At last Louis could bear it no longer. He stood up and begged the judge to let him say a few words. “My counsel come from Quebec, from a far province,” he said. “They have to put questions to men with whom they are not acquainted, on circumstances they don’t know…”

“You will be able to address the jury later in the trial, Mr. Riel,” said the judge.

“But the witnesses are passing, and the opportunities!” Louis protested. “Already I have two hundred questions not asked by my counsel!”

“Your honour, we must resign if Mr. Riel interferes,” said one of his lawyers.

“I wish to retain my lawyers. But I cannot abandon my dignity!” pleaded Riel. “Here I have to defend myself against the accusation of high treason, or I have to consent to the animal life of an asylum. I don’t care much about animal life if I am not allowed to carry with it the moral existence of an intellectual being.”

On the following days, Riel listened as lawyers for the Crown tried to prove that he was completely sane, that he had offered to desert the Métis for a bribe of thirty-five thousand dollars, that his vanity and ambition alone had caused the uprising. Then Riel’s lawyers called witnesses. Father André and Father Fourmond said Riel was “completely a fool” on questions of religion and politics, that when contradicted, he would fly into a temper, and “use violent expressions.” Dr. François Roy, from the Beauport asylum, testified that Louis had suffered from “megalomania.”

At last, on July 31, Riel was allowed to address the jury. “I feel blessed by God for all those who testified that I am not mad,” he began. Then he tried to explain Métis grievances. “The rebellion would have remained constitutional if we had not been attacked,” he said. As to his religious ideas, “I wished to leave Rome aside because it divided Catholics and Protestants,” he told the court. And he claimed to be the prophet of the New World. As to politics, he concluded, “I am simply a guest of the Half-breeds of the Saskatchewan. I worked to better the condition of the people of the Saskatchewan at the risk of my life. I have never had any pay. It has always been my hope to have a fair living one day. It will be for you to pronounce - if you say I was right, you can conscientiously acquit me, as I hope through the help of God you will.”

His speech was a reasonable explanation of his actions. It undermined his lawyers’ argument that he was insane, and made it clear that he did not want to be acquitted on those terms.

The next day, the judge addressed the jury. Then Louis knelt as the jury withdrew to deliberate. After only an hour, they returned.

“We find the defendant guilty,” said the foreman. “But we wish to recommend clemency.”

Once again, Riel was allowed to speak. He first thanked the jury. “Should I be executed… I would not be executed as an insane man,” he said. Then for three hours, while his audience sweated and fidgeted in the sweltering heat, Louis talked about his “fifteen years’ war,” his long struggle for his people against the government of Canada. Overcome by emotion, he sometimes rambled, and paused to collect himself. He described the Red River Resistance, and his pride at being the father of the Province of Manitoba. He spoke of his mission as the prophet of the New World, and of his vision of people from many lands, not just Ontario, pouring into the North-West to populate it.

“Is that so insane?” he asked.

He mentioned land rights for the Métis and Indians. “We are not birds,” he said. “We have to walk upon the ground…”

At last he stopped, exhausted.

The judge read the sentence, the words dropping like stones into the silence of the courtroom. “Louis Riel,” he said, “on the 18th of September next you will be taken to the place appointed for your execution and there be hanged by the neck until you are dead. And may God have mercy on your soul.”

Locked in a small cell in the Regina North West Mounted Police barracks, Riel felt death creep closer day by day “How has death become my fiancée, with the horror that I feel for her?” he wrote in his diary. “How can she follow me with an attention equal to the repulsion she inspires in me?”

Yet one small flame lived among the ashes of his hopes. The newspapers told him of the storm of public opinion in his favour in Quebec. Many people there believed he was a francophone scapegoat - that the government of Canada wished to hang him because he was not English. The arguments of Riel’s lawyers and his history as an inmate in asylums had convinced the Quebec public that he was also insane and should not be executed. In public meetings and in their newspapers, French Canadians were putting pressure on the government of Canada not to execute Riel. Old friends like Masson, Fiset, and Desjardins had organized the committee that had paid his legal expenses. Now they did their best to save him. Of course, in Ontario the tide of opinion ran the other way, and many clamoured for his death. Meanwhile, his lawyers appealed his case to the Court of Queen’s Bench in Manitoba. If that failed, they would appeal directly to the Lords of the Privy Council in London.

Now, in the shadow of death, there was another appeal that Riel had to make. “What must I do to be reconciled with the Church?” he asked Father Fourmond.

“You must sign a document abjuring your heresies and affirming your faith in the Catholic Church,” the priest told him. “And you must read it aloud before the other Métis imprisoned here.”

“Prepare the document, Father, and I will sign it,” said Louis. “I cannot be without the comfort of the Church now.”

But he sometimes still spoke of himself as a prophet and was eager to share his revelations from the Holy Spirit.

“I saw the spirit of Bishop Bourget as a blazing sun,” he told Father André one day in August.

“You must control these foolish and extravagant thoughts,” Father André told him. “You have given up your heresies, remember.”

“My ideas are like bubbles coming to the surface in a pan of hot water,” Louis protested. “I will renounce them if you don’t approve. But I can’t help having them!”

In the end, the priests agreed to let him be as long as he said nothing contrary to the teachings of the Church.

Marguerite and the children were staying with his mother at St. Vital. “You may well believe,” Riel wrote to his wife, “that I am concerned about your health and about our dear little children. Be brave and offer your tears to the Holy Virgin and Our Lord.”

He also wrote letters to the American consul at Winnipeg, and later sent a plea to the president of the United States. He reminded Grover Cleveland that he had become an American citizen and asked for help on that basis. And many Americans in the northeastern states remembered him. They wrote letters and telegrams to the Canadian government on his behalf. So did people in cities like Chicago and St. Paul. But the American government did not act.

As the date of his execution drew nearer, Louis wrote a meditation in which he said,

Death has gained a day on me since yesterday
Death is busy taking away my tomorrow.
She carries it off as swiftly as the pendulum
of the clock counts the seconds.
My God! Help me to prepare myself.

Late one evening, Corporal Tabor, the youngest of his guards, let himself into Riel’s cell. Louis noticed that he seemed ill at ease.

“From now on a guard must be in your cell twenty-four hours a day, Mr. Riel,” Tabor explained. “Until…”

“Until my execution?”

Tabor nodded. “The death watch. It’s the rule.”

“So we must see a lot of each other,” said Riel. Then, “Mr. Tabor, do you happen to play cribbage?”

Tabor nodded. So after that they played to pass the time whenever Tabor was on duty.

In early September, Julie, Marguerite, and Joseph Riel were allowed to visit.

“I wanted to come before, Louis,” cried Marguerite. “But…”

“Hush. I know,” he told her. For she was expecting a baby and was in poor health. “Now I want all of you to remember that there is still hope. If it is God’s will I shall be saved.”

On September 17, the day before the scheduled execution, the officer in charge came to Riel’s cell. “You have been granted a month’s reprieve while the appeal process goes on,” he told him.

Overwrought, Louis burst into tears. Then, mastering himself, he sat down and wrote to his mother, “I have twenty-nine more days to prepare myself for death and to enjoy life.” But now he began to worry again about the poverty of Marguerite and the children. He thought of having a photographer take pictures of him, which could be sold to give them a small income, but nothing came of this.

He had visits from Father André every day. “Perhaps you would like another confessor,” Louis’s former enemy said. “I can ask to be relieved of this duty.”

But Louis had softened toward the crusty old man. “No, Father!” he replied. “I want only you.”

He and Tabor kept up their cribbage games, and he had become friendly with other guards too, even writing snippets of verse for them:

Duncan McDonell
                         I do
                          Wish you
                                    Well.

O my fair guard Frederick Rhodes
You wish me to write you a line
Remember that there are two roads
One is bad, the other divine
If you know how to make your choice
You will have a future of joyce.

And he noted,

After a while, I know the Boys
Will gather all my little scrips;
Publish them as one of their joyce
And as a tie of our friendships!
To celebrate
A true Prophet: Louis “D” Riel.

Throughout October, Louis wrote down more and more prophecies and revelations from the Holy Spirit. Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes would hear the prophet of the New World, he predicted. He foresaw devastating wars and the alliance of Britain and the United States. He also set about renaming the universe. “God wants the Big Dipper to be called the ‘Fabien Barnabé,’ he wrote. “God wants the North Star to be named ‘Henriette.’”

His execution was postponed once again to give his lawyer time to reach England and petition the Privy Council. But there, permission to appeal Riel’s case was denied, and the execution was rescheduled for November 10. Riel’s nerves quivered at each postponement, but the flame of his hope burned a little higher. For he read in the newspapers that in Quebec the public outcry over his sentence was reaching a climax. Might the government not spare him after all?

News came that Marguerite had given birth to their third child, a son, on October 21. But the baby had lived for only two hours. In a letter to Henriette, Riel poured out his grief. “The misery that I feel in seeing my little one taken from me without ever being able to embrace him without ever being able to give him my love strikes to the innermost depths of my soul,” he wrote.

In early November, Riel’s execution was postponed yet again, to November 16. Soon after, three men, one after another, visited Louis. He already knew Dr. Jukes, the staff surgeon of the Mounted Police. The other two told him they were reporters. But they were not. The uproar in Quebec over Riel’s sentence had convinced Prime Minister Macdonald that doctors must decide whether Riel now knew right from wrong. If he did not, he could not be executed. But Macdonald knew that if he pardoned Riel, Ontario would turn against the Conservative party. If he did not, the Conservatives were finished in Quebec.

Dr. Jukes found Riel normal, “except upon certain religious and private matters (re Divine mysteries).” He liked him, and wrote that he wished “justice and popular clamour could be satisfied without depriving this man of his life.” Later he had second thoughts, and sent a telegram to the government saying that the matter should not be decided without examining Riel’s writings.

Dr. M. Lavell was the first “reporter” to interview Riel. He found him intelligent, and particularly noted his voice, “soft, mellow and sweet, interesting to a degree, drawing out the sympathies of the listener.”

“I’m worried about my children,” Louis told him, “that the disgrace of my being executed as a criminal may cause them to suffer.”

