Something so restful lies on lake and shore,
The world seems anchored, and life’s petty war
Of haste and labor gone forevermore.
From Port Arthur to Rat Portage (happily renamed Kenora in 1905), Pauline sat by the window, mesmerized by the view. The miles of track between Lake Superior and the Manitoba border had been some of the most expensive to lay. The muskeg swamps had turned out to be quagmires of gelatinous peat, capable of swallowing tons of sand and gravel and anything else the engineers dumped on it. Nine thousand men had worked on this section; in one area, seven layers of rail lay buried, one on top of the other. Laying track across 300 miles (480 kilometres) of Ontario muskeg, Sandford Fleming had recorded, cost the same as laying track across 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometres) of prairie. Alongside the track was the old “tote road,” along which men, machinery and stores had been hauled while the rail line was constructed. Its value now gone, it was already reverting to bush.
Endless miles of tangled forest, gaunt dead pine trees, swamps and muskeg stretched before Pauline under a wide, clear azure sky. But the late summer vista was far from dreary. Sumac bushes were turning deep red as the evenings cooled; the blackened skeletons of burnt timber were covered by the ubiquitous purple fireweed; there were occasional glimpses of glassy blue lakes and foaming rivers, edged with dark green shores. When anything of particular interest was sighted (a moose, perhaps, or a bear), Smily and some of the other men crowded onto the open-air platform at the back of the train.
Pauline had always found natural beauty inspiring, be it the Grand River or Lake Rosseau. But now the sheer size of Canada and its extraordinary natural wealth filled her with almost unbearable joy. She felt no nostalgia for her stuffy little room in Holland Park or the cosmopolitan delights of England. “The little island has dropped many thousand miles behind me,” she wrote to Harry O’Brien from Rat Portage, where she and Smily left the train and installed themselves at a small hotel called Hilliard House. “This ‘great, lone, land’ of ours is so absorbing, so lovely, so magnificent, that my eyes forget the beauties of the older land. Ah! There are no such airs as these in England, no such skies, no such forest scents and wild sweet perfumes. These August days are gorgeous. The atmosphere is rife with amethyst, amber and opal tints, parented by the far-off bush fires, and the thin north air. The sun lays like a ball of blood, and oh! The stillness, the silence, the magnitude of this country impresses me as it never has before.”
Dramatic scenery was not the only aspect of Canada firing Pauline’s imagination. “We are getting into Indian country now,” she told O’Brien. “Every town is full of splendid complexioned Ojibwas, whose copper colouring makes me ashamed of my washed out Mohawk skin, thinned with European blood. I look yellow and ‘Chinesey’ beside these Indians.” An Ojibwa camp bordered the tracks east of Rat Portage. Men in black hats smoked pipes while women hung fish out to dry and barefoot children ran between the teepees. Most wore traditional dress; their dark hair was long, and they had blankets from the Hudson’s Bay Company wrapped around them. Pauline found everything about them intriguing.
Shipman had secured eleven bookings for the Johnson–Smily act between August 27 and September 11. Four were in Winnipeg, but the rest were in a circle of little communities such as Morden, Boissevain, Brandon, Manitou, Selkirk and Carman. Some of the towns were accessible by branch lines; others required Pauline and Smily to hire a four-wheel cart, in which they bumped along the rough roads. They must have cursed their manager for not looking at a map as he made the bookings—they often had to double back for an engagement before proceeding west. They also had to deal with third-rate hotels, bad meals and dirty water. At Boissevain, a “villainous smelling compound” was produced in answer to a request for a pitcher of water. Smily said they didn’t need fancy drinks; simple water was sufficient. “Wal, that’s what ye’ve got,” replied the waiter.
Pauline refused to be daunted. She was particularly struck by Winnipeg, capital of the province of Manitoba, where she and Smily spent over a week in early September. Since 1881, when the CPR had decided to route the railway through Winnipeg, the city’s population had exploded from 5,000 to 35,000. Steamboats plied the two rivers on which the city sat, the Red and the Assiniboine. The huge railyards, which included two roundhouses and miles of track, were well on their way to becoming the most extensive in the British Empire. When the Winnipeg Grain Exchange opened in 1887, the city became the undisputed centre of Canada’s grain trade. By the time Pauline arrived, seven private and eight chartered banks were already doing a roaring business. Winnipeggers had big dreams for their city, which they festooned with such grandiloquent titles as “Gateway to the Golden West,” “Bull’s Eye of the Dominion” and “the Chicago of the North.”
Pauline walked along a Main Street that was 140 feet (42 metres) wide, lined with sturdy wooden sidewalks, and that claimed to stretch for 2 miles (over 3 kilometres). She admired the new stone post office, the horse-drawn street railway and the magnificent 1,250-seat Princess Opera House, which had opened in 1883. She and Smily played in far more modest venues; a portion of the admission fee from each performance went to the sponsoring organization. Their first show was at the Winnipeg Grace Church. Subsequent evenings were spent at the Rover Bicycle Club, the Winnipeg Church of Zion and the North Presbyterian Congregation.
