THOMAS SCOTT
The Red River Resistance lasted for 416 days.1 During that time three people died: John Hugh Sutherland, Norbert Parisien and Thomas Scott. Sutherland’s death was a tragic accident regretted by everyone. Everyone understood there was no need to pursue further justice for his death. Memories of Sutherland rest in peace. Memories of Parisien and Scott do not.
Scott was tied to the deaths of the other two. Scott was in the Portage party when they captured Parisien on February 15, 1870. Parisien escaped and in the process stole a gun. He was hiding in the bushes when Sutherland galloped by. Parisien, fearing recapture, shot him twice. Sutherland knew it had been an accident, and on his deathbed he pleaded for mercy for Parisien. But his magnanimous gesture came too late. Scott had already beaten Parisien with a club. Using Parisien’s sash, Scott galloped his horse back and forth over the ice, simultaneously dragging and strangling the barely conscious man. Cooler heads prevented Scott from lynching Parisien, but it was hardly a merciful intervention. It condemned Parisien to die slowly from Scott’s strangling and vicious beating.
No one seems to know whose side Parisien was on or if he was on any side at all. Riel thought he was a Schultz partisan. But it was Schultz’s Canadian Party that captured Parisien. What is clear is that Parisien was Métis and he died at the hands of Thomas Scott. The New Nation reported that Parisien died of his wounds on April 6, 1870.2
Shortly after the brutal assault on Parisien, Thomas Scott was captured and imprisoned by Lépine. By all accounts Scott was an obnoxious bully boy. His character did not improve in captivity. He taunted and kicked the guards. He spat bitter racist slurs at them day and night. Riel tried several times to persuade Scott to settle down, but he said he would never be satisfied until he had walked through the blood of Louis Riel. Scott threatened repeatedly to assassinate Riel, overthrow the Métis forces, torch Métis homes and take the fort. With Schultz and Mair gone, Scott was one of the remaining leaders of the Canadian Party. According to the Métis guards, Scott was inciting the other captives to violence, and infecting the other prisoners and everyone else in the fort. According to The New Nation,
Mr. Scott was very violent and abusive in his language and actions, annoying and insulting to the guards, and even threatening the President. He (Scott) vowed openly that if ever he got out, he would shoot the President; and further stated that he was at the head of the party of Portage people, who on their way to Kildonan, called at Coutu’s house and searched it for the President, with the intention of shooting him.3
Most accounts say the guards wanted to kill Scott because he taunted and kicked them. This makes little sense. The guards had heard racist slurs all their lives. They were hunters, strong men who would not fear a man they had tied up and in their control. If he kicked them they would have just kicked him back.
The motives of the guards make more sense if we look to the strategic reasons for eliminating Scott. He was dangerous to the guards, their families and especially to Riel. Scott was inside the fort, not outside. And the fort was not a prison. It was a large wooden building. Windows could be opened, and there were visitors and many people around. Security was difficult to maintain, which could readily be seen from the number of escapes. Scott was perfectly placed to lead an attack from the inside while the Canadian Party mounted an attack from outside. The men would be forced to guard their backs and to fight on two fronts. There were too many opportunities for Scott, a man obsessed with killing Riel, to make good on his threats. Scott was a serious problem and he was inside their defences. The guards believed Scott needed to be killed.
The French Métis were men of action. They never opted for a wait-and-see approach. When they thought something needed doing, they did it. The guards dragged Scott out into the courtyard and started to beat him. They might have killed him then if one of the Provisional Government councillors had not intervened. The guards thought saving Scott was a mistake. They believed Scott had to be eliminated and they pressed Riel hard. Damase Harrison and Jerome St. Matte demanded that Riel send Scott to the war council for judgment. If Riel refused, then he would be the one facing the council.
Riel was an Indigenous leader. He was not the commander of an army. He could not command his men to blindly obey if they disagreed with his orders. Riel’s men were independent volunteers, and they followed him because they believed in him. They were also free to leave at any time and free to take their own path. So, Riel was forced to concede to the guards’ demands. But he would not let the Métis descend to the level of the Canadian Party, which had just acted as a mob, viciously beaten Parisien, attempted a lynching and left him on his deathbed. Riel insisted that the Provisional Government was to be respected. They would act deliberately and deliver justice with due process, in the manner of a government.
So, they put Scott to a trial before the war council. It was not a trial in the style of British justice. This was a Métis trial. It was the way they meted out justice according to the Laws of the Prairie. These were the same laws they had just codified and adopted in assembly. Articulating and codifying laws, especially those that are part of an oral tradition, is not a small endeavour. It takes considerable thought and the participation of many people. It is safe to say, then, that the Métis had been thinking a great deal about their laws and how they worked. They had been applying their laws. The Laws of the Prairie had governed the Métis throughout the North-West, everywhere except in the Red River settlement. Since many Métis spent more time on the Plains than in the settlement, the Laws of the Prairie would have been very familiar to them. They formed the basis for how the Métis dealt with justice on the hunt, and they’d been doing it this way for over fifty years. It was a system that began under Cuthbert Grant and developed over time. It was well known to the Métis buffalo hunters.
The Métis guards in the fort were buffalo hunters. During the fall and winter, they were in the settlement, supporting the Resistance. The Métis force had been bolstered because the hunters were there and not out on the Plains. They were skilled with horse and gun and they drilled often. They had even co-opted Macdonald’s commissioner, Colonel de Salaberry, into drilling their young boys with bayonets, guns and tactics. These were the men who demanded that Riel put Scott on trial.
The procedure of a Métis trial was unique. It drew from three distinct legal traditions––British common law, France’s criminal process, and Cree and Ojibwa justice systems. There were some similarities in all three. Each called on witnesses to testify. All three systems used one or more decision-makers. But after that, there were significant differences.
In the British adversarial system, witnesses testified before the accused and were cross-examined by a prosecutor. In the French non-adversarial system, the evidence was primarily gathered before the trial and admitted with few restrictions. Judges decided based on their inner conviction whether there was moral proof of guilt. In the First Nations system, the hearing was concerned with the facts of the offence and the history of the accused. It was a forward-looking, non-adversarial system.
Both the British and French systems purported to seek the truth with respect to the facts of the offence. Indigenous trials sought a different goal—restoration of harmony in the community. While this required an examination of the facts of the offence, there was no belief that an adversarial system helped the decision-maker to arrive at a useful remedy. First Nation trials acknowledged societal causes and had a broad range of remedies unknown to British or French law.
Scott’s trial more closely resembled the French and First Nation systems. There was more than one judge, and the trial was not conducted under an adversarial system. It was more of a review of evidence admitted without restriction, and the judges decided based on their inner conviction that there was moral proof of guilt.
Scott’s trial did not focus on the details of the offence, which was vaguely described as insubordination. Two witnesses testified as to the specific incidents of Scott’s wilful disobedience, his threats, his assaults on Riel, the danger he posed and his physical abuses of the guards. There was no cross-examination. A council of six heard the evidence but Scott was not present for that part of the trial. He was brought into the room to hear the verdict, which was translated for him by Riel.
In some ways the procedure at Scott’s trial resembles Riel’s trial in 1885. Riel was not allowed to present the defence or evidence he wanted, and he was allowed to speak only after the evidence was closed. The main difference was that Riel’s trial was conducted in his presence. There was no presumption of innocence in either trial and both guilty verdicts were foregone conclusions. It is the death sentence in both trials that shocks the conscience.
The procedure of the Scott trial should not be held up against the Canadian or British justice system. By the 1860s the Court of Assiniboia in Red River had developed its own unique justice system. For example, the court, a creature of the Hudson’s Bay Company, often allowed judges and legal counsel to adduce their own opinions and testimony as evidence. Often more than one Hudson’s Bay Company officer (called a judge) sat on a case, the presumption of innocence played little or no role in a trial, and the court declined to hear cases that were against its own corporate interests. The court’s procedures were anything but regular, and the Métis believed that it acted with a clear bias against them. This is in part why the Métis often exercised their influence to clear some cases off the docket that were not in their interests. Pure British law and trial procedure were unknown in Red River.
The trial of Thomas Scott was held before a war council composed of André Nault, Joseph Delorme, Janvier Ritchot, Elzéar Lagimodière, Elzéar Goulet and Baptiste Lépine. Joseph Nolin acted as the clerk. Ambroise Lépine was the presiding officer, and Louis Riel translated into English. Riel, Nolin and Ambroise Lépine didn’t vote.
We have conflicting accounts of the trial. According to Joseph Nolin, three witnesses, Joseph Delorme, Riel and Edmund Turner, gave evidence against Scott. According to André Nault, Riel was not a witness but he spoke to the judges, urging them to spare Scott the death sentence. If they disagreed and found Scott guilty, Riel would accept his share of the responsibility.
After hearing the evidence the court unanimously voted Scott guilty. Scott was brought in and the court voted on his sentence in his presence. The majority, Ritchot, Nault, Goulet and Delorme, voted for a death sentence. Baptiste Lépine and Elzéar Lagimodière voted against execution.
Death was not their only punishment option. The Métis used shame quite effectively, to deter thieves, for example. A thief on the buffalo hunt who was tried and found guilty was marched into the centre of the camp, where his name, with “thief” added, would be shouted out three times. The entire camp would then know the thief by name, and word would spread to other camps across the North-West. Because each individual life depended on the collective, and the collective depended on trust, public shaming worked well in those situations. But it was obvious to everyone that Scott was not susceptible to shaming.
Banishment, another common punishment, and one suggested by one of the war council, Elzéar Lagimodière, was also not a realistic option. No one believed Scott would stay out of the country. They could not let Scott stay in prison, where he would continue to be a danger to them all. The decision to execute Scott stood. Ambroise Lépine ruled that the majority sentence would be carried out. Scott was executed the next day, March 4, 1870, by a firing squad.4
The Métis trial of Thomas Scott should not be critiqued as an absence of, or inadequate, justice. It was not mob rule and it was not primitive. It was duly deliberated with due process, not carried out in the heat of passion, and it was done according to a justice system that had been functioning in the North-West for half a century.
After the execution the Métis refused to hand over Scott’s body. A wooden box was buried inside Fort Garry, but when the box was later exhumed, there was no body inside. Elzéar Goulet and Elzéar Lagimodière disposed of Scott’s body, and both went to their graves without revealing where they disposed of it. The search for Scott’s body continued well into the mid-twentieth century, and to this day no one knows where Scott’s body is.
The death of Scott has consumed the attention of English Canadians for over a century, but there is virtually no memory of Parisien. His death does not echo down through English-Canadian history as Scott’s death has. But the Métis Nation remembers Parisien. They are mystified by the intense focus on the execution of Scott and the indifference to Scott’s murder of Parisien. The Métis Nation story of Thomas Scott starts with the murder of Parisien.
From the Métis perspective, the Provisional Government conducted a trial and carried out a court-ordered death sentence. Scott’s death was a state execution. It was the first fateful decision that would have future consequences for the Métis Nation.
THE QU’APPELLE ASSEMBLY
The Qu’Appelle Lakes had long been one of the Métis rendezvous and wintering camps. A Métis assembly had been called at the lakes as soon as the snow disappeared and it was possible to travel in the spring of 1870. Early arrivals waited weeks for all the Plains hunter families to assemble. By April over a thousand Métis had gathered in Qu’Appelle. They came from all over the North-West, including from south of the border. They were keenly attuned to what was going on in Red River, and families talked of little else. They wanted to hear the latest news, and they were entirely sympathetic to their relatives in Red River.
The Qu’Appelle assembly was a great social event. People devoured the stories of the Red River Resistance, especially stories about Riel. It is at the Qu’Appelle assembly that we first hear the Métis begin to speak of Riel as a man inspired by heaven. There were stories that Riel had been seen with a supernatural being in the form of a man and that he conversed with this being in a strange language that was not French, English or Indigenous.
Métis elders, lii vyeu, all have stories about Riel. They all begin with the same words: “Riel, oh he was a saint, aen saent.” They all think of Riel as a holy man, a man who walked with God and the spirits. That reverence for Riel began in Red River, but by the spring of 1870, it had reached the hunters in Qu’Appelle. They took the stories of Riel with them throughout the North-West.
The hunters saw their relatives in Red River engaged in a battle to protect the Métis Nation and all that entailed—their land, religion, culture, practices and rights. The question for the thousand assembled at Qu’Appelle was whether they were going to join the action in Red River. Most wanted to go. Indeed, that appears to have been the general mood of the camp. The fight was about family, their rights and their nation. They were not naturally inclined to abstain from such a fight, and they would never take sides against their brothers and sisters in Red River.
The Hudson’s Bay Company traders tried to convince the Métis winterers to stay out of it. They distributed Donald Smith’s proclamation widely. But there had been too many proclamations. McDougall’s proclamations had turned out to be bogus. What was different about this one? They would not believe in the proclamation just because the Hudson’s Bay Company said it was authentic.
The deciding factor lay with Pascal Breland and Salomon Hamelin. Both were important Métis traders and very influential men. Both vehemently opposed Riel’s activists. Breland was called le roi de traiteurs (the king of the traders), and his influence was greatly enhanced by being the son-in-law of Cuthbert Grant. When Breland made his speech to the assembly, he knew the mood of the gathering, so he began by situating the Métis clearly on side with the goals of those in Red River. It was wrong for Canada to impose her rule without first making terms with the Métis. All the Métis wanted to protect their lands, their language and religion, their independence and their culture. So far they all agreed.
But Breland had never supported the Riels. He was from St. François Xavier, and since the Sayer trial, there had been a difference of opinion between the Métis of St. François Xavier and the Métis of St. Vital and St. Norbert. It was not an irreconcilable difference. There were many marriages between the two groups. But since 1849 they had mostly hunted in separate groups, and it was not lost on the St. François Xavier Métis that Louis Riel’s father had been, toward the end, one of the most vocal opponents of the Hudson’s Bay Company and therefore of Cuthbert Grant. Times had changed but some of the old tensions remained. The Métis from the French parishes around the Forks and St. François Xavier were not always unanimous in their ambitions.
Breland and Hamelin, both wealthy traders, had much to gain from an alliance with Canada that would open markets for their trade goods. They also had their land registered (it had originated as a grant from the Hudson’s Bay Company to Cuthbert Grant), so they were less fearful of losing their claimed lands. And unfortunately Riel had imprisoned Hamelin for a while the previous winter, a fact that did not make him disposed to assist the Riel activists. Breland and Hamelin were also associates of Dease and of an older generation of Métis who were uneasy with the brash young men leading the charge in Red River. Finally, Breland’s son was working with Riel’s party, and that was particularly galling for his father.
The news of Thomas Scott’s execution had circulated before the assembly. In that spring of 1870, the Métis winterers gathered at Qu’Appelle were reluctant to let the execution of Scott change things. But Breland and Hamelin were persuasive. Retribution was coming for that deed. Macdonald was sending the army. If the hunters went to Red River, they would be fighting against the Canadian army and they wouldn’t win that battle. Both men argued that the hunters should not go to Red River. It was the turning point. Had Breland and Hamelin not urged neutrality, the hunters, over a thousand of them, would have gone to Red River. That had been what they wanted to do before Breland and Hamelin spoke. But in the end they listened to Breland’s advice and stayed out of it. Most drifted back onto the Plains, and only a few went to Red River to help. That was the second fateful decision.
THE MANITOBA ACT
At the end of March 1870, the Red River delegates, Alfred Scott, Judge Black and Father Ritchot, left Red River for Ottawa. They were armed with a new draft of the List of Rights, which the executive of the Provisional Government had drafted. Thomas Bunn had given the delegates a letter of instruction and a commission. The delegates were instructed that they had full discretion to negotiate ten of the twenty articles.5 However the other articles were “peremptory.” The delegates were not empowered to conclude any final arrangements. They were to negotiate the best deal they could and bring the proposal back to Red River for the approval of the Provisional Government.
When two of the delegates, Father Ritchot and Alfred Scott, landed in Ontario, Schultz and his friends had them arrested—twice. The Métis Nation was outraged that the delegates selected by their Provisional Government had been arrested. The court dismissed both warrants. Nevertheless, because of these antics, Scott and Ritchot were not free until April 23. It certainly started the negotiations on a sour footing.
The delegates began to negotiate with the federal government on April 25, 1870. All the while the government was preparing a force to go to Red River. On April 6, 1870, Colonel Garnet Wolseley had written to his brother, “The government is anxious that everything should be done quietly for as they expect some vagabond delegates from Mr. Riel’s government to go to Ottawa they do not wish it to appear that they are preparing for war whilst they are also professing to treat amicably.”6 Privately, Macdonald wrote that the “impulsive half-breeds . . . must be kept down by a strong hand until they are swamped by the influx of settlers.”7 But there was no unanimity on the question of sending in the army. Quebec was against it, understanding, correctly as it turned out, that the troops could only have one purpose—punishment.
