Flint and Feather

by Charlotte Gray

  But Pauline was an outsider; she could never compete with Miss Heaven in her costly buttercup mousseline. She was too poor to afford the latest fashion in primrose organdie: a decade later she was still wearing the gowns she had bought in London in 1894. She was obliged to live on her wits. Worse yet, she was on the stage. She might have convinced her mother that she was a recitalist not an actress, but the snobbish Mrs. Kirkpatrick and the haughty Miss Nordheimer were unlikely to appreciate such a subtle difference. And as Toronto’s population swelled with impoverished people from different ethnic backgrounds, an ugly racism gathered force amongst the Kirkpatricks, the Boultons and their ilk. Proud as Pauline was of her lineage, it was perceived as a little too exotic by families now clinging to Anglo-Saxon bloodlines. As an Indian and as a female performer, she was doubly disadvantaged. The menfolk of the fine old families might find her thrilling, but the womenfolk would never accept her.

  Moreover, Pauline didn’t particularly want to fit in. She was determined to maintain her dual identities: she was Tekahionwake as well as Miss Johnson. When fashionable Toronto artists offered to paint her portrait, she was more than happy to wear her buckskin costume for the sittings. J. W. L. Forster, a Paris-trained painter whose usual subjects were such civic dignitaries as Timothy Eaton and Sir Oliver Mowat, waived his $500 fee in order to capture the Mohawk poet in oil. Forster adored what he called “her full possession of the valkyrielike wild passion of the traditional Red Indian.” His portrait shows a stunning young woman, an eagle feather in her curly, dark hair and a bear’s claw necklace round her long neck, against a background of sun-dappled leaves.

  Audiences loved what a Grand Rapids newspaper called in 1896 “a wondrous beautiful young Indian maiden, possessed of all the romantic charms read in story books descriptive of her vanishing race. As lovely as Minnehaha and as eloquent as the noted chiefs of her tribe,…she is proud of her blood and says her father was great and good. She alludes to him as an Indian Napoleon.” Tekahionwake continued to be a stronger draw than Owen Smily at recitals. “His style was perhaps as good as Miss Johnson’s, but lacking in the novelty that she possessed,” commented the Grand Rapids reporter.

  But as Pauline embarked on yet another tour of the Midwest in 1897, her uncertainty about who she was and where she belonged began to show. A reporter from the Chicago Tribune found her attractive, but touchy: “Miss Johnson wears Frenchy looking gowns and neatly fitting shoes and gloves. She doesn’t powder her face nor rouge her lips, but she curls her front hair and manicures her nails. In fact, she does pretty well everything that a real Indian would not be expected to do…And she talks like a Vassar graduate.” But when the reporter seemed more interested in whether “real Indians” manicured their nails than in Iroquois legends and customs, Pauline snapped at him: “If you don’t want to hear about the history of my people, what did you come to see me for?”

  Pauline’s insecurity was compounded by money worries. Her extravagance was getting out of hand. Despite her successes, she was always scrambling for ready cash to pay her travel, hotel and clothing bills. In 1896, she tried to sell some Indian masks to Washington’s Smithsonian Institute. She wrote to the anthropologist Horatio Hale, who had often visited the Johnson family at Chiefswood, and asked him to authenticate the masks. “My dear Miss Pauline,” he wrote back. “It is too bad that after doing so much and so well in your profession, you should be left…in pecuniary troubles. But these, I presume, are only temporary.” Hale was wrong: financial worries ate away at Pauline all her life. Her profligacy shocked her frugal sister, Evelyn, who never bought a dozen cut carnations and always counted her change as she carefully slipped it into a little black purse.

  As Pauline criss-crossed the continent day after day, trying to keep her costumes clean and her creditors at bay, she began to feel her age. When she checked her appearance in the mirror before she glided onto the stage each evening, she could no longer ignore the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes or the deepening grooves between her nose and mouth. The beautiful young Indian maiden was not so young anymore. She shrewdly refused to tell reporters the date of her birth. “You see,” she wrote to the literary critic J. E. Wetherell in 1895, when she was thirty-four, “When a woman depends upon the public for her bread and butter, she must not get old. I lose money every time people undertake to establish when I was born.” In late-Victorian Canada, women were old at forty and few lived beyond their fifties. Pauline asked herself for how long North Americans would pay to see a middle-aged woman recite her own verse.

