Flint and Feather

by Charlotte Gray

  Pauline was tired. She was tired of performing, tired of being patronized, tired of scrambling to make a living. She was a trooper: as soon as her moccasin-clad foot stepped onto a platform, the adrenalin still flowed and her face lit up with energy. Her low, clear voice still echoed through hall, tent or theatre, rivetting her listeners with its haunting rhythms. But what had once been a deeply felt performance had become an act. She was tired of making the effort to please the public. She had lost the urge to “set people on fire” with her poetry.

  At the end of the month, she and Walter gave a recital at the Roycroft Inn in East Aurora, outside Buffalo, New York. The inn was part of an extraordinary Arts and Crafts community founded twelve years earlier by an eccentric former soap salesman named Elbert Hubbard. Hubbard was the author of a series of biographical sketches of well-known artists and writers. The community had begun with a printing press on which Hubbard produced his books, then expanded to include furniture, leather, metalworking and bookbinding workshops. As visitors began to arrive to admire and purchase Roycroft artefacts, Hubbard designed and built an inn. The dining room of the Roycroft Inn was filled with original oil paintings (many by the Canadian artist Carl Ahrens) and the cool, quiet library was lined with beautifully bound books available to both residents and guests. Hubbard himself was a charismatic crank who had been inspired by William Morris, of England’s Kelmscott Press. He saw himself as a prophet of aesthetic values, and he gave inspirational speeches all over the United States about the dangers of industrialization. By the time Pauline and Walter arrived in East Aurora, close to 500 people lived and worked within the Roycroft community.

  Roycroft residents loudly applauded Pauline and her message of peaceful co-existence between races. For her part, over the next few days Pauline responded to the serenity of Roycroft. Hubbard himself was away at the time (“barnstorming the one night stands,” as he scribbled in a note to them). Among the collection of postcards that Pauline kept in her navy leather writing case were several of Roycroft. Perhaps her favourite was a shot of the interior of the chapel, with its plain wooden benches. She spent many hours there, lost in reverie. A week after she had reluctantly left Roycroft and travelled to Manitoba, Pauline told a reporter from the Winnipeg Tribune that the Roycroft residents lived “ideal lives in many ways. Mr. Hubbard is not a slave-driver and they enjoy the greatest of freedom during working hours.” Roycroft was far more uplifting than the grind of appearing at the “morally elevating” Chautauquas.

  By mid-October, Walter and Pauline were back on tour. They made their way through Manitoba and Saskatchewan, giving performances at small towns they had last visited in 1905. In Edmonton on November 4, Pauline had lunch with Ernest Thompson Seton, who had just spent six months in Northern Alberta. Then the McRaye–Johnson partnership travelled west as far as Kelowna, BC. Here Pauline insisted that she needed a few days off, so Walter left her at the Lake View Hotel and explored some of the local small towns. “Dink is away, looking for a ranch,” Pauline wrote to Archie Morton. “We—ie. he, Lucy and I—hope to run a chicken ranch up here somewhere…I am going to wear a blue check apron and feed corn to the ‘chookies.’ Better join the colony, my good friend.” Archie was not the only person that Pauline hoped to recruit for her ranch fantasy. “Bert Cope comes into St. John via the Empress of Ireland,” she added.

  But the chicken ranch never materialized, and Pauline and Walter were soon on the road again. They turned east and went back to Battleford, Saskatchewan, spent Christmas on the Prairies, travelled as far east as the Maritimes for more performances in April and May of 1908, and finally returned to Ontario at the beginning of the summer. The Johnson–McRaye partnership had now been on the road, living out of steamer trunks and trying to keep both their skits and their outfits fresh, for nearly twelve uninterrupted months.

