You must have known that in taking up arms we should be beaten.
Gabriel Dumont to Riel after the Battle of Batoche
Not until December 19, 1884, did Louis Riel at last dispatch to Ottawa his petition about the South Branch Métis land grievances. Of all the documents associated with the rebellion, this one is the most puzzling. Nowhere does it contain Riel’s own name or signature. The only author identified is Riel’s assistant, William Jackson, who in a covering letter described himself as “Secretary, General Committee.”
The Métis land grievances, the issue that had brought Riel northwards, were addressed in just two single-sentence paragraphs in the petition. Everything else either was of interest only to white settlers or concerned general political issues relating to the North-West. The only points raised on behalf of the Métis were: “That the Half-breeds of the Territory have not received 240 acres of land each, as did the Manitoba Half-breeds”; and “That the Half-breeds who are in possession of tracts of land have not received patents [titles] therefore.”
That was it, although one other paragraph called for more food supplies to be provided to the Indians. After six months in the making, the document was extraordinarily skimpy: it advanced no new arguments about Métis land claims. Most astonishingly, it made no mention of the issue that most agitated the Métis—confirmation of their traditional Quebec-style lots, long and narrow and extending to the riverbanks.
It is fair to question just how much of the petition Riel actually wrote himself. The text sounds rather like Jackson, a political and naïve radical: it declares that “settlers are exposed to coercion at elections” and that the territory needed free trade, representation in the federal Parliament and a railway to Hudson Bay. Further, Jackson commented provocatively in his covering letter that consideration had been given to sending the petition to “the Privy Council of England … rather than the federal authorities,” as though Britain could tell Canada what to do within its borders. All in all, the document was more a grandiloquent political manifesto than a petition seeking redress of land grievances.
The consequence in Ottawa was confusion. When he was asked later in the Commons whether he had received Riel’s petition, Macdonald answered, “The Bill of Rights had never been officially or in any way promulgated so far as we know, and transmitted to the government.”* This response was not evasion but a genuine misunderstanding—by this time, Riel and Jackson were known to be working on a Bill of Rights, though it was never completed. Mostly, the petition conveyed the impression that Riel, under Jackson’s influence, was trying to forge some kind of alliance with the settlers.
Initially, Macdonald responded relatively speedily. He acknowledged the petition immediately, a formality Jackson misinterpreted as evidence that a satisfactory answer would follow. Macdonald put the key question before the cabinet—whether the territory’s land policy should be changed to allow the South Branch Métis to make land claims similar to those granted in Manitoba. In that province, many Métis had sold their scrip to speculators at sums far below its value. Macdonald told Governor General Lord Lansdowne in disgust: “The scrip is sold to the sharks and spent in whiskey.” Despite his own misgivings, however, he secured cabinet agreement for a settlement similar to the terms in Manitoba.
But Macdonald bungled the delivery of this message. On January 28, 1885, the news was sent from Ottawa to Lieutenant-Governor Edgar Dewdney that the government would set up a Half-Breed Commission “with a view of settling equitably the claims of half-breeds.” This commission did eventually do some useful work, but the announcement was written in near-incomprehensible bureaucratese. When he was asked in the Commons what action he was taking, Macdonald was needlessly provocative, explaining to MPs that he had agreed to the commission “with the greatest reluctance,” but “at the last moment I yielded and I said [to the cabinet]: ‘Well, for God’s sake, let them have the scrip; they will either drink it or waste it or sell it, but let us have peace.’ ” To compound his apparent indifference, Macdonald did not get around to selecting the members of the commission until mid-March.
Most damaging of all, no notice of the announcement was sent to Riel. Instead, it went to Dewdney, who forwarded it to a local politician, who passed it on to Charles Nolin, a moderate Métis, who at last, on February 8, handed over a copy to Riel. Understandably, Riel interpreted this roundabout route as an attempt to circumvent him. After reading the document, he said angrily to the Métis, “In 40 days, Ottawa will have my answer”—a span of time that matched the period of Christ’s withdrawal into the desert.
