Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont

by Joseph Boyden

  Accounts of the fateful day of March 17, 1865, vary quite widely, but most agree that a group of Métis riders came upon the chief factor of Fort Carlton, Lawrence Clarke, who claimed he was returning from business in Ottawa. When they asked him if he had any news for them regarding their land claims, he surprised and shocked them when he supposedly spat, “The only answer you will get will be bullets.”

  What he continued to say, according to Siggins’s Riel biography, is that he’d passed an encampment of five hundred policemen who were preparing to arrest the Métis agitators, and they were especially focused on taking Riel. As it turns out, Clarke, for reasons only he could explain, not only greatly exaggerated the number of police, but his false words caused a wave of panic to sweep the Métis communities. As Siggins says of Clarke, “What he accomplished was to jump-start the North-West Rebellion.”

  Regardless of whether the Métis were already prepared and willing to enter armed resistance, as some historians claim, or whether they were taunted into it by the alarmist and self-serving Clarke, the outcome, once again, remains the same. The Mounted Police have made the first aggressive move. They have shown their hand, or as Gabriel might prefer to think of it, they took the break in this billiards game. This now allows Gabriel the leader to emerge fully in March, and with his expertise as the head of the buffalo hunt, he calls his men to arms and to action. Expecting a large contingent of police to arrive anytime now, Gabriel knows that what his men desperately need are arms and ammunition. Talk spreads of taking Fort Carlton to the north to secure the necessary supplies and a central holdout for the Métis, but unfortunately for Gabriel this doesn’t come to fruition despite the very strong possibility that he could have done it.

  Instead, Gabriel sends word to the nearby Indian reserves of chiefs Beardy and One Arrow. Gabriel knows he’s lost the backing of most if not all English settlers. This became apparent a while ago, especially when Louis introduced the idea of a provisional government and began speaking openly of an armed defence of the homeland. Gabriel believes he doesn’t need them anyway. The Indians will help him, and Gabriel’s men number in the several hundred. They know this territory as no one else. Gabriel has some nice plans if things indeed turn violent. After all, he has fought for and against his Indian cousins and knows the way of the guerrilla warrior. What he needs most—and worries about most—are those vital arms and ammunition.

  With this in mind, he makes his first bold action on March 18. Riding with more than five dozen armed men and his friend Louis at his side, Gabriel enters Batoche and stops in at the store of the English settler Kerr, demanding he hand over guns and ammunition. Not only does Gabriel commandeer a handful of shotguns and rounds, he takes his first prisoners of the insurrection, an Indian agent and his interpreter from One Arrow’s reserve. Gabriel realizes that they may come in handy if the time arises for negotiations with the police; he is well versed in prairie warfare and its long tradition of taking prisoners who can act as bargaining chips later on. Many more prisoners will come in the days to follow, and Gabriel will make sure they are treated well even as Louis lectures them repeatedly about his visions and his goals.

  From Kerr’s, the group heads to the church and deposits Louis there before riding out to cut the transmission wires. The uprising has officially begun, and it will not be telegraphed. Gabriel knows that the less information his enemies have, the better off the Métis will be. After raiding another local, non-Métis store and taking more prisoners, he watches over the next couple of days as his upstart army grows, as Métis from all around arrive in Batoche to throw their hats into the ring.

  Gabriel, using his knowledge as leader of the buffalo hunt, organizes this small army of maybe three hundred men into appropriate groups. The best riders will act as scouts, patrolling both banks of the South Saskatchewan River, keeping a sharp eye for the enemy. His next mission is to make a plan to take not only Fort Carlton but the nearby town of Prince Albert as well. In this way, the greatest multifaceted problem—arms, ammunition, supplies, and food— will be dealt with once and for all, and the Métis will be in a place to wage a guerrilla standoff for months, if need be.

