I am now at the end of a career that some colleagues and probably rather more students consider to have been a bit too long. My work on Louis Riel was published at the beginning of that career, for the most part between 1972 and 1974, probably more to defend an ancestor, Colonel W.D. Otter of Cut Knife Hill, than to avoid perishing from post-thesis drought.1 The intervening years have not passed without some learning. Among other details, I have discovered how passionately our ancestors followed every detail of the great trials of their day. Newspapers even looked away from politics to report, in extenso, what the butler saw or what the nursemaid overheard her mistress say as she bent over the body. Of all Victorian-era trials, was any more avidly followed and debated by Canadians than the Queen v. Louis Riel?2 Even an intervening century has hardly reduced the fervour of Riel’s allies and of his critics.3 And for good reason: the trial saw some of Canada’s most famous courtroom performers do life-or-death battle in a stifling Regina courtroom. The Queen v. Louis Riel combined politics and the law with the passion of a client who had faint hope of outliving his conviction and who faced the utter humiliation of being judged insane.
Riel’s two years as a mental patient, first at Longue Pointe and then in Quebec’s notorious Beauport Asylum, had taught him that there were worse fates than death – although the Crown’s inference that he had been a self-seeking imposter rivalled the humiliation of being declared insane. Being insulted could not compare to what Riel recalled as the “animal existence” of an inmate of an insane asylum in the 1880s.4
The Regina trial provided a feast for a nation of judicial connoisseurs. Although the setting was a stifling, prefabricated former police office of the territorial government, the Crown was led by Christopher Robinson, a worthy son of that pillar of Canadian High Toryism John Beverly Robinson, the prosecutor in Canada’s other famous series of treason trials, the Ancaster Assizes of 1813, and by Britton Bath Osler, a Liberal, linked as a brother to Canada’s best known physician. Penniless and confined to the North-West Mounted Police (NWMP) barracks in Regina, Riel had neither means nor opportunity to provide for his own defence. However, the friends of his Montreal youth and Quebec political allies of his cause mobilized the funds to finance a notable team from the Quebec Bar: François-Xavier Lemieux, Charles Fitzpatrick, and James Greenshields. In the years to come, when Wilfrid Laurier and the Liberal Party displaced the Conservatives from power, Lemieux would become chief justice of Quebec, Fitzpatrick would become Laurier’s minister of justice and a future chief justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, and Greenshields, a McGill University gold medallist, would become chief justice of the Superior Court of Quebec. Called to the bar in 1877, he would soon compile a brilliant series of acquittals in Montreal murder cases.5
As events evolved, Riel might have felt better served if his brilliant lawyers had stayed home. As he complained from the dock, while government lawyers were trying to prove him guilty of a capital offence, his own counsel were trying to prove him insane enough to spend the rest of his existence in a lunatic asylum. If his friends had succeeded, is it conceivable that anyone more than a century and a quarter later would still take much interest in the case of the Queen v. Louis Riel, much less erect the massive monuments on Legislature grounds that now honour his memory and his role in Manitoba and Saskatchewan history? Would historical re-enactors find more than token audiences for replays of an insane man’s arguments in his own defence?
Over the many years since his execution, Riel’s reputation has slowly been transformed. In 1885 both Liberal and Conservative newspapers across English-speaking Canada revelled in the verdict and sentence.6 Times have changed. Perhaps a collective sense of guilt over the non-fulfilment of the Métis land claims embodied in the Manitoba Act of 1870, and over the tragic experiences of Canada’s First Nations, has earned their advocate, Louis Riel, a new and much more sympathetic hearing from twenty-first-century Canadians. Both in his Depressionera reinterpretation of the history of western Canada and in his biography of Riel, George F.G. Stanley offered English-speaking Canadians a far more sympathetic understanding of the Métis leader than they would ever find in the provincially approved history textbooks of mid-twentieth-century Canada.7 In recent years, Stanley’s version of Riel has largely been reinforced by the research of J.M. Bumsted and of Bob Beal and Rod MacLeod and by D.N. Sprague’s Canada and the Métis, 1869-1885, not to mention the proselytizing prose of Maggie Siggins.8
Canadians in 1885 lived in a harsher, more judgmental environment than their twenty-first-century heirs. Death is no longer a penalty in Canadian criminal law, whatever public opinion may apparently wish. Even in 1885, the more savage the penalty, the more likely a jury to balk at conviction. That factor was probably at work in Regina by the end of July. Even before the reign of Queen Victoria began in 1837, the antique penalty for high treason, laid out in the Statute of Treasons of 1352,9 had been abandoned. “Drawing and quartering” (chopping apart a traitor’s corpse) had passed into abeyance, allowing the villain merely to be “hanged by the neck until dead.”10
With an eye to rhetoric, it is worth considering the medieval language of the charge read out by the clerk of the court, Dixie Watson, to which Riel and his counsel had to make answer:
Louis Riel, then living within the dominion of Canada and under the protection of our Sovereign Lady the Queen, not regarding the duty of his allegiance nor having the fear of God in his heart, but being moved and seduced by the instigation of the devil as a false traitor against our said Lady the Queen, and wholly withdrawing the allegiance, fidelity and obedience which he should, and of right ought to bear towards Our Lady the Queen … together with divers other false traitors … most wickedly, maliciously and traitorously did levy and make war against our said Lady the Queen … and did then maliciously and traitorously attempt and endeavour by force and arms to subvert and destroy the constitution and government of this realm, as by law established.11
An exile from Canada, Riel had applied for and been granted United States citizenship. It might have been expected that Washington would intervene on his behalf. We know that American friends he had made during his sojourn in Montana expected such intervention. In fact, precedent and William Blackstone’s legal teaching made Riel’s foreign citizenship irrelevant. As Alan Taylor reminds us in his history of the War of 1812, Americans held boldly to the principle that national allegiance was a matter of personal choice.12 The British at the time insisted that citizenship was determined solely by birthplace. British-born naval and military deserters captured in American uniforms and ships companies were traitors and subject to the penalties of treason. More important for Riel, British law upheld the principle of “natural allegiance,” compelling anyone resident in a country to respect its laws as part of a “debt of gratitude” owed by those who enjoyed the “peace, order and good government” of that country, regardless of citizenship. By coming to Batoche in 1884, Riel had subjected himself unequivocally to the laws of Canada and the British Empire.
If Riel was required by the rule of natural allegiance to face trial in Canada, did it have to be in Regina? Relying on an imperial statute promulgated in 1821, Riel’s lawyers initially insisted that a capital offence would have to be tried either in an older, established province such as Ontario or in British Columbia, a province since 1871. Nor was it legitimate to try a capital offence without a prior grand jury hearing. Christopher Robinson demolished the argument by citing subsequent imperial statutes that gave Ottawa jurisdiction and a Canadian statute of 1880 that permitted capital offences to be tried in the North-West Territories.13 Although that might have placed the venue at Prince Albert or Battleford, the newly named capital of the territories was a perfectly legal choice. Indeed, Judge Hugh Richardson had proved the point when, a year before, his sentence of hanging for a convicted murderer named Conner or Kohner was upheld on appeal to Manitoba’s Court of Queen’s Bench. In fact, Kohner had already used the gibbet on which Riel’s life would end.
Well before 1885, the Canadian Parliament had decided that if it did not choose to load up the venerable blunderbuss of Edward III’s Statute of Treasons, it could turn to the lesser crime of treason-felony. Canada had its own Act for the Better Security of the Crown and Government of 1868,14 a milder version of Edward III’s statute since a death sentence was not mandatory. This was the law under which other prominent Métis and Natives would ultimately be charged for their role in the 1885 rebellion, and most would be punished with a few years of imprisonment in a federal penitentiary.15 Another treason law could have been fitted to Riel as a United States citizen. During the Fenian Raids, Parliament had adopted and adapted the Fenian Act of 1866,16 making it treasonable for a citizen of a nation at peace with Canada to make war on Canada. This could have been applied to Louis Riel, but, like Canada’s own treason-felony statute, it avoided the automatic death penalty Sir John A. Macdonald was determinted to exact.17
In the wake of the 1885 rebellion, the federal government’s legal strategy was to be as lenient as possible to the Métis and Native participants since Ottawa wanted to argue that they had been duped by a cunning and thoroughly sane Louis Riel. At the same time, the Crown would use the full rigour of the criminal law against Native offenders convicted of murder in the Frog Lake killings and other fatal encounters during the winter and spring of 1885. In this policy, Ottawa found an enthusiastic agent in Judge Charles A. Rouleau, the stipendiary magistrate based at Battleford, whose house and library had been burned during the Cree invasion of Battleford and who, during the siege, had fled south in terror of his own and his family’s life. Rouleau set about the trial and conviction of accused Natives with more than a hint of vengefulness, and even a cursory view of his proceedings in Battleford reveals Natives accused without representation or even translation into their own language and a series of lengthy prison terms that frequently proved fatal to their Native victims.18
Ottawa’s strategy for dealing with Riel was equally unforgiving, but the political risk of executing someone who was again becoming a folk hero in Quebec might be eased if the government could locate some co-conspirators among the Ontarion-born English-speaking settlers in Prince Albert and neighbouring communities. The decision by the Canadian Pacific Railway to adopt a southern route through Regina and Swift Current had devalued the property of those who had expected the railway to encourage homesteading and land sales in or near Saskatchewan’s Park Belt. Many of the aggrieved had welcomed Riel’s return as much as the Métis.19
Recognizing the longstanding hostility between Métis and Sioux in Manitoba in 1870, Riel had kept potential Native supporters at a distance. By 1885 he seems to have concluded that his policy had been unwise. Once at Batoche, he generally ignored his possible allies at Prince Albert and sought support primarily among Native bands whose lands bordered on the Métis settlements and whose grievances had been growing steadily. These tactics were not necessarily successful since Native leaders had no good reason to have confidence in Métis success. However, hard times and broken promises had divided many bands; dissatisfied members erected warrior’s lodges and looked forward to profiting from any conflict between whites and Métis.20
No sooner had Riel despatched his envoys to Native bands than white settler support cooled. The terror of an Indian war seized all but a very few settlers. It also alienated any possible sympathy from official Washington. Unlike in 1870, when Riel had seemed a possible agent of annexation, American authorities offered no resistance and even some encouragement to Canadian efforts to despatch supplies via Chicago and St Paul. Senior officers like General Frederick Middleton, cases of arms and ammunition, and even some small militia units travelled to Winnipeg by way of the United States. Ottawa’s policy in the North-West was designed to show who was in charge north of the 49th parallel, but there was no perceptible resistance from Washington. Only the financial crisis of the Canadian Pacific, and considerable exaggeration of the capacity of its unfinished rail line to deliver troops, horses, and guns to the North-west, persuaded Ottawa to move its expeditionary force on its side of the international border and rescue its major investment from bankruptcy.
Although Robinson and Osler attempted to fulfil the government’s plan to find co-accused among the white settlers of Prince Albert, both lawyers soon concluded that it was futile. Posterity has not challenged their judgment.21 Only W.H. Jackson, the secretary of the Settlers’ League, an excitable young Ontarian who volunteered to become Riel’s secretary, who converted to Catholicism, and who ended, like others in Batoche, as one of the prisoners confined to the local rectory, could plausibly be considered a co-conspirator. But Riel, not Jackson, was and remains the key leader in the Métis rebellion of 1885. After a one-day trial, Jackson was pronounced insane and sent to the Selkirk Asylum in Manitoba, where he soon escaped to the United States. He spent the balance of his life as Honoré Jaxon, a harmless and penniless labour organizer and socialist militant in Chicago and New York.22 Far from appeasing Quebec, Jackson’s treatment – contrasted to Riel’s conviction and execution – only seemed to prove the gross favouritism Ontario Protestants enjoyed wherever the federal government was in control. Charges against other anglophones were systematically dropped for lack of evidence or because they co-operated as Crown witnesses against Riel.
Language was another issue at Riel’s trial. His judge, jury, and prosecutors spoke only English. In consequence, for the most part, so too did Riel and his legal counsel. Could the judge, jury, and Crown counsel understand testimony in French? The court was provided with an interpreter, but the trial transcript, from which we must assess most issues of argumentation and rhetoric, was composed virtually entirely in English. Given the nature and technology of court reporting in Canada in the 1880s, it would be surprising if some passages were not composed or at least interpreted in part by the court stenographer. Journalists covering the trial reported that Riel sometimes spoke passionately and rapidly. At other points, his voice slowed to give his words greater impact. A newspaper account of the trial claimed that Riel, in his address to the full court, spoke for two hours;23 an unhurried reading of the official transcript of his speech lasts a little over an hour. Although the heat in the courtroom undoubtedly made minutes drag, was anything omitted by the stenographer? There is now no evident way to find out.
