Miss Johnson's pen had not been idle, and in 1903 the Geo. N. 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, B. C., 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
North-western 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:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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