Legends of Vancouver

Foreword

I have been asked to write a preface to these Legends of Vancouver, which, in conjunction with the members of the Publication Subcommittee—Mrs. Lefevre, Mr. L. W. Makovski and Mr. R. W. Douglas—I have helped to put through the press. But scarcely any prefatory remarks are necessary. This book may well stand on its own merits. Still, it may be permissible to record one’s glad satisfaction that a poet has arisen to cast over the shoulders of our grey mountains, our trail-threaded forests, our tide-swept waters, and the streets and skyscrapers of our hurrying city, a gracious mantle of romance. Pauline Johnson has linked the vivid present with the immemorial past. Vancouver takes on a new aspect as we view it through her eyes. In the imaginative power that she has brought to these semi-historical sagas, and in the liquid flow of her rhythmical prose, she has shown herself to be a literary worker of whom we may well be proud: she has made a most estimable contribution to purely Canadian literature.

Preface

These legends (with two or three exceptions) were told to me personally by my honoured friend, the late Chief Joe Capilano, of Vancouver, whom I had the privilege of first meeting in London in 1906, when he visited England and was received at Buckingham Palace by their Majesties King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra.

To the fact that I was able to greet Chief Capilano in the Chinook tongue, while we were both many thousands of miles from home, I owe the friendship and the confidence which he so freely gave me when I came to reside on the Pacific coast. These legends he told me from time to time, just as the mood possessed him, and he frequently remarked that they had never been revealed to any other English-speaking person save myself.

Biographical Notice

E. 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 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 the 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. The loyalty of her ancestors breathes in her prose, as well as in her poetic writings.

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 read Scott, Longfellow, Byron, Shakespeare, and such books as Addison’s Spectator, Foster’s Essays and Owen Meredith’s writings.

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 most of the high-grade magazines, both on this continent and England.

Her writings having brought her into notice, the next step in Miss Johnson’s career was her appearance on the public platform as a reciter of her own poems. For this she had natural talent, and in the exercise of it she soon developed a marked ability, joined with a personal magnetism, that was destined to make her a favourite with audiences from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Her friend, Mr. Frank Yeigh, of Toronto, provided for a series of recitals having that scope, with the object of enabling her to go to England to arrange for the publication of her poems. Within two years this aim was accomplished, her book of poems, The White Wampum, being published by John Lane, of the Bodley Head. She took with her numerous letters of introduction, including one from the Governor-General, the Earl of Aberdeen, and she soon gained both social and literary standing. Her book was received with much favour, both by reviewers and the public. After giving many recitals in fashionable drawing-rooms, she returned to Canada, and made her first tour to the Pacific Coast, giving recitals at all the cities and towns en route. Since then she has crossed the Rocky Mountains no fewer than nineteen times.

Miss Johnson’s pen had not been idle, and in 1903 the George Morang Co., of Toronto, published her second book of poems, entitled Canadian Born, which was also well received.

After a number of recitals, which included Newfoundland and the Maritime Provinces, she went to England again in 1906 and made her first appearance in Steinway Hall, under the distinguished patronage of Lord and Lady Strathcona. In the following year she again visited London, returning by way of the United States, where she gave many recitals. After another tour of Canada she decided to give up public work, to make Vancouver, BC, her home, and to devote herself to literary work.

Only a woman of remarkable powers of endurance could have borne up under the hardships necessarily encountered in travelling through Northwestern 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 on her, and her health completely broke down. For almost a year she has been an invalid, and as she is unable to attend to the business herself, a trust has been 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 are the beautiful Indian Legends contained in this volume, which she has been at great pains to collect, and a series of boys’ stories, which have been exceedingly well received by magazine readers.

During the sixteen years Miss Johnson was travelling, she had many varied and interesting experiences. She travelled the old Battleford trail before the railroad went through, and across the Boundary country in British Columbia in the romantic days of the early pioneers. Once she took an eight hundred and fifty mile drive up the Cariboo trail to the gold fields. She has always been an ardent canoeist, and has run many strange rivers, crossed many a lonely lake, and camped in many an unfrequented place. These venturesome trips she made more from her inherent love of Nature and adventure than from any necessity of her profession.