  In early June, Pauline parted company with Walter and took the westbound express alone right to the end of the line in Vancouver. On June 29, she checked into the Hotel Vancouver for a month’s rest. Her bones ached, her energy was low and she now slouched as she walked. There were other, more disturbing symptoms, too—flare-ups of fever, persistent lassitude. Most of all, she hated growing old. Her striking good looks had always been an important part of both her self-image and her carefully constructed appeal to others; like many beautiful women, she found a loss of looks was a blow to her self-esteem. She resented questions about her age. “Youth is the eternal heritage of the poet,” she later wrote to a fellow poet, “and when the poet is a woman she is hurt and wounded and bruised, when the public clamours from curiosity to pry into her personal, sacred life and remark upon her age, when her whole being cries out for youth, and yet she knows it is lost for ever.”

  She could not afford to take things easy. “I say that I have come here for a rest and a holiday,” she confided to a friend who worked at the Vancouver World, “but really I have a great deal of work to do.” She wanted to write some more stories for Elizabeth Ansley at The Mother’s Magazine, who had recently asked her for “some humour and bright, happy stories that will serve as a recreation for the mother when she picks up the magazine.” By now, Pauline had learned how to make adroit use in her literary work of her own life—particularly its more dramatic aspects and episodes. She knew that her mother’s history, especially Emily Howells’s controversial marriage to a Mohawk chief, was excellent raw material for a story exploring prejudices within both the non-native and the Iroquois communities. She also intended to produce more articles for The Boys’ World, which paid promptly and well for everything she wrote. As usual, she needed the money. The Hotel Vancouver’s charges were very reasonable: $60 a month for a room and all meals. But Pauline would have to write several stories at $6 per thousand words to foot the bill.

  Magazine pieces were Pauline’s short-term objective. A larger issue she now faced was where she might settle if she decided to give up the stage and focus on prose. “Tekahionwake,” according to her friend at the Vancouver World, “has called [Vancouver] ‘The Smile of God,’ and she says that she never will make her home anywhere except in Vancouver—or London, England.” But London, England, had proved barren turf in her 1907 visit there. And Vancouver now had two significant new attractions for her. The first was Bert Cope, for whom (she told the Vancouver World) she predicted “great things in the future.” The second was the welcome given to her by an unexpected delegation which arrived at the Hotel Vancouver soon after she had settled in there.

  The delegation was led by Chief Joe Capilano—whom Pauline now learned to call by his Salish name, Su-á-pu-luck—and consisted of the men she had met in August 1906 in London. Clad once again in their ceremonial dress, they repeated to the poet the greeting she had given them the previous year in Canada House: “Klahowya tillicum skookum.” This time, it was Pauline’s face that lit up as genial old Chief Joe bade her a hearty welcome to the West. She had journeyed far to get to Vancouver, he said with a warm smile, and they did not want the white people to be the only ones to greet her. By their words and their gestures, the chiefs made it clear that they considered the Iroquois poet to be one of them. Chief Joe invited her to visit the Capilano village across Burrard Inlet.

  Pauline was deeply touched. No native peoples east of the Rockies had ever offered her this kind of welcome. She had lost any sense she may once have felt that she belonged on the Six Nations Reserve, and she was starting to lose confidence that Canada’s native peoples would ever catch up with European immigrants in political and economic affairs. There was so much squabbling between bands, and so few leaders were emerging of the stature of Big Bear or Smoke Johnson. Was the noble independence of Indian peoples, which she had spent her life championing, a chimera? In January 1907, she had written to Prime Minister Laurier asking him to appoint a non-native man unfamiliar to the reserve as the new Superintendent of the Six Nations Reserve. “My people are a peculiar nation,” she explained. “One odd thing is their indifference to persons they know too well. A
n absolute outsider, an utter stranger gains their allegiance and their confidence and their loyalty to a far greater degree than those they have about the Reservation and its environments. They are an exacting, difficult tribe to govern, often malcontents, often I fear apparently ungrateful, but never really so.”

  Now a chief who was not afraid to take political initiatives himself, and who would stare down any man who tried to bully him, wanted to help her feel at home in Vancouver. Nothing in her long public career, she told onlookers, had pleased her “more than this visit from her red brothers of the far west.” She realized she could settle in Vancouver. Perhaps she might even recapture that sense of belonging that she had never felt since she waved goodbye to Chiefswood twenty-three years earlier.

