” For his part, Mair was flattered by Pauline’s admiration and found her combination of native blood and European manners charming. He was more than happy to contribute to her “Indian poetess” stage persona. He agreed to keep an eye out for the kind of savage

  By late 1892, Pauline was bewitching audiences with wampum belts, trade brooches, a bear-claw necklace and fiery oratory.

  accessory she was looking for: eagle feathers, bear’s teeth and claws, arrows.

  Pauline’s theatrical instinct proved infallible. She wore her “Indian” outfit, which was an entirely synthetic creation, to recite her Indian poems in almost all her subsequent stage performances. From then on, the first part of her programme consisted of Pauline in her Indian costume, electrifying her audience with melodramatic poems such as “A Cry from an Indian Wife,” “Ojistoh” and “As Red Men Die.” During a brief interval she would hurriedly strip off the buckskin and moccasins, tighten the laces on her corset, slip on an elegant evening gown, silk stockings and pumps (and often a picture hat), then step back onto the stage and woo her listeners with verse about birdsong, landscapes, mountains and trains. The evening gown was as much a theatrical costume as the native outfit. Pauline’s audiences were bewitched by the idea that one woman could embody two such different identities. “Miss Johnson on the platform,” wrote an anonymous Saturday Night reviewer in December 1892, “is very different from the accomplished lady so well known in social circles; when reciting one of her own fiery compositions on the wrongs suffered or heroism displayed by her Indian race, she becomes the high-spirited daughter of her warrior sires and thrills the reader through and through.”

  Spirited performances in buckskin were not Pauline’s only attempt to destroy the stereotype of the passive Indian maiden that too many non-native writers employed. In May 1892, she gave vent to her exasperation with the way Indian girls were treated in modern fiction in an article called “A Strong Race Opinion,” published in the Sunday Globe: “The story writer who can create a new kind of Indian girl or better still portray a ‘real live’ Indian girl will do something in Canadian literature that has never been done but once…Half of our authors who write up Indian stuff have never been on an Indian reserve, have never met a ‘real live Redman,’…[no] wonder that their conception of a people they are ignorant of, save by hearsay, is dwarfed, erroneous and delusive.”

  At the same time, Pauline wrote a short piece of fiction in which the main character was just the “new kind of Indian girl” she was talking about. She submitted “A Red Girl’s Reasoning” to The Dominion Illustrated’s 1892 short story competition. “It does not stand a ghost of a chance,” she told Archie. She was wrong. The story won the contest and was published in February 1893—Pauline’s first piece of fiction to appear in print. The story describes a love match between Christie Robinson, a beautiful young half-Indian woman, and Charlie McDonald, a handsome blond Englishman. Christie, the heroine who is “the offspring of red and white parentage,” looks remarkably like Pauline herself: “olive-complexioned, grey-eyed, black-haired, with figure slight and delicate.” And Christie is no dog-like Wanda. Her husband is horrified when she innocently reveals to a society hostess in a provincial capital that because there was no missionary at the isolated Hudson’s Bay post where she was raised, her own parents were married in a traditional native ceremony rather than a Christian ritual. Charlie accuses his wife of publicly humiliating him with this revelation. Cut to the quick by his hypocrisy in valuing his heritage over hers, Christie doesn’t hesitate for a minute. She walks out on him and refuses to be reconciled. “Why should I recognise the rites of your nation when you do not acknowledge the rites of mine?” she asks. By the end of the story, in a reversal of The Algonquin Maiden’s stereotype, it seems that Charlie, rather than Christie, will expire from unrequited love.

  Pauline Johnson had taken the first steps towards standing “by my blood and my race,” as she had told Archie she intended to do. However, her adoption of “Indian dress” and her celebration of the native point of view were geared as much to promoting her own career as to confronting wrong-headed theories. In fact, her stage act inadvertently implied that Indians might eventually be assimilated into the dominant society. If she could switch smoothly from Indian to European dress, couldn’t the rest of Canada’s native peoples?

  Pauline was still wri
ting from limited personal experience. She came from the wealthiest, most Europeanized Indian reserve in Canada and knew only a province where non-natives vastly outnumbered the handful of Indian peoples. She was playing with her Indian heritage; her own identity was firmly rooted in the British traditions passed on by her mother. She would have to travel into Western Canada, where the majority of Indians lived and where they faced much harsher government policies and attitudes, before she would realize the full impact of “the Indian Extermination and Non-education Theory”—and truly start to identify with Canada’s native peoples.

