Many years earlier, a boy with tousled chestnut curls had stood hand in hand with his little sister beside a dusty cart track. They were waiting to see the first Métis hunting brigade of the year go by. They knew it was coming because they had heard the squealing of the ungreased axles of the carts all the way down by the Seine.
“Aren’t they grand?” Louis cried, as the first Red River cart, drawn by plodding oxen, lumbered by. Sara squeezed his hand.
A rider on a prancing horse grinned down at them. He was splendid in his fringed and beaded buckskin and bright-coloured sash. “Au revoir, mes petits!” he called, sweeping off his wide-brimmed hat with a flourish.
“Au revoir, monsieur!” they chorused.
Cart after cart lumbered by, bound for the far West in search of the buffalo. It happened every year, in June and again in October.
“When they get back there’ll be parties, with fiddle music and jigs,” Louis told Sara. “But the best part is the stories about the hunt. And maybe they’ll have to fight the Sioux. Oh, I wish I could go with them!”
But it wasn’t likely that he ever would. Louis Riel was a Métis because his French-Canadian grandfather had married a woman of French and Chipewyan parentage. The Métis people shared the French language and the Catholic religion. But not all lived in the same way. Many earned a living by hunting buffalo. Some also traded goods to the United States in their Red River carts. Others manned the York boats and canoe brigades that carried the goods of the Hudson’s Bay Company. But Louis’s family belonged to the more settled, prosperous Métis of the Red River Settlement south of Lake Winnipeg. They owned a farm, and raised grain, vegetables, and livestock. His father, Jean-Louis Riel, also ran a gristmill on the Seine River. So it seemed likely that Louis’s future would be the same.
Louis’s world was a place of riverside woods and farmland, with the open prairie rolling beyond. Gazing over the fields, he could see only church steeples and windmills poking above the horizon. There were just two really big buildings in Red River, and he knew both of them well. At the centre of the little settlement loomed the stone bastions of Upper Fort Garry, which belonged to the Hudson’s Bay Company. The Company controlled trade and also the Council of Assiniboia, which governed the settlement. His father often went to the fort on business, and Louis tagged along. From there, gazing across the river, he could see the twin spires of the cathedral of St. Boniface soaring into the sky. He had been baptized in the cathedral, and attended mass there every Sunday.
Despite its small size, Red River was multicultural. The French Canadians and Métis were francophone and Catholic. The Saulteaux people spoke Cree, and some had been converted to the Protestant faith. Most of the anglophones were Protestants too. Some of them were English-speaking mixed-bloods, the children of Hudson’s Bay Company traders and aboriginal women. Others were the descendants of Scottish settlers who had arrived in 1812, or of settlers who had arrived later from Upper Canada, later renamed Ontario.
Louis’s father came to Red River around 1842 and bought a river lot next door to the Lagimodiére family. Within months, he asked for the hand of pretty Julie Lagimodiére. But although her parents were pleased, Julie hesitated. Not that Jean-Louis was not a good-looking fellow, and not that the French-Canadian Lagimodiéres objected to his being Métis, for they did not. But Julie did not wish to marry anybody. She wanted to be a nun.
In doubt about what she should do, she went to church one day to pray about her problem. On the way home, she suddenly felt herself enveloped in flames, yet she was not scorched. Looking up, she saw an old man in the clouds, “flashing with light, and encircled with fire.”
“Disobedient child!” boomed a powerful voice. “Return home and tell your parents that you will obey them!”
Overcome with awe, Julie did as she was told. She and Jean-Louis were married in January, 1844. Louis Riel, the couple’s first child, was born on October 22 of that year.
From the beginning, religion was part of the air Louis breathed. Julie hung over his cradle, murmuring prayers, and she and Jean-Louis vowed that the baby’s first words were “Jesus,” “Mary,” and “Joseph.” Soon he was old enough to learn to say the rosary, and to take part in family prayers each night. The Riels’ next two children did not survive, so for four years, until the birth of Sara, Louis was not just an only son but a much-loved only child.
His early life was full of excitement. When he was just five, his father played a starring role in a thrilling political drama. Métis and other local traders had long been challenging the Hudson’s Bay Company law that all trade must go through the Company’s post at Red River. To them, it made more sense to trade directly with the Americans, who paid higher prices. The more the Hudson’s Bay Company tried to control the trade, the more the traders resisted. They also sent petitions against the Company to London.