  19

  A GREAT CHIEF DIES: Vancouver 1908–1910

  IN 1908, Vancouver was, as Walter put it in a letter to Archie Morton, “a great burg.” Close to 100,000 people lived there, and the city boasted some fine civic landmarks, including the ever-so-British grey stone Christ Church Cathedral and the classic Greek temple façade of the Canadian Bank of Commerce. Streetcars trundled down the major streets and most houses were lit by electricity. Fantastic mansions, surrounded by smooth lawns and boxwood hedges, were springing up along Davie, Denman and Robson streets in the West End. Gabriola, the elaborate home built by sugar baron Benjamin Tingley Rogers, featured eighteen fireplaces and wood panelling imported from England. At Woodward’s department store on Hastings Street, Vancouverites could purchase Cuban cigars and Paris fashions. There were three well-attended theatres, three lively newspapers and a well-stocked Carnegie library. The largest electrical store in the city was Cope & Sons Ltd. on Hastings Street, owned by Bert Cope’s father, Fred.

  The city’s recent, raw beginnings still butted into its new-found sophistication. The sidewalks were wooden; monumental tree stumps disfigured building lots; huge lumber piles obstructed a clear view of the inlet and the mountains; primeval rain forest squeezed the city boundaries. Guests at older downtown hotels were still entitled to an “eyeopener” (a shot of whiskey before breakfast) as part of the price of their room. When Pauline had first seen Vancouver only fourteen years earlier, it had been little more than a remote logging town of 20,000 people huddled around Burrard Inlet. The promise of future development was

  In 1904, Montreal photographer William McFarlane Notman photographed Vancouver’s urban sprawl. Coal Harbour is in the distance, on the left.

  already there, though, thanks to the arrival on May 23, 1887, of Engine 374, pulling the first transcontinental CPR express. “The Constantinople of the West!” prophesied the British writer Douglas Sladen in 1895, commenting on how “Nature and circumstance have been prodigal to Vancouver.” But back then, the place had been primitive by Eastern Canadian standards. Its ramshackle buildings were dwarfed by ancient cedars, spruce and Douglas firs. Owen Smily, who had accompanied Pauline on that first 1894 visit, was kept awake half the night by the crows outside the window of his Hotel Vancouver room.

  Now, a few years later, Vancouver reminded Pauline of Winnipeg in 1897. It pulsated with the same attractive mix of comfortable wealth and pioneer spirit. And there was something else about Vancouver that fascinated her. Until the 1880s, the majority of people living on Canada’s west coast (which had become the province of British Columbia in 1871) were members of the many Indian nations such as the Shuswap in the interior, the Kaska and Sekani in the north and the

  A group of Indians at Alexander Bay, at the foot of Columbia Street: they formed a significant proportion of Vancouver’s population.

  Haida, Nootka and Salish on the coast. And Indians were still a significant presence in the city in 1908. Although most Indians had adopted the European style of dress, they maintained their old customs. On her daily walks from the Hotel Vancouver, Pauline could see Indian tents pitched on the shore of the Alexander Street warehouse district and Indian fishermen setting salmon nets off English Bay. Across the inlet, there was Joe Capilano’s village, with its whitewashed houses and Anglican church. The Musqueam band (like the Capilano band, part of the Squamish people, a subgroup of the Coast Salish) had a settlement on Point Grey. Moreover, Vancouver was too new for its elite to have yet become sclerotic with imported class prejudices. There were plenty of former North West Company and Hudson’s Bay Company employees among the better-established homeowners, and several had some Indian blood (though they did not flaunt it). Well-to-do women like Julia Henshaw in the West End, attending their At Homes every weekday afternoon, were less obsessed with pure British pedigrees than their counterparts in Toronto’s Rosedale. Pauline did not feel the angry compulsion to “stand by my blood and my race” in the same way that she did when faced by Toronto’s crème de la crème.

