On a beautiful summer morning in 1868, Riel leaned against the railing of a steamboat thrashing its way down the Red River. Around a bend, St. Boniface Cathedral appeared against the blue vault of the prairie sky, and tears sprang to Louis’s eyes. The church was new to him, for the old one with its twin spires had burned down in 1860. But on that spot he had been blessed and sent out into the world with so many hopes. And now he was back, with none of them fulfilled. He turned his gaze to the convent of the Grey Nuns. Was Sara looking out of one of the windows? For in 1861 she had entered the convent as a novice.
Now he could see for himself how much Red River had changed. North of Fort Garry, a new village called Winnipeg had sprung up. Nearly fifteen thousand people lived in the Red River Settlement now, and, along with the rest of Rupert’s Land, it would soon become part of the new Dominion of Canada. This much he knew from his talks with Métis traders south of the border.
Two years had passed since Louis left Montreal. His account of his doings in these years is terse: “Left Montreal 19th June, 1866. Came to St. Paul, lived in Minneapolis, St. Anthony and Saint Paul 2 years. Left St. Anthony in July 68 and came to St. Joe, Dakota.” All the while, he had worried about money. By the summer of 1867, he was in St. Paul. From there, he wrote to his mother, “You are always in my thoughts. You know how much I love you, my good mother and my little brothers and sisters. I am sad that I cannot make you as happy as you would like.”
Everywhere he went, Riel sought out fellow francophones, like the French-Canadian settlers who lived in St. Anthony, north of Minneapolis. Riel felt at home there, and he could gossip about Red River with Métis freighters, too. He held various jobs, one of them in a dry goods store. Then, in 1868, he was sent by a St. Paul merchant on business to the Métis village of St. Joseph, near the border. From there it was only a brief trip home.
But even home was not the same.
“So you left the old place,” Louis said to his mother, looking around the new homestead. It was in the parish of St. Vital, on the east bank of the Red River. The house was built of logs and had two storeys, a big stone fireplace, and a kitchen wing.
Julie Riel smiled. “Yes, my son. The land is better for farming here. And we’re closer to my family.”
“Now your Lagimodiére tongues can wag to your hearts’ content,” he teased.
“And Henriette and I can walk to school now,” piped up Alexandre, the “baby” of the family. He and Henriette had been born since Louis left Red River, and Alexandre had attached himself like a limpet to his grand brother.
Louis’s mother gazed at him fondly. Her darling had come back, when they most needed him. And how could she not be proud of such a splendid-looking fellow, who spoke so beautifully and looked such a gentleman?
“Now, tell me everything,” said Louis, sitting down at the kitchen table.
“It’s been two terrible years,” blurted Charles. “First the grasshoppers ate everything. Then the buffalo disappeared, so the hunters have no money. People are starving!”
Louis nodded, and squeezed his arm. For he knew Charles had had to leave school to work in his uncle’s mill and help bring in a little money
“And not just the buffalo,” added Joseph. “There’s not a fish in the lake or a rabbit on the prairie!”
“And a tornado hit the Anglican church in Winnipeg!” put in Octavie, eager to tell the best bit.
Louis pulled a long face. “Vraiment? And what did the Anglicans do to deserve it?” he asked.
“We did get a small harvest last year,” said Charles, when the laughter died down. “And we still have the livestock.”
“And Charles shares what he earns,” said Julie Riel proudly. “And Marie, too.”
Sara, Louis learned, was teaching at the Grey Nuns’ mission at St. Norbert. He soon rode over to visit her. He was shocked to see Sara in her sober grey habit, her face framed by a stiff white coif. The love for him in her eyes was the same, yet an unspoken “but” lingered between them. He knew she still hoped he would become a priest.
Riel also visited the parish priest, Father Noël-Joseph Ritchot.
“I think you will be a man like your father,” the priest told him. “One who cares about his people.”
“Every day I hope to follow in his footsteps,” Louis said eagerly. He soon made a habit of talking with Father Ritchot about the situation in Red River. The priest listened gravely, stroking his flowing black beard, and asking a keen question now and then.
At harvest time, Riel set to work on the farm. He had not done heavy labour for a long time. His muscles ached and his soft gentleman’s hands blistered and cracked. The harvest that year was meagre. They salvaged some grain and potatoes from their drought-stricken fields, but Louis knew they would have to accept seed grain for next year’s crop from the famine relief committee.
Though Riel stuck to his labours, he sometimes wondered how long he could keep it up. He loved his family dearly, yet life at the Riel homestead was a bit suffocating. After all, he was a grown man. He had lived in a wider world. His time had been his own and he had had his privacy. Now he shared sleeping quarters with his young brothers. And wherever he went about the farm, indoors or out, his family’s faces followed him, like sunflowers seeking the sun. So much depended on him. Yet he knew in his heart that Red River was a dead end for him. There were simply no jobs for a Métis with a fancy education.
