Flint and Feather

by Charlotte Gray

  As Pauline cast around for ways to increase her income, her thoughts returned to her London success. She recalled Sir Arthur Pearson’s enthusiasm for her stories, for which he had paid 2 guineas each (about $12 in her day). She wondered whether, if she wanted to focus all her energies on magazine commissions, she should follow the examples of the male authors she knew and leave Canada. Charles G. D. Roberts was now in London, enjoying a steady stream of commissions for the kind of tales that could be told around a campfire. (He was also enjoying the life of a boulevardier, while back home in Fredericton, May Roberts struggled to raise their four children.) Sir Gilbert Parker was cutting a swath through London, writing historical fiction set in Canada. From his estate in Connecticut, Ernest Thompson Seton was churning out animal stories that drew on the extensive knowledge of natural history gleaned during his years living in the Carberry Hills of Manitoba.

  Life with the Washingtons was comforting—but it was also boring. Pauline recalled the fun she had had in London the previous year. She knew that Bert Cope, the young Vancouver violinist she had met on the SS Lake Cham-plain, was back in England and would willingly squire her around the city.

  In mid-April, Pauline sat down at the writing table in the bay window of the Washingtons’ home and took out a sheet of her new stationery. Her 1907 letterhead announced that “The Iroquois Indian Poet Entertainer” was going to present “her own poems of Red Indian Life and Legend” in a new American and Canadian tour. Down the left margin of the paper ran quotations from the 1906 London reviews (“clever and effective verse,” according to the London Times; “Miss Johnson has a dramatic manner,” declared the London Morning Post). Pauline wrote in her firm, sloping hand Kate’s address: 112 Aberdeen Avenue, Hamilton. Then she stared out at the well-trimmed garden, in which daffodils already bloomed, and pondered how to ask for a loan from someone she had not spoken to for many months.

  “My dear Mr. Lighthall,” she finally began. “How long is it since I have either seen you or written you.” After a few brief pleasantries, she raised “a business matter.” She wanted to spend a few weeks in England. She would return by July 1, “to open for a two month engagement for the Chautauqua Societies, the best occasions I ever signed for.” In the short term, however, she was a little short of cash. She would forward to Mr. Lighthall some of the choicest articles in her Indian collection as surety for a loan of $100, which she promised to repay by August 1. She listed her treasures: moosehair and porcupine work, an Onondaga turtleshell rattle, the silver medal presented to her father by the Prince of Wales in 1860. “Of course, I would not part with one single article for any price. I would merely send them as a ‘hostage’ and when I meet my note, would expect these articles returned to me…Could you arrange this for me?”

  With her usual blithe optimism, Pauline had already purchased her ticket for the transatlantic crossing when she wrote this note. She was booked on SS Lake Erie, the CPR sister ship to SS Lake Champlain. Luckily, William Lighthall (now a prosperous local politician, former Mayor of Westmount and well-known writer in Montreal) came through. “Lent her $50 without security—really as a gift,” he scribbled at the bottom of Pauline’s letter. Pauline was on board ship in Saint John harbour when she received his letter telling her that the money would be waiting for her at the Bank of Montreal’s London branch. “I thank you over and over and shall not forget your kindness,” she wrote in a note of gratitude. “I would have liked you to have the Indian things, but it is also pleasant to have them with me on my trip. I shall work very hard for the six weeks I shall be in London, for I have had a great measure of success recently in literature of which I feel you will be most glad.”

  The prospect of another balmy London spring excited Pauline. But she was now forty-five, and unused to travelling by herself. The night before the SS Lake Erie sailed out of Saint John, she found herself uncharacteristically anxious. As usual, she turned to a friend to lift her spirits. Pauline sent a note to Archie Morton, who along with Bert Cope had kept her company on her previous voyage. “Dear ‘Cute Little Divil,’” she wrote to the young law student. “Do come and say bon voyage to me. I am quite lonely without Dink who is in Winnipeg ahead of an English company. Our big engagements don’t open until July and as I had nothing to do I thought I would holiday in London…Thine, E. Pauline Johnson.” But Pauline remained alone. Archie was in Montreal and did not receive the note until weeks later.