  In the final weeks of 1897, Pauline seems to have taken stock of her circumstances and decided that she needed a change. She acknowledged to herself that she no longer felt at home in Ontario. She could see that after five years, her partnership with Owen Smily was coming to an end. Smily was tired of endlessly playing second fiddle to an aging Pauline, who had learned so much of her stagecraft from him but always assumed he would carry her bags. She recognized that she needed to go where she could pull in the best audiences, earn some money and perhaps make new friends.

  So she decided to make a fresh start for herself in Winnipeg. She was comfortable in the West, she told a Winnipeg newspaper, with its “go-ahead institutions, its kindly people, and appreciative, though discriminating, audiences.” She loved the fluid, accessible society of Winnipeg, and its surfeit of young swains who paid court to her after her recitals. The Indian peoples she had seen on the Prairies and in the foothills, who still rode bareback with scalps tied to their belts, intrigued her. Plenty of respectable citizens in Western towns had both British and Indian blood, and there was little stigma attached. So she booked herself into the Hotel Manitoba and announced that she had come to stay.

  And at Winnipeg’s Grand Opera House on December 29, 1897, she had a capacity audience rolling in the aisles with laughter. She performed a new sketch entitled “The Success of the Season,” in which she skewered a Toronto grande dame and her social-climbing ambitions. “She afforded much amusement by her pictures of the follies and insincerities of fashionable, or would-be-fashionable, society,” noted the Winnipeg Free Press. Pauline had left social pretensions behind in the East. She wanted a new life in “the Chicago of the North.” Within a few weeks, it seemed that she might have found it.

  14

  “A HALF-BREED BUT SUCH A NICE ONE”: Charles Drayton 1897–1899

  THE sound of wild applause was still echoing around the Grand Opera House on December 29, 1897, when Pauline Johnson gave a final curtsey and retired to her dressing room. She had scarcely sat down and kicked off her shoes before there was a loud knock on the door. Checking her reflection in the mirror, she rose and answered the summons. In the dim light of the backstage corridor, she saw a square-jawed, bull-necked young man who immediately thrust a bouquet of flowers at her. Flowers, in the middle of a Winnipeg winter, were a more than extravagant gesture.

  Pauline had lots of admirers in Winnipeg, but this particular beau was more persistent than most—and had received more encouragement. His name was Charles Robert Lumley Drayton, and he was twenty-five years old. His story was typical of many of the young men working in Winnipeg in the 1880s and 1890s. He was the younger son of a well-to-do Toronto family who had been sent out to make his way in the West and “help put the ‘Win’ in Winnipeg,” as the locals liked to say. And he was just the type of man to whom Pauline was always drawn: a youthful athlete more than ten years younger than herself, with impeccable English manners.

  Charles Drayton’s parents had not been in Canada long. His father, Philip, originally arrived in Ontario as an officer in the British army. He had then been posted to Barbados and, after resigning his commission in 1874, returned to Toronto to settle there with his wife, Margaret Covernton. There was already a Drayton living in Ontario, east of Toronto—Philip’s cousin Reginald Drayton, a British remittance man. Reggie could not have been more different than Philip, the ultra-respectable former army officer. Reggie, a rascal since boyhood, had been sen
t to the colonies by his clergyman father in Gloucestershire to keep him out of trouble in the Mother Country. His father paid for him to live in the Rice Lake area north of Cobourg with Clinton Atwood (son-in-law of the writer Catharine Parr Traill), who was supposed to teach the irrepressible Reggie how to farm. Unfortunately, Charlie Drayton’s Uncle Reggie had absolutely no time for agriculture but all the time in the world for drinking and hunting.