  Pauline was now in demand everywhere, thanks to her Toronto successes and Frank Yeigh’s adroit management. She had become a regular contributor to Saturday Night, where the assistant editor, Hector Charlesworth, bought anything she offered him. (Pay, however, was absurdly low: $3 for “The Song My Paddle Sings.”) Charlesworth was an unabashed admirer of Pauline, whom he had first encountered when he was in his late teens. “I never met any native-born Canadian who gave a more complete sense of aristocracy than Pauline Johnson,” he declared in his memoirs, “though when I first met her she was very poor.” The critic, Pauline’s junior by eleven years, was one of the first of a string of young men who became ardent fans of the Indian poet. Apart from enjoying Charlesworth’s company, Pauline also realized he was a useful contact: Saturday Night’s notices of her performances were always positive. Pauline batted her eyelashes at young Hector and allowed him to squire her to lunches with actors such as Rosina Voke and the Belgian artiste Hortense Rhea. For his part, Charlesworth made sure that her recitals were described in Saturday Night in such fulsome terms as “a particular event of the season.” Pauline was given as much space as rivals with far larger reputations, such as the opera singer Matilda Sissieretta Jones, “the Black Patti,” and Miss Jessie Alexander, “who stands at the head of the elocutionary profession in Canada.”

  Hector Charlesworth, editor of Saturday Night and subsequently chair of the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Conimission. As a young man, he revered Miss Johnson.

  The summer after her Toronto debut, Pauline managed to take a few weeks off for a trip to Lake Rosseau, but by the fall her diary was full of engagements. Between October 1892 and May 1893 alone, she gave 125 recitals in 50 different towns and cities in Ontario—Paris, Fergus, Berlin, Strathroy, Watford, Renfrew, Smiths Falls, Rockland, Kingston, Lindsay…The poet sometimes felt that wherever steel rails went, she was bound to follow. Yet she enjoyed the constant motion as the steam locomotives puffed from one small town to the next on the network of branch lines and private railroads that criss-crossed the province. The landscape through which she travelled was a monotonous sequence of log barns, pasture fields fenced with clumsy stumps or rail fences, swamps, woodlots and lumber towns. Like most late-nineteenth-century poets, Pauline ignored the muddy, rutted roads and mean-looking farms and saw only the purple clover, scudding clouds and church steeples. She could not read on these bone-rattling journeys, so she always took a piece of needlework with her. She was on the move. Between carefully counting her cross-stitches and gazing out of the window, she was seldom bored.

  A week in advance of Pauline’s appearances, Frank Yeigh would send out notices, with a picture of Pauline, to each town, announcing a run of five or six “concerts.” The local bill-poster would plaster the notices on every available surface, then collect a fee when Pauline finally arrived. There would be a small advertisement in the local paper notifying readers of the Indian poetess’s imminent arrival. The venues were usually modest: the local schoolroom or church hall, occasionally someone’s drawing room. The performances were often sponsored by a local organization such as the Odd Fellows, the Freemasons, the Knights of Pythias or the Young Britons. Sometimes Pauline found herself on the same bill as a local fire brigade band or school choir. Unpretentious as such performances sound today, they attracted good audiences in the pre-cinema, pre-television era. Compared to alternative forms of public entertainment (usually Sunday sermons, minstrel shows and perhaps a travelling circus), Pauline was a huge novelty. In November 1893, for example, she performed for the Young Women’s Guild and the Women’s Chapter of St. James Anglican Church, Stratford, Ontario. She collected a fee of $25 plus expenses for her appearance—considerably more than she earned for any poems published. On the other hand, the total take for the evening was $137, so her hosts made a handsome profit.

  Around this time, a young man named Orlando John Stevenson heard her for the first time. “I was fresh from college then, with the echoes of Shelley’s ‘East Wind’ and Wordsworth’s immortal ‘Ode’ in my ears,” Stevenson wrote later in a 1927 book about Canada’s finest writers. “But I can still call up the picture of the dingy lamp-lit parlor of an old manse in Eastern Ontario, where I met and talked with [Pauline Johnson]. I recall the fascination with which I listened to her recital of ‘As Red Men Die’ and ‘The Song My Paddle Sings’ in the equally dingy and almost funereal atmosphere of the village church near by. It was a new kind of poetry, which jarred and jangled strangely…To this day as I recall her recital I cannot think of the march of the Iroquois chieftain over [the] bed of burning coals without an indescribable thrill.”

