Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont

by Joseph Boyden

  Moïse Ouellette, the son of the ancient Joseph who was bayonetted mercilessly the day before, delivers a letter from Middleton to Louis. Middleton states that Louis will receive safe passage to the Canadian camp, where he will be offered protection until John A. decides what to do with him.

  Louis answers that he needs more time to reflect, pray, and write before he will turn himself in. He retreats to his hideout and asks God once again to light a path for him. He’s heard that Gabriel is searching for him. One option is for the two of them to slip through the Canadian lines and make a run back to Montana. But can Louis do this? How can he abandon his people and, like a coward, slip away into the night? Louis doesn’t hold it against Gabriel if this is what he must do. Just today word came that Gabriel had killed a couple more Canadian soldiers while collecting blankets and provisions for his people. Gabriel literally has blood on his hands, and so he must flee or be killed.

  And then the answer strikes Louis like a lightning bolt. Yes! Suddenly he knows exactly what he must do! God has finally spoken, and as always, God’s word is exact. Louis will turn himself in to Middleton. He will tell Middleton that now that the leader of the rebellion has been captured, he must offer leniency to all Métis in the country. The pressure will be taken off his people in the short term.

  But what about the long term? What can be salvaged? God proves his greatness once more when Louis is struck a second time by a lightning bolt. Surely he will be taken to trial for what the Canadians call a crime. And won’t a trial attract huge attention? Louis can imagine that a trial for treason will garner not just national but international attention. A phoenix can rise from the ashes of Batoche. It can. Louis will make sure that he’s given a platform from which he can espouse the simple, just, and fair requests of the Métis. Louis will turn himself in and use the trial that follows to continue pursuing the dream of a Métis homeland in the vast Canadian wilderness.

  On the afternoon of May 15, just three days after the fall of Batoche, with his dear Marguerite and children cared for by friends, Louis walks out of the bush and along a path near Guardepuis Crossing. He’s tied a white handkerchief on one sleeve and holds the letter from General Middleton in his hand. It doesn’t take long for a small patrol to see him and order him to halt. When they ask him who he is and he answers “Louis ‘David’ Riel,” they can’t believe their luck. Surely there will be a bonus for finding the leader of the rebellion! They happily take him into custody and hurry him to General Middleton’s camp.

  Despite the attempt to bring Louis into the camp secretly, word spreads fast that the leader of the rebellion has finally surrendered. Louis sits in General Middleton’s tent and swarms of officers and reporters arrive to get a glimpse. Louis still fears for his safety, especially at the hands of the soldiers in the camp, but Middleton once again promises that he won’t be harmed. The two chat for a long while, and Middleton asks Louis how he possibly imagined he might defeat such a large force of soldiers. Louis responds that the hope was never to win so much as to hold them off until the Dominion understood it needed to deal with Métis concerns directly and through negotiation.

  Middleton orders a tent pitched for Louis beside his own, and for the next number of days, while they await word of where Louis will be taken, they speak of many things. Often they double back to the battle and the wish of both men that it could have been avoided.

  Within a couple of days Middleton is instructed to bring Louis to Regina, where he is to stand trial. On the day before he is to leave, a military photographer captures a haunting image of Louis. The photo shows him in silhouette, standing in front of a tent, wearing a Stetson and the heavy wool pants of his people. Louis’s beard is full and unkempt, as if he has given up grooming. His posture, not quite straight, suggests his weariness. He still wears the white armband of surrender on his left arm, and the soldiers behind him can’t help but stare. The prophet of the New World, to one who might not recognize him, looks like any hard-working and hard-living member of the Métis community of Batoche. But this man who stands here in front of a military tent, he is not from here, and this place is no longer his home. Once more, Louis has been cast into the wilderness.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Crossing

  For eleven days Gabriel and his friend Michel Dumas ride through the Canadian wilderness of Saskatchewan, south to the freedom of Montana. What would normally be a threehundred-mile journey doubles in length as the two men are forced to avoid the obvious trails that now swarm with Canadian soldiers and scouts, all of them looking for the master of the prairies. Gabriel knows the first long section of his ride from childhood memory, but as he approaches Montana, he must recall the trip he made less than a year ago, when he first went down to ask Louis to come back to Batoche with him.

  Does Gabriel regret bringing Louis to Saskatchewan? Does he regret not fighting harder with the prophet about waging a guerrilla war? It isn’t in Gabriel’s makeup to regret. That which has happened has already happened, and nothing he does can possibly change it. Long before he brought Louis back from exile, the Métis were heading for a battle with the federal government. Maybe Louis served to speed up the process. But it would have come, regardless. What Gabriel does still have control over is what he can do in the next weeks, the next months. He will attempt to rally any Métis and Indians he can find who are willing to join him, and he will make a daring rescue of Louis. The battle for a Métis homeland is not over. It will never be over as long as Métis live in the North-West.

