Louis spent a happy spring watching his crops sprout under the warm sun and strolling with Evelina on wooded paths beside the Au Sable River. The old lilac bush at the front of the Barnabé house burst into bloom, and its sweet scent wafting through the open windows inspired Riel to more dreams, more poems.

The lips of my beloved
Tempt my mouth more than watermelon
When I am thirsty. They are chaste and ruby,
Sweeter to taste than bees’ nectar.
Her cheeks are the loveliest tint.
Their rose and white are like the blossoms of
the laurel,
More beautiful when they come and go
Especially under the influence of love.

There was a bench under the lilac - their bench, they called it - where he and Evelina often sat and talked. One day their hands touched, his brown, work-roughened fingers closing over her slender white ones.

Louis took a deep breath. “Evelina, ma belle,…” he began, but then he stopped. How could he ask her to marry him? He hadn’t a penny and had just spent years in an asylum. What kind of future could he offer her?

But Evelina’s eyes were shining. “Yes, Louis,” she said, boldly answering his unasked question. “I will be your wife!”

He kissed her hand. “But I have nothing. We must wait…”

She nodded. “I know you will make a proper home for me someday. Until then, we must keep our engagement a secret. Fabien understands our love. But Maman…”

Louis sighed, remembering Marie-Julie Guernon’s mother long ago. Must his love affairs always be conducted in secret? But he agreed.

Riel’s harvest was poor. By September he was in New York City looking for work, but nothing turned up. And old passions were kindling in him again. He met with a group of Fenians and tried unsuccessfully to interest them in backing a Métis republic. After that, Louis dropped in at Keeseville to say goodbye, then set off for St. Paul. He knew Bishop John Ireland planned to establish a Catholic colony in Minnesota, and he hoped to work for him. But though he had a pleasant interview he heard nothing more. He lingered in St. Paul until January, mulling over his plans for a republic and writing poems and love letters to Evelina. Then he went to stay with a friend near St. Joseph.

His mother, sisters, and brothers came to visit him. Seeing them again felt bittersweet. The “little ones” were all grown up. Octavie brought her husband, Louis Lavallée, and Eulalie was betrothed. Henriette was a slender young lady of seventeen. Joseph was courting one of the Marion girls, and Alexandre, his “little pet,” was attending St. Boniface College. Where had the years gone? And Sara still toiled as a missionary at Île-à-la-Crosse. Would he ever see her again?

On January 20, 1879, Riel went to meet Joseph Dubuc at the nearest railway station. Their eyes locked, and they shook hands formally. The thought of Dubuc sitting in his seat in Parliament still scorched Riel’s proud soul. At a local hotel, they met with Ambroise Lépine, his brother Maxime, and other old friends. Bitterly, they discussed the wrongs of the Manitoba Métis.

“Oh, yes, there have been land grants,” admitted Ambroise Lépine. “But the government put so many niggling regulations on them that a lot of us didn’t get them.”

“And new settlers grabbed much of the best land while the government delayed our claims,” put in his brother.

“I hear many Métis are moving on to the Saskatchewan territory,” said Riel.

Ambroise nodded. “Yes, and speculators buy up their Red River lands for a song.”

Riel heard them out. “I think what has happened is an outrage,” he said at last. “But what does anyone care about the opinions of a poor lunatic? I spent time in an asylum. It’s useless to try to hide it.”

“Your people don’t think you’re a lunatic,” replied Dubuc.

Riel gave him a sharp glance.

“All your friends believe you never were mad,” Dubuc went on. “They say either the government had you locked up for revenge, or you pretended to be mad.”

Louis’s eyes lit up. “What you say is true,” he said. “I did pretend to be mad. I thought that a poor fool would be pitied. Then my enemies would cease persecuting my people. That’s the explanation of the whole business.” He spoke on for half an hour about how he had fooled everyone.

The others nodded approval, but Dubuc looked doubtful.

He doesn’t believe me, thought Riel. “Anyway,” he went on, I don’t wish anyone to petition for a pardon for me.”

“Why not?” asked Ambroise Lépine. “You could come home then.” For he had chosen to serve out his jail sentence rather than accept exile.

“I am not a murderer. I have not committed any crime,” replied Riel. “So I have no need of a pardon. And I don’t care about a full amnesty, either. I want to stay here, on the frontier, a living and perpetual protest against England for its ill-intentioned proceedings against me.”

Meanwhile, Father Barnabé wrote that Evelina was seriously ill. Riel wrote to her about his plans and sent verses to her. By spring, she was better. “I often go and sit under the lilacs, which are ready to bloom,” she wrote. “I am carried back to the days when we were so happy, both of us seated on the same bench.” But she fretted that she might not be fit for life in the West, and that she was “too humble” for the high position he might occupy if his plans for a new republic succeeded. Perhaps Louis worried that she might be right, that life in the West might be too hard for her. After May 1879, he stopped writing to her.