  Not all Pauline’s appearances were in small towns. “I am to go to Ottawa,” she wrote gleefully to William Lighthall, “and am looking forward to seeing our friends and fellow-singers there. I say ‘our’ in a Canadian use of the word, not personally for it sounds rather saucy.” Pauline was too modest to claim membership in “the ranks where you and Lampman, Campbell and Scott…stood so long before I breathed poetic air…My work would be little without the ‘booming’ or if it had been written by one without romance of ancestry.” However, she proved a big hit in the nation’s capital, where she performed in front of the Governor General and his wife, Lord and Lady Stanley, and several members of the Conservative Cabinet. The weather was terrible and the streets had turned into rivers of mud, but the hall was overflowing. According to the Globe, “It is very rarely that the vice-regal party sit out an entire programme, and that they did on this occasion was a tribute to the artiste.”

  Pauline acquired many new friends on her travels—often strategically placed friends who, she hoped, might help her professionally. The Indian poetess entranced an eager young Ottawa lawyer named William Scott. When she returned to Brantford after her Ottawa run, she received a short, stilted note from Scott, asking for a copy of “In Days to Come.” Pauline already knew the identity of her new admirer who was so eager to reread a poem in which the poet recalls “drifting through the sunlit June” with a lover. She knew that he came, in Sandra Gwyn’s words in The Private Capital, from a “rollicking noisy clan of sisters and brothers and cousins and aunts and uncles, who all but overflowed onto the sidewalk from the big square redbrick house” in the Sandy Hill neighbourhood. She knew that his father was Sir

  Ottawa in the 1890s: Elgin Street from Parliament Hill. The Russell House hotel, where Pauline always stayed, is in the centre on the left of the street.

  Richard Scott, a prominent Liberal politician. Stagefolk were always welcome in the Scott home: Lady Scott, William’s mother, came from a family of Irish actors. The Irish-Catholic Scotts were not rich, but they were respectable—and popular, thanks to their lively parties, which often included charades and singsongs round the parlour piano. And William’s cousin Agnes was a neophyte writer.

  In time, Agnes Scott would emerge as the capital’s most gifted social columnist, with regular columns in Saturday Night (under the pseudonym Amaryllis) and the Ottawa Free Press (where she wrote as “The Marchioness”). In 1892, Agnes was contributing anonymous reviews to the Ottawa Citizen. Pauline recognized that William and his cousin were useful allies in the capital. She sent William a handwritten copy of her poem, with a charming note. She also commented to him on a “very pretty” review in the Citizen of her performance: “I have an idea that some of your party wrote it up. That pretty cousin of yours, so apt with her pen, perhaps
is at the root of the matter. At all events, whoever the writer may be, they have pleased me, and you may thank them for me for a very dainty compliment daintily expressed.” And Pauline carefully noted the Scotts’ Daly Avenue address in her address book so she could call on them when she was next in the capital. One just never knew when friends with contacts in the theatrical and political worlds might be helpful…

  Pauline also honed her ability to confuse observers with the ambiguity of her background. She was delighted when invitations began to arrive from Indian and historical societies in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts—finally, she was getting international exposure. In Newark, New Jersey, members of the local canoe club escorted her from her hotel to her recital, like the praetorian guard around a Roman emperor. She bewitched a reporter from the Boston Herald, whose gushing article about her appearance in Boston began, “As she threw aside her Indian mink-trimmed garment…and stretched out a welcoming hand yesterday, one would never suspect her as being the granddaughter of ‘Disappearing of the Indian Summer Mist.’” Pauline milked this encounter for all it was worth. The dazzled reporter described her as “in conversation…brilliant, in appearance handsome and attractive…Already she has been lionized by the Hub’s bright literary set.”

  Despite the frenetic travel and pace of performance, Pauline continued to think of herself primarily as a poet. Yet verse was only a small part of her output, and the least lucrative. In 1892 she published articles on subjects as varied as a canoe trip down the Grand River, Indian medicine men, skating and the game of lacrosse. The following year, she wrote a long account of the August meet of the American Canoe Association in the Thousand Islands region of the St. Lawrence River for the Illustrated Buffalo Express. But gradually she realized that stage performances were her most satisfying outlet, and the easiest way to earn money. This was particularly true after Frank Yeigh started pairing her up for recitals with a witty young Englishman named Owen Alexander Smily, a veteran of the British music halls. Smily was a versatile performer who could imitate any accent, from Cockney to Yankee, and play anything at the piano. Blond, good-looking and eight years younger than Pauline, he was the kind of young man whose company Pauline usually enjoyed. The relationship appears to have remained on a strictly professional level; Owen never married and seems to have displayed little interest in women.