This accounting of the events differs substantially from the traditional victim/oppressor version, which holds that Riel’s petition was treated with contemptuous indifference by Ottawa, inciting him to a rebellion he might not otherwise have initiated. The principal source for this alternative analysis is Thomas Flanagan’s Riel and the Rebellion: 1885 Reconsidered. There, Flanagan wrote, “The North-West Rebellion was as much a religious movement as a political uprising.” He argued that “the Metis’ grievances were at least partly of their own making” and that the government “was on the verge of resolving them when the Rebellion broke out.” He also questioned whether Riel was motivated by “disinterested idealism” or by self-interest in securing a settlement of his personal finances as part of an overall settlement with the government.*
Both the traditional and the revisionist versions contain elements of the truth. It’s difficult to disagree with Flanagan on his key point that by this time Riel’s religious convictions took precedence over everything else, including the Métis’ land claims. He was right also to note that Macdonald was, belatedly, taking action to address these claims. But his conclusion that Riel was prompted as much by his personal financial interests (although these certainly existed) is highly improbable. Riel may have misled the Métis, but he would not have cheated them.
Riel was most certainly still obsessed with the future of his people. But his focus had shifted. He was primarily concerned now with their religious future—the realization of the “divine mission” assigned to him by God via Bishop Bourget. Riel also saw the Métis’ future not so much in terms of additional land for individuals as in some kind of reserve in the North-West. One comment in Jackson’s covering letter is particularly revealing: he called on Ottawa to negotiate the North-West’s “entry into Confederation.” Riel believed that the survival of the Métis as a people could be achieved only by their securing a sort of self-governing reserve, one comparable to, but with greater autonomy than, the reserves of the Indians. In contemporary parlance, he seems to have had in mind some form of a distinct society, even of sovereignty-association, terms and concepts that of course did not then exist.
In Ottawa, the prevailing view, expressed repeatedly by Macdonald, was that the Métis could identify themselves either as whites or as Indians, but they could not claim the privileges of both groups. Nor was it easy to imagine how a reserve for the Métis could actually work; Father Albert Lacombe, the much-loved missionary to the Blackfoot, attempted to create one later in Alberta, but it attracted few Métis and was soon closed. The painful truth was that with the buffalo gone, the Métis could not avoid coming to terms with the new socio-economic and technological order—with, for instance, the railway and steamships already taking away many of their traditional jobs as teamsters and boatmen. Lastly, the notion of a Métis-settler alliance of some kind was quite unrealistic. While enraged that the CPR’s decision to shift its line to the south had severely damaged the economy of northern Saskatchewan, the settlers would never have marched with the Métis in rebellion against their own government. Riel must have known he was seeking the impossible. Yet he possessed still one indomitable sustaining force—the depth and intensity of his religious convictions.
Once in South Branch, Riel became a changed man. Earlier, in the asylums in Quebec and during his time in Montana, he had stopped talking about his “divine mission” because people laughed at him. In South Branch, no Métis laughed, though some surely did so in private openly. He had, now, a congregation that believed in him. As early as September 1884, the local bishop, Vital Grandin, was warning that Riel had become to the Métis “a saint; I would say rather a kind of God.” The local missionaries were deeply shocked. Their disbelief only reinforced Riel’s certitude. “I had terrible struggles with him, and I aroused his anger so much he lost all control of himself,” Father André later recalled, adding, “He became in those moments truly a maniac, twisting himself into contortions in a rage.” André tried to warn Riel that his way “could only end in war, that it would bring down on them all sorts of evils and cover the country with ruin and blood.” To Riel, certain he was doing what God wanted him to do, a solution to the apparent impossibility did exist. Should it be necessary, God would work a miracle for him.
A critical difference between Riel’s 1869 to 1870 resistance and his rebellion of 1885 was that the priests were no longer with him. Father Alexis André, well-liked by the Métis, regarded Riel’s religious views, such as that the Vatican should leave Rome for Canada, as those of an outright heretic. (photo credit 28.1)
Macdonald never gave any indication he took seriously the reports reaching him about Riel’s all-consuming religiosity; his likeliest response would have been to dismiss them as evidence of another incomprehensible squabble among Catholics. The reports he did take seriously were those claiming Riel was asking to be bribed so he could quit and go home.
The source for these reports was Father André, who quarrelled constantly with Riel about religion and told the “veritable fanatic” that his views about the Catholic Church and the Pope moving from Rome to the North-West were heresies. When André got the Métis leader talking about subjects other than religion, he noticed that Riel kept referring to his personal financial claims, saying he was worried about his family’s needs (his wife was pregnant with their third child). Among Riel’s claims were the original 240 acres awarded in 1870 to all the Métis in Manitoba, as well as some other land claims he believed he was entitled to as compensation for expenses he’d incurred while helping to bring Manitoba and the North-West Territories into Confederation.