A core question for both Riel and posterity was whether the Métis leader was insane or, as the Crown insisted, a self-promoting imposter, arousing a civil war to lever a further bribe out of the federal government? “My name is Riel,” he had allegedly told Lawrence Clarke, a Hudson’s Bay Company factor and representative for Lorne, the Prince Albert district in the territorial assembly, “and I want Material.”24 Riel’s lifelong fondness for puns gives the story a coincidental verisimilitude, and the sum that might have persuaded him to disappear back to Montana has usually been set at $35,000. Clarke had his own interest. Riel’s presence was an argument for stationing more NWMP in his district so that he and other merchants could profit from their business.25
Riel had left Montana without any material guarantees, summoned by people who hoped he could repeat his 1870 feat of transforming a colony into an authentic, if somewhat expensive, province of Canada called Manitoba, while securing Métis land claims. He was legitimately concerned with the welfare of his wife and that their two, and soon to be three, children would be left in utter destitution. As a prisoner in the police barracks in Regina, Riel was heavily guarded against both his own potential escape and any plots to rescue or to murder him. His jailer, Captain Richard Burton Deane, the adjutant of the nwmp, loaded Riel with a heavy ball and chain whenever he was allowed to exercise in the barrack yard. As some compensation, Deane allowed his prisoner to use the NWMP commissioner’s office as a workroom. Soon, Riel was busy drafting letters, composing religious poetry, and struggling to find ways to support his family. Would Deane allow him to be photographed, perhaps with his ball and chain? The prints could be sold at a price to admirers, critics, and the merely curious. Deane refused. Riel also wrote to the prime minister, seeking a grand state trial before the Supreme Court of Canada. In return, he pledged to do everything he could to protect the Macdonald government and to embarrass the Liberal Party, which he blamed for his persecution and penniless exile in the United States. Riel’s reward for his political service would be his restoration to Manitoba politics and what he termed “a fair indemnity.” Mindful of his jailer, Riel also reported that Captain Deane might make an ideal lieutenant governor for Manitoba when he became premier. Needless to add, Macdonald did not make Riel’s letters public.26
After Riel was brought to his camp as a prisoner, General Middleton’s first instructions from his minister, Sir Adolphe Caron, was to despatch him to Winnipeg, the biggest city in the Canadian West and part of an established province. Caron’s boss, Sir John A. Macdonald, countermanded the order. Under the law in 1885, Riel had to be tried in the North-West Territories, whose capital was now Regina. It might also be a concern that Manitoba law promised the accused a twelve-member jury and, if the accused so chose, a jury evenly divided between English speakers and francophones. The likelihood of a unanimous conviction by such a jury was remote, although the change of location seems to have reflected the law, not opportunism.27
Telegrams promptly redirected Riel and his escort straight south to Regina, a town known recently as Pile of Bones Creek until it became the improvised home of both the NWMP and the territorial capital. In the cells at the police barracks, Riel would be safe from both rescue and assassination. (Both threats could realistically be contemplated.) When Riel’s lawyers reached Regina, they and their sponsors were dismayed at the prospect of spending weeks and months in a tiny, hot, and primitive prairie town. On Riel’s behalf, they demanded a month’s delay so that they could collect witnesses, documents, and evidence. Judge Hugh Richardson, one of only three stipendiary magistrates in all of the North-West Territories, was British-born, a small-town Ontario lawyer and militia officer from Woodstock, briefly a Liberal-appointed civil servant, and now the life-and-death judge of Louis Riel.28 The verdict, under territorial law, would be pronounced by a jury of only six men chosen from a panel of thirty-six. Riel’s lawyers ignored their client’s demands for trial by Canada’s Supreme Court, but they did demand a change of venue for the trial to an older province where their friend’s fate could be settled by twelve “good men and true.” Next they insisted that witnesses like Gabriel Dumont as well as several Catholic missionaries, not to mention several senior civil servants from Ottawa, should be made available for cross-examination. Richardson welcomed such witnesses, but he had to confess that he could not guarantee Dumont and other prominent rebels would be secure from arrest and prosecution. Fathers Alexis André and Vital Fourmond could come in safety since they had been Riel’s prisoners at Batoche and would be immune from prosecution. The senior civil servants could remain at their desks in Ottawa.29