Longing for someone his own age to talk to, he asked Louis Schmidt to come for a long visit. But when his old friend showed up on the doorstep, Riel sized up his hangdog appearance in a glance. Schmidt had managed to get nothing but a series of small hand-to-mouth jobs. Louis felt a chill around his heart. Might this be his future too, if he remained in Red River?
Night after night, once the family was abed, Riel and Schmidt discussed the kind of place Red River had become. It didn’t make for pleasant hearing.
“Protestants and Catholics have always disagreed, surely?” Louis asked. “And the whites with the mixed-bloods, too. About all people agreed on is that they hated the Hudson’s Bay Company.”
“They still do,” said Schmidt. “But now they hate each other too. Thanks to the meddling of bigoted clergymen, the Protestants think we Catholics are agents of the devil. Even the mixed-bloods think the same. Our Indian heritage isn’t enough to paper over the cracks.”
“And the so-called Canadian party?” Louis asked.
“A bunch of carpetbaggers from Ontario out to make fast fortunes by buying land low, hoping to sell it high if Canada takes over,” snorted Schmidt. “Bigoted, too. Anyone with Indian blood is dust beneath their boots.”
“I hear Schultz is their leader.”
Schmidt nodded. A red-haired giant of a man, Dr. John Schultz had established a general store in Winnipeg. He despised the First Nations people, mixed-bloods, and Métis of Red River, and gathered like-minded people around him.
One night, Riel and Schmidt talked almost until morning, Louis pacing back and forth before the dying fire. “If Canada takes over, our culture and our faith will be drowned in a flood of English-speaking Protestants from Ontario,” he said at last. “Is there no one to lead our people?”
Schmidt shook his head. “No,” he said. “Though not all of us are helpless. The big merchants do well and live comfortably. They have contracts with the Company. Some of them - Monsieur Breland, Monsieur Goulet - sit on the Council of Assiniboia. But the last thing they want is to stir up trouble, though they know they will suffer if Canada takes over. That will mean high trade tariffs and railroads. The end of freighting by ox cart.”
Riel stroked his glossy moustache. “But what will happen to the little people? The boatmen? The hunters?”
“Doomed,” said Schmidt. “The West is changing. The buffalo are going - you know there were none this year. No buffalo means no meat or buffalo robes, and that means no money for supplies. To make matters worse, the fashion has changed in Europe, people say. Silk hats are in, beaver hats are out. That will harm the fur trade.”
A smouldering log rolled out of the hearth, and Riel kicked it back, sending a shower of sparks volleying up the chimney “We Métis can’t just sit like ptarmigan waiting to be shot!” he protested. “We must act!”
“But what can we do?”
“We’ll know when the time comes,” said Louis.
They shook hands on it.
In November, Louis heard that the writer Charles Mair had arrived to join the Canadian party. In January, a letter of Mair’s containing an account of Red River was published in the Toronto Globe. It painted a rosy picture of the colony’s prospects.
“No mention of floods, drought, early frosts, or plagues of grasshoppers,” Riel complained to Schmidt. “And he said the only reason that ‘half-breeds’ were starving was because they wouldn’t farm!”
“He insulted the mixed-blood ladies, too. Said they lack a pedigree, and backbite the white ladies,” said Schmidt.
In Winnipeg, Mrs. Annie Bannatyne, the mixed-blood wife of a prosperous merchant, decided to avenge this insult. She found out when Mair picked up his mail; then, armed with a riding whip, she sashayed down to the general store. When Mair showed up, she pulled his nose and walloped him with the riding crop. “There,” she said. “You see how the women of Red River treat those who insult them!”
All Red River rocked with laughter. Riel sat down and wrote a gleeful ditty, which people began to sing. It goes in part,
Let’s set ourselves to wring
La-i-tou-trà-là
Let’s set ourselves to wring
The nose of this dogfish
Down there!
It’s a lady who shows us
La-i-tou-trà-là
Its a lady who shows us
How we must treat them
Down there!
And he did more. Not long afterward, on February 25, the following letter appeared in Le Nouveau Monde, a Montreal newspaper:
Red River. February 1, 1869
Mr. Editor:
Please be so good as to give me a little space in the columns of your journal, so that I too may write of Red River. I cannot resist that temptation since I have read the outrages which a journal of Upper Canada has just uttered in publishing a letter of a certain Mr. Mair, who arrived in Red River last fall… Only a month after his arrival in this country, Mr. Mair set out to describe it and its inhabitants.
The writer of the letter then pointed out that Mair had not told the truth about Red River and its people. And he rejected Mair’s claim that only “half-breeds” had accepted help from the famine relief committee.
I am a half-breed myself and I say that there is nothing falser than those words. I know almost all the names of those who received help this winter, and I can assure you that they were of all colours. There are some half-breeds who do not ask for charity, as there are some English, some Germans and some Scots who receive it every week…
The letter was signed L.R.