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Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake) is the youngest child
of a family of four born to the late G. H. M. Johnson
(Onwanonsyshon), Head Chief of the Six Nations Indians,
and his wife, Emily S. Howells. The latter was of English
parentage, her birthplace being Bristol, but the land
of her adoption was Canada.
Chief Johnson was of the renowned
Mohawk tribe, being a scion of one of the fifty noble
families which composed the historical confederation
founded by Hiawatha upwards of four hundred years ago,
and known at that period as the Brotherhood of Five
Nations, but which was afterwards named the Iroquois
by the early French missionaries and explorers. For
their loyalty to the British Crown they were granted
the magnificent lands bordering the Grand River in the
County of Brant, Ontario, on which the tribes still
live.
It was upon this Reserve, on
her father’s estate, “Chiefswood,”
that Pauline Johnson was born, [Page xiii]
and it is inevitable that the loyalty to Britain and
Britain’s flag which she inherited from her Red
ancestors, as well as from her English mother, breathes
through both her prose and poetic writings.
At an extremely early age this
little Indian girl evinced an intense love of poetry;
and even before she could write composed many little
childish jingles about her pet dogs and cats. She was
also very fond of learning by heart anything that took
her fancy, and would memorize, apparently without effort,
verses that were read to her. A telling instance of
this early love of poetry may be cited, when on one
occasion, while she was yet a tiny child of four, a
friend of her father’s, who was going to a distant
city, asked her what he could bring her as a present,
and she replied, “Verses, please.”
At twelve years of age she was
writing fairly creditable poems, but was afraid to offer
them for publication, lest in after years she might
regret their almost inevitable crudity. So she did not
publish anything until after her school days were ended.
Her education was neither extensive
nor elaborate. It embraced neither High School nor College.
A nursery governess for two years at home, three years
at an Indian day-school half a mile from her home, and
two years in the Central school of the city of Brantford,
was the extent of her educational training. But, besides
this, she acquired a wide general knowledge, having
been through childhood and early girlhood a great reader,
especially of poetry. Before she was twelve years old
she had [Page xiv] read every line
of Scott’s poems, every line of Longfellow, much
of Byron, Shakespeare, and such books as Addison’s
“Spectator,” Foster’s Essays, and
Owen Meredith.
The first periodicals to accept
her poems and place them before the public were “Gems
of Poetry,” a small magazine published in New
York, and “The Week,” established by the
late Prof. Goldwin Smith, of Toronto, the New York “Independent,”
and Toronto “Saturday Night.” Since then
she has contributed to “The Athenæum,”
“The Academy,” “Black and White,”
“The Pall Mall Gazette,” “The Daily
Express,” and “Canada,” all of London,
England; “The Review of Reviews,” Paris,
France; “Harper’s Weekly,” “New
York Independent,” “Outing,” “The
Smart Set,” “Boston Transcript,” “The
Buffalo Express,” “Detroit Free Press,”
“The Boys’ World” (David C. Cook Publishing
Co., Elgin, Illinois), “The Mother’s Magazine”
(David C. Cook Publishing Co.), “The Canadian
Magazine,” “Toronto Saturday Night,”
and “The Province,” Vancouver, B.C.
In 1892 the opportunity of a
lifetime came to this young versifier, when Frank Yeigh,
the President of the Young Liberals’ Club, of
Toronto, conceived the idea of having an evening of
Canadian literature, at which all available Canadian
authors should be guests and read from their own works.
Among the authors present on
this occasion was Pauline Johnson, who contributed to
the programme one of her compositions, entitled “A
Cry from an Indian Wife”; and when she recited
without text [Page xv] this much-discussed
poem, which shows the Indian’s side of the North-West
Rebellion, she was greeted with tremendous applause
from an audience which represented the best of Toronto’s
art, literature and culture. She was the only one on
the programme who received an encore, and to this she
replied with one of her favourite canoeing poems.
The following morning the entire
press of Toronto asked why this young writer was not
on the platform as a professional reader; while two
of the dailies even contained editorials on the subject,
inquiring why she had never published a volume of her
own poems, and insisted so strongly that the public
should hear more of her, that Mr. Frank Yeigh arranged
for her to give an entire evening in Association Hall
within two weeks from the date of her first appearance.
It was for this first recital that she wrote the poem
by which she is best known, “The Song my Paddle
Sings.”
On this eventful occasion, owing
to the natural nervousness which besets a beginner,
and to the fact that she had scarcely time to memorize
her new poem, she became confused in this particular
number, and forgot her lines. With true Indian impassiveness,
however, she never lost her self-control, but smilingly
passed over the difficulty by substituting something
else; and completely won the hearts of her audience
by her coolness and self-possession. The one thought
uppermost in her mind, she afterwards said, was that
she should not leave the platform and thereby acknowledge
her defeat; and it is undoubtedly this same determination
[Page xvi] to succeed which has carried
her successfully through the many years she has been
before the public.