At a meeting on December 23, André asked Riel outright whether, if the government met his terms, Riel might in exchange return to Montana. Afterwards, André wrote to Dewdney urging him to let Macdonald know that “$3,000 to $5,000 would cart the whole family across the border.” A local politician present at the meeting corroborated this discussion, claiming that Riel had said that if the government would “pay him a certain amount in settlement of these claims he would arrange to make his illiterate and unreasoning followers well satisfied with almost any settlement of their claims for land.” The tone of these reports indicates that André and his companion were telling Macdonald not so much what they had heard but what they had wanted to hear. In fact, Riel had never concealed from the Métis his personal financial claims, and none of them ever accused him of false motives.
Macdonald himself thought otherwise. He told the Commons, “I believe he came in for the purpose of attempting to extract money from the public purse.” He added dismissively, “Of course that could not be entertained for a moment.” Ever since Riel had slipped back into Canada after being sent money to stay in the United States, Macdonald had become personally hostile to him, his attitude gradually hardening into outright contempt.
After it was all over, George Denison, the old Canada Firster turned passionate imperialist, wrote in exasperation, “The whole dispute was mainly about some red tape regulations as to surveying some forty or fifty thousand acres of land on which people were already settled … [this] in a wilderness of tens of millions of acres.” A finagling of the regulations, thus, could have saved the country a great deal of blood and treasure. This escape-hatch was never resorted to, however, for two reasons: Riel had succumbed to religious zealotry, and Macdonald had forgotten his ruling maxim: “A public man should have no resentments.”
The most distinctive attribute about the rebellion was that its outcome was inevitable from the start. Riel’s strategy, to use that term loosely, was to repeat exactly what he had done in 1869–70: proclaim a provisional government, seize hostages for bargaining purposes and avoid causing casualties so the government could negotiate with him. He realized, although never admitting it, that the execution of Thomas Scott had been a terrible mistake. The circumstances in 1885, however, were utterly different. This time, no priests or American annexationists were on his side, and the English Métis, though supportive, had no intention of taking up arms. This time, insurgents would no longer be resisting outside interference but rebelling against a legitimate government. Most critically, a railway over which troops could be rushed to the West was now close to completion.
Riel did have one asset he had lacked before. Beside him now was Gabriel Dumont—a man who inspired admiration, even love, from almost all who met him. At forty-eight, he was stocky, bull-shouldered, handsome, with long hair like an Indian. He was open, generous and fearless. As a hunter, he had few equals—he was a superb shot, an outstanding horseman and, rare on the prairies, an exceptional swimmer. Sam Steele, the celebrated Mounted Police officer, said Dumont knew the prairies “as a housewife knows her kitchen”; he could always find the buffalo and “always brought them down.”
Dumont’s admiration for Riel was absolute, and he was himself a passionate Métis nationalist. He believed fervently in Riel’s religious beliefs, saying, “God would listen to his prayers.” (Riel also impressed him by being able to beat him at billiards, Dumont’s greatest passion after gambling.) The Métis looked up to him as a warrior-prince, and the Indians held him in awe. His personal appeal even attracted some Indians, though still very few, to the Métis side. Riel, though, all but threw away this priceless asset. Dumont wanted to wage a guerrilla war, harassing the army as it approached, especially at night. But Riel was convinced that if no casualties occurred, the government would negotiate with him. “Mine was the better plan,” Dumont said, after it was all over. Unquestionably, he was right.
In every respect but one, Riel’s position in 1885 was incomparably weaker than it had been in Red River. The advantage: Gabriel Dumont, a natural guerrilla fighter. But Riel never made use of this asset until it was too late. (photo credit 28.2)
Above all, Riel still possessed his direct connection to God. Despite Father André’s protestations, he became increasingly explicit about his beliefs. He was “a prophet of the New World”; a sacred king; a descendent of Saint Louis, the king of France, who would defeat the forces of evil in the world. His piety became ever more embracing. At one all-night wedding, while the guests danced and enjoyed their refreshments, Riel spent the night upstairs on his knees praying. He developed a special diet consisting of milk, vegetables and cooked blood. His personal vanity became ever more pronounced: in his diary, he described himself as “unusually wise and farsighted,” with an intelligence “far above any other.”