  Layered over Vancouver’s native peoples and original settlers was a mix of immigrants far more exotic than anywhere east of the Rockies. Most Vancouverites were born outside Canada, as the 1911 census would confirm. Most of those came from Europe or the United States, but many had crossed the Pacific Ocean. Between 1881 and 1884, more than 10,000 Chinese workers had been brought over to British Columbia to help build the Canadian Pacific Railway; large numbers subsequently gravitated to Vancouver. There were also Japanese immigrants who fished and worked in the canneries, and a small number of Sikhs employed in the lumber mills. Vancouver’s free-and-easy atmosphere had not stopped the spread of rampant racism, with European residents pitted against both native peoples and the under-class of Asian newcomers. Non-whites were forbidden to own property, and Asian immigrants were herded into overcrowded ghettoes. By the turn of the century, Vancouver’s Chinatown included several blocks of brick tenements; with a population of more than 3,500, it was almost as large as San Francisco’s.

  Racial animosity was overt within the working classes. The constant cutthroat competition for jobs in the city’s boom-or-bust resources industries, such as lumber and fish, exacerbated ill-feeling between people who didn’t look, dress or speak the same. In 1907, tension had exploded when the Asiatic Exclusion League accused the Chinese of causing an economic slump by working for less than standard wages. A mob of 15,000 people surged through Chinatown, smashing windows and beating up Chinese residents. The rabble then moved on to Japantown. Luckily, residents there had been forewarned and were able to defend themselves and their property with knives and broken bottles.

  Meanwhile, the Coast Salish suffered and starved as a swelling tide of European settlers occupied their traditional fishing spots, logged their hunting grounds, despoiled their burial sites and banned potlatches, their ceremonial feasts. Chief Joe had had good grounds for his complaints to the “Great White Chief,” King Edward VII, in 1906. But his London adventure only confirmed his reputation amongst Vancouver’s ambitious business and political leaders as a trouble-maker. When they heard that Capilano and the King had discussed the return of traditional hunting grounds to the natives, they accused the dignified and thoughtful chief of “inciting the Indians to revolt.”

  In June 1908, however, Chief Joe Capilano’s attention was focussed not on Squamish grievances but on making the Iroquois poet from Ontario feel at home. The day after Pauline had received Chief Joe and his fellow chiefs, another visitor arrived at the Hotel Vancouver. Chief Joe’s son Matthias had come to escort her to the band’s village on the North Shore. They paddled over in his canoe, and Pauline met Chief Joe’s wife, Mary Agnes (Líxwelut), and daughter Emma. Pauline loved being back in a canoe, and immediately warmed to the Capilano people. Chief Joe offered her the use of a light canoe during her stay.

  Almost every day, Pauline would settle herself in the stern of the dugout and paddle along the shoreline of English Bay and Burrard Inlet. She had never canoed on salt water before, or explored a coast-line that changed according to the state of the tides. There were small bays to discover, with giant sun-bleached timbers washed up on the shingle. There was a constant bustle of vessels on the water. Little steamboats like the Clayburn f
erried people to the North Shore. Elegant yachts belonging to the city’s wealthy merchants creamed through the waves. At the wharves, the CPR’s oceanliners unloaded cargoes of silk and tea from China and Hong Kong. Local passenger steamers toot-tooted their departures for Victoria, Portland, Seattle, Nanaimo or Tacoma. And at the village on the North Shore, there were always Chief Joe, Mary Agnes, Matthias and Emma, happy to admire Pauline’s paddling skills and teach her Chinook words and phrases.

  One of Pauline’s favourite destinations was a small basin of water tucked into the lee of Stanley Park. The cove was known to locals as Coal Harbour, since it was close to a CPR coalyard. “I always resented that jarring, unattractive name,” Pauline later wrote, explaining that she preferred to call it Lost Lagoon. “This was just to please my own fancy, for as that perfect summer month drifted on, the ever-restless tides left the harbour devoid of water at my favourite canoeing hour, and my pet idling place was lost for many days.” Pauline had almost abandoned poetry by now, but the timeless beauty of Lost Lagoon inspired verses reminiscent of the poetry she wrote in the 1880s, during her Muskoka trips: