Canadian Houses
of Romance

by

XXI

CHEIFSWOOD

IN autumn the grain fields of Ontario are waving in brazen tides that creep up to the door sills of comfortable farm houses and huge barns. Through a meadow valley the Grand River cuts a deep blue path among the fields. We stopped at a village for gasoline and asked if we were near Brantford.
     “Quite near. You will see the Chief’s house to your left as you go along. It is about ten miles from the city—the old Johnson place, facing the Reserve. See that strip of land on the other side of the river? Old Reserve of the Six Nations. A country by itself. You can get over by the ferry just below Chiefswood. There’s an Indian will take you if you use your horn.”
     So instructed, we found an old house standing in a wide field facing the river, and separated from it by a slope of magnificent trees. We opened the rickety gate and a flurry of chickens rose before our feet. We saw an English residence, plain in line, with long French windows, and walls that have been washed with a deep cream plaster. We came slowly up a grass-grown path and knocked at the door. A young woman appeared, and there were [page 171] children close behind her. “My husband raises chickens” she said, “so you can see that we do not attempt to keep up the grounds. So far as the interior goes there is just a trace of the Johnson occupation…There is the old stone fireplace in what was, we suppose, the reception room…Here is a walnut sideboard—a wonderful piece…This, we think, was the front door and, see, the bannister is solid walnut.”
     It looked as though it were polished every day, so beautiful was the initial finish. We followed the exquisite satin bannister up the stairs.
     “This was the room in which Pauline Johnson was born,” said the tenant. It is a square room overlooking the valley. “And here is something that may interest you. This cupboard door…look at the sentence written here upon it, either by Pauline or her sister.” Faintly written in lead pencil, we read: “Walnut from seed between woodshed and barn, 1861.”
     “They must have loved the place!” went on the woman reflectively.
     Yes, one loves a place where one has seen the trees grow, out of which one’s doors are hewn.
     Chiefswood was built nearly a hundred years ago, as the wedding gift of Onwanonsyshon, Chief Johnson, to his English wife, who was of the family of Howells, of which the American, William Dean, was a member. Plank was laid on plank, [page 172] the finest lumber being used, with no hammering of nails but by pegs driven into auger holes as in David’s Temple, that monument “to light and beauty”, in the village of Sharon, Ontario.
     One remembered stories of the life of the Chief’s daughters, educated by their mother, and then at a public school, with some penalty to pay for a difference: [page 173] the difference of the “cross of red and white.” Averted glances, perhaps, for these young people whose home faced a Government Reserve comprised of many Indians over whom their father was chief.
     Years afterwards in England, in her gorgeous native dress, Pauline Johnson charmed London society by the reading of poems that told of lost causes, and old heroisms; poems that sang strange and pagan tunes. Into them, Chiefswood, soft old English house fronting the Reserve, must have entered; the house where she was Tekahionwake, tribal princess of the Mohawks.
     After her London experience, in days when western travel in Canada was difficult, she went barnstorming in crude villages and among camps, and in smug young cities of the plains. On the Pacific Coast she found a new home. To the Capilano Indians, she was “great poet and princess”, and in Vancouver, at the last, she lived and died. As the constant stream of tourist-buses and motors wind through the aisles of Stanley Park, the drivers stop to let visitors go down a woodland path by the sea, where Siwash Rock is profiled against the sky, and a stone is set up with an Indian girl’s face cut into it. There is a little drinking fountain below the stone, where flowers or garlands of leaves and ferns are always to be found.
     But in her native province there is only this fading [page 174] house on the edge of the Reserve, with strangers leasing it.