  How Pauline spent her time in London is not clear. Laura Wood, wife of the New Brunswick businessman who had met Pauline in 1900, reported that Pauline spent the summer of 1907 in “the English country[side] with four friends.” Pauline certainly made contact with Lord Strathcona, who immediately invited her to give a recitation at his annual Dominion Day reception. His secretary enquired, “Will you let me know what I shall put down in the programme?” Pauline also had a brief brush with British aristocracy: among the scarce papers for this period is a souvenir programme for the visit of the King and Queen of Denmark to London. But there is no evidence of new professional achievements. If she tried to get work from London editors, she was largely unsuccessful. In June a short piece about a fellow Iroquois, long-distance runner Tom Longboat, appeared under the byline “E. Pauline Johnson, Tekahionwake” in the London-based magazine Canada. But there is no trace of Pauline’s work in the columns of the Daily Express or any other large-circulation British publication. She did not secure a London publisher for the stories she had now completed. She did not re-register as a recitalist with the Keith Prowse Agency.

  Perhaps Pauline simply enjoyed slowing down. Perhaps she spent most of the damp days of May and June back in the flat in St. James’s Square, which she had rented once again, producing more material for Elizabeth Ansley’s publications in the United States. Or perhaps she spent most of her time with Bert Cope and his musician friends.

  Bert is another elusive figure in the story of Pauline Johnson. Despite an age difference of close to thirty years, Pauline and the talented young violinist from a wealthy Vancouver family became close friends. She later told a Vancouver newspaper that she and Bert “’did’ the theaters and concerts together, and had a right royal time.” Pauline mentioned to Archie Morton that Bert’s mother had also visited him and that she spent time with both of them. In later years, Fred and Margery Cope, Bert’s parents, always welcomed Pauline into their family home in Vancouver, and often included her in Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners.

  Yet the friendship was obviously more than a cordial alliance between two colonials in London. Pauline and Bert developed a very deep and special affection for each other. All her life, Pauline aroused and enjoyed the respectful love of men younger than herself. They loved her because she was charming and because she was fun. The age difference between Pauline and Bert was too wide to make a spring–autumn flirtation likely—an eighteen-year-old boy rarely finds a forty-six-year-old woman romantic. Pauline was now middle-aged and matronly. For Bert, Pauline exuded the mystique not of a wild Mohawk maiden but of a seasoned performer who could teach him how to hold an audience’s attention. At Lord Strathcona’s vast receptions, it must have been reassuring for the young man to swan around with one of the evening’s stars on his arm. For Pauline, the admiration of a sensitive young artist was both flattering and a nostalgic reminder of all the heedless flirtations of her youth.

  The exact nature of their friendship must remain conjecture. But there is one wisp of evidence about its importance to Pauline. In 1908, she published a sequence of love poems, “Autumn’s Orchestra.” These were the first such poems she had written since her disastrous liaison with Charles Wuerz in 1900, and the last she would ever write. There are clearly autobiographical elements in the sequence. “Autumn’s Orchestra” is dedicated to “one beyond seas,” and begins,

  Know by the thread of music woven through

  This fragile web of cadences I spin,

  That I have only caught these songs since you

  Voiced them upon your ha
unting violin.

  The image of a distant violinist is woven into almost every stanza:

  There is a lonely minor chord that sings

  Faintly and far along the forest ways,

  When the firs finger faintly on the strings

  Of that rare violin the night wind plays,

  Just as it whispered once to you and me

  Beneath the English pines beyond the sea.

  In the sequence’s “Finale,” the lonely ache for a distant soulmate is almost tangible:

  But through the night time I shall hear within

  The murmur of these trees,

  The calling of your distant violin

  Sobbing across the seas

  And waking wind, and star reflected light

  Shall voice my answering. Good-night, Good-night.

  Pauline’s third sojourn in London came to an abrupt end in mid-June. She received a cable requesting her immediate presence in the United States. “I had to come in by New York,” she wrote to Archie Morton, “as our summer engagements began earlier than we expected.” Between her arrival in New York and the opening of the Chautauqua season on July 1, she made a very quick trip north to Brantford. On June 25, her brother Allen Johnson finally married Floretta Katherine Maracle, the woman he had been seeing for at least four years.

  Allen was the only one of the four Johnson siblings to marry, and his sisters must have wondered if it would ever happen. Already forty-nine, Allen had been jilted by another woman in the 1890s. Since then he had drifted around. Good-looking and lazy, he first lived with his mother and Eva in Brantford, spending his days moping in the back bedroom. After Emily’s death, Allen moved to Toronto, held a series of inconsequential jobs and began courting Floretta Maracle. Floretta was a fine young woman who worked for the federal government’s Department of Indian Affairs. One of six orphaned sisters from the Tyendena’ga Reserve near Belleville, she had been raised by relatives on the Six Nations Reserve and had attended the Mohawk Institute. She taught in the little Ohsweken schoolhouse before getting a job with the Department. Pauline was very fond of Flo, a petite and lively character who had been a member of the 1903 camping party on Stony Lake. “Strong in her purity of power, / Fidelity her richest dower,” runs a verse that Pauline penned to her new sister-in-law. Flo needed her fidelity—Allen took an age to propose to her. Flo and Allen settled in Toronto in what seems to have been a happy marriage. There were no children.

  After the wedding, Pauline met up with Walter McRaye in New York for their tour of Chautauqua camps. Walter was in high spirits: Lucy Webling (who was still in England) had agreed to marry him. “Is not this news about Dink and Lucy?” Pauline wrote to Archie Morton. “Of course I am delighted, and when I am out of an engagement I tell them I shall come and camp on them for an indefinite time. I deserve it, as I introduced them.”

  Both Pauline and Walter were relying on their Chautauqua season to allow them to accumulate some capital. Pauline, as usual, had a pile of debts to pay, and Walter wanted to start married life with something in the bank. They would be paid $50 for each performance and had been booked for at least twenty Chautauquas. Even with Pauline taking a larger share of their earnings, both could hope to save several hundred dollars. Such a sum, they reasoned, would compensate for the hard work that fellow performers had told them Chautauquas demanded.

  The Chautauqua movement had begun thirty-three years earlier, and took its name from a small resort in upper New York State close to Lake Erie. There, a Chicago minister named John Heyl Vincent founded a summer lecture series for Methodist Sunday school teachers in 1874. The lectures proved immensely popular, and by the late 1880s similar lecture series, known as “Chautauqua Assemblies,” had been organized throughout the northern United States. In 1900, there were more than 400 local Chautauquas, most taking place in brown canvas tents pitched close to lakes, where soft breezes provided relief from summer heat. Families would rent a tent ($5.50 per session), eat at a communal cafeteria and enjoy up to sixty different entertainments over the course of ten days. The programmes had expanded from their original religious focus to include a potpourri of

  Each summer, thousands of Americans flocked to Chautauqua Assemblies for entertainment and enlightenment.

  education, culture and entertainment, with a stiff shot of temperance rhetoric. The fees offered to speakers were large enough to attract big names, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Music helped raise the tone in these uplifting assemblies; brass bands, choral groups and string quartets provided anything from a choral mass to a spirited rendering of “Comin’ Through the Rye.”

  By the time the Johnson–McRaye partnership got on the Chautauqua bandwagon, bookings for the various Chautauqua assemblies had been handed over to professional agents. The Clayton Lyceum Bureau in Chicago recruited Pauline and Walter to be part of the programme for Chautauquas in Indiana, Michigan, Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois and Oklahoma. The schedule was frenzied. They had to take the train over a huge distance to an unfamiliar destination, perform at the Chautauqua recital the next day and then catch the train to the next destination the following morning. Every night was spent under canvas; every audience (and they always seemed to include screaming babies and reluctant children) was a new challenge. The incessant travelling meant that Walter and Pauline did not even

  Pauline and Walter joined the Arkansas playwright and novelist Opie Read on the Chautauqua circuit.

  have time to relax with their fellow performers and enjoy a good grumble about the Clayton Lyceum Bureau’s slave-driving attitude.