On February 24, a community meeting was held at the church in Batoche to discuss the government’s announcement of the land claims commission. Riel told the gathering he had done all he could by sending in the petition and would now return to the United States. The entire congregation roared back, “No, No.” After promising to stay, Riel asked, “And the consequences?” Back came the unanimous response: “We will suffer the consequences.” At a meeting on March 5, Dumont and ten others signed an oath to “save our country from a wicked government by taking up arms.” Then the whole audience joined in prayer. By mid-March, Riel had welded together Métis nationalism and his religious vision into an indissoluble whole.
The actual rebellion began on March 18, exactly forty days after Riel first read the government announcement. He sent armed Métis to a store in Batoche to seize arms and ammunition, and later imprisoned hostages. He proclaimed that he had decided to divide the North-West into seven parts, one for the Métis, the others for nations such as the Irish, Germans and Italians. When a priest rebuked him, Riel silenced him, declaring, “Rome has fallen.” He created a provisional government, calling it “Exovedate”—a Latinized word of his own invention, meaning “from out of the flock.” The Exovedate’s first act was to proclaim Riel “a prophet in the service of Jesus Christ.” Later, it renamed the days of the week—Monday, for instance, became Christ Aurore. Throughout the rebellion, the Exovedate concerned itself almost entirely with religious matters rather than the prosecution of the insurgency. The outcome of the rebellion depended now, not on Riel and Dumont, or Macdonald and General Frederick Middleton, a British officer and commander of Canada’s militia, but on God.
It has been said that the best-planned war strategy never lasts longer than the first encounter with the enemy. Riel’s plan to take up arms but not inflict any casualties lasted less than a week. Soon after the rebellion began, a report reached Batoche that a force of five hundred Mounted Policemen was marching on the community to arrest Riel. In fact, no such scheme existed; rather, fifty policemen and an equal number of local militia, commanded by Superintendent Leif Crozier, had moved from Fort Carlton, an old Hudson’s Bay Company post, to be nearer to the South Branch district. In response, Riel and Dumont set out with several hundred Métis for Fort Carlton. The two groups met at the hamlet of Duck Lake. There, misunderstandings occurred, tempers flared and a few shots were fired. By the time it was over, twelve members of Crozier’s force were dead and five Métis. Crozier retreated with his wounded, first to Fort Carlton and then to Battleford. Fearing a follow-up attack from the Métis, the police and townspeople barricaded themselves into the local barracks.
The Métis had scored a considerable victory, but Riel’s strategy had been undone by the spilling of blood. So he temporized. Dumont wanted to pursue Crozier and ambush him, then go on to Fort Carlton and seize its stores. Riel insisted that they turn around and return to Batoche—and there the Métis stayed for almost the full duration of the rebellion. Riel was now conducting a contradiction in terms—a rebellion that sat on its hands. Worse, he had failed to take account of the changed military dynamic created by the nearly completed railway. Most self-defeating of all, he was gravely underestimating Macdonald.
The rebellion had not surprised Macdonald. He had government informers in South Branch, and Superintendent Crozier had sent a warning five days before Riel’s call to arms: “Half-breed rebellion likely to break out any moment.… If Half-breeds rise, Indians will join them.”
Macdonald was now performing at his best. On March 23, even before the bad news from Duck Lake came in, he wired Edgar Dewdney in cipher: “General Middleton proceeds to Red River tonight. Orders sent to Winnipeg militia to be ready to move.” Macdonald followed with a second telegram, which he transmitted openly: “The land claims of the half-breeds are to be adjusted without delay. A Commission is to proceed to the spot immediately.” A few days later, he telegraphed Father Albert Lacombe, urging him to call on Chief Crowfoot to make certain the Blackfoot would remain loyal. Lacombe made the visit, and the militarily formidable Blackfoot remained quiet. One reason for their passivity was that, the previous summer, Dewdney had arranged for Crowfoot and other Blackfoot Confederacy chiefs to go by train to Winnipeg, where they saw for the first time the size and technological abundance of the coming new order. As additional countermeasures, extra rations were suddenly made available to the Blackfoot and to several Cree bands—a step that could have been taken much earlier.