  This makes perfect sense in Dumont’s closest circle of men, but when Louis gets wind of the plan, he puts his foot down regarding what might end up being unnecessary violence. Gabriel, having been in the position of having to kill or be killed before, is willing to go to the place he implicitly understands is dangerous and where, most likely, men will lose their lives. But during these days when no violence has yet been perpetrated by either side, Louis’s strong aversion to it wins the day. On a number of occasions in the near future, Louis’s decision to allow the insurrection and the Métis’ literal fight for their lives to go only so far ultimately destroys any chances the Métis might have. Gabriel mustn’t be happy at all with the call, and tells Louis on a number of occasions that he is giving the enemy too much leeway, but in the end he cannot find it in himself to trust his own gut, for this means going against Louis. The initial problem of a lack of arms and ammunition will grow only more desperate as the weeks pass by.

  And so, instead of taking the fort by force, Louis writes the commander there, demanding he give up. Nothing comes of it. Louis, it seems, will go out of his way to avoid bloodshed, but in a rebellion it is bound to come, and indeed, not too long afterward, the dark wings of violence throw a shadow over the country.

  As the last week of March arrives, Gabriel’s scouts report that they have spotted police across the river and toward Duck Lake. Gabriel knows the strategic importance of Duck Lake: it lies on the trail between Batoche and Fort Carlton, and so whoever controls it can use it as a vantage point, a place to spy on the other. He obtains Louis’s okay to raid some stores there and to scout it out more carefully. Once accomplished, that evening Gabriel and his men capture two policemen scouting for Crozier, who commands Fort Carlton. One scout lies and tells Gabriel that he’s simply a land surveyor, but Gabriel scoffs at the notion of a surveyor working late at night in the moonlight. The policemen are taken prisoner and, as dawn arrives, with Gabriel and company stabling their horses, a shout goes out that more policemen have appeared.

  According to Gabriel, he is slower than some of the others in bridling his horse, and by the time he’s done, a few of his men are on their way to meet the police. Gabriel hates not being in the lead and tries to take a shortcut through deep snow, slowing him even further. By the time he catches up to his men, they are in a standoff with the police. Each side numbers approximately thirty, and all are well armed and nervous. Gabriel jumps off his horse, admonishing his own men for not knowing to take this defensive position. That’s when he recognizes a Scottish Métis named Thomas McKay who rides with the policemen. Gabriel’s shouted insults are hot. He threatens to shoot McKay and makes it clear that he believes McKay is a coward and a turncoat. Gabriel goes so far as to try to strike McKay from his horse with his Winchester, the one he long ago nicknamed le petit. But in the scuffle the rifle misfires, almost bringing the standoff to a bloody crescendo. The police, realizing that nothing good can come of this situation, retreat. Gabriel and his men fire a volley over their heads for good measure as the Métis celebrate.

  Exhausted, they return to Duck Lake, only to once again hear the shout of yet another police convoy spotted a short time later. As Woodcock points out in his Dumont biography, Crozier, the commander of Fort Carlton, immediately rallies his full strength of troops, fifty-six policemen and fewer than fifty inexperienced volunteers, Lawrence Clarke among them, the troublemaker and instigator demanding that the Métis be taught a swift and painful lesson. Crozier believes that if word of the police’s earlier retreat gets out, this will embolden not only the Métis but the neighbouring Indian reserves, and so he acts impetuously, not knowing that at least three hundred Métis have arrived at Duck Lake, including Riel himself.

  With his beloved brother Isidore at his side, Gabriel heads out once more to meet the police. This time they’ve
pulled their sleighs off the road and lined them up in a defensive position. Gabriel immediately realizes that the police have come to fight, but still he tells his brother, “We mustn’t shoot first; we’ll try to take them as prisoners; it’s only if they defend themselves that we’ll shoot too.”

  Isidore, carrying a rifle but also a white blanket to show that he means only to talk, and his Cree friend, the wise old chief Assiyiwin, who is unarmed, approach the line of police while Gabriel and his outfit hang back and slyly begin to surround them. Crozier himself, along with another Scottish Métis, this one named Joseph McKay, rides up to meet them. Assiyiwin, seeing how well-armed McKay is, calls him “Grandson” and asks him where he goes with so much weaponry, at the same time reaching his arm out to the younger man. Inexplicably, McKay shoots the unarmed chief dead as Crozier screams for his men to begin firing upon the Métis. Gabriel watches in horror as his own brother is shot dead from his horse. The first blood has been spilled. Gabriel’s own blood. There will be no turning back.