Miss Pauline Johnson died in Vancouver on March 7, 1913. In accordance with her last wish her ashes were buried in Stanley Park within sight and sound of Siwash Rock, where the main driveway round the park, coming from the English Bay entrance, divides east and west—the western branch sloping down towards the rock and the eastern going to the Big Tree. An editorial in the Vancouver Daily Province of March 8 said:

The keynote of her whole disposition was a generous charity towards everything and everybody with whom she came in contact. There was no trouble too great for her to take, no detail too small for her to neglect when it was a matter of giving happiness to others. She was one of those great souls who would starve themselves on the trail, work unwearyingly for her companions, cheer them ever onwards through good times and bad, and rejoice with them when the goal was achieved. She loved life with a passionate devotion that was almost pathetic in its intensity. In spite of all her travelling, all her experiences, which were by no means easy, Pauline Johnson never lost her capacity for getting the best out of life. She was absolutely natural and simple in her love of happiness. She disliked artificiality of any kind. The seasons as they came and went were in themselves a constant source of pleasure to her. She loved the Pacific coast with its ever-changing colours, the sea and the deeply gashed mountains. The wind in the great firs and the roaring of the mountain torrents were music in her ears. With the passing of winter passed also the soul of Pauline Johnson to the happy hunting grounds, there to find eternal freedom untrammeled by mortality. To all who knew her she was the “best beloved vagabond.” It was always fine weather and good going on the trail of life when Pauline Johnson blazed the way.

The Two Sisters

The Lions

You can see them as you look towards the north and the west, where the dream-hills swim into the sky amid their ever-drifting clouds of pearl and grey. They catch the earliest hint of sunrise, they hold the last colour of sunset. Twin mountains they are, lifting their twin peaks above the fairest city in all Canada, and known throughout the British Empire as “The Lions of Vancouver.”

Sometimes the smoke of forest fires blurs them until they gleam like opals in a purple atmosphere, too beautiful for words to paint. Sometimes the slanting rains festoon scarfs of mist about their crests, and the peaks fade into shadowy outlines, melting, melting, forever melting into the distances. But for most days in the year the sun circles the twin glories with a sweep of gold. The moon washes them with a torrent of silver. Oftentimes, when the city is shrouded in rain, the sun yellows their snows to a deep orange; but through sun and shadow they stand immovable, smiling westward above the waters of the restless Pacific, eastward above the superb beauty of the Capilano Canyon. But the Indian tribes do not know these peaks as “The Lions.” Even the chief, whose feet have so recently wandered to the Happy Hunting Grounds, never heard the name given them until I mentioned it to him one dreamy August day, as together we followed the trail leading to the canyon. He seemed so surprised at the name that I mentioned the reason it had been applied to them, asking him if he recalled the Landseer Lions in Trafalgar Square. Yes, he remembered those splendid sculptures, and his quick eye saw the resemblance instantly. It appeared to please him, and his fine face expressed the haunting memories of the faraway roar of Old London. But the “call of the blood” was stronger, and presently he referred to the Indian legend of those peaks—a legend that I have reason to believe is absolutely unknown to thousands of Palefaces who look upon the Lions daily, without the love for them that is in the Indian heart, without knowledge of the secret of “The Two Sisters.” The legend was intensely fascinating as it left his lips in the quaint broken English that is never so dulcet as when it slips from an Indian tongue. His inimitable gestures, strong, graceful, comprehensive, were like a perfectly chosen frame embracing a delicate painting, and his brooding eyes were as the light in which the picture hung. “Many thousands of years ago,” he began, “there were no twin peaks like sentinels guarding the outposts of this sunset coast. They were placed there long after the first creation, when the Sagalie Tyee1 moulded the mountains, and patterned the mighty rivers where the salmon run, because of His love for His Indian children, and His wisdom for their necessities. In those times there were many and mighty Indian tribes along the Pacific—in the mountain ranges, at the shores and sources of the great Fraser River. Indian law ruled the land. Indian customs prevailed. Indian beliefs were regarded. Those were the legend-making ages when great things occurred to make the traditions we repeat to our children today. Perhaps the greatest of these traditions is the story of ‘The Two Sisters,’ for they are known to us as ‘The Chief’s Daughters,’ and to them we owe the Great Peace in which we live, and have lived for many countless moons. There is an ancient custom amongst the coast tribes that, when our daughters step from childhood into the great world of womanhood, the occasion must be made one of extreme rejoicing. The being who possesses the possibility of some day mothering a man-child, a warrior, a brave, receives much consideration in most nations; but to us, the Sunset tribes, she is honoured above all people. The parents usually give a great potlatch, and a feast that lasts many days. The entire tribe and the surrounding tribes are bidden to this festival. More than that, sometimes when a great Tyee celebrates for his daughter, the tribes from far up the coast, from the distant north, from inland, from the island, from the Cariboo country, are gathered as guests to the feast. During these days of rejoicing the girl is placed in a high seat, an exalted position, for is she not marriageable? And does not marriage mean motherhood? And does not motherhood mean a vaster nation of brave sons and of gentle daughters, who, in their turn, will give us sons and daughters of their own?