In August, Riel set off for the Saskatchewan territory. As he jolted westward in an ox cart, he was planning a new strategy. He now hoped to create a great confederacy of Métis and First Nations that would invade western Canada from a base in Montana. Then he planned to set up a provisional government and secure the rights of his people. As a first step, he went to Wood Mountain to meet with Sitting Bull, the famous Sioux chief. The scarred old warrior gazed at him impassively as he talked.

“I know how desperate the situation of the First Nations is,” said Louis. “The buffalo are almost gone. Many Aboriginal Peoples face famine, even those who signed treaties with Canada.”

“There is no one who does not know that,” the chief replied.

“It is time to act. We must force Canada to recognize our rights in this land. If the Métis and the First Nations stand together we can do it!” Riel insisted.

After this meeting, Riel moved on south to a Métis camp near the Milk River in Montana. Over the winter, he contacted other First Nations, trying to win their support for his invasion scheme. But none would commit to a definite plan.

Meanwhile, Louis struggled to adapt to life in a Métis hunting camp. He was shocked by the drinking and violence created by the liquor trade. And, tenderfoot that he was, he found life in a drafty cabin in the bitter Montana winter apppalling. But in December he proudly wrote to his brother Joseph, “They have done me the honour of electing me chef du camp” He took his new authority as the community leader seriously, and lectured the Métis men about their drinking and the violence it led to. Some turned against him, and he was even threatened with violence himself. In a poem, he wrote,

One day you stuck your fist in my chest,
Trying to frighten me. You made a row
Because in camp, I put unbridled rebels like you
In their place…

To keep body and soul together, Riel chopped wood, acted as translator, and did some small trading. In the spring of 1880, he moved south with a group of thirty to forty families of buffalo hunters. At Fort Benton he made a formal declaration that he wished to become an American citizen. Later that year, he got permission from the Army commander at the fort for his group to winter on a nearby reservation. The winter that followed was harsh, the worst in years. The embers of his life barely aglow, Louis stopped writing to his family. But nothing shook his devotion to the Métis people. “I am the only one who can lead them,” he wrote.

Meanwhile, Louis saw a chance for a little personal happiness. He was thirty-seven years old now, and had still had no family of his own. In 1881, he began to court dark-eyed Marguerite Monet dit Bellehumeur, a young Métisse. She was lovely and devoted to him, and marrying her would bind his life even more closely to the Métis people. He wrote,

Her living faith and her uprightness
Of spirit are good to see.
Ah! What a fine creature she is
She always does her duty.
I have the benefit of knowing
That her love isn’t changeable
When she loves, she loves completely.
Her glance entices me.

But to his anger and embarrassment, many Métis in the camp found his late love affair uproariously funny. They mocked their prim-and-proper leader and made rough jokes about his romance. As always, he poured out his hurt in poetry:

Every boy in the world
Chooses his love.
I too have a beloved
That I see every day.
But people gainsay
My humble and good faith.
In order to wrong me
They speak evil of me…

Ten painful years
Have I laboured for my fellow-countrymen.
They wish me to forego
All allowable happiness,
Alas, and live
Joyless and friendless…

Louis and Marguerite married on April 27, 1881. No priest was available, so it was a “country” marriage. Riel fretted about this and wrote:

It is the long absence of a priest
My girl, that has forced us
To marry this way.
My girl, you will not be shamed.

A Jesuit priest performed a religious ceremony for them the next year, two months before their son, Jean, was born.

In the autumn of 1881, Riel and Marguerite moved with the Métis band to Rocky Point on the Missouri River. Louis had received some money from the sale of land in Red River, so he set up a small business as a travelling trader. Still worried about the effects of the liquor trade on the Métis, he launched a lawsuit against a liquor trader named Simon Pepin. In the end, this cost him money he couldn’t afford and he lost the case. An American named Alexander Botkin had helped him, so in the election of November 1882, Riel campaigned for Botkin and the Republican Party. Democratic Party politicians then falsely accused Riel of election fraud - encouraging Métis not qualified to vote to cast a ballot. He was clapped in jail. Louis was soon free on bail, but this lawsuit, too, cost him dear. However, all charges against him were finally dismissed.

Through all of this, amid the hubbub of Métis hunting camps, in dingy lodgings on his trading trips, Riel was writing a book. He called it the Massinahican, a Cree word that referred to the Bible. The Massinahican was to be the bible of his new religion. In it he summed up the revelations he had received from God. For now, though, he continued to worship in the traditional Catholic faith, sure that someday God would tell him the time was right to reveal his new religion.

“You have a letter, Louis?” Marguerite asked one day in early 1883.