If Captain Deane believed that Riel’s letter to the prime minister was sufficient to prove Riel’s madness, Macdonald would not have been pleased. Evidence of insanity could save Riel’s life and aggravate the roaring chorus of voters who wanted him dead. In 1870 and again in 1885, the Métis leader had imposed the cost and embarrassment of major military expeditions as the price of preserving the young Dominion a mari usque ad mare. In 1870 Riel had justified the execution of Thomas Scott as the price of forcing Canada to respect his authority over the Red River. For Sir John A. Macdonald, Riel’s life had become the price of keeping Canada united across its vast and restless western plains. In the earlier crisis, Macdonald had purchased Riel’s disappearance with a discretionary payment from his government’s secret service fund. Paid to disappear, Riel had returned to Batoche in 1884 to fish in troubled waters. An earlier return to friends in Quebec ended in a two-year stay at the Beauport Asylum when his behaviour of roaring like a bull and ripping up his clothes and bed sheets had exhausted the patience of his friends and relatives.30 A somewhat calmer Riel had found work as a school teacher at a Catholic mission in Montana. As seen from Ottawa, Riel seemed entirely capable of manipulating Métis and Natives into a murderous rebellion. Devout Catholic missionaries might regard his heretical claims to be the prophet of the New World as a form of insanity, but few Protestants were remotely interested in Riel’s religious aberrations. In the end, Fathers Alexis André, Louis Cochin, and Vital Fourmond could claim that they had brought Riel back to orthodox Roman Catholicism in return for the promise of a Christian burial.31
In the summer of 1884, Gabriel Dumont and other leading Métis had come south from Batoche to persuade the hero of their 1870 struggle to bring his classical and legal education back to their service as spokesman for the Métis claim to one-seventh of the arable land of the North-west Territories. It appears that Riel’s Métis hosts were unaware of the religious visions that had fed the aggressive and seemingly unbalanced behaviour that had landed Riel in two successive Quebec asylums and that would reappear at Batoche when he sought to explain and to fulfil his divine mission as the prophet of the New World. In Ottawa, Macdonald saw Riel as a man who had betrayed the prime minister’s generosity and shattered his tolerance. Riel might arouse a popular following in Quebec, but Macdonald put his faith in the power of the Catholic Church to suppress support for a man who had imprisoned Catholic missionaries in their own rectory and who had reviled Archbishop Alexandre-Antonin Taché of St Boniface as a common thief for his land dealings. Uproar in Quebec would soon die away. In contrast, Orange Ontario’s hatred of the murderer of Thomas Scott was unassuaged after fifteen years. Their spokesmen in Cabinet and caucus reminded Macdonald that their voters would never forgive him if Louis Riel escaped the gallows or even ended his days in an insane asylum.
Was Riel really insane? A present-centred perspective may become irrelevant or confusing. Psychiatry was hardly an exact science in 1884, whatever may be claimed for it now. Riel’s jury heard medical testimony and opinions that had clearly failed, despite the best efforts of Riel’s counsel, to convince them that the Métis leader’s insanity met the test of the oft-mentioned, seldom-read M’Naghten Rules.32 The two soldiers who had come to know Riel in the days and weeks after his surrender, General Middleton and Captain George Holmes Young, reported him to be sane and articulate. They were unlikely to have raised religious or political topics.
Long after the trial and its verdict and sentence had provoked outrage in Quebec, Macdonald conceded one of the demands Riel had made in his final address to the court. A commission was appointed to examine his mental state. Two doctors from eastern Canada, Michael Lavell, warden of Kingston Penitentiary, and François-Xavier Valade of Ottawa, who earned part of his income as a food inspector for the federal government, would join surgeon Andrew Jukes of the NWMP in Regina.33 Their job was to assess Riel’s current mental state as his date of execution approached.
Since the trial verdict had been upheld in appeals all the way from Manitoba to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London, Macdonald explained to Lavell, “You cannot therefore go beyond that verdict, and your enquiry will be limited to the simple question of whether he, at the time of your report, is sufficiently a reasonable and accountable being to know right from wrong.”34 Jukes, the police surgeon, had already made up his mind. He compared Riel to Immanuel Swedenborg, an eighteenth-century religious mystic whom Jukes had found persuasive. By that comparison, Riel was sane.
Lavell, an obstetrician, was impressed by Riel’s concern for his own children, an allegiance that had recaptured priority in Riel’s mind over the Métis leader’s concern for his place in history. Like Jukes, Lavell was drawn to Riel as a man who had delusions about religion and politics but otherwise was normal and even, intellectually, impressive.
Valade, the sole French Canadian with any direct role in Riel’s fate, was the most critical of the three experts. Valade was more upset than Lavell or Jukes about Riel’s religious heresies and hallucinations, but like his colleagues, he was attracted by the man’s personality. “I confess,” he wrote to Macdonald, “I should be well pleased if justice and popular clamour could be satisfied without depriving this man of life.” In contrast to Lavell’s report, Valade concluded that Riel “is not an accountable being, that he is unable to distinguish between right and wrong on political and religious subjects, which I consider well marked typical forms of a kind of insanity under which he undoubtedly suffers, but on the other hand, I believe him to be quite sensible and can distinguish right from wrong.”35 Governor Edgar Dewdney despatched the Lavell and Valade opinions to Macdonald, concluding that the two experts had reached the same conclusion with only minor semantic differences.36
In his major speech at the trial, Riel had given priority to establishing his own sanity. Forced by Judge Richardson to choose between retaining his counsel or being left to organize his own defence, Riel had kept his lawyers and forfeited any right to cross-examine witnesses. That forced him to postpone any rebuttal of their testimony until he could address the jury in the last moments of his trial.