The immediate success of this
entertainment caused Mr. Yeigh to undertake the management
of a series of recitals for her throughout Canada, with
the object of enabling her to go to England to submit
her poems to a London publisher. Within two years this
end was accomplished, and she spent the season of 1894
in London, and had her book of poems, “The White
Wampum,” accepted by John Lane of the “Bodley
Head.” She carried with her letters of introduction
from His Excellency the Earl of Aberdeen and Rev. Professor
Clark, of Toronto University, which gave her a social
and literary standing in London which left nothing to
be desired.
In London she met many authors,
artists and critics, who gave this young Canadian girl
the right hand of fellowship; and she was received and
asked to give recitals in the drawing-rooms of many
diplomats, critics and members of the nobility.
Her book, “The White Wampum,”
was enthusiastically received by the critics and press;
and was highly praised by such papers as the Edinburgh
“Scotsman,” “Glasgow Herald,”
“Manchester Guardian,” “Bristol Mercury,”
“Yorkshire Post,” “The Whitehall Review,”
“Pall Mall Gazette,” the London “Athenæum,”
the London “Academy,” “Black and White,”
“Westminster Review,” etc.
Upon her return to Canada she
made her first [Page xvii] trip to
the Pacific Coast, giving recitals at all the cities
and towns en route. Since then she has crossed
the Rocky Mountains nineteen times, and appeared as
a public entertainer at every city and town between
Halifax and Vancouver.
In 1903 the George Morang Publishing
Company, of Toronto, brought out her second book of
poems, entitled “Canadian Born,” which was
so well received that the entire edition was exhausted
within the year.
About this time she visited
Newfoundland, taking with her letters of introduction
from Sir Charles Tupper to Sir Robert Bond, the then
Prime Minister of the colony. Her recital in St. John
was the literary event of the season, and was given
under the personal patronage of His Excellency the Governor-General
and Lady McCallum, and the Admiral of the British Flagship.
After this recital in the capital
Miss Johnson went to all the small seaports and to Hearts’
Content, the great Atlantic Cable station, her mission
being more to secure material for magazine articles
on the staunch Newfoundlanders and their fishing villages
than for the purpose of giving recitals.
In 1906 she returned to England,
under the distinguished patronage of Lord and Lady Strathcona,
to whom she carried letters of introduction from the
Right Honourable Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Prime Minister
of Canada. On this occasion she was accompanied by Mr.
Walter McRaye, who added greatly to the Canadian interest
of the programme [Page xviii] by his
inimitable renditions of Dr. Drummond’s Habitant
poems.
The following year she again
visited London, returning by way of the United States,
where she and Mr. McRaye were engaged by the American
Chautauquas for a series of recitals covering eight
weeks, during which time they went as far as Boulder,
Colorado. Then, after one more tour of Canada, she decided
to give up public work, settle down in the city of her
choice, Vancouver, British Columbia, and devote herself
to literature only.
Only a woman of tremendous powers
of endurance could have borne up under the hardships
necessarily encountered in traveling through North-Western
Canada in pioneer days as Miss Johnson did; and shortly
after settling down in Vancouver the exposure and hardship
she had endured began to tell upon her, and her health
completely broke down. For more than a year she has
been an invalid; and as she was not able to attend to
the business herself, a trust was formed by some of
the leading citizens of her adopted city for the purpose
of collecting, and publishing for her benefit, her later
works. Among these is a number of beautiful Indian legends
which she has been at great pains to collect; and a
splendid series of boys’ stories, which were exceedingly
well received when they ran recently in an American
boys’ magazine.
During the sixteen years Miss
Johnson was traveling she had many varied and interesting
experiences. She has driven up the old Battleford trail
before the railroad went through, and across [Page
xix] the Boundary country in British Columbia
in the romantic days of the early pioneers; and once
she took an 850-mile drive up the Cariboo trail to the
gold-fields. She was always an ardent canoeist, ran
many strange rivers, crossed many a lonely lake, and
camped in many an unfrequented place. These venturous
trips she took more from her inherent love of nature
and of adventure than from any necessity of her profession.
She has never been a woman who
cared for clubs or any such organization; and has never
belonged to but two, the American Canoe Association
and the Vancouver branch of the Canadian Women’s
Press Club.
No writer in Canada can lay
greater claim to being a Canadian that this native-born
woman, who, although she has chosen to make her home
in the beautiful city of Vancouver, still owns Indian
Reserve land in Ontario, and is still a ward of the
Canadian Government. [Page xx]
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