Lavell found Riel to be sane, and feared that his testimony might help send him to the gallows.

Dr. F.X. Valade, the second “reporter,” wrote to Lieutenant-Governor Dewdney of the North-West Territories,

After having examined carefully Riel in private conversation with him and by testimony of persons who take care of him, I have come to the conclusion that he is not an accountable being, that he is unable to distinguish between wrong and right on political and religious subjects, which I consider well-marked typical forms of insanity under which he undoubtedly suffers, but on other points I believe him to be sensible and can distinguish right from wrong.

Dewdney telegraphed the text of the reports by Lavell and Valade to the prime minister, who prepared a memo based on them for the Cabinet. Despite Valade’s point that Riel could not distinguish between wrong and right on political and religious subjects, the Cabinet decided that the execution must proceed.

J.A. Chapleau, who had been Riel’s schoolmate at the Collége de Montreal, threatened to resign from the Cabinet over the issue. But in the end, none of the French-Canadian ministers resigned. “He shall hang,” vowed Prime Minister Macdonald, “though every dog in Quebec bark in his favour.” And in the report that was later presented to Parliament, Valade’s crucial words were omitted.

Riel had already written his will, leaving his love and his blessings to his family, and begging their forgiveness for the suffering he had caused them. He prepared himself to face death, but he still felt a flicker of hope. He had been spared so often before!

But on the evening of November 15, Colonel Irvine came to his cell. “I regret to inform you that the execution will be carried out at eight o’clock tomorrow morning,” he announced.

Louis drew a ragged breath. “Ah. I thought I still had twenty-four hours,” he replied. Now he could hear the sound of hammering through the thin walls of his cell. They were building the scaffold.

Riel ate a last meal of eggs and milk. As a memento of their companionship, he gave Corporal Tabor the cribbage board. Then he spent the night awake, praying with Father André. Henriette had sent him a rosary and a little vial of holy water from the shrine of Lourdes, in France, and he kept them close. After midnight, he wrote his last letters, and his children were much in his thoughts. He wrote to Marguerite, confiding them to her care and adding a tender postscript:

I write a word of kindness according to God to my little, little Jean; a word of kindness and tenderness also to my little, little Marie-Angélique.
Be brave. I bless you.

His last letter was to his mother, and in it he bade farewell to all.

I embrace you all with the greatest affection.
You, dear mother, I embrace as must a son
whose soul is full of filial love.

You, my dear wife, I embrace as a Christian husband according to the Catholic spirit of conjugal union.
My dear little children, I embrace you as a Christian father should, blessing you to the full extent of divine mercy, for the present life and the life to come.
You my dear brother and sisters, brothers- and sisters-in law, nephews and nieces, close relatives and friends, I embrace you all with all the warmth of which my heart is capable.
May you be happy.
Dear Mother,
I am your affectionate, submissive and obedient son
Louis “David” Riel

At five in the morning, Father André said mass for Riel, and at seven, he administered the sacrament of extreme unction. Louis then bathed, and old, worn clothes were handed him - a black coat, tweed trousers, a wool shirt, and moccasins.

“So shabby!” he said, with a reproachful glance. But he put them on.

At eight o’clock it was time. Sheriff Chapleau, a French Canadian, was supposed to march Riel to the scaffold, but he refused the duty. Deputy Sheriff Gibson went to fetch Louis instead, but on the threshold of the cell he stopped, unable to speak.

Riel looked up, pale but calm. “You want me, Mr. Gibson?” he asked. “I am ready.”

Down the long corridor he padded in his moccasins, and into the guardhouse. There he knelt and kissed the ivory crucifix he carried, while Father André absolved him of his sins. Then Father McWilliams, another priest, preceded him up the ladder that led to the scaffold outside.

The morning was bright and cold, the sky infinitely blue, the prairie glazed with sparkling frost. Riel took a deep breath of the crisp air. His eyes searched the faces of the small knot of witnesses gathered at the foot of the scaffold to watch him die, and his lips parted. It was his last platform, his last audience, his last chance. Surely now the right words would come, glorious words that would convince people of his sincerity, of his mission. But he had promised Father André not to speak. He glanced at the old priest, but Father André shook his head. And Louis obeyed. There would be no last words.

The hangman stepped forward and bound Riel’s hands behind him. His face was solemn, but his eyes gleamed in anticipation. For he had asked for this duty. He had been a friend of Thomas Scott and one of Riel’s prisoners at Red River in 1870.

In the last moments, Father André broke down and sobbed.

“Courage, bon courage, mon pére,” Riel said softly. Then the hangman slipped the mask and noose over his head. There was sudden darkness, and Louis felt the stifling pressure of canvas against his nostrils as he inhaled, the weight of the heavy knot behind his left ear…

The hangman leaned closer. “Louis Riel, you had me once and I got away from you,” he said. “I have you now and you’ll not get away from me!”

But perhaps Riel did not hear him, for as Father André wept he was reciting the Lord’s Prayer with Father McWilliams. “…Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil -”

The trap door sprang open beneath Louis’s feet, and the world fell away.