Riel had opened his speech to the jury with an apology for speaking English: “I cannot speak English very well, but am trying to do so, because most of those here speak English.”37 He next prayed to God, adding his hope that the jury would not “take it as part of a play of insanity.”38 Earlier, Riel’s estranged cousin, Charles Nolin, had testified that Riel’s visions took a physical form, covering his face with sweat and making his limbs palpitate. In his speech, Riel explained that such symptoms were common among those he referred to consistently as “half-breeds.” His people, he explained, had much intuition about how tomorrow’s hunt or tonight’s meeting would turn out, and physical symptoms – twinges, sweating, shaking – were natural and normal experiences. His voices had told him on the night before his own day of testimony on 31 July that “somebody will come t’aider.” That he could look forward to help in both languages, he claimed, had proved its veracity. The message itself had been confirmed for Riel on his way to court on the following day when police surgeon Jukes had quietly informed him that Judge Richardson would give him a chance to speak for himself, despite the opposition of his own Quebec lawyers.39
Anyone who reads Riel’s resulting speech, delivered to a packed and sweltering courtroom, can see that it served Macdonald’s interests better than Riel’s. Certainly, Riel did not sound like a mad man, nor was he nearly as coherent about Métis or settler grievances as he would be on the following day, when Judge Richardson invited him to respond to the jury’s guilty verdict. Riel’s biographer, George Stanley, suggests that fear of being found insane, as his lawyers hoped, led Riel to improvise a speech but that, in his confusion and desperation, Riel had disorganized the fragmentary notes he had prepared before his trial.40 When he used his notes in his postverdict speech, it was too late to influence anyone but the frigidly hostile Judge Richardson. Possibly, Riel’s reminder of the state of his penniless family had evoked sympathy that led the jury to weaken their guilty verdict with a plea for mercy. Just as probably, this plea was included as a necessary accommodation of a recalcitrant jurist when unanimity was required for conviction. One of the Crown’s lawyers, Britton Bath Osler, was later scathing about both the judge and the jurors, but prosecutors are not selected for their broad and generous opinions of the accused or his sympathizers.
A century and a quarter after Riel’s trial, most Canadians have forgotten or never cared to know much about Louis Riel, but the majority of informed opinion would probably prefer to claim him as an innocent, if ineffective, advocate of a deeply aggrieved Métis nation and of their First Nations neighbours. What kind of war did he levy on the Queen when NWMP superintendent Lief Crozier rode to Duck Lake with a hundred armed police and special constables? In a more secular age, we may be tempted to regard Riel’s visions and beliefs as evidence of insanity more than his assumptions of power over his own people. If Riel described his early benefactor Archbishop Taché as a thief for robbing a widow of her land, modern memories of sexual abuse by clergymen might draw public sympathy for Riel’s claim that soft words encouraged the powerful to ignore their crimes, whereas harsh words could encourage a beneficial honesty.41
“The past,” claimed the British novelist L.P. Hartley, “is a foreign country. They do things differently there.” Canada in 1885 was not modern-day Canada. Failure to execute Riel, warned Manitoba premier John Norquay, would cost Sir John A. Macdonald’s party any hope of re-election in 1887. In 2014 Macdonald’s ingenious and remorseless prosecution of Riel seems an error in political judgment wholly comparable to Riel’s execution of Thomas Scott in 1870. How could Riel know that his victim, Scott, would become a martyr for the Orange Order?
Contemporary history offered Sir John A. Macdonald an instructive warning about the danger of hasty and political executions. In 1881 Daniel Guiteau, a lawyer with serious symptoms of insanity, assassinated President James Garfield. In the heat of public outrage, Guiteau was swiftly tried, condemned, and executed. Outrage soon cooled, to be replaced by growing condemnation for the way an insane man had been hurried to judicial murder. By 1885, as J.M. Bumsted reminds us, the Guiteau case was widely regarded as a travesty of justice.42 As close bystanders of American legal processes, Canadians might have taken note.43
Like his successors, from Wilfrid Laurier to Stephen Harper, Sir John A. Macdonald might also have remembered that it was no accident that in 1883 Quebecers had adopted “Je me souviens” as their provincial and national motto. Riel’s execution made him part of the contested collective memory of both Canada and Quebec.