“It’s from Sara,” he told her. “And here’s a greeting for you, her new sister-in-law.”

Marguerite flushed with pleasure as he read her the loving message.

Louis sat down at once to reply. His eyes misted as he reread Sara’s promise that God would yet reward his good intentions. She still believed in him! “Alone in the midst of a world that does not want my ideas, I am obliged to be silent and keep within myself my great hopes of God,” he wrote. “God knows what price the kind words in your letter have in my eyes!”

But he did not share his next letter with Marguerite, for it was from Evelina, the girl he left behind him. After reading of Riel’s marriage in a newspaper, she had tracked down a Montana address for him. In scathing words, she demanded that he tell her the truth about his marriage and accused him of destroying her happiness. Burning with indignation, Louis sat down and drafted a response. She had wanted a proper home before they married, he reminded her. She had expressed doubts about their love… It’s not known whether he ever sent this reply, but to the end of his life he kept all of Evelinas letters.

Times were hard for the little Riel family that spring. They had no money, and Marguerite was expecting another baby. Louis was upset by a strange vision he had of his father, and said he felt “a very strong moral sadness.” In desperation, he took a job as a shepherd, while Marguerite worked as domestic help. Then Riel was offered a teaching position at St. Peter’s Mission, near Sun River, Montana. At last he would be earning regular pay, and they would be able to settle down and educate their children at the mission school. The Riels arrived at St. Peter’s in April and moved in with Joseph Swan, a Métis from Red River. But, “My wife and children and I, we have no home,” Louis wrote. “We live with others. We have neither beds nor pillows. We sleep on straw.”

In late June, Riel returned to Manitoba. His exile had long since expired, and he had become an American citizen. It was time for a visit - Henriette was getting married, and he also wanted to see to land claims there. His arrival was hot news in Winnipeg, and reporters from two newspapers hurried out to St. Vital to interview him. About the Red River Resistance and Scott’s execution, he insisted, “I am more and more convinced every day, without a single exception, that I did right.”

As friends and relatives gathered for the wedding celebrations, Louis wrote jokingly to Marguerite, “I have hardly been able to sleep on account of the large number of visitors.” Yet not all his old friends welcomed him. He had a falling-out with Archbishop Taché, and his relationship with Joseph Dubuc and other prosperous French-speaking Manitobans felt strained, too. “No one wanted me in the influential political circles of Manitoba,” he wrote, forlornly. “I am forgotten as if I were dead.”

But not by everyone. At the wedding, Métis from the village of Batoche on the South Saskatchewan River sought him out.

“Our river lots are being threatened by new surveys,” Napoleon Nault told him. “And English-speaking settlers are pouring in.”

“We petitioned the government,” added Damase Carriére, “but there was no reply.”

They gazed at him hopefully. “Ah, the same old story,” said Riel, stroking his beard. He had much to ponder on the long dusty ride back to Sun River.

Louis and Marguerite’s daughter Marie-Angélique was born that autumn, and in November he began his teaching job. He was well liked, but teaching small children wore him down. “My health suffers from the fatiguing regularity of having to look after children from 6 in the morning until 8 at night, on Sunday as well as on the days of the week…” he complained. “I do not get enough rest.”

And the year 1884 began badly. In January, Riel learned that Sara had died, and his sorrow plunged him into deep depression. In April and May, he had fearful dreams and heard the voice of God say he would spend thirty years in purgatory. Yet at other times, he felt strangely exhilarated. “The jug of my spirit has come uncorked,” he wrote. He took it as a sign that his true mission was beginning at last and began writing down prayers and meditations. Then he received letters from the Saskatchewan territory. The Métis there were hoping for his help. They were going to send a delegation to him.

On June 4, the delegation arrived, weary and dusty. Summoned from Sunday mass, Riel shook hands with their leader.

“You are a man who has travelled far,” he said. “I don’t know you, but you seem to know me.”

The man’s deep-set eyes twinkled. Of course he knew Monsieur le président. Hadn’t they met long ago at Fort Garry? But then he had been a lithe young hunter who had ridden hundreds of kilometres to offer his help. No wonder Riel didn’t recognize the burly middle-aged fellow he had become. “Yes,” he said. “And I think you may know the name of Gabriel Dumont.”

Riel made the delegation wait a day for his answer, and then he agreed to go back with them. On June 10, the little cavalcade set out for the Saskatchewan country. Louis had promised to help the Métis win their rights. He mentioned, too, that he had claims of his own to settle with Canada. Now, as the wagon jolted across the rolling prairie, he dreamed of compensation at last for his sufferings. And that was not all. If God willed it, if the time was right… Visions of a Métis republic in the North-West and his Church of the Shining Mountains shimmered before his eyes like a mirage.