“But it was many thousands of years ago that a great Tyee had two daughters that grew to womanhood at the same springtime, when the first great run of salmon thronged the rivers, and the ollallie bushes were heavy with blossoms. These two daughters were young, lovable, and oh! very beautiful. Their father, the great Tyee, prepared to make a feast such as the Coast had never seen. There were to be days and days of rejoicing, the people were to come for many leagues, were to bring gifts to the girls and to receive gifts of great value from the chief, and hospitality was to reign as long as pleasuring feet could dance, and enjoying lips could laugh, and mouths partake of the excellence of the chief’s fish, game, and ollallies.

“The only shadow on the joy of it all was war, for the tribe of the great Tyee was at war with the Upper Coast Indians, those who lived north, near what is named by the Paleface as the port of Prince Rupert. Giant war-canoes slipped along the entire coast, war parties paddled up and down, war-songs broke the silences of the nights, hatred, vengeance, strife, horror festered everywhere like sores on the surface of the earth. But the great Tyee, after warring for weeks, turned and laughed at the battle and the bloodshed, for he had been victor in every encounter, and he could well afford to leave the strife for a brief week and feast in his daughters’ honour, nor permit any mere enemy to come between him and the traditions of his race and household. So he turned insultingly deaf ears to their war-cries; he ignored with arrogant indifference their paddle-dips that encroached within his own coast waters, and he prepared, as a great Tyee should, to royally entertain his tribesmen in honour of his daughters.

“But seven suns before the great feast these two maidens came before him, hand clasped in hand.

“ ‘Oh! our father,’ they said, ‘may we speak?’

“ ‘Speak, my daughters, my girls with the eyes of April, the hearts of June’ ” (early spring and early summer would be the more accurate Indian phrasing).

“ ‘Some day, oh! our father, we may mother a man-child, who may grow to be just such a powerful Tyee as you are, and for this honour that may some day be ours we have come to crave a favour of you—you, Oh! our father.’

“ ‘It is your privilege at this celebration to receive any favour your hearts may wish,’ he replied graciously, placing his fingers beneath their girlish chins. ‘The favour is yours before you ask it, my daughters.’

“ ‘Will you, for our sakes, invite the great northern hostile tribe—the tribe you war upon—to this, our feast?’ they asked fearlessly.

“ ‘To a peaceful feast, a feast in the honour of women?’ he exclaimed incredulously.

“ ‘So we would desire it,’ they answered.

“ ‘And so shall it be,’ he declared. ‘I can deny you nothing this day, and some time you may bear sons to bless this peace you have asked, and to bless their mother’s sire for granting it.’ Then he turned to all the young men of the tribe and commanded: ‘Build fires at sunset on all the coast headlands—fires of welcome. Man your canoes and face the north, greet the enemy, and tell them that I, the Tyee of the Capilanos, ask—no, command—that they join me for a great feast in honour of my two daughters.’ And when the northern tribes got this invitation they flocked down the coast to this feast of a Great Peace. They brought their women and their children; they brought game and fish, gold and white stone beads, baskets and carven ladles, and wonderful woven blankets to lay at the feet of their now acknowledged ruler, the great Tyee. And he, in turn, gave such a potlatch that nothing but tradition can vie with it. There were long, glad days of joyousness, long, pleasurable nights of dancing and campfires, and vast quantities of food. The war-canoes were emptied of their deadly weapons and filled with the daily catch of salmon. The hostile war-songs ceased, and in their place were heard the soft shuffle of dancing feet, the singing voices of women, the play-games of the children of two powerful tribes which had been until now ancient enemies, for a great and lasting brotherhood was sealed between them—their war-songs were ended forever.

“Then the Sagalie Tyee smiled on His Indian children: ‘I will make these young-eyed maidens immortal,’ He said. In the cup of His hands He lifted the chief’s two daughters and set them forever in a high place, for they had borne two offspring—Peace and Brotherhood—each of which is now a great Tyee ruling this land.

“And on the mountain crest the chief’s daughters can be seen wrapped in the suns, the snows, the stars of all seasons, for they have stood in this high place for thousands of years, and will stand for thousands of years to come, guarding the peace of the Pacific Coast and the quiet of the Capilano Canyon.”

This is the Indian legend of “The Lions of Vancouver” as I had it from one who will tell me no more the traditions of his people.