Winnipeg audiences gave standing ovations to the Johnson–Smily double act. Many of the city’s new immigrants were young Englishmen, lured by CPR promises that there was a fortune to be made in the newly opened Prairies. They roared with laughter at the music hall patter of Smily, a fellow Englishman. Pauline, billed as “fresh from a triumphant London season,” enthralled them with her combination of aristocratic grace and native spirit. It was months, if not years, since most of the spectators had seen a woman in a fashionable silk gown from Kensington High Street. Admirers sent gifts round to her hotel: flowers, bags of apples, sugared biscuits, photographs of the city. The warmth of the reception suggests that for all their boosterism about the “Gateway to the West,” many of the new Winnipeggers felt a long way from home. “The Peg” was a boom town engulfed by untamed prairie. A quarter of a century earlier, when it was still known as “The Forks” and was part of the Red River Colony, it had resounded with the sounds of marching soldiers, yelling officers and gunfire in the first Métis uprising led by Louis Riel. In 1885, the citizens of Winnipeg had waved at the trains that carried government troops further west to put down the splutterings of the North-West Rebellion in Batoche and Fish Creek, and capture Riel. Winnipeggers had hanged Louis Riel in effigy on Main Street in July 1885. Pauline was well aware of the tension between natives and settlers within Winnipeg; her ballad “A Cry from an Indian Wife,” which championed the Indian point of view, was a staple of her stage programme wherever she performed. But the two Métis rebellions against the Dominion government in Ottawa, and the subsequent surrender to Ottawa’s authority of the great Plains Indian leaders—Poundmaker, Little Poplar, Lucky Man and, finally, Big Bear himself—now seemed like ancient history. All Pauline saw was energy; all she heard was enthusiastic applause. She determined to return.
By the second week in September, Pauline and Smily were back on the transcontinental train. Shipman had failed to secure any bookings between Brandon, 134 miles (216 kilometres) west of Winnipeg, and Medicine Hat, 142 miles (228 kilometres) east of Calgary. For the intervening 600 miles (965 kilometres), Pauline divided her time between talking to her fellow passengers, doing needlework and gazing out of the window. Within the past decade, the railway had spawned one-street communities at regular intervals along the track; eventually, the CPR would foster the growth of more than 800 villages, towns and cities in the three Prairie provinces. Pauline stared with curiosity at the red-painted grain elevators, the plaid-shirted farmers driving teams of horses, the chickens scratching in dusty backyards, the wooden frontages of stores and saloons. Although the constant travelling was hard, she loved the “g
reat brown prairies,” she wrote to Harry O’Brien. “This trip is a revelation to me,” she added. She and Smily then spent five days in the Calgary area, performing at Medicine Hat, Pincher Creek, Lethbridge and Fort Macleod, as well as Calgary itself.
There were plenty of novelties to spark Pauline’s muse. She watched a pack of wolves snarl over the bones of a luckless stray steer: “Those fellows had as distinctive dispositions as seven men. In the brief moments we had to watch them, we could distinguish the fighting wolf, the gluttonous wolf, the mean wolf, the amiable wolf, the timid wolf—why, there was even a lazy wolf who, famished as he was, would put himself to no undue exertion to secure bones.” She serenaded a gopher: “A merry little rascal, with a saucy little way / Who dresses like a hypocrite, in soft, religious grey.” She marvelled at the glimmering peaks of mountains on the horizon. She and Smily sweltered through
In the 1880s the Sarcee people were confined to reserves by the Dominion government, but still clung to their traditional way of life.
“the steam-pipe breath of the Chinook wind,” which left them dehydrated and covered in grey dust. Her euphoria grew with every mile she travelled: “I cannot tell you how I love my Canada, or how infinitely dearer my native soil is to me since I started on this long trip.”
They were now in real Indian country. For the first time, Pauline was seeing native peoples who were only one generation away from their ancestors’ traditional lifestyle, untouched by European influences. Plains Indians such as the Cree nations, the Blackfoot Confederacy (which included the Blood, Crowfoot and Sarcee peoples), the Stoney nation and the Sioux peoples still spoke their own languages, wore traditional dress and lived in teepees. However, the buffalo on which they once depended were gone, and each band had now been restricted to a reserve. In theory, the Dominion government was teaching native people to farm. In practice, the experimental farms were not going well. This was hardly surprising, given the contemptuous official attitude towards Indians. “It is policy of the Government,” according to the 1892 edition of the Statistical Year Book of Canada, “to endeavour as much as possible to persuade Indians to give up their wandering habits and stay on their reserves…Only those brought into personal contact with the Indians can understand the ignorance, superstition and laziness that have to be overcome before the Indians
By the late nineteenth century, there was a thriving market in Central Canada for pictures of the Blackfoot and Cree peoples of the Prairies.
can be persuaded to take genuine interest and perseverance in the simplest farming operations.”
