Only a woman of tremendous 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 upon her, and her health completely broke down.  For more than a year she has been an invalid; and as she was not able to attend to the business herself, a trust was 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 is a number of beautiful Indian legends which she has been at great pains to collect; and a splendid series of boys’ stories, which were exceedingly well received when they ran recently in an American boys’ magazine.

During the sixteen years Miss Johnson was travelling she had many varied and interesting experiences.  She has driven up 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; and once she took an 850-mile drive up the Cariboo trail to the gold-fields.  She was always an ardent canoeist, ran many strange rivers, crossed many a lonely lake, and camped in many an unfrequented place.  These venturous trips she took more from her inherent love of nature and of adventure than from any necessity of her profession.

After an illness of two years’ duration Miss Johnson died in Vancouver on March 7, 1913.  The heroic spirit in which she endured long months of suffering is expressed in her poem entitled “And He Said ‘Fight On’” which she wrote after she was informed by her physician that her illness would prove fatal.

  Time and its ally, Dark Disarmament
      Have compassed me about;
  Have massed their armies, and on battle bent
      My forces put to rout,
  But though I fight alone, and fall, and die,
      Talk terms of Peace?  Not I.

It is eminently fitting that this daughter of Nature should have been laid to rest in no urban cemetery.  According to her own request she was buried in Stanley Park, Vancouver’s beautiful heritage of the forest primeval.  A simple stone surrounded by rustic palings marks her grave and on this stone is carved the one word “Pauline.”  There she lies among ferns and wild flowers a short distance from Siwash Rock, the story of which she has recorded in the legends of her race.  In time to come a pathway to her grave will be worn by lovers of Canadian poetry who will regard it as one of the most romantic of our literary shrines.

THE WHITE WAMPUM

(The following poems are from the author’s first book, “The White Wampum,” first published in 1895.)

OJISTOH

I am Ojistoh, I am she, the wife
Of him whose name breathes bravery and life
And courage to the tribe that calls him chief. 
I am Ojistoh, his white star, and he
Is land, and lake, and sky—­and soul to me.