Ritchot began the negotiations with two crucial issues. First, he expressed his concern about sending in the army. Second, he demanded a general amnesty for all the participants. Sir John A. Macdonald and Sir George-Étienne Cartier deflected any talk of an armed force. They also led Ritchot to believe that the amnesty would be forthcoming. Macdonald and Cartier wanted to talk about the land, specifically about whether there would be control over the lands and resources. They conceded that Manitoba would enter Confederation as a province, but it was not really a concession, because under their scheme Manitoba would be a province in name only, with control of the lands and resources left in the federal government’s hands. The reason Riel had been so insistent about Manitoba becoming a province was because he understood that provinces had local control over lands and resources. The List of Rights also emphasized the need for local control whether Manitoba was called a territory or a province. Macdonald’s proposal, that Manitoba would be a province in name only, defeated all the aspirations of the Provisional Government.
For Ritchot, the chief negotiator, the change was profound. The Métis sent their negotiators to obtain local control of lands and resources, language and religious protections, democratic rights and the principles on which Manitoba was to enter Confederation. Instead there was no local control over lands and resources. This left Métis lands and customary land use practices particularly vulnerable. But Ritchot was determined to protect their lands, so the negotiation turned to how much land Canada would set aside for the Métis. Macdonald and Cartier initially offered 100,000 acres. Ritchot negotiated them up to 1.4 million acres.
Why did the delegates accept Macdonald and Cartier’s proposal when it was contrary to their instructions? One major factor would have influenced their need to conclude an agreement quickly. They knew that Macdonald was amassing an army to send to Red River. They also accepted because of three promises Macdonald and Cartier made. The first promise was that the Métis land distribution would be supervised by the local legislature. Second, there would be legislation to ensure that the lands would continue to be held by Métis families. Finally, an amnesty was promised and would be forthcoming. Cartier was well aware of the Red River negotiators’ reliance on an amnesty. He wrote to Sir John Young, “The delegates relied upon these explanations and forthwith entered upon the negotiations which resulted in the passing of the Act relating to the Government of the Province of Manitoba . . . [and without the assurance of an amnesty] it is more than probable they would not have felt themselves justified in negotiating.”8
Macdonald and Cartier had a tough time getting their bill ratified. When the draft bill went to the House of Commons, the Canadian Party screamed its opposition. Macdonald and Cartier could not afford to have “Schultz of Red River” against the bill, so they bought him off with $11,000 and the offer of an appointment in Red River. Schultz, ever the opportunist, promptly supported the bill, a dereliction that caused much anger among his confederates.
When Father Ritchot returned to Red River with the draft bill, he worked with Riel and the council before presenting it to the people. They knew that Macdonald was sending the army. They all knew it was a take-it-or-leave-it offer. So Ritchot presented the draft bill with a fair amount of spin, leaning heavily on the promises about the amnesty and local control over land distribution. The Métis were persuaded that the promise of 1.4 million acres would allow them to secure their lands. The Provisional Government agreed to accept the terms of the draft bill that would, on May 12, 1870, become the Manitoba Act.
This was the third fateful decision.
RIEL DISARMS
Everyone in Red River knew that the army was arriving with a large number of volunteers from the Orange Lodges in Ontario. By May 25 the Canadian Expeditionary Force was at the end of Lake Superior, awaiting only the passage of the Manitoba Act before embarking overland to Red River. The “orangistes” in the ranks spent much of the trip to Red River boasting about how they would avenge their brother Thomas Scott by annihilating the Métis and assassinating Riel. Many of the voyageurs hired to transport the army were Métis, and they deployed the moccasin telegraph to send messages to Riel in Red River. The Métis Nation began discussions about what to do about the coming army, and whether to do anything at all.