After the first few years, Ottawa never allocated adequate rations, adequate supplies or competent teachers to the native farmers. Labour-saving machinery was deliberately withheld from them, on the grounds that they would never learn how to service complicated implements. Moreover, many of the farms, like the reserves, were on poor land, miles from the railway. The majority of European settlers who acquired similar tracts simply gave up and either returned east or moved to areas with richer soil, higher rainfall and better access to markets. But native peoples were trapped: legislation made it illegal for them to leave their reserves. No wonder that several bands, particularly those within a day’s ride of the CPR tracks, had discovered an easier way to make a living: playing “Red Injuns” for the benefit of tourists who were arriving in increasing numbers on the trains.
Tourists were transfixed by “braves, squaws and papooses,” as they liked to call such Plains Indians as they saw. An affable fellow named Edward Roper, whose account of transcontinental travel was published in 1891 under the title By Track and Trail, was most impressed by the Crowfoot people. He described them as “really very good-looking.…Comparing a crowd of Kentish hop-pickers with a band of uncivilized Indians, decidedly the latter would bear away the prize for cleanliness and decency.” He enjoyed throwing oranges and small coins from the back of the train and watching the children scramble for them in the dust. Roper was fascinated by Canadian attitudes to Indians. They seemed to regard natives, he reported, “as a race of animals which were neither benefit nor harm to anyone, mentioning that they were surely dying out.”
Other travellers were less sympathetic. Douglas Sladen, a dyspeptic English academic who crossed Canada the same year as Pauline, photographed a Stoney Indian family and was furious when “as soon as the operation was completed, he would advance toward you and intimate with blood-curdling signs that the person who was photographed ought to be paid.” In his memoir, On The Cars and Off, Sladen also recorded some Cree Indians, “very much painted and in very gaudy blankets, who were trying to sell cow horns as the real buffalo.”
When Pauline and Smily arrived at Fort Macleod, they discovered that the Blackfoot Indians there had organized “a sort of miniature Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.” They were just in time to watch “an Indian race on Indian ponies that alone was worth five dollars to see.” In their description of the race published in the Globe, there is no hint that one of the two authors was an Indian herself. They and their fellow passengers all found the spectacle satisfyingly “savage”:
The race usually ends in a fight between the various competitors but it is exciting enough without the fracas. The riders dispense with saddle and ride barebacked (both horse and jockey). An article resembling an apron is the only habit of the latter. When the word is given to go, they go! They do not temporise, neither do they dally. They are not trained jockeys and so understand nothing about pulling or any of those eastern wiles, but they get there, yea, verily, they get there! It is the very opposite of an eastern race. There the onlookers do all the yelling, but the uproar of the spectators at Macleod was as the snap of a toy pistol to the bang of a rifle compared with the sustained war-whoop of that mob of naked Indians as they whirled past.
Yet Pauline was also aware that the Indian peoples she saw were impoverished, demoralized shadows of their once proud selves. Disease and alcohol had decimated their numbers. Away from Smily and the other backslapping English tourists, more sombre sentiments prevailed. At the train’s frequent stops on its journey west, she bought photographs of some of the famous scenes and leaders of the “dying race.” Her collection included a photograph of a “Sun Dance Teepee,” postcards of Stoney Indians and their camp, and portraits of three important chiefs: Big Bear, Poundmaker and Piapot. Piapot, a Cree chief who had not participated in the 1885 North-West Rebellion, spoke for many of his fellow chiefs when he described the Dominion government’s treatment of Indians out west: “In order to become sole masters of our land they relegated us to small reservations as big as my hand and made us long promises, as long as my arm. But the next year the promises were shorter, and get shorter every year until now they are about the length of my finger, and they keep about half of that.”
Pauline had neither the time nor the opportunity to make personal contact with the Blackfoot horse-racers or with any of the silent Indians who stared impassively at the train as it steamed across their ancestral lands. They were as foreign to her as Sicilians or Castilians would be to a Welsh person. To them, she was simply another white woman from the east. Nevertheless, she was stirred by their plight, particularly when she focussed on individuals. She wrote a poignant poem called “Silhouette,” about a Sioux chief glimpsed from the train window. The glimpse must have triggered memories of her own long-dead father and his struggle to protect Iroquois lands from encroachments:
Etched where the lands and cloud-lands touch and die,
A solitary Indian tepee stands,
The only habitation of these lands,
That roll their magnitude from sky to sky.
The scraggy tent poles lift in dark relief,
The upward floating smoke ascends between,
And near the open doorway, still and lean
And shadow-like, there stands an Indian chief.
With eyes that lost their fire long ago,
With vision fixed and stern as fate’s decree,
He looks toward the empty
west to see
The never-coming herd of buffalo.
Only the bones that bleach upon the plains,
Only the fleshless skeletons that lie
In ghastly nakedness and silence, cry
Out mutely that naught else to him remains.
The predicament of native peoples who, within the space of a few years, had seen the buffalo disappear and their way of life destroyed by strangers, haunted Pauline for the rest of her life. Proud and fearless nomads had become pathetic “fleshless skeletons.”
Pauline’s first trip west was thus a revelation to her. The majestic landscape had held her spellbound. The Prairie “Redmen” had fascinated her. Most important, her imagination was gripped by the raw frontier spirit—the sense that everybody was welcome, and that newcomers could reinvent themselves in this wide-open land.
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