  At Kewanee, Illinois, the Johnson–McRaye partnership took to the stage after the Honourable William Jennings Bryan, who gave a three-hour speech on “The Old World and Its Ways.” At Paris, Illinois, the Chautauqua programme included Miss Elma B. Smith, “the delightful child impersonator and bird warbler,” and lecturers who spoke on everything from “Home Life in Greenland” and “The Bright Side of Prison Life” to “How to Live Twice as Well and Twice as Long, or How Funerals May Be Postponed.” In Evansville, Indiana, Pauline and Walter were up against Strickland Gillilan, “the funniest man on the American platform who yet tinctures his humour with beautiful thoughts.”

  For $50 a night, Pauline and Walter were prepared to grit their teeth and get on with it. But it was not fun. Pauline and Walter were largely unknown to their audiences. Pauline was advertised as “Tekahionwake, the Indian poetess” whose work had “a barbaric swing of primal emotion.” Although “Civilization has touched her with its finer qualities,” the programme notes suggested she would be more like a figure from a Wild West show than one from the literary salons of London. Most of the farmers and tradesmen who stared at the buckskin-clad woman on the stage waving her father’s dagger at them had even less sympathy for native North Americans than did their Canadian counterparts farther north. They had been raised on the frontier legends of the genocidal campaigns by the US army during the 1870s Indian Wars; many might have agreed with the infamous remark of Union General Philip Sheridan that “the only good Indian is a dead Indian.” Meanwhile, McRaye’s strangled habitant accent, as he recited the poems of William Drummond, was incomprehensible to the rural folk of the Midwest.

  As the season wore on, the pressure intensified. “In a big tent with noisy, crying babies, small boys with peanuts and people moving around,” McRaye recalled in an uncharacteristically dour comment, “it is not always easy to get your talk over.” One night, a train wreck ahead of them meant that they did not reach their destination until four o’clock in the morning. They then discovered that there were no beds available. They spent the night sitting in a park, waiting for breakfast. Walter stayed upbeat throughout, chatting away to all and sundry about his and Pauline’s adventures. He told a reporter from the Springfield Daily Leader that “Miss Johnson has lately spent more than a year in England, where she was received with special favour by King Edward.” (Pauline scribbled in the margins of this column, �
��McRaye twaddle.”) But by late July, the gruelling pace had got to Pauline. Her health collapsed.

  She described her plight to Ernest Thompson Seton, from whom she had borrowed money in 1906 that (along with several other debts including the 1907 loan from William Lighthall) she still had not repaid. “Such a disaster has befallen me,” she wrote from Boulder, Colorado.

  A heathen Chautauqua manager, in that most heathen state Missouri, placed us in a huge circus tent to give the recital. A thunder storm blew up soaking the canvas, then the torrid sun teemed down. The tent steamed, filled with vapour, the [thermometer] at 98 degrees and—well! My throat went. For nine days I did not speak aloud, and had every joint in my body swollen and scarlet with rheumatism…Nine nights cancelled, at fifty dollars a night. Just a loss of $450.00 at one fell swoop…And it was for this I came from England!

  By the time she was writing to Seton, Pauline had recovered sufficiently to give two scheduled recitals in Boulder. She sent Seton a “miserable $10” to prove she was not a “Bad Injun,” and promised to forward the rest of what she owed soon. “But I am afraid to part with it…in case my voice does not hold out.”

  Pauline managed to finish the season. She wrote to Archie Morton from her final appearance, in Bloomfield, Iowa, that she and Walter “have been working like nailers on our trip, matinees and evening performances almost daily.” But her jarring experiences with Chautauqua left her fragile in health and temper. This was evident when a reporter from the Boston Herald interviewed her in September after a very successful recital at the Vendome for the Massachusetts Indian Association. As usual when confronted with a reporter, Pauline played up the sophisticated complexity of her heritage—her literary achievements, her Mayfair manners and her Iroquois pride. The reporter raised a sceptical eyebrow; like the Midwestern farmers, he couldn’t quite believe that this well-dressed woman was a real Indian. Pauline’s eyes flashed. “Ah, I understand that look,” she snapped. “You’re going to say I’m not like other Indians, that I’m not representative. That’s not strange. Cultivate an Indian, let him show his aptness and you Americans say he is an exception. Let a bad quality crop out and you stamp him as an Indian immediately.”