  Perhaps stuffy Philip followed scruffy Reggie to Canada to keep an eye on him; perhaps, as a former army officer with limited means, when he returned to Britain after years in the colonies he felt out of place in a country where engineers and entrepreneurs were the new heroes. By the time the Philip Draytons settled in Toronto, they had two sons: Henry, born in Canada in 1869, and Charles, born in Barbados in 1872. A daughter, named Margaret after her mother, was born in Toronto. At first, the boys’ father remained relentlessly British in loyalty; while he studied and then taught law at Osgoode Hall, he sent his sons to the English public school Harrow. As Philip Drayton’s income steadily increased, the Draytons’ allegiances slowly shifted and the family merged into Toronto’s WASP elite. Philip served on City Council as an alderman, and both boys eventually graduated from Upper Canada College.

  Henry was a model son: he studied law and, when only twenty-four, was appointed Assistant Solicitor for the City of Toronto. Henry always took himself very seriously; he was careful, restrained and, wrote a contemporary, “never made a statement that was good for a headline, or coined an epigram, or lost his temper.” His thick brown hair was slicked back with brilliantine, his bushy moustache was trimmed within an inch of its life and his stiff collars gleamed with starch. Ambitious socially and professionally, he was said to be at his best when “sitting in a club lounge with a prosperous cigar, explaining his opinions to men not quite as important as himself.”

  His younger brother, however, was a different character. Charles was high-spirited, energetic and a bit of a rake. Like his brother, he had a posh English accent and posh English clothes, but unlike Henry, he had a devil-may-care approach to life. Philip Drayton must have feared he had sired another Reggie. Had he still lived in England, he would probably have purchased a commission for Charlie in his old regiment, the Queen’s Own 16th Rifles, and sent him off to one of Britain’s distant little wars—Sudan, perhaps, or northern India. But since the Draytons now lived in the colonies, Philip did the next best thing. He persuaded the head of the Western Canada Savings and Loan Company to employ his younger son as an office boy in its Toronto headquarters, with a view to sending him out West once he had proved his reliability. Charlie rose to expectations: in 1891, the nineteen-year-old was dispatched to the company’s Winnipeg office. For the stocky, muscular young Charles, with his unruly dark hair and ready laugh, it was the perfect destination, a city that consisted of rounds of drinks, rolls of money and the ever-present clatter of hammers and saws.

  “Society in Winnipeg is noticeably young, with the high-spiritedness of youth and something of its impatience of control,” a correspondent wrote in the Montreal Daily Star in October 1888. The correspondent was Sara Jeannette Duncan, Pauline’s Brantford-born school friend who wrote under the pseudonym Garth Grafton. In 1888, Sara crossed Canada by train on a round-the-world trip with a friend, and later published her account in A Social Departure: How Orthodocia and I Went Round the World by Ourselves. (This convoluted title was a “New Woman” pun, since an orthodox woman would never travel by herself.) Sara found Winnipeg a lively, attractive place in which well-bred young women were given an enthusiastic welcome. Her description reflected all the characteristics of this wide-open pioneer city that would persuade Pauline to settle there a few years later: “Its friendliness, without restraint or reserve, is delightful…There appears to be a great abundance of young men in the place…The number to be met at a five o’clock tea, usually contemned of masculinity, is surprising. Something in the air of the country makes everybody vivacious.”

  Sara devoted several inches of her column to an institution of which Charles Drayton would inevitably become a member. This was “the Shanty”: a boarding house in which various well-off bachelors lived together and “give dinners and drive in the most charming and individual fashion and who form an important element in all that is ‘going on’ in a social way in Winnipeg.” The institution of the Shanty began in the early 1880s when, following the advance of the CPR tracks, the city’s population exploded with railway managers, land speculators, merchants and white-collar clerks for banks and insurance companies. Since then the Shantymen had changed their quarters occasionally, and their membership regularly, but never their “fraternal spirit,” according to Sara: “Those of its members removed by matrimony or other providential causes, [the Shanty] considers not lost but gone before.”