In fact, prompted by some instinctive sense of the scale of the challenge coming down on him, Macdonald had snapped out of his Old Tomorrow mode even earlier. In February, he had introduced into the Commons a Franchise Bill that he would call “the greatest triumph of my life.” It was no such thing, but it had the useful objective of making the federal government, rather than the provinces, responsible for the administration of federal elections. As an added benefit, a great swatch of provincial patronage, such as the appointment of returning officers, would now be the property of the federal government—in other words, of Macdonald. Embedded in the bill were two imaginative initiatives: the first, already described, extended to Indians the right to be able to vote without losing any of their other rights; the second, an idea then unique in the world, proposed to extend the vote to women.
Once the rebellion actually began, Macdonald acted swiftly and decisively. One of his best moves was to get Father Lacombe, a much-loved missionary, to convince Chief Crowfoot to remain neutral. Lacombe soon wired back that the militarily formidable Blackfoot would “be loyal.” (photo credit 28.3)
That same month, Macdonald had to deal with the possibility of having to send troops abroad. When the dramatic news reached Canada that Sudanese followers of the Mahdi had stormed Khartoum and killed General Charles Gordon after a year-long siege, it unleashed across Canada a tidal wave of feeling for the Empire. To add to the pressure, Australia and New Zealand voluntarily announced that they would send troops to support the British. But Macdonald sent no troops. “England is not at war,” he explained to Charles Tupper, the Canadian high commissioner in London, “but is merely helping the Khedive [of Egypt] to put down an insurrection[,] and now that Gordon is gone the motive of aiding in the rescue of our own countrymen is gone with him.”
One more challenge Macdonald had to confront came from British Columbia. For several years, the BC government and its MPs in Ottawa had been demanding action to halt the influx of workers from China. Macdonald stalled, arguing that in the absence of a large local population the CPR line could only be completed by outside workers in that province. He kept disallowing acts passed by the BC government to ban the employment of Chinese workers. In mid-1884, he set up a Royal Commission to study the subject and requested a report by the spring of 1885.
Lastly, Macdonald had had to find time and energy to worry about the CPR as its cash reserves dwindled, the price of its stock fell and bankers turned away from its requests for loans. On March 18, the same day that Riel issued his call to arms, George Stephen asked the government for yet one more loan—for five million dollars. The cabinet said no, simply because Parliament would never grant it. So Macdonald waited for a more propitious moment to come along.
Unfortunately for Riel, he challenged Macdonald just at the time when the Old Chief was in a mood to act like a leader who knew where he wanted to go.
Riel’s return to Batoche after his victory at Duck Lake changed the insurrection into two parallel but quite separate rebellions. The Métis remained in their homes, and a small number of Indians went on the warpath. For years, Riel had tried to achieve a full-scale alliance with the Indians. While still in Montana, he had on several occasions approached Canadian Indians hunting for buffalo below the border and suggested that the two groups should combine to drive the white man from the North-West. He spoke at length to the Cree chief Big Bear, who was interested but suspected Riel might not act in good faith. Riel next turned his attention to Crowfoot, the Blackfoot chief.
Crowfoot was the ideal chief for a warlike tribe. He had fought in nineteen wars, and on one occasion, armed only with a spear, had killed a grizzly bear. He was tall, lithe, confident, dignified, hot-tempered, intensely proud and so manly that he had ten wives.* As early as 1876, he had taken treaty because he saw no sense in fighting the white invaders. In 1879, Crowfoot led a Blackfoot hunting party south of the border in search of buffalo. Riel sought him out, and they held long talks. As Crowfoot later related, “He wanted me to join with the Sioux [Chief Sitting Bull] and the Crees and the half-breeds … to have a general uprising and capture the North-West and hold it for the Indian race and the Metis.” In the end, Crowfoot refused to cooperate in Riel’s plan. Once he arrived in Canada in the summer of 1884, Riel repeated his attempt to achieve a pan-Aboriginal alliance, but again without any success.
The Métis victory at Duck Lake transformed the situation. Young braves welcomed this chance to prove their mettle in war. Their enthusiasm was magnified by widespread anger on the reserves about shortages of government-supplied food and the general conviction that treaty promises had been broken. Father Lacombe warned Dewdney, “One who knows the Indian character could very easily perceive they were not pleased when told of victories of the whites; on the contrary they were sorry and disappointed.”
The feared Indian War never happened, though. By one estimate, only 4 per cent of Indians in the North-West took up arms, and almost all of them went their own way. The Indians were simply never persuaded that their interests were the same as those of the Métis. Not even the admired Gabriel Dumont could overcome this perception. As a further constraint, Canadian Indians were well aware of what had happened to their kin in Indian wars below the border. Far from least, they had signed peace treaties with the Queen and her Canadian government representatives, and they took the words in these documents seriously.
