Legends of Vancouver - E. Pauline Johnson (finding audrey .TXT) 📗

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.

Legends of Vancouver 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