  The Shanty was one aspect of Winnipeg’s surfeit of eligible bachelors that appealed to independent-minded young ladies like Sara and Pauline. But there was a seamier side to Winnipeg’s male-dominated demographics to which neither Pauline nor Sara would have dreamt of alluding. Men outnumbered women by two to one in the city, and most of them were not well-dressed young bucks from Eastern Canada like Charlie Drayton and his friends. Thanks to the railway, Winnipeg, like Toronto, was facing a rising tide of immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe. At the same time, an economic depression in Quebec and Ontario was behind an influx of unemployed men (including a fair number of gamblers, drifters and ne’er-do-wells) from Eastern Canada, who had left sweethearts, wives and families back home until they could get established. As an old Ontario folk song put it,

  One by one they all clear out,

  Thinking to better themselves no doubt,

  Caring little how far they go

  From the poor little girls of Ontario.

  The rooming houses and hotels in the vicinity of Winnipeg’s CPR station were crammed with single men. They worked sixteen-hour days in the rapidly expanding boom town, doing all the heavy work that today is done by machine. They excavated the city ditches, dug the sewers, laid the water mains, mixed the concrete, graded and gravelled the streets. In construction jobs, they manhandled foundation stone, bricks, mortar and steel into place. Lonely and poorly housed, in their off-hours these men congregated in the only recreational centres available to them—bars, brothels and pool halls. By 1900, there would be three times as many brothels in Winnipeg as there were churches. The largest, busiest bordellos were just north of Portage Avenue on Thomas Street (“John Thomas Street” to regulars, later elevated to Minto Street, after the Governor General). Winnipeg was as well known for its prostitutes as for its pioneers.

  It was the prospect of a quick fortune that brought all the punters, rich and poor, to “the Chicago of the North.” And by 1897, when Charles Drayton began paying court to Pauline Johnson, he was well on his way to prosperity. He had been appointed an Assistant Inspector for the Western Canada Savings and Loan Company, later renamed the Canadian Permanent Loan Company. There was barely a community in the Prairies or British Columbia that Charlie hadn’t visited in order to assess its land potential. He had bounced in a horse-drawn buggy along primitive tracks and through mountain passes, and stayed in the same ratty hotels that Pauline stayed in. He was rapidly emerging as one of the leading authorities on property values in the West. In short, he was turning into the kind of respectable banker that his father had hardly dared hope he would become.

  Charlie Drayton’s success had allowed him to graduate from his convivial boarding house to the elegant Clarendon Hotel. He still loved the thigh-slapping informality of life in the West, compared to Toronto’s buttoned-down society. But the charms of the bachelor life had begun to pall. He had lived through six bone-chilling Winnipeg winters and six blistering, bug-ridden Prairie summers. Many of his fellow Shantymen had either married or returned east. He wanted to settle down and make a home. However, the shortage of eligible brides in Winnipeg was a problem. Then Pauline Johnson came to town. And from the momen
t Charles Drayton first laid eyes on her, declaiming her verses on stage or perhaps slipping into the Hotel Manitoba, which was next door to the Clarendon, he was smitten.

  Once Pauline was living in Winnipeg, events moved quickly. After a brief tour of southern Manitoba in early January, she returned to Winnipeg and boasted about her dazzlingly ambitious plans for the coming year to a reporter from the Manitoba Morning Free Press. She was going to travel west to perform in Prince Albert and Regina, she announced, then travel east for an Ottawa engagement, then south to New York City to publish a book of short stories. She would then make a tour of the United States before leaving for Australia in the fall. In other words, she would be on the move for the next twelve months—unless a better offer came along.

  These plans were not just ambitious, they were also unrealistic. There is no evidence that Pauline had written any short stories since “A Red Girl’s Reasoning” had appeared in 1892. She did not have the money or a partner for a demanding tour of the United States or Australia. In her 1981 biography of Pauline Johnson, author Betty Keller describes the plans as a ruse to force Charlie Drayton’s hand. “For nearly twenty years,” suggests Keller, Pauline “had been hearing wedding bells every time a new man entered her life…Charles Drayton fitted Pauline’s dream of the perfect husband and she was determined to marry him.” Charlie didn’t need much of a nudge. On January 25, the Toronto Globe announced the engagement in Winnipeg of Miss E. Pauline Johnson and Mr. Charles R. L. Drayton: “Each of the principals is receiving the congratulations of their numerous friends in the city and in the east.” The wedding would take place the following September.