Louis Riel and
Gabriel Dumont
ALSO IN THE
EXTRAORDINARY CANADIANS
SERIES:
Big Bear by Rudy Wiebe
Lord Beaverbrook by David Adams Richards
Norman Bethune by Adrienne Clarkson
Emily Carr by Lewis DeSoto
Tommy Douglas by Vincent Lam
Glenn Gould by Mark Kingwell
Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine and Robert Baldwin
by John Ralston Saul
Wilfrid Laurier by André Pratte
Stephen Leacock by Margaret MacMillan
René Lévesque by Daniel Poliquin
Nellie McClung by Charlotte Gray
Marshall McLuhan by Douglas Coupland
L.M. Montgomery by Jane Urquhart
Lester B. Pearson by Andrew Cohen
Maurice Richard by Charles Foran
Mordecai Richler by M.G. Vassanji
Pierre Elliott Trudeau by Nino Ricci
SERIES EDITOR:
John Ralston Saul
Louis Riel and
Gabriel Dumont
by JOSEPH BOYDEN
With an Introduction by
John Ralston Saul
SERIES EDITOR
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First published 2010
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (RRD)
Copyright © Joseph Boyden, 2010
Introduction copyright © John Ralston Saul, 2010
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
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LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Boyden, Joseph, 1966–
Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont / Joseph Boyden.
(Extraordinary Canadians)
ISBN 978-0-670-06671-1
1. Riel, Louis, 1844–1885. 2. Dumont, Gabriel, 1837–1906.
3. Métis—Prairie Provinces—Biography. I. Title.
II. Series: Extraordinary Canadians
FC3217.1.A1B69 2010 971.05'10922 C2010-903063-X
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This book was printed on 30% PCW recycled paper
For Gabriel.
For Louis.
And always, for Amanda.
CONTENTS
Introduction by John Ralston Saul
1 Awake
2 Transformation
3 Promise
4 Secret
5 Oath
6 Quickening
7 Decimation
8 Ordained
9 Goliath
10 Wilderness
11 Crossing
12 Words
13 Hunting
EPILOGUE
SOURCES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
CHRONOLOGY
INTRODUCTION BY
John Ralston Saul
How do civilizations imagine themselves? One way is for each of us to look at ourselves through our society’s most remarkable figures. I’m not talking about hero worship or political iconography. That is a danger to be avoided at all costs. And yet people in every country do keep on going back to the most important people in their past.
This series of Extraordinary Canadians brings together rebels, reformers, martyrs, writers, painters, thinkers, political leaders. Why? What is it that makes them relevant to us so long after their deaths?
For one thing, their contributions are there before us, like the building blocks of our society. More important than that are their convictions and drive, their sense of what is right and wrong, their willingness to risk all, whether it be their lives, their reputations, or simply being wrong in public. Their ideas, their triumphs and failures, all of these somehow constitute a mirror of our society. We look at these people, all dead, and discover what we have been, but also what we can be. A mirror is an instrument for measuring ourselves. What we see can be both a warning and an encouragement.
These eighteen biographies of twenty key Canadians are centred on the meaning of each of their lives. Each of them is very different, but these are not randomly chosen great figures. Together they produce a grand sweep of the creation of modern Canada, from our first steps as a democracy in 1848 to our questioning of modernity late in the twentieth century.
All of them except one were highly visible on the cutting edge of their day while still in their twenties, thirties, and forties. They were young, driven, curious. An astonishing level of fresh energy surrounded them and still does. We in the twenty-first century talk endlessly of youth, but power today is often controlled by people who fear the sort of risks and innovations embraced by everyone in this series. A number of them were dead—hanged, infected on a battlefield, broken by their exertions—well before middle age. Others hung on into old age, often profoundly dissatisfied with themselves.
Each one of these people has changed you. In some cases you know this already. In others you will discover how through these portraits. They changed the way the world hears music, thinks of war, communicates. They changed how each of us sees what surrounds us, how minorities are treated, how we think of immigrants, how we look after each other, how we imagine ourselves through what are now our stories.
You will notice that many of them were people of the word. Not just the writers. Why? Because civilizations are built around many themes, but they require a shared public language. So Laurier, Bethune, Douglas, Riel, LaFontaine, McClung, Trudeau, Lévesque, Big Bear, even Carr and Gould, were masters of the power of language. Beaverbrook was one of the most powerful newspaper publishers of his day. Countries need action and laws and courage. But civilization is not a collection of prime ministers. Words, words, words—it is around these that civilizations create and imagine themselves.
The authors I have chosen for each subject are not the obvious experts. They are imaginative, questioning minds from among our leading writers and activists. They have, each one of them, a powerful connection to their subject. And in their own lives, each is engaged in building what Canada is now becoming.
That is why a documentary is being filmed about each subject. Images are yet another way to get at each
subject and to understand their effect on us.
The one continuous, essential voice of biography since 1961 has been the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. But there has not been a project of book-length biographies such as Extraordinary Canadians in a hundred years, not since the Makers of Canada series. And yet every generation understands the past differently, and so sees in the mirror of these remarkable figures somewhat different lessons. As history rolls on, some truths remain the same while others are revealed in a new and unexpected way.
What strikes me again and again is just how dramatically ethical decisions figured in these people’s lives. They form the backbone of history and memory. Some of them, Big Bear, for example, or Dumont, or even Lucy Maud Montgomery, thought of themselves as failures by the end of their lives. But the ethical cord that was strung taut through their work has now carried them on to a new meaning and even greater strength, long after their deaths.
Each of these stories is a revelation of the tough choices unusual people must make to find their way. And each of us as readers will find in the desperation of the Chinese revolution, the search for truth in fiction, the political and military dramas, different meanings that strike a personal chord. At first it is that personal emotive link to such figures which draws us in. Then we find they are a key that opens the whole society of their time to us. Then we realize that in that 150-year period many of them knew each other, were friends, opposed each other. Finally, when all these stories are put together, you will see that a whole new debate has been created around Canadian civilization and the shape of our continuous experiment.
And in no story does the past reverberate into the present with as much force as that of Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont. Riel, the great martyr or villain—depending on your point of view—of nineteenth-century Canada, has become the Father of Manitoba, the great Métis leader, and a tragic national hero. Gabriel Dumont, long-time Métis leader, a great buffalo hunter and guerrilla fighter, and one of Canada’s most remarkable military leaders, has always been a mysterious figure, somehow cut off from mainstream political reality.
Now the brilliant novelist Joseph Boyden has brought the two men together, back into the relationship that shaped them, shaped modern Métis history, and was central to the shaping of Canada. After all, the tragedy of the Canadian internal war of 1885 showed how badly we could go wrong as a country, how easily and deeply we could scar ourselves, both the victims and the victimizers. But the power of the Riel–Dumont story has turned the tragedy into a lesson.
This balance, this tension of two very different men, shows how their reality and the reality of the Métis people are central to all our lives.
Louis Riel and
Gabriel Dumont
CHAPTER ONE
Awake
Gabriel wakes before the sun. All real hunters do. He tethers his horses to his four-wheel cart. He wishes the squealing axles silent because he knows that they cry out his departure to those who are afraid of him, and to those who wish him great ill. These include the priest, Father André, and that whining dog of a man, the bureaucrat Lawrence Clarke.
Gabriel’s wife is used to his early morning departures, has come to expect them and his eventual return, days or weeks or months later, his cart laden with the sustenance of the hunt. But this journey carries great secrecy and great import for the people who have asked him to take it.
Gabriel is not a tall man. He’s compact and powerful though, thick as a bull moose through the chest, with the black eyes of a crow, the beard of the French, and the high cheekbones of the Sarcee. He is the leader of the buffalo hunt, a position of high respect and huge skill as well as crushing demand. The buffalo are mostly gone now, and the Métis people fall back on what they’ve always fallen back on in tight times: their farms here, in what is now Saskatchewan, laid out Red River style, long and narrow, using the riverfront for their thirst. Métis and crops alike need water, first and foremost. And the Métis allotments are sensible for this landscape.
But Gabriel is not a farmer. He knows that anyone who wishes to head west, or east for that matter, has to cross the wide and pretty South Saskatchewan River. With no buffalo to pursue, he’s built himself a good business here where the Carlton Trail nears Batoche. He runs a river ferry, and because Gabriel is a social man, he’s constructed a small store as an excuse for visitors to come in. When they do, they’re always surprised to find a billiards table at the centre of the room. There’s nothing Gabriel enjoys more than a good game, and he’s a talented player, rarely losing. Gabriel’s known across the North-West not only for his skills as a hunter and a leader but for his social skills, too. He’s a wellrespected man.
Canada has just turned seventeen, is prone to the moods and fears and stubbornness of a teenager. Surveyors, at the behest of John A. Macdonald, have arrived to tell the Métis that the Métis’ understanding of their environment does not correspond with Ottawa’s. The surveyors are just working men, for the most part, and must take little joy in squaring off imaginary parcels of wilderness. But their work inflames the Métis. The Métis, after all, have been pushed farther and farther west, following the buffalo, following a life in the wilds. They are a people of the land. The freedom and difficulty of the land is what they know.
And now that the American Civil War is a staunched but still festering wound, that hungry nation to the south looks north and west toward Manifest Destiny to try to quell its other appetites. The government of Canada understands this acutely, pushing its surveyors westward as fast as the surveyors can plot out squares of earth. A Canadian railroad, a sea-to-sea iron horse, is the only way to show the Americans that Canada is not a part of their destiny. Métis be damned if they will slow this progress.
To the men in Ottawa, the mixed-bloods are insolent and stubborn. The Métis represent two painful thorns in John A. Macdonald’s feet as he attempts his Anglo-Saxon stride to the Pacific. One foot swells with the Indian problem, the other with the French. While often illiterate, the Métis are better organized politically than the Indians. And they have a wanderlust that the Québécois do not. The Métis are both Indian and French. And they are neither. To make matters worse for Sir John, the Métis’ growing understanding that their actions have consequences Ottawa cannot ignore stems from the grassroots actions of one man, a man Sir John has long wished dead or gone. His name is Louis Riel.
Yes, the Métis are complicated in that they are halfbloods. The European blood—more often French, but also Scots, Irish, or English—understands but still despises the work of the surveyor. The Indian blood—Cree, Ojibwa and Saulteaux, Sarcee, Peguis, Blood, Blackfoot, Gros Ventre, Dene, among others—this Indian blood struggles against ownership of land by humans, and especially governments. But the Métis learned a hard lesson in Manitoba a number of years ago—that if they do not have title to their land, the bureaucrats in Ottawa sell it to others, to newcomers or men representing vested interests. And so far, the government has turned a deaf ear to Métis petitions for fair title to the land that they now settle and live on.
Gabriel, who sets out on his secret journey south early that June morning, is a man who’s always been ruled more by his Indian blood. He has lived off and from the land his whole life. He is a Métis leader whom the Indians see as a chief, respected and feared by those who’ve met him. As a young man, barely a teenager, he was forced to kill Sioux attackers at Grand Coteau. He can shoot a duck’s head clean off at a hundred paces, is one of the few who can call buffalo by mimicking the grunt of the bull, the whine of the cow. Gabriel is a master horseman, and besides French and a smattering of English, he speaks six Indian languages despite the fact that he cannot read or write.
Intelligence and wisdom, though, cannot be quantified by these abilities, especially in the wild lands of the Canadian West in 1884. After all, it would be a great joke to try to imagine a politician from Upper Canada surviving more than a couple of days in this beautiful but harsh place that the Métis have settled as they pus
h farther and farther away from Ottawa, as they search for their own belonging, Israelites in a very different setting, in a very different time.
And so Gabriel, captain of the hunt, a role passed down from his father and his father’s father, leaves his home before sunrise so as not to inform those who wish him ill and begins the ride south, seven hundred miles through rolling prairie, with three trusted allies—one French Métis, one an English half-breed, the third his brother-in-law. Two others join them for a while but decide not to complete the journey.
What Gabriel doesn’t know, though, is that the local factor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, that dog Lawrence Clarke, has heard the whisperings of Gabriel’s secret mission and has sent an urgent wire to government officials saying action must be taken and Gabriel stopped. Clarke’s an excitable man and has had run-ins with Gabriel in the past, has even tried to have him arrested. Clarke claims that Gabriel wishes to start a rebellion and is not afraid of bloodshed. Clarke says many demeaning things about the Métis, but what Clarke doesn’t say is that he himself is set to profit financially and politically if Gabriel Dumont and his ilk fail in their mission. What’s so sadly ironic is that bloodshed is indeed on the horizon, plenty of it, and much of the blame can be placed squarely on the shoulders of Lawrence Clarke.
WHILE DUMONT KNOWS his own country as only the leader of the buffalo hunt can, his seven-hundred-mile trip south from Batoche into Montana is one he’s never travelled before. It fills him with the excitement of adult purpose but also the wanderlust of his youth. He’s not seen this new land south of what is today the city of Saskatoon, country as pretty as his own, the prairie awakening in late May with rosy everlasting, purple rock cress, shining arnica and ground plum, larkspur, shooting star, and prairie onion.
Those who have never seen prairies imagine them as nothing more than mile after mile of flat and redundant land. This is far from the truth. The earth unfolds in slow rises and low dips under Gabriel’s cart wheels, and he keeps a sharp eye for possible enemies who might be hiding in the bunches of cottonwood, burr oak, or trembling aspen or in the deeper valleys leading to rivers. He easily avoids the North West Mounted Police patrols. They are noisy and leave their mark wherever they go. It’s the hostile bands of Indians who might see him as an unwanted visitor that worry him most. But as it turns out, the Blackfoot of this part of Canada know him and welcome him; they suggest routes he might take to slip into the United States.
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