(1861-1913)
She also learned to canoe and camp and spent hours listening to her grandfather "Smoke Johnson's" war stories, while reading the works of English writers like Walter Scott, John Milton, and William Shakespeare. She later took her grandfather's stories and retold them in a style that would appeal to a mass audience.
When her father died in 1884, the family could no longer afford to keep up Chief-Woods Manor, so rented it out and moved to Brantford, where Pauline enjoyed an active social life in Brantford society; but while she had many suitors, none would cross the line and offer her marriage. Their loss and her gain as she now needed to make a living, and began writing poems, which were bought and published in local papers like the Brantford Expositor in an anthology called Songs of the Great Dominion.
Her recitals of poems like "Cry from an Indian Wife" or "The Song My Paddle Sings" always stirred up emotions, but her keen sense of humour could also have them rolling in the aisles.
She would always recite the first half of her program in a ball gown, and for the second half when she read her "Indian" poems, she donned a costume which she made herself from buckskin, Mohawk metal work, rabbit pelts, a hunting knife, her grandfather's Huron scalp Her popularity spread and for the next seventeen years she toured in London, England, parts of New England and most of Canada.
Pauline retired from touring in 1909 and settled in Vancouver. She wrote in a small apartment, paddled her canoe around the bays of the city and entertained friends. She listened to the legends and stories of the Squamish people as told to her by her friend Chief Joe Capilano and in 1911 published them in a book called Legends of Vancouver (1911). By now, however, she was suffereing from breast cancer, and her friends began a trust fund to raise money to pay her expenses. Through her pain she wrote her final poem, "And He Said Fight On", which expressed her optimism and will to live.
Pauline Johnson died March 7, 1913 at the age of 52 All flags in Vancouver flew at half-mast the day she was buried and her funeral procession included all of the city's distinguished men and women, and representatives from every society and club. A large group of Squamish Indians with their chief, the son of Pauline's friend Chief Joe Capilano, walked near the end of the procession and her body laid to rest, at her request, in Stanley Park, her favourite place in Vancouver. She is the only person who has ever been buried in the park and although she had requested that her grave site have no monument, a large stone with her picture and Mohawk designs was placed there later by the Women's Canadian Club. A True Canadian Heroine. Molly would have been proud.
Have compassed me about
Have massed their armies, and on battle bent
My forces put to rout;
But though I fight alone, and fall, and die,
Talk terms of Peace? Not I."
kind of Indian girl, or better still portray a "real live" Indian girl will do something in
Canadian literature that has never been done, but once. The general author gives the
reader the impression that he has concocted the plot, created his characters, arranged his
action, and at the last moment has been seized with the idea that the regulation Indian
maiden will make a very harmonious background whereon to paint his picture, that he,
never having met this interesting individual, stretches forth his hand to his library shelves,
grasps the first Canadian novelist he sees, reads up his subject, and duplicates it in his own
work.
Surely the Redman has lost enough, has suffered enough without additional losses and sorrows being heaped upon him in romance. There are many combats he has won in history from the extinction of the Jesuit Fathers at Lake Simcoe to Cut Knife Creek. There are many girIs who have placed dainty red feet figuratively upon the white man's neck from the days of Pocahontas to those of little "Bright Eyes," who captured all Washington a few seasons ago.
Let us not only hear, but read something of the North American Indian "besting" someone at least once in a decade, and above all things let the Indian girl of fiction develop from the "doglike," "fawnlike," "deerfooted," "fire-eyed," "crouching," "submissive" book heroine into something of the quiet, sweet womanly woman she is, if wild or the everyday, natural, laughing girl is, if cultivated and educated, let her italics, even if the author is not compelled to give her tribal characteristics.