More than one person, including Gabriel Dumont, wanted Riel to take on the army. Dumont promised five hundred warriors.9 Old Nick Chatelain, a much-respected Métis leader at Lake of the Woods/Rainy Lake appears to have been acting as a double agent. He was retained by Canada to keep the Ojibwa on side when the Expeditionary Force came through, which he did, but only to the extent that the Ojibwa agreed not to attack the force. They wouldn’t lift a finger to help. They refused to act as guides or to clear the portages.10 That was in June. In July Chatelain was in Red River. Did Riel want the Métis from Lake of the Woods to attack the expedition? Chatelain suggested that a quick drop of logs at the right spot on the Winnipeg River would obliterate the force once and for all.11
It was Riel who stopped the Métis from attacking the troops. The newspapers confirmed the vulnerability of the troops and Riel’s control over his men:
I am of opinion––and almost every officer in the detachment agrees with me—that a hundred determined men with a couple of guns, could not only have, over and over again, sent our boats to the bottom, but have kept the whole detachment at bay and in fact have caused its return . . .12
[B]ut for Riel’s command over his men, but for his strong personal influence and predilection for Canada and her institutions, the loss of life would, in all probability, have reached hundreds, massacre and assassination would have done their bloody work, the Canadian expedition would certainly never have reached Fort Garry this year.13
If Riel had known about the violence the Expeditionary Force was about to inflict on the Métis, one wonders if he would have made a different decision. It is quite certain that many Métis thought the army was only coming for slaughter and should be stopped. And Riel knew he could take the warpath; that’s what would have followed if he’d agreed to Chatelain’s or Dumont’s suggestions. The Métis would have followed him. But Riel had never sought war. He took up arms only to defend their right to negotiate.
At this point Riel did not suspect that Canada and Manitoba would gut the key provisions of the Manitoba Act. It would have taken a devious mind to imagine that Canada would create a system that left the Métis with virtually none of the promised 1.4 million acres of land and that Manitoba would negate the French language and Catholic schools protection. Riel was many things, but not devious. He had led his people, the Métis Nation, in a basically peaceful entry into Canada. Riel was a grand idealist, and his ideals had become reality—or so he thought.
He was inexperienced in the ways of Canadian politics. Métis politics are passionate but direct. When Léveillé set up a parallel guard at Fort Garry, he was announcing to everyone that he didn’t trust Riel. There was nothing devious or covert about Léveillé’s watch. Even Dease directly confronted Riel. They argued passionately, sometimes yelled at each other and never did agree. That was the kind of politics Riel knew. He was naive when it came to the kind of politics Macdonald and Cartier practised on a daily basis.
Still, Riel had done well in leading the Resistance. He obtained his goal—negotiations. He stickhandled powerful parties—the Americans, Great Britain, Macdonald, the Sioux and his own people. He was not perfect by a long shot. He misjudged the vehemence of the Canadian Party. He was sometimes furious and sometimes very frustrated. Sometimes he was barely in control. Things didn’t always go the way he wanted them to and he made some bad decisions. But he had managed most of it well. Canada asked him to keep governing until the lieutenant-governor arrived and he agreed. He thought he could manage the handover peacefully. So, he didn’t accept Dumont’s five hundred horsemen, and he thanked Old Nick Chatelain and advised him not to go to war.14
This was the fourth fateful decision.
Riel sent the bulk of his men home. He met with the winterers who came back from the Plains in May. There were large meetings in Winnipeg and at the White Horse Plain. At these meetings Riel explained what had happened over the winter, about the Manitoba Act and the Métis Nation Treaty that guaranteed them 1.4 million acres of land, and he spoke of the coming troops. He printed and distributed Wolseley’s “we-come-in-peace” proclamation:
TO THE LOYAL INHABITANTS OF MANITOBA
Our mission is one of peace and the sole object of the expedition is to secure Her Majesty’s sovereign authority . . . Justice will be impartially administered to all races and to all classes . . . and will afford equal protection to the lives and property of all races and of all creeds. The strictest order and discipline will be maintained and private property will be carefully respected. Should any one consider himself injured by any individual attached to the force his grievance shall be promptly enquired into.15
Riel even had a celebration planned for the lieutenant-governor’s arrival. He wanted to mark the day of the handover with grace and ceremony.
Riel wrapped up his tenure, all the while believing the amnesty was on its way. But it never came. The civil authority, the lieutenant-governor, didn’t come either—at least not in time. Only the army came. Riel lingered in Fort Garry, but at the last minute he was warned that Wolseley’s real intention was to imprison him and that his life was in danger. Riel stayed to watch the vanguard of the force arrive, and then he fled south of the border. That is when he had his first taste of bitterness. His ideals had taken a body blow. Even his faith in the priests was tested. He knew now just how naive they had all been.