In the spring and summer of 1870, Robert Cunningham, Molyneux St. John, and Kate Ranoe filed 89 stories for Toronto’s Daily Telegraph and Globe while embedded with Colonel Garnet Wolseley’s military expedition to Red River in what would become the Province of Manitoba. Together, their articles are a first draft, rough and ungainly, of the story of the expedition written from a unique civilian perspective. They also bring a host of long-forgotten characters to life and offer eyewitness insights into the first major crisis faced by a very young Canadian nation.
Embedded: Two Journalists, a Burlesque Star, and the Expedition to Oust Louis Riel is my effort to wrangle their work into — hopefully — a more coherent narrative. I’ve made no effort to check the veracity of the stories or to correlate them with other contemporary accounts. The book, as such, shouldn’t be read as a purely historical chronicle of the expedition to the Red River Settlement but rather for the unparalleled take by three civilians who lived day-to-day with one of the most important military expeditions in Canadian history.
I’d also like to make a few notes on the text. First, I’ve tried to reduce clutter by removing direct references to the primary source material. For those interested, I’ve organized the newspaper articles by chapter in the section called “Sources.” Other references are noted where appropriate. Second, the text includes a number of dialogues, most between Robert Cunningham and people such as Louis Riel, Reverend George Young, and Chief Henry Prince. These are excerpted from the newspaper articles, with some minimal editing for punctuation and style, but shouldn’t necessarily be taken as accurate representations of what the characters were like, what they said, or how they spoke. One case in point is Cunningham’s report of his conversation with Louis Riel in January 1870. Riel’s hair-trigger temper and mood swings seem to correlate with contemporary accounts, but Cunningham takes considerable licence with Riel’s ability to speak English (Riel was fluently bilingual), education (Riel was well schooled in religion, law, and political science), and blasphemy (Riel was a devout Catholic who abhorred the practice). Then, as now, hyperbole sells. Third, some of the cited material includes terms such as Indian, half-breed, or squaw. While considered derogatory today, these were common in 1870 and have been included to preserve historical accuracy.