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Notes

1. The Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2002), edited by W.H. New, suggests, perhaps misleadingly, that Mitchell “was the author of five books of fiction, patriotic sentiment, and local history.” In reality there was The Kingdom of America: The Canadian Creed (1930), which could be termed a work of patriotic sentiment; The Yellow Briar: A Story of the Irish on the Canadian Countryside (1933), a work of autobiographical fiction; The Water-Drinker (1937), a collection of poems; Robert Harding: A Story of Every Day Life (1938), a novel; and The Settlement of York County (1952), a work of local history published posthumously and very likely not entirely by Mitchell’s hand.

2. The Mitchell family in Canada began with its pioneer patriarch, John Mitchell (1815–1901), and his wife, Jane (1817–1875), both originally from Ireland. They had seven children, of whom William Mitchell (1847–1916), the second born, was the father of John Wendell Mitchell (1882–1951), creator of Patrick Slater and author of The Yellow Briar (1933).

3. The Mitchell family donated a parcel of land that was part of the Mitchell farm in the late 1840s for a Methodist church and cemetery plot, the first burials taking place in the latter in 1848. The church, known as the Mitchell Church, was served by a circuit missionary minister and remained as a Methodist congregation until the Methodist and Presbyterian churches were united in 1925. (See “The Mitchell Church Story” by Jack Brooksbank and Steven Brown in addenda to The Yellow Briar (1994).

4. Mitchell displayed his reformist and visionary tendencies in a tiny breviary-like booklet that he called The Kingdom of America: The Canadian Creed, which he published privately at considerable cost in 1930. In it Mitchell ranged over the story of Canada, the country’s links with England, and its prospects because of its proximity to the United States. But the heart of what Mitchell called “this curious little book” was concerned with Canada and its sense of itself. In holding up a mirror to the country, Mitchell exhibited the generosity of spirit and a forward-looking sensibility that are present in The Yellow Briar. As an example of his prescience, he says: “His Majesty’s Canadian government might occupy itself to good purpose in giving [Canadians] … a Canadian flag that will have at least the dignity of a registered trade mark.” He goes on to say with some irony: “Canadians were left until a recent date in use of a flag that carried on the fly a grotesque jumble of hieroglyphics, including among others, a dead fish, a live buffalo, an antediluvian ship, a field of grain and a marine sunset.” He goes on to growl that beasts and flowers will not be appropriate for a flag and, prophetic irony of ironies, thinks that the maple leaf will not do because it does not occur in all regions of Canada.

5. The extent to which John Mitchell managed to muddy the waters regarding himself is evidenced by the fact that there are two different years listed for his birth (1880 and 1882), and The Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada (2002) refers the reader away from John Mitchell, the real person, to Patrick Slater, the fictitious creation, whose given dates are those of John Mitchell.