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the Iroquois Council to elevate John’s status.
    The Council leaders were not averse to being pushed. They too recognized the potential of a young man who was committed to his own people as well as to British interests. John Johnson might be a loyal British subject, but he was no sycophant. In 1840, at a historic assembly of Ontario native peoples, he encouraged his fellow Indians to cooperate in demands for land title. He also urged the Ojibwa to refer to the British governor as “Brother” rather than “Father” to promote a relationship of equality. Moreover, John was skilled in the traditional Iroquois art of oratory. In the oral culture of the Iroquois, eloquence was the people’s literature: its metaphors painted the skies and the forest; its cadences were their music. When John Johnson rose to speak at public gatherings, a deep hush would fall as he lifted his voice in a spellbinding singsong rhythm that mesmerized listeners.
    The Mohawk elders knew that young Johnson, who had mastered the English tongue as well as most of the languages of the Iroquois, could be as valuable to them as to the British. They consented to make him a “pine-tree chief,” which meant he was appointed for life only. He became the speaker of the Six Nations Council, with the name Sakayengwaraton. The name translates as “the haze that rises from the ground on an autumn morning and vanishes as the day advances.” It didn’t take Johnson’s colleagues long to shorten this splendid appellation to the nickname “Smoke,” or to refer to the great orator, behind his back, as “the Mohawk warbler.”
    John “Smoke” Johnson was canny. With a pine-tree chieftaincy under his belt, he made an advantageous marriage. His wife, Helen Martin, belonged to one of the fifty noble families of the Iroquois Confederacy, the families which held hereditary chieftaincies. Helen’smother, Catherine, had her own intriguing history. She had been born Catherine Rolleston, daughter of Dutch settlers near Philadelphia, but as a young girl she had been captured by Mohawks during a skirmish in the War of Independence and had been adopted by a chief. Although her parents came from Holland and she spoke English, Catherine had no interest in emulating Molly Brant and straddling two worlds. She married a young Mohawk named George Onhyeateh Martin, and appears to have been happily absorbed into the Mohawk nation. During the long trek from the Mohawk Valley to the Grand River Reserve in the late 1780s, Catherine Rolleston Martin hid in the bundle on her back the silver communion service sent by Queen Anne to the Mohawks in the early years of the eighteenth century. She passed on neither a hint of her Dutch upbringing nor a word of English to her daughter Helen, who became Pauline Johnson’s grandmother.
    John “Smoke” Johnson and Helen Martin Johnson had six children. The childhood of these youngsters differed little from that of their parents and grandparents. They ran barefoot through the woods and learned to hunt and paddle as their ancestors had done in their lost lands to the south since time immemorial. The Six Nations Reserve, established less than thirty years earlier, was still for the most part uncleared wilderness. Tall forests of white pine and oak, and thick scrub of tamarack and muskeg, were rich in game—white-tailed deer, passenger pigeons, quail, woodcocks, wild turkeys—to supplement the diet of cornmeal and berries. Over-hunting had almost wiped out the beaver population around the Great Lakes, but there was plenty of other quarry for hunters who wanted to sell pelts to the Europeans—black bear, muskrat, fisher and marten.
    The Iroquois peoples planted corn and root vegetables in the cleared patches of earth around the scattered settlements of roughly built wooden houses. Willow trees lined the banks of the Grand River, and porcupines snuffled through the undergrowth, allowing women to continue the traditional crafts of basket-making