  As if to prove his point, Gabriel continues to come across small bands of Métis and Indians who are sympathetic to his cause. They feed him and point out the best trails. Resting during the day, riding from dusk to dawn, and praying to the Virgin Mary for guidance, he crosses into the U.S. when he fords the Milk River. Now it is Gabriel who is the homeless one, a man exiled from his own beloved family and country. He’d told Madeleine he would send for her when he found a temporary place of safety in which to settle, but until then, he doesn’t feel whole.

  As good as Gabriel was at escaping the Canadian army, his luck runs out shortly after he crosses into the States. Gabriel and Michel are surprised by a U.S. Army patrol and are taken to Fort Assinniboine in Montana. As George Woodcock points out in his biography of Dumont, the commander of the fort, when he realizes just who it is he has in his custody, quickly concludes that this is a political, not a military, issue. He wires to his commander who wires to his, and the hot potato that is Gabriel Dumont makes himself known all the way to the president of the United States, Grover Cleveland. Cleveland sees that the Canadians haven’t asked for Gabriel’s extradition and realizes that John A. has enough on his plate trying to deal with that strange man Riel, and so he orders Gabriel and his friend freed, even welcomed to wander around the country as they see fit.

  After a comfortable stay at Fort Assinniboine, where he’s treated more as a celebrity than a prisoner, Gabriel makes his way to Spring Creek, Montana, where he has a brother-inlaw and there’s a strong Métis community. From there he begins to visit other communities in Montana, trying to gauge whether he can raise a group of men who are willing to ride with him back to Canada and free Louis. But every week more and more reports confirm that Louis is so well protected that it will take an army to free him. What was at best a grandiose idea begins to wither on the vine. Gabriel, so far from home and stuck now in this foreign country, begins to realize his idea is nothing more than a silly dream. He will have to try to find other means to free his friend.

  The guilt, now, of abandoning his friend, his family, his people, and his country begins to torture Gabriel. After all, he’s never run from a fight in his life, even when he was heavily outnumbered and even when death appeared to be the sure result. But isn’t this exactly what he’s just done? Gabriel makes it known through the newspapers in Montana that he was solely responsible for the violence that broke out in Saskatchewan and that Louis had always been for peace.

  Gabriel finds out
that Louis has been taken to Regina, where he is to stand trial for high treason. Gabriel, through his channels, lets Louis’s lawyers know that he wants to serve as a witness at the trial, that he wants to once and for all clarify that he was the general and it was he who led the troops. Louis was simply a spiritual adviser who never even fired a weapon. What court can sentence a man to death for carrying a golden crucifix? Gabriel has finally figured out a true way to help the prophet. Louis’s lawyers, in the few days of preparation they have before the trial, work feverishly to get the Crown to agree to allow Gabriel safe passage to Canada. This is Gabriel’s one real chance to help Louis, and he waits anxiously for word that he can safely return home.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Words

  Louis’s confinement in his tent beside General Middleton is quite civil. But when it comes time, during the third week of May, to be taken to Regina, the feeling of safety that Louis has been lulled into begins to disappear. He boards the Northcote, the same steamer that Gabriel disabled and came close to capturing on the first day of the Battle of Batoche. On board are a number of wounded Canadian soldiers, and when they hear that the madman himself is along for the ride, they become hostile. A constant guard is posted to Louis, not so much to prevent his escape as to protect him from armed and angry soldiers.

  Louis does find some solace in a young officer who has been assigned constant watch over him. His name is Captain George Young, and for the next eight days, he becomes a sounding board for Louis. Their conversations range over many topics, but Louis is smart enough to always return to Métis grievances and the reasons they were forced into conflict with the Canadian government. If this Captain Young is a spy planted to glean Crown evidence from Louis, he will not get it. In their conversations, Louis learns that the man’s father, a Methodist minister, is actually an old compatriot from Red River—in fact, quite astoundingly, he is the man who led the rabble-rouser Thomas Scott to his execution upon Louis’s orders. And now, Louis must wonder, does the son lead another man to his death?

  When the Northcote ends its voyage at Saskatoon, Louis and Captain Young are taken by cart over rutted and rough terrain to Moose Jaw. Word has spread that Gabriel plans to attempt to free Louis and the going is slow and cautious. The dozens of heavily armed soldiers accompanying the cart are fearful that every grove of trees or clump of brush harbours expert marksmen waiting to pick them off. But the trip is uneventful, and when they arrive in Moose Jaw Louis is whisked by train to Regina, where he’s to stand trial.