  Outnumbering the enemy so decisively, and boiling with anger upon witnessing his brother’s murder, Gabriel and his marksmen begin picking off the exposed policemen. He later states that he was reloading le petit when the police appeared, and that they would retreat once again, realizing that they were outnumbered and nearly surrounded. After a good half hour of men shooting wildly at each other, with Gabriel’s troops slowly tightening the noose around the enemy, he senses the crushing defeat the police are about to endure. It’s at that time that he spots one of the most striking—and one of the strangest—images of his life. Louis himself has emerged on horseback from the woods behind and trots bravely among the men, completely exposed to police fire, carrying a cross raised above his head, exhorting the Métis: “In the name of God who created us, answer their fire!”

  Ever the tactician, even in the heat of battle Gabriel recognizes that the police are going to have to retreat through a clearing, and as they begin to do so, in his own fog of war, not sixty paces away, he exposes himself to too much of their fire. His men watch as Gabriel takes a bullet to the skull and immediately drops, blood gushing from his head. They can only believe that he is dead. His cousin eventually makes his way over to try to see, and as he discovers that Gabriel is alive, that the bullet has ricocheted off his thick buffalo skull (leaving a deep scar for the rest of Gabriel’s life), his cousin is shot dead by a retreating policeman. Gabriel has lost two family members in less than an hour.

  Gabriel’s other brother, Edouard, takes control of the men and is about to deliver the coup de grâce by pursuing and killing the rest of the police force when Louis stops him in his tracks, declaring that enough death has happened for one day. Gabriel desperately wants Edouard to go ahead regardless, in part out of retaliation, in part knowing that Fort Carlton, then Prince Albert, and eventually Battleford will fall to the Métis and they will, in essence, control a huge swath of the North-West. Once again the warriors bow their heads to Louis even though their guts tell them not to.

  The aftermath of this first battle finds twelve police and militiamen dead and many wounded. The Métis, after witnessing the slaughter of Isidore and Assiyiwin, lose three other men in the fierce fighting. It is a clear victory for the Métis, and Gabriel, tied to his horse and still bleeding profusely from the head, listens as Louis commands a cheer from the men for their brave general.

  In this, the first violent uprising in Canada in fifty years, the Canadians of the North-West have suffered their first military loss. Crozier, who attacked instead of waiting for reinforcements that he knew were on their way, is blamed for his foolish decision and berated in reports accordingly.

  As for the Métis, they have started on a road they’ve not taken before, one that they can’t turn back from now. Suddenly, the worst possible situation has begun to unfold. Gabriel knows this, knows that the choices have diminished to one: his people must hold off the might and anger of the Canadian military, and the only way to accomplish this will be through guerrilla tactics. This is no longer a billiards game. And more men are going to die before it is over.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Quickening

  A week before blood reddens the snow at Duck Lake, on March 19, Louis instates the provisional government of Saskatchewan. He sees himself as taking on the role of a political and spiritual leader and appoints Gabriel as the adjutant-general who will be in command of the Métis army. Louis has put much thought into what to name the council that will run this nascent government and decides that he must create a new phrase if he’s to capture the essence of his vision. He calls this new council the Exovedate, meaning roughly “those who have left the flock.” Perhaps his friend Gabriel would have preferred a more masculine name that brought back to life the all-but-vanished buffalo herds rather than the docile and somewhat dumb beasts that a flock suggests, but Louis best understands the Christian symbolism of sheep and departing the fold. The Métis who have gathered around Louis and Gabriel have a difficult time pronouncing—or really understanding—Exovedate, and so they call the new government le petit provisoire.

