The Project Gutenberg EBook of Legends of Vancouver, by E. Pauline Johnson

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Title: Legends of Vancouver

Author: E. Pauline Johnson

Release Date: June 24, 2004 [EBook #3478]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LEGENDS OF VANCOUVER ***

Produced by Judy Boss and Andrew Sly

LEGENDS OF VANCOUVER

By E. Pauline Johnson
(Tekahionwake)

PREFACE

I have been asked to write a preface to these Legends of Vancouver,
which, in conjunction with the members of the Publication
Sub-committee--Mrs. Lefevre, Mr. L. W. Makovski and Mr. R. W.
Douglas--I have helped to put through the press. But scarcely any
prefatory remarks are necessary. This book may well stand on its
own merits. Still, it may be permissible to record one's glad
satisfaction that a poet has arisen to cast over the shoulders of
our grey mountains, our trail-threaded forests, our tide-swept
waters, and the streets and sky-scrapers of our hurrying city, a
gracious mantle of romance. Pauline Johnson has linked the vivid
present with the immemorial past. Vancouver takes on a new aspect
as we view it through her eyes. In the imaginative power that she
has brought to these semi-historical sagas, and in the liquid flow
of her rhythmical prose, she has shown herself to be a literary
worker of whom we may well be proud: she has made a most estimable
contribution to purely Canadian literature.

BERNARD McEVOY

AUTHOR'S FOREWORD

These legends (with two or three exceptions) were told to me
personally by my honored friend, the late Chief Joe Capilano, of
Vancouver, whom I had the privilege of first meeting in London in
1906, when he visited England and was received at Buckingham Palace
by their Majesties King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra.

To the fact that I was able to greet Chief Capilano in the Chinook
tongue, while we were both many thousands of miles from home, I
owe the friendship and the confidence which he so freely gave me
when I came to reside on the Pacific coast. These legends he
told me from time to time, just as the mood possessed him, and he
frequently remarked that they had n