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and quillwork. Trading links developed fast between the reserve and the steadily growing immigrant settlements in the surrounding areas. Mohawk and Onondaga women arrived at the markets of Hamilton, Brantford, Port Dover or Port Burwell to trade cornmeal, embroidered moccasins andbaskets for products shipped in from England, including iron pots, cloth and silver trinkets. Iroquois men would appear with venison, freshly caught salmon or muskrat pelts, and barter them for guns, gunpowder and whiskey.
    Although European and Iroquois settlers did not mingle socially, there was plenty of room for all in the 1820s and 1830s, and it was an easy co-existence. Outside Kingston and Toronto, both natives and immigrants in Upper Canada relied on the land for their living. Most of the British were at least as poor in worldly goods and formal education as the Iroquois; there was little difference between the two groups in their living conditions. Almost everybody lived in wooden houses with smoky fireplaces, root cellars and sleeping lofts. European settlers respected their native neighbours’ local know-how. Most were eager to copy their hunting and trapping skills and to learn from them about medicinal plants and vegetable dyes. They adopted their means of travel: snowshoes in winter, canoes in summer. Besides, shared loyalty to Church and Crown united these diverse British subjects. Every Sunday, John “Smoke” Johnson would take his children along to the little whitewashed Mohawk Chapel near Brantford, where he would read the Ten Commandments to the congregation. As one of the few Iroquois who spoke English fluently, he often interpreted the sermon, given each Sunday by a cleric who had been sent across the Atlantic by the missionary association called, with the arrogance of imperialism, the “Society for Converting and Civilizing the Indians.” While John “Smoke” Johnson translated the clipped English phraseology into the melodious singsong of the Mohawk tongue, his children would gaze at the shiny silver communion service that their grandmother had carried to Canada all those years ago.
    The second child of John “Smoke” Johnson and Helen Martin Johnson was born on October 7, 1816, and named George after the British monarch, King George III. When George Henry Martin Johnson was still a boy, it was evident that he had inherited many of his father’s finer qualities. Straight-backed and self-assured, he had an easy grin and a quick wit. He also had a gift for languages, so his parents sent him away to school in the neighbouring town of Brantford, where he boarded with another Mohawk family. Soon he spoke English wellenough to substitute for his father as interpreter at the Mohawk Chapel.
    George Johnson’s Brantford sojourn allowed him to make valuable connections with British authorities. When the firebrand William Lyon Mackenzie led a rebellion against the colonial government in Upper Canada in 1837, there was no question where Mohawk loyalties lay. George Johnson stood proud beneath the Union Jack and was recruited as a despatch rider to Allan Napier MacNab. MacNab, a Hamilton lawyer, was amongst the most zealous in the suppression of the uprising. (For a brief period in the 1850s, MacNab was Premier of the United Canadas.) George Johnson’s reputation as a young man to watch shot up. The Cayugas, one of the six nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, presented him with a tomahawk inlaid with silver, as a token of their admiration for him.
    In 1838, when George was twenty-two years old, a new minister arrived at the white clapboard mission church at Tuscarora. The Reverend Adam Elliott was a tall Scotsman of devout intent and impossibly shy disposition. At first, he was uncertain how to treat the young Mohawk who translated his sermons so gracefully. But George’s easy manner and quiet self-assurance soon put Elliott at ease. He invited George Johnson to stay with him at Tuscarora parsonage, and despite Adam Elliott’s