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