Produced by Judy Boss and Andrew Sly
By E. Pauline Johnson
(Tekahionwake)
I have been asked to write a preface to these Legends of Vancouver,which, in conjunction with the members of the PublicationSub-committee—Mrs. Lefevre, Mr. L. W. Makovski and Mr. R. W.Douglas—I have helped to put through the press. But scarcely anyprefatory remarks are necessary. This book may well stand on itsown merits. Still, it may be permissible to record one's gladsatisfaction that a poet has arisen to cast over the shoulders ofour grey mountains, our trail-threaded forests, our tide-sweptwaters, and the streets and sky-scrapers of our hurrying city, agracious mantle of romance. Pauline Johnson has linked the vividpresent with the immemorial past. Vancouver takes on a new aspectas we view it through her eyes. In the imaginative power that shehas brought to these semi-historical sagas, and in the liquid flowof her rhythmical prose, she has shown herself to be a literaryworker of whom we may well be proud: she has made a most estimablecontribution to purely Canadian literature.
BERNARD McEVOY
These legends (with two or three exceptions) were told to mepersonally by my honored friend, the late Chief Joe Capilano, ofVancouver, whom I had the privilege of first meeting in London in1906, when he visited England and was received at Buckingham Palaceby their Majesties King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra.
To the fact that I was able to greet Chief Capilano in the Chinooktongue, while we were both many thousands of miles from home, Iowe the friendship and the confidence which he so freely gave mewhen I came to reside on the Pacific coast. These legends hetold me from time to time, just as the mood possessed him, and hefrequently remarked that they had never been revealed to any otherEnglish-speaking person save myself.
E. PAULINE JOHNSON (Tekahionwake)
E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake) is the youngest child of a familyof four born to the late G. H. M. Johnson (Onwanonsyshon), HeadChief 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 ofone of the fifty noble families which composed the historicalconfederation 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 Frenchmissionaries and explorers. For their loyalty to the British Crownthey 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," thatPauline Johnson was born. The loyalty of her ancestors breathes inher prose, as well as in her poetic writings.
Her education was neither extensive nor elaborate. It embracedneither high school nor college. A nursery governess for two yearsat home, three years at an Indian day school half a mile from herhome, and two years in the Central School of the city of Brantford,was the extent of her educational training. But, besides this, sheacquired a wide general knowledge, having been through childhood andearly girlhood a great reader, es