     Down a bit of rough road, then, to the river’s edge…a blast of the horn, and almost at once the Indian ferryman with his raft. As we floated softly over the river we asked our way through this unknown country. The ferryman was evasive. “You’d better go over and see Mr. S——t,” he said. “He’s a councillor, he can tell you all about the Reserve.”
     “Is he an Indian?”
     “Nobody but Indians here!”
     “The name sounds German.”
     “Well, some Germans marry with the Indians once. Very clever, those Germans, they make the land pay.”
     “Does your friend approve of Longhouses?”
     The ferryman laughed. “Oh, you ask him about them pagan Indians!”
     We took careful note of the direction of the councillor’s farm, and over narrow country roads we set out to find it…In a moment we had entered a primitive region separated by a hundred years from the highway just behind us. Faintly one recalled certain neglected sections of the State of Kentucky, but only faintly, for there, brick houses are sometimes found among the negro cabins. Here one drives for miles and only log houses or unpainted [page 175] shacks are in evidence. Sometimes we saw grass-thatched barns; sometimes an old well; or a primitive punt; once a quaint little enclosed graveyard; and several times low wooden structures which we thought were Longhouses. Horses and buggies driven by sombre youths jogged slowly along the narrow roads. Often across an open doorway the figure of a man sprawled,—relaxed and supine in the sun.
     After a time we arrived at a prosperous line of barbed wire enclosing broad fields of grain. A small house and large barn topped a little hill, and toiling up the lane leading thereto we came upon a dark stout gentleman in a yellow linen dust-coat, with a small valise in his hand industriously puffing along.
     “Give you a lift?” we asked.
     “You may,” responded the gentleman, and opened the door of the car and entered solemnly.
     “Going up to Mr. S——t’s?” we asked hopefully, for we were not altogether sure of our bearings.
     “I’ve walked all the way out from Brantford,” he replied, “you friends of Mr. S——t?”
     “Just visitors,” we answered him. “Do you belong to the Reserve?”
     “Yes—I belong. But I been away. All my people belong. We don’t have no outsiders here you know,” he added, lest false hopes should be [page 176] raised. We explained the situation, and he promised on our arrival at the house to find Mr. S——t and send him to us if possible.
     We awaited the great man, gazing with interest at a crayon of a (probably deceased) soldier in full modern regalia sunning itself againt a large stone in the front yard.
     Mr. S——t presently emerged, an elderly half-breed in tweed trousers and a purple shirtwaist. [page 177] Like most celebrities he made his position quite definite at once.
     “Well, folks,” he said kindly, extending to each a firm brown hand, “I got a party on inside. I can’t talk long, but what you want to know?”
     It sounded the ominous note of brevity. Whereupon we praised Chiefswood and Pauline Johnson. That was a success. Sympathy flashed into the eye of Mr. S——t. He admitted that the Johnsons were “big people.” He acknowledged that Pauline was a poet—though, for himself, he had never seen her books. “I’m too busy,” he said, “with work on this farm. Big farm, you see!”
     Something of the German pioneer spirit looked out of his shrewd eyes.
     “Other places here look small compared to yours.”
     “Yes, they are smaller,” he agreed, “originally there were about five thousand Indians here and they were given ten acres each by the Government. But some people farm more than that, for, while we cannot buy any land, we can buy or sell to any man the improvements that we make. This is good enough soil—but it’s hard to make the Indians cultivate it.” Again the German in him spoke.
     “What about the future of the Reserve?” we asked.
     “Oh, good future—good future. Have you see Ossweken?” [page 178]
     “Do you mean the village?”
     “Yes—we got two churches there, and big Council House.”
     “Is there a Longhouse too?”
     He looked inquiry then, and his face darkened. “Yes—four Tom-fool Longhouses are still on the Reserve. That is pagan Indians’ work. They make all the trouble—all our trouble at Ottawa is pagan trouble. They talk, talk—all the time in Mohawk—night after night—talking, talking. Time Longhouses were closed up now. That old system is just about done. We should all speak English, like they do in schools and Council Houses. Very big Council House in Ossweken—you better see it.”
     We asked about the present working régime of the Reserve.
     “The Council men used to be chiefs. Now we carry on business in English. We take some of our business to the Government at Ottawa—Indian Department. We discuss many things there. It is a very interesting thing to be in the Council, Indian affairs are not dead yet you know—not by a long way.”
     But we could see that our host was getting restless. He glanced often and anxiously at the house, from whence the sound of guttural voices proceeded. We hurried the next question.
     “Do the pagans try to interfere with the Councillors? Just who are the pagans?” [page 179]
     “Pagans?” in haughty disdain, “pagans are old stuff. They believe this country is still ours, still Indian. They want to possess the money in the hands of the Government for the whole Reserve. Big fund there, more than a million dollars. The pagans want the fund money more than its interest which goes on all the time…Talk, talk, talk—all in Mohawk…You wait ten, twenty years—no more Indian talk then. All English!….Well, I got a party on. I guess I got to go now. Glad to see you folks. You look all around, and come back and talk to me again some day. You go to see Ossweken—fine Council House there.”
     With another grave handshake we were dismissed.

     Through a long dusty road, between little farms where bulrushes and swamp weeds made contrasting colours in colours in corners of many a neglected field, we finally emerged on the edge of the village.
     Here were a few houses more prosperous than any we had seen. Coloured glass window panes enlivened larger wooden dwellings, and there was an Indian inscription on what we afterwards learned was an English church. Then a lane that led us to the main road into Brantford.
     We felt as though we had shaken off a dream. What ancient ghosts of a period long gone!…Indians talk-talking in their wooden Longhouses; [page 180] German half-breeds speaking of moneys in trust for an almost vanishing tribe—truly an alien wedge thrust into cheerful Ontario; an echo of old forces!
     Think of their ancient power. Homer might have written of these people at their best, thinly disguised as gods—beings that suggest the myths and legends of this continent in a mysterious way…The Mohawk tribe was one of a confederation formed by Hiawatha four centuries ago. At the beginning of the 17th century it included five tribes, but in 1715 they were joined by a related people and were henceforth to be known as the Six Nations. In government, and property system it was advanced beyond anything that its discoverers had experienced except in dreams. The tribes managed their own affairs under a sachem and a council; and a council of fifty sachems met annually to dispose of questions affecting the confederation. The Mohawks had crossed into Canada under Joseph Brant, and for their fealty to the British Crown were given two reservations near Erie and Ontario, on one of which, to the north of Lake Erie on the Grand River, Chief Brant had settled.
     And what exists of it here is the remnant of a race living out its last hours in this sober little Reserve; the fading house of a chieftain and his English wife—and a handful of poems. [page 181]

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