  Louis, who believes his health has been pushed to its limit over the now dying winter, begins to feel the exhaustion leaving his body at the telltale signs of spring’s approach; the river ice will soon break and the water will surge. Louis’s life is like a river. He has been pulled along from his earliest days in a direction that’s been preordained. This river, this life, has led him finally here to Batoche, and now he senses the river quickening. The waters are beginning to eddy and swirl, indeed are beginning to froth underneath the winter ice. The power of the river, of Louis’s life, pushes hard against the ice that holds it down. This is all preordained, like the seasons, like winter to spring. Soon, very soon, the ice will give with an echoing boom that will be heard clear across the country, across the world, and the water will flow again, free of the ice’s constraints.

  Louis, feeling the pulse of the river in his veins a few days before installing the Exovedate, makes his boldest public statement to date in front of the Saint-Laurent church. “Rome has fallen!” he declares to the priests and the Métis gathered on the steps of the church which Father Fourmond forbids him to enter. This is the first dove to burst forth from his chest. And the Métis are with Louis now, not with the priests.

  More doves follow. It makes perfect sense for Bishop Bourget, the conservative and powerful bishop who has influenced so much of Louis’s thinking, to be the first pope of the New World. And so it should be. Rome has rotted from the inside and here, finally, on the soil of the grand North-West, a new Rome can be built. Louis has many more specific plans, from renaming the days of the week to praying for the resurrection of a dead American politician who will help the Métis cause, but first he must deal with the most daunting of issues: forcing John A. to recognize that the Métis have fair claim to the lands upon which they live.

  Louis believes that all he wants is realistic, but there are those who have labelled him mentally unsound in the past. Indeed, he spent almost two years in an insane asylum for behaviour that those who care for and love him couldn’t understand. They couldn’t grasp that God spoke to Louis on the mountain near Washington, D.C., during the days he attempted to hold secret court with American president Ulysses S. Grant, during those days when Louis firmly believed nothing short of an American military invasion of western Canada could help secure a real Métis homeland.

  Yes, Rome has fallen, and Bishop Bourget is the perfect man to become the new pope. Ten years before, Bourget himself sent a letter confirming Louis’s deep-seated belief that his path was a righteous and important one. Ten years ago, in July of 1875, Louis was deep in the wilderness of his soul, officially banned from Canada, a bounty on his head. The Orangemen clamoured for his assassination in a year when he had already been elected to the Parliament in Ottawa by the people of Manitoba but could not claim his seat. It was a year of torment and true suffering, made worse in that he was separated from his large and
beloved family. But a letter from the bishop helped quell some of the pain, for the letter stated what Louis already knew. The bishop wrote, “I have the deep-seated conviction that you will receive in this life, and sooner than you think, the reward for all your mental sacrifices.… For He has given you a mission which you must fulfill in all respects.”

  Five months after receiving that letter, while in the American capital and attending mass not long before Christmas, Louis was struck by an overpowering mystical experience. He writes in his journal,

  I suddenly felt in my heart a joy which took such possession of me that to hide from my neighbors the smile on my face I had to unfold my handkerchief and hold it with my hand over my mouth and cheeks. In spite of my precautions a young boy about ten years old, who was a little in front of me, saw my great joy.… And if it had not been for the great efforts I made to restrain my sighs, my tears and cries would have made a terrible noise within the church.

  Over the next while, visions continued to visit Louis, including one where the spirit of God comes to him, filling Louis with a divine light before transporting him to what he understands to be the fourth heaven, where he is instructed for at least an hour and a half about the nations of the earth. The visions culminate in a powerful one while Louis hikes up a mountain near Washington, D.C., the same spirit who visited Moses “in the midst of cloud and flame” appearing to Louis. It says to him in Latin, “Rise, Louis David Riel, you have a mission to accomplish for the benefit of humanity.”

  Understandably, Louis’s friends are somewhat concerned. Louis takes to referring to himself as Louis “David” now, even though David is not his given name. More than that, he sinks into horrible places where he shouts and bellows, sometimes even in church, and most odd of all, a couple of times he tears his clothes from his body and rips them to ribbons, claiming that God wants us to be naked in front of Him, for it shows we have nothing to hide.