Annette, The Metis Spy A Heroine of the N.W. Rebellion
By Joseph Edmund Collins
The beasts must have ridden far, for their flanks were white with foam, and their riders were splashed with froth and mud,
“The day is nearly done, mon ami,” said one, stretching out his arm and measuring the height of the sun from the horizon. “How red it is; and mark these blood-stains upon its face! It gives warning to the tyrants who oppress these fair plains, but they cannot read the signs.”
There was not a motion anywhere in all the heavens, and the only sound that broke the stillness was the dull trample of the ponies’ hoofs upon the sod. On either side was the wide-level prairie, covered with thick, tall grass, through which blazed the purple, crimson, and garnet blooms, of vetch and wild peas. The tiger lily, too, rose here and there like a sturdy queen of beauty with its great terra cotta petals, specked with umber-brown. Here and there, also, upon the mellow level, stood a clump of poplars or white oaks—prim like virgins without suitors, with their robes drawn close about them; but when over the unmeasured plain the wind blew, they bowed their heads gracefully, as a company of eastern girls when the king commands.
As the two horsemen rode silently around one of these clumps, there suddenly came through the hush the sound of a girl’s voice singing. The song was exquisitely worded and touching, and the singer’s voice was as sweet and limpid as the notes of a bobolink. They marveled much about who the singer might be and proposed that both should leave the path and join the unknown fair one. Dismounting, they fastened their horses in the shelter of the poplars and proceeded on foot toward the point whence the singing came. A few minutes walk brought the two beyond a small poplar grove, and there, upon a fallen tree-bole, in the delicious cool of the afternoon, they saw the songstress sitting. She was a maiden of about eighteen years, and her soft, silky, dark hair was over her shoulders. In girlish fancy, she had woven for herself a crown of flowers out of marigolds and daisies and put it upon her head.
She did not hear the footsteps of the men upon the soft prairie, and they did not at once reveal themselves but stood a little way back listening to her. She had ceased her song and was gazing beyond intently. On the naked limb of a desolate, thunder-riven tree that stood apart from its lush, green-boughed neighbours, sat a thrush in a most melancholy attitude. Every few seconds he would utter a note of song, sometimes low and sorrowful, then in a louder key, and more plaintive, as if he were calling for some responsive voice from far away over the prairie.
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Joseph Edmund Collins
COLLINS, JOSEPH EDMUND, teacher, publisher, journalist, and author; b. 22 Oct. 1855 in Placentia, Nfld, son of William Joseph Collins and Eleanor O’Reilly; m. Gertrude Anna Murphy and they had two children, who died in infancy; d. 23 Feb. 1892 in New York City.
Biography.
While Joseph Edmund Collins liked to speculate on his family’s distinguished lineage, his father was a farmer and lighthouse keeper of modest means. Intelligent and ambitious but without formal education, Edmund, as he preferred to be called, experimented with several occupations: at 18 he briefly served with the Constabulary Force of Newfoundland; at 19 he left the island to take up work in a law office in Fredericton, N.B.; and at 20 he turned to teaching school. It was not until Collins became attached to journalism, first as the publisher of the Fredericton Star in 1878 and then as editor of the Chatham North Star two years later, that he was finally captured by the world of letters. As his mother reported, he found the power to “sway the multitude” irresistible.
Collins had a message to convey, namely, the promotion of an independent, even republican, Canada. In particular, he sought by fostering the literary culture of the nation to give the inert political body of confederation a heart and soul of its own; and it was on the educated youth of the country, those he believed free from the partisan and sectarian prejudices of the past, that he focused his efforts. In Chatham, Collins’s enthusiasm and natural brilliance caught the imagination of his wife’s second cousin, the young schoolteacher and fledgling poet Charles George Douglas Roberts*. Around the campfire and sitting room, Collins pushed Roberts to the greater effort as a poet and greater commitment as a nationalist, and he saw the publication of Roberts’s Orion, and other poems in the autumn of 1880 as the breakthrough necessary to the creation of Canadian literature.
When Collins moved to Toronto that winter to become an editor at the Globe, he carried both his message and Roberts’s example. It was probably Collins who, in May 1881, provided the copy of Orion that so inspired another young poet, Trinity College student Archibald Lampman; it was certainly Collins who established a corresponding friendship between Lampman and Roberts. Furthermore, Collins used his influence with publisher Goldwin Smith*, to whom he had been drawn by mutual outlook, to have Roberts hired as editor of the Week and brought to Toronto in the autumn of 1883. In short, Collins stimulated, promoted, and drew together the two central members of the group which would subsequently be labeled the “confederation poets.” Lampman called him the “literary father” of a generation of young poets, telling a friend that “with old Joseph Edmund to egg us on we shall surely do something.” But in doing something Lampman and Roberts left their mentor behind.
Brilliant, enthusiastic, and a lover of life and literature, Collins lacked the discipline to persevere with his writing, career, and family. Unwilling or unable to hold a job, he was described by Roberts as “always engaged busily in loose, random work.” He dropped from the Globe within a year or two and thereafter attempted to make a living from free-lance journalism. Writing on almost any subject for any magazine, journal, or newspaper that would pay him, Collins never had or made the leisure to realize the potential his friends were sure he had. Indeed, the only significant work to issue from his pen was the first biography of Sir John A. Macdonald, issued by Rose Publishing Company in 1883. Collins attributed his ideals of pragmatic nationalism to Macdonald and strained to fit his subject into a liberal mold. Too partisan and too little researched to survive as a reference, the biography nevertheless has lasting importance because of the penultimate chapter on “Thought and literature” – one of the first significant attempts to draw attention to the country’s new generation of authors, of whom Roberts was named exemplar. His praise of young authors was repeated the following year in a lesser work, Canada under the administration of Lord Lorne. Tiring of such political biographies, between 1884 and 1886 Collins published four forgettable novels, the imaginative Story of Louis Riel alone achieving notoriety – for its overt racism.
By 1886 Collins’s career as a writer was stalled: his nationalist vision had been checked by a country too immature to sustain its men of letters. His friends recognized this reality and found other jobs, Lampman as a clerk with the Post Office Department in Ottawa and Roberts as a professor at King’s College, Windsor, N.S. Collins would not or could not follow this path, and instead gravitated to the literary bustle of New York City. There he became an editor at the Epoch, a new weekly magazine of literature and opinion. But Collins did not forget his roots. When the first issue appeared on 11 Feb. 1887, it contained, among notices of works by various American authors, an announcement of Roberts’s In divers tones (which was dedicated to Collins). Indeed, Roberts’s name continued to appear on the literary page until Collins left the magazine in 1889.
Unfortunately, the change of scene did not improve Collins’s prospects. Whether as a cause or a consequence, he turned to drink, undermining both his health and his marriage. Thrown back on the precarious life of the freelance writer, and now alone, he shifted from rented room to rented room, frequently living off the charity of friends. Among those who took him in was another of the confederation poets, William Bliss Carman*, who in 1890 had come to New York to seek his fortune as an editor with the Independent. Perhaps revived by the young Carman, that summer Collins visited the Roberts home in Windsor in an attempt to improve his health and recapture some of the inspirational camaraderie of the past. Though the holiday momentarily revived Collins’s health, it ruptured a friendship. Too dissipated to be a congenial companion, Collins made matters worse when he departed for New York in October leaving a trail of unpaid bills for Roberts to cover. As Roberts later wrote to Carman, “My profound distrust of him had killed my affection for him.” It was a sad end to an important relationship. For his part, Carman provided a home almost until drink finally took the distracted Collins early in 1892.
Joseph Edmund Collins