1 In research for my doctoral dissertation, I had discovered an unpublished parliamentary return of messages between the defence minister, Sir Adolphe Caron, and others engaged in the 1885 campaign; see Desmond Morton and Reginald H. Roy, eds, Telegrams of the North-West Campaign, 1885 (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1972), which includes most of the messages and was published with much assisstance from Barbara Wilson of the Public Archives. This led to The Last War Drum: The North-West Campaign of 1885 (Toronto: Hakkert, 1972), published for the Canadian War Museum. Finally, I wrote The Canadian General: Sir William Otter (Toronto: Hakkert, 1972).
2 I published an introduction to and transcript of the Riel trial for the Canadian Social History series, The Queen v Louis Riel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974).
3 Among the many recent accounts of Louis Riel and his fate, one may cite the serious analytical work on the fate of Thomas Scott collected in J.M. Bumsted, Thomas Scott’s Body and Other Essays on Early Manitoba History (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2000); Bob Beal and Rod MacLeod, Prairie Fire: The 1885 North-West Rebellion (Edmonton: Hurtig, 1984), with its particularly fine account of the trials of Métis and Native accused; and D.N. Sprague, Canada and the Métis, 1869–1885 (Waterloo, on: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1988). Thomas Flanagan takes an unfashionably critical view of Riel in Riel and the Rebellion: 1885 Reconsidered (Saskatoon: Western Producer Prairie Books, 1983), but he shows more sympathy as editor and commentator of The Diaries of Louis Riel (Edmonton: Hurtig, 1976), among other works published by the Riel Project under the supervision of George F.G. Stanley. A more recent and valuable view of the Métis leader appears in Lewis H. Thomas’s biography of Riel in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/riel_louis_1844_85_11E.html (accessed 10 October 2013). Another sympathetic work is Maggie Siggins, Riel: A Life of Revolution (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1994).
4 See Riel’s comment in midtrial, in Morton, ed., Queen v Louis Riel, 212.
5 On prosecution and defence counsel, see Macmillan Dictionary of Canadian Biography (Toronto: Macmillan, 1978), 262 on Fitzpatrick, 315 on Greenshields, 456 on Lemieux, 633-4 on Osler, and 713 on Robinson.
6 Toronto’s Globe led other Liberal papers in adding the suspicion that the Conservatives would now allow Riel to be spirited away, and such a plot may well have been planned by a wealthy Regina Métis, Pascal Bonneau. It came to nothing. See Beal and MacLeod, Prairie Fire, 303–4.
7 George F.G. Stanley, The Birth of Western Canada: A History of the Riel Rebellions (Toronto: Longmans Green and Company, 1936), reversed many of the conventional interpretations of Louis Riel in the academic history of Canada. Stanley reinforced his position with the biography Louis Riel (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1963), which was reprinted five times by 1972. See also note 3.
8 See note 3 for the contributions of these researchers.
9 15 Edw. 3, stat. 5, cap. 2.
10 On the versions of treason available to Canadian courts, see Beal and MacLeod, Prairie Fire, 294–6.
11 Charges against Riel were laid on “The information and complaint” of Alexander David Stewart, the chief of police in Hamilton, Ontario, and, as it happened, a brother-in-law of Colonel W.D. Otter. It was read by Dixie Watson, clerk of the court. See Morton, ed., Queen v Louis Riel, 3–7. The text of the charge is drawn from Stanley, Louis Riel, 345.
12 See Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1813: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels and Indian Allies (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 3–5, passim.
13 See also Beal and MacLeod, Prairie Fire, 296.
14 31 Vict., cap. 69.
15 At the opening of the proceedings on 18 July 1885, Britton Bath Osler for the Crown explained the legitimacy of the trial process, including the absence of a grand jury and the small size of the trial jury. See Morton, ed., Queen v Louis Riel, 64–8.
16 Fenian Act of 1866, or An Act to Continue for a Limited Time the Several Acts Therein Mentioned, sc 1868 (31 Vict.), c. 29.
17 J.M. Bumsted, Louis Riel v. Canada: The Making of a Rebel (Winnipeg: Great Plains, 2001), 307–9. Passing through Winnipeg, on his way to organize the evidence against Riel, police chief Stewart chatted with a reporter for the Winnipeg Sun: “He intended to get all the evidence he could against Riel, and by any means, for …,” said the chief with a sly laugh, “I guess the idea is to hang him.” Cited in Beal and MacLeod, Prairie Fire, 296.
18 Stanley, Birth of Western Canada, 194–242. The best account of the trials of the Métis, white, and Native accused is in Beal and MacLeod, Prairie Fire, ch. 17.