In 1849, a Métis named Pierre-Guillaume Sayer was charged with illegal trafficking in furs. Crowds of angry Métis gathered at the courthouse and fired volleys of shots into the air. Their leader was Jean-Louis Riel. They had turned to him because he had confronted the Company before and was known as a fearless activist.
Now he and a group of Métis stormed into the courtroom.
“Free Sayer,” demanded Jean-Louis, “or well set him free ourselves!”
In the end, Sayer was released, and his confiscated furs were returned to him.
“Le commerce est libre! Vive la liberté!” cheered the Métis. And they celebrated with a feu de joie, a happy crackle of gunfire.
Louis burned with excitement when he heard the news. “Papa is a hero, isn’t he?” he demanded.
Julie Riel hugged him. “Yes, mon petit chou. He is helping our people,” she told him.
The next big event came three years later, in the spring of 1852. The Red River flooded disastrously, sweeping away everything along its banks. Huddled with his family, soaked through and shivering, Louis watched the muddy, roiling waters engulf the family home.
“Does God want our house to be washed away?” he asked.
“Everything that happens is the will of God,” replied his father.
In 1854, Jean-Louis borrowed funds and set up a gristmill on the Seine, which produced a modest living. He built a bigger house, too. It was much needed, because more children had been born. After Sara, in 1848, had come Marie, in 1850, Octavie, in 1852, Eulalie, in 1853 and Charles, in 1854. Another son, Joseph, was born in 1857.
Louis, meanwhile, had grown into a handsome boy with big, thoughtful eyes. Wherever he went, Sara trotted at his heels, faithful as a shadow - part pet, part playmate. Together they played along the river near the mill, or in the woods and fields around their home. They must have had playmates from the Métis or First Nations communities too. The Riels and Lagimodiéres had strong roots in French Canada, and French was the language they taught their children, yet both Louis and Sara also became fluent in Cree.
Louis began school when he was seven years old. He first boarded at the convent school of the Grey Nuns in St. Boniface, and later attended the Christian Brothers’ school, which was held in the library of the bishop’s house. Already aware that some of his classmates had less than he did, Louis used to give his school lunch away to hungry children, until his mother found out and had him fed at school. No wonder some of the other boys saw him as a goody-goody.
One day, a schoolmate snatched his cap and threw it on the ground. “Fight, sissy,” he jeered, cocking his fists.
Louis’s face flushed scarlet. “Just you wait,” he cried. “I shall ask my mother if it’s all right to fight you. If she says yes, then we’ll meet again.”
He was a good student, and soon began to learn English and Latin. One day Bishop Alexandre-Antonin Taché dropped in to see how the boys in the school were doing. He had known Louis all his life, and noticed him intent on his Latin grammar.
“You like to study, my son?” asked the plump little priest.
Louis’s face kindled. “Oh, yes, Monseigneur,” he said eagerly. “I love books.”
The bishop nodded, well pleased. When Louis was a little older, Taché gave him free run of the library, and Louis spent hours poring over heavy tomes of literature and philosophy. The bishop began to think that this clever, pious youngster might be just who he was looking for - someone who might someday become the first Métis priest in the North-West.
And so, in June of 1858, thirteen-year-old Louis found himself standing in the sunshine on the steps outside St. Boniface Cathedral. He had just heard mass with his family, and his soul was still aglow with the mystery and wonder of it. Sara, her eyes wide and shining in her thin face, tugged on his sleeve.
“How proud you must be, Louis! And we are all so proud of you,” she said. But even as she spoke, tears welled up in her eyes.
Louis couldn’t speak for the lump in his own throat. He was proud to be one of three boys chosen to study at a college in Montreal. But it was so far away! He couldn’t even imagine such a journey. He would have to live in a great city, shut away from the fields and woods he loved. And he would not to be able to see his family again - for years! Swallowing hard, he hugged his mother and gave her a loving message for his father, who was away on a business trip. Then there were all his brothers and sisters to hug, and Sara, the last of all.
“I’m afraid I won’t be able to bear it, Sara,” he whispered. “Unless God helps me.”
“He will, Louis. I know He will!” Sara gazed up at him with adoring eyes, sure that when she saw her beloved brother again he would be all grown up. A man. A priest.