Only two substantial groups of Indians did take up arms—Cree belonging to the bands led by Poundmaker and Big Bear. Here resided one of the great tragedies of the rebellion. Both chiefs had deliberately kept their bands away from the new order overtaking the West by refusing to go into a reserve for as long as they could. At the same time, though, neither had any doubt about the irresistible power of the new order. Poundmaker had told his people, “It is useless to dream that we can frighten them,” while Big Bear, with his typical cunning, told them, “We should not fight the Queen with guns. We should fight her with her own laws.”
But by their prolonged resistance to retreating into reserves, which made them ineligible to receive food rations (issued only to bands attempting to become farmers), Big Bear and Poundmaker had weakened their own leadership. The condition of their bands was pitiable, and many members had slipped away. Those who still followed them tended to be the most militant of the braves. Once the rebellion started, these hardliners formed warrior societies, which by tradition had the exclusive right to make decisions about peace or war, Big Bear’s own son Imasees being a member. Poundmaker and Big Bear still retained great respect, but their authority had shrunk.
The news of the Métis victory at Duck Lake catalyzed the warrior societies of these bands into action. Both voted for war. Led by Wandering Spirit, the angriest of all the braves, Big Bear’s warriors set off for a tiny hamlet called Frog Lake, where Thomas Quinn, a particularly hard Indian agent, lived. Big Bear, fearing violence, took off on a hunt, hoping he could satisfy his people with a huge feast. Back in Frog Lake, Wandering Spirit got into a shouting match with Quinn when the agent refused his request for rations. The argument became ever more heated, until Wandering Spirit raised his rifle and killed Quinn with a single shot. Despite Big Bear’s hasty return and his cries of “Stop! Stop!” a general massacre followed in which all but one of Frog Lake’s ten adult males were slaughtered, including two priests. “It was as if they were trying to lash out against years of deprivation, abuse and wounded pride,” writes Blair Stonechild of this terrible outburst.*
Poundmaker faced a comparable challenge, though one without any imminent risk of a rampage. After the Métis victory at Duck Lake, he led a group of Indians from several Cree reserves, together with some Assiniboine and Stoney braves, to Battleford, where the townspeople and a few police had barricaded themselves inside a makeshift fort. Their goal was to secure some food for their people. They did get the supplies, but as tensions mounted some of the braves looted and burned houses that had been abandoned by the townspeople. The Indians then pulled back and established a camp outside the town at Cut Knife Hill. When they received a message from Riel to “destroy Fort Battle[ford], seize the stores and munitions and bring the forces and animals here,” they took no action.
Meanwhile, Big Bear’s band lingered at Frog Lake, then eventually moved west to seize the supplies at Fort Pitt. The fort protected a small police detachment led by Inspector Francis Dickens, a son of the famous novelist Charles Dickens. This time, Big Bear intervened successfully to prevent violence. He convinced the policemen to abandon the fort on the promise they would not be hurt. Dickens and his crew of police scuttled off downriver in a scow, leaving behind civilians who were taken hostage but not harmed in any way.
The decisive event remained the massacre at Frog Lake. It had the same effect on Canadian public opinion as the murder of a Quebec cabinet minister by FLQ terrorists a century later. From it came rage and fear and patriotism. The consequence was Canada’s first-ever genuinely national army.
General Middleton, a decorated veteran of British colonial wars, faced two problems as the army’s commander. One was that Macdonald kept telling him what to do; for instance, informing him, “The first thing to be done is to localize the insurrection so as to prevent the flame from spreading westwards.” The other was that the Canadian militia were poorly trained and lacked any experience of war. In response, he ignored Macdonald’s messages and put his troops through rigorous training.
Some militia troops did exist in the West—the 90th Rifles, based in Winnipeg, included Lieutenant Hugh John Macdonald among its members. Middleton hurried west, got the Winnipeg militia moved to Qu’Appelle (in present-day southern Saskatchewan) and immediately set to training these raw recruits. But moving an entire army to the West was quite another matter.