19 Morton, Last War Drum, 16–24. Among the aggrieved were Lieutenant Colonel A.T.H. Williams, the member of Parliament for East Durham, who had invested heavily in Park Belt land but who had put together a militia battalion for service in the North-West. His anger against Riel helped to push him into leading the attack on 12 May that ended the Canadian siege of Batoche. He died later in the expedition, having made no secret of his contempt for General Middleton’s cautious leadership. Williams’s Tory successor held East Durham in a by-election but warned Macdonald, “God help him next time if he don’t hang Riel.” See ibid., 159; and H.A. Ward to Macdonald, 26 August 1885, Library and Archives Canada (lac), Macdonald Papers, vol. 108, 43418.
20 Older Native chiefs like Big Bear, One Arrow, and Poundmaker opposed younger, more radical elements in their bands who formed warrior lodges and, despite their many grievances, showed strong misgivings about trusting their futures to Louis Riel. At Cut Knife Hill, Poundmaker had intervened to allow the Canadian troops to withdraw. It won him life-long respect from Otter and a prison sentence from Judge Rouleau. The Cree chief’s photo remained part of Otter’s office until he died. Big Bear had interceded with his warriors to protect the widows of men they killed. He, too, went to prison. Both men did not long outlive their captivity.
21 The trial of Tom Scott, a white political leader of the Métis, ended in acquittal. See Beal and MacLeod Prairie Fire, 316–22.
22 On Honoré Jaxon’s subsequent career, see Beal and MacLeod, Prairie Fire, 339–40.
23 See Riel’s final address to the court in Morton, ed., Queen v Louis Riel, 311–25.
24 Riel’s desired “material” was a $35,000 down payment on the $100,000 indemnity he believed he had negotiated for all Métis families in Manitoba as compensation for giving up their land for the future province. See Flanagan, Riel and the Rebellion, ch. 5.
25 On Clarke, see Sprague, Canada and the Métis, 162–3; on the material grievances of the Métis, see ibid., 157–66.
26 Riel to Sir John A. Macdonald, 26 July 1885, LAC, Macdonald Papers, vol. 107, 43192-207. Although Riel had described Captain Deane as fit to become lieutenant governor in Manitoba, “ce noble officier” concluded that Riel’s communications with the prime minister proved only that he was “cracked.” See R.B. Deane, Mounted Police Life in Canada: A Record of Thirty One Years’ Service (London and Toronto: Cassell and Co., 1916), 190. On the legal background of any plea of insanity, see Beal and MacLeod, Prairie Fire, 299–301.
27 On the hurried change of destination for Riel, see Morton and Roy, eds, Telegrams of the North-West Campaign, 288, 302, 308, 309, 310. On motivation, see Beal and MacLeod, Prairie Fire, 293–4.
28 On Judge Richardson, see Macmillan Dictionary of Canadian Biography, 701.
29 On the trial venue, see Flanagan, Riel and the Rebellion, 122–3.
30 On Riel’s condition in 1876–78, see Stanley, Louis Riel, 224–30.
31 Morton, ed., Queen v Louis Riel, xxvi.
32 Flanagan, Riel and the Rebellion, 129–31.
33 On the medical commission, see Lewis H. Thomas’s biography of Riel in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, cited at note 3. Beal and MacLeod, Prairie Fire, 336–7, attribute the interpretation of the Valade and Lavell reports to Governor Dewdney.
34 Macdonald to Lavell, 31 October 1885, Public Archives of Canada, Macdonald Papers, vol. 106, 42638.
35 Valade to Macdonald, 8 November 1885, Public Archives of Canada, Macdonald Papers, vol. 106, 42650-1.
36 Thomas Flanagan’s harshest criticism of Macdonald arose from the “Old Chieftain’s” acceptance of Dewdney’s misrepresentation of Valade’s report on Riel. Valade’s horror of Riel’s heresies battled with his unexpected discovery of Riel’s intelligence and charm. Father André, the charismatic Oblate who persuaded Riel to submit to church doctrine, also convinced Valade not to become an accessory in Riel’s execution. Flanagan, Riel and the Rebellion, 143, states that Macdonald and his colleagues “resorted to forgery to conceal, or at least disguise Valade’s original opinions.” See also Morton, ed., Queen v Louis Riel, xxv–xxvi; and Beal and MacLeod, Prairie Fire, 337.
37 Morton, ed., Queen v Louis Riel, 311.
38 Ibid., 311–12.
39 Ibid., 320.
40 Stanley, Louis Riel, 358.
41 Morton, ed., Queen v Louis Riel, 318–19.
42 Bumsted, Louis Riel v. Canada, 283.
43 I owe the Guiteau analogy to Beal and MacLeod, Prairie Fire, 304–5.