William Van Horne, the uncommonly efficient, hard-driving general manager of the CPR, now proved to be exactly the right man in the right place. During the Civil War, he had moved many Union soldiers over the railways. After a talk with John Henry Pope, the acting minister of railways, he put a proposition to the government: the CPR would move the entire army to the West on the condition that Van Horne had complete and exclusive charge. “Has anyone got a better plan?” Macdonald asked the cabinet. Van Horne soon came up with a detailed proposal—an excellent one for the army and the government, and every bit as much for the CPR.
About the railway itself, Macdonald had been close to despair. “Our difficulties are immense … we have blackmailing all round,” he wrote to Charles Tupper in London, referring to the demands of Quebec and Maritime MPs for regional payoffs for their votes to bail out the CPR. “How will it end, God knows.” Out of nowhere, Van Horne had given him the solution: the railway would transport the army to the West, and in return a grateful nation would save the CPR.
Given the go-ahead, Van Horne declared he could transport to Qu’Appelle, the rail point nearest to Batoche, an army of some 3,300 men from Quebec, Ontario and the Maritimes. The first troops would be delivered to their destination within ten days. It seemed impossible. In the railway line above Lake Superior, there were still four gaps totalling eighty-six miles. Somehow, the men, horses, artillery pieces and supplies would have to be dragged over the bare rock and muskeg amid temperatures that could fall to –4 °F (–20 °C).
Militia members had already been ordered to assemble, and thousands gathered in drill halls in Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, Quebec City and Halifax, and in all the towns of the Loyalist Strand out to Kingston. After a few days, they were put on parade and given inspirational speeches by their commanders and blessings by their clergymen. A unit from the University of Toronto sang songs in Latin as they marched through huge crowds to the railway station. In Toronto and elsewhere in English Canada, the bands played such tunes as “The British Grenadiers”; in Montreal, they played “La Marseillaise.” Untrained volunteers smuggled themselves aboard the trains.
Van Horne exceeded his target and got the men there in just nine days. In the rough tract above Lake Superior, he had hot meals waiting for them wherever they stopped, and at every gap in the line the troops were bundled into waiting dogsleds. Many suffered frostbite or snow blindness, but only one man died.
The first troops reached Qu’Appelle on March 28. Middleton’s strategy was simple and sensible: once he had assembled a large enough army and had drilled them, he would march off directly to the heart of the rebellion. By April 6, only three weeks after the rebellion had begun, he started out for Batoche, 230 miles to the north, with four hundred foot soldiers as well as cavalry and artillery. A week later, with his army reinforced by newcomers, he was only 100 miles from Batoche. Riel wrote in his diary, “I have seen the giant; he is coming; he is hideous. It is Goliath.”
In fact, the first engagement between the soldiers and the insurgents involved neither Middleton nor the Métis. It was between some soldiers and Poundmaker’s Indians—and the soldiers lost as badly as their compatriots had at Duck Lake, with Poundmaker’s intervention alone preventing an utter rout. An ambitious officer, Colonel William Otter, had been sent by Middleton to hurry a force to Battleford, where civilians and policemen were threatened by the Indians encamped on Cut Knife Hill. Otter relieved the town, but without any authority set off next to attack the Indian camp. He found it easily and began shelling the teepees. The Indians quickly realized the shells did little real damage, so they crept out through the bushes and encircled Otter’s force. Before long, two dozen soldiers were dead or badly wounded, and Otter beat a retreat. The Indians wanted to pursue them, but Poundmaker stopped them by holding up the sacred pipe-stem, the Oskichi, and saying, “They have come here to fight us and we have fought them; now let them go.”*
Excited by their success, but knowing that Middleton’s army was nearing Batoche, the braves were uncertain what to do. Métis messengers sent by Gabriel Dumont urged them to join in the decisive battle. Poundmaker bowed to the wishes of the warrior society and put his mark on a letter saying he would come. His band did move, but with conspicuous slowness.
For more than six weeks, Riel and his Métis had been engaged in a rebellion in which the insurgents remained motionless, except for scouts sent south by Dumont to keep watch on Middleton’s progress. The only topic of discussion was religion. Riel himself never carried a gun, only a large crucifix, while the rebel flag included a large picture of Our Lady of Lourdes. Aware that the enemy was coming nearer, Riel wrote in his diary, “I pray you to keep away the sons of evil. Stagger them when the fight takes place so … they will know the Almighty is prepared to inflict retribution upon them.”
At last, on April 23, Riel allowed Dumont to take the fight to the enemy. Dumont set off with about 130 Métis for Fish Creek, South Branch’s most southerly point, to ambush Middleton’s forces. He arrived too late for a night attack, Riel having slowed the march by insisting on saying a full rosary at each halt, and early the next morning exchanged shots with army scouts. Outnumbered three to one, Dumont was soon in serious trouble and at risk of being surrounded. The Métis sharpshooters held the soldiers back, however, and Middleton failed to press his advantage. In Batoche, where Riel had returned, he prayed with his arms outstretched in the form of a cross. His prayers were answered in the sense that Middleton squandered a victory that was his for the taking.*
Three days later, his contingent now increased to 900 and equipped with a Gatling gun, a forerunner of the machine gun, Middleton arrived in Batoche to face some 250 to 300 Métis and about 30 Indians. Even here, only about one in two adult male Métis had turned out to fight for Riel.
The fighting began on May 9 and extended over three days. The Métis, entrenched in dugouts, suffered few casualties. Dumont confused his foes by constantly moving his troops, making his forces seem much larger than they actually were, while his troops demoralized the soldiers by the accuracy of their fire. In contrast, the army’s cannon did little damage and mostly hit buildings, while the wildly firing Gatling gun sent a hail of bullets over the rebels’ heads. The Métis were running out of ammunition, though, and at night they crept over the battlefield to pick up bullets dropped by the soldiers. Eventually they had nothing but nails and pebbles to fire at them.
Skill and bravery could only do so much. On the fourth day, Middleton planned a careful, probing attack. Frustrated militiamen simply got up and charged the enemy. The Métis ranks broke, and perhaps as many as fifty men were killed. The soldiers, now roaring in triumph, broke into Batoche and freed the prisoners. Afterwards, they looted the Métis’ houses and burned them. It was the single Canadian victory of the entire campaign.
In a wood above the town, Dumont and Riel found each other. Riel asked, “What are we going to do? We are beaten.” Dumont responded, “You must have known that in taking up arms we should be beaten.” Three times over the next four days, Dumont slipped back into Batoche, to steal blankets, dried meat and a horse. Each day, he searched for Riel, but, as he said later, “The good Lord did not wish me to see poor Riel again. I wanted to advise him not to surrender.” Eventually, carrying six buckwheat cakes as supplies, Dumont set off for the border. He made it safely.
Riel never gave any thought to trying to escape. In the last desperate moments, he told one Métis, “I’m the one they want, and when my enemies have me they’ll be over-joyed; but my people will be at peace and they will get justice.” On May 15, two army scouts walking in the woods came upon a weary, shoeless Métis. Asked who he was, he answered, “Louis Riel.”
Once Riel was escorted back to the army camp, he was brought to General Middleton. The two men talked for the rest of the day on a variety of subjects, principally about the Catholic Church. Riel said the church was thoroughly corrupt and that “religion should be based on morality and humanity and charity.” Middleton said later, “He was a man of rather acute intellect. He seemed quite able to hold his own on any argument or topic we happened to touch on.” Captain George Young, the officer who guarded Riel during the nine-day journey from Batoche to Regina, thought likewise: “I found that I had a mind against my own, and fully equal to it; better educated and much more clever than I was myself.” To neither man was Riel in any way insane.
* To increase the confusion, the document sent to Ottawa carried the title “Petition of Rights.”
* This revisionist analysis provoked claims that Flanagan was a racist—and even demands for his dismissal from the University of Calgary.
* This account is based on Hugh Dempsey’s excellent biography, Crowfoot, Chief of the Blackfeet.
* Later accounts have blamed the massacre on some of the Indians having drunk patent medicines they found in the hamlet that contained alcohol. However, the single survivor, William Cameron (protected by some because well regarded), wrote in his later book, Blood Red the Sun, that he took the two boxes of Perry Davis’ Painkiller and hid them in a chimney.
* Otter announced a victory by claiming he had forestalled an Indian attack on Battleford. (None was planned.) Later, he did well in South Africa, winning a considerable victory at Paardeberg, was promoted to general, and in 1907 became the first Canadian to command Canada’s militia. Macdonald, as one of his letters shows, never believed Otter had won at Cut Knife Hill.
* In the Fish Creek encounter, Hugh John Macdonald came as close as he ever would to actual combat. He wanted to lead a charge against the Métis, but his superior overruled him. If he had, the skilled Métis would have sliced down his troops.