  If conditions with General Middleton were civil, Louis’s two-month stay awaiting trial is abysmal. A detachment of Mounties is now in charge of him, and the men’s disdain, even hatred, is obvious. They are English-speaking Protestants, many of them belonging to the Orange Order, and there’s no sympathy in their bones for a Catholic halfbreed agitator and murderer like Louis Riel. He is locked in a small, stone cell, his leg chained to the wall. His meals consist of potatoes with a few stringy bits of beef. The place is cold and dank at night, and hot and claustrophobic during the day. Louis’s only exercise is kept to short walks, during which he is forced to carry the heavy metal ball that is attached to his chain. He’s given a pen and paper, though, his only solace. Louis writes poems and reflections, and asks the Mountie in charge that his wife and children be looked after. While political prisoners should be handled with more respect than this, Louis’s spirit sinks when he realizes that he’s being viewed as the lowest common felon. He’s truly in the hands of the enemy now, and any hope that he’d be treated with the equality and respect his people deserve dissolves in the growing late-spring heat.

  Information about and access to the outside world is kept from him, which only adds to his sense of doom. What he doesn’t know is that a number of Quebec Liberals, many of them old friends and allies, are rallying to his defence and starting a fund for him. They are able to hire four respected lawyers: François-Xavier Lemieux, Charles Fitzpatrick, James Greenshields, and T.C. Johnstone. The thinking is that Louis will need both French and English lawyers so that the trial isn’t too easily viewed as an English–French battle, a majority versus minority issue. In many ways this will be a trial about the future of all of Canada, and Louis’s defence team will symbolize this. Louis needs help from all corners if he’s to stand a chance.

  His lawyers have a few options. First and foremost, they want to change the charge against Louis from high treason to treason-felony. In the case of treason-felony, the presiding judge and jury are given complete discretion as to punishment, which can range from a few days in prison to life. But the other charge, high treason, carries only one penalty: death by hanging. There are solid arguments for why Louis should be charged with the former rather than the latter; there is plenty of set precedent for this charge, and besides, Louis is an American citizen, having become one not long before Gabriel found him in Montana. How can he be charged with high treason, then, when he isn’t even a subject of the Queen? His lawyers, though, are not novices, nor are they naive. The Crown is out for blood, so the chances of the lesser charge being applied are minimal.

  There are other options. One is to begin to plan a defence claiming that Louis’s rebellion was justified and a product of acute and continued federal mishandling and even criminal ignorance of Métis petitions for land claim review. But this route is complicated, time-consuming, and dangerous. The chances of getting a sympathetic hearing from a jury likely composed mainly of English-speaking Orangeman are slim at best.

  The option that quickly becomes most useful is to pursue the obvious: Louis Riel is not guilty by reason of insanity. It’s no secret that he spent a long time in different asylums in the 1870s. His writings are laced with what are clearly insane ramblings. He has acted in countless bizarre ways over the course of the rebellion, including stating his belief that he is a prophet of the New World. He’s even taken on the Biblical name “David.” It would be far easier to convince a jury— even a hostile one—that the man is insane. This will at the very least spare him from the gallows.

  After six weeks languishing in his tiny jail cell, Louis, with little knowledge of what his lawyers are thinking or even when they might arrive so that he can meet them, is taken to the courthouse in Regina a few miles from his jail cell. Still fearing that the warrior Gabriel Dumont will stage a daring rescue, the Mounties go to strange lengths to foil such an attempt, dressing Louis up as a policeman and sitting him in a wagon for his first ride to court, with three real policemen at his side. It’s a large and daunting caravan, and Gabriel, hundreds of miles away, is unaware of the stir he continues to cause.

  According to the court system, Louis must be charged with an actual crime by someone called a claimant. For reasons that remain murky, the man chosen to be the claimant is the police chief of Hamilton, Ontario, a town thousands of miles away. In what seems for Louis another sure sign that he’s doomed, this police chief is a member of the Orange Order. Louis is charged with high treason—waging war on representatives of the Queen’s government. As Louis knows only too well, death by hanging awaits upon conviction.

  Louis is very smart, but he has no legal training. When he finds out that the acting judge will be a man named Hugh Richardson, he has even more reason for deep concern. Richardson is not a judge in the proper sense. He’s what’s called a stipendiary magistrate, a barrister of at least five years’ experience who serves as a part-time judge in the thinly populated North-West Territories. Stipendiary magistrates are hired by the administration in Ottawa, an administration that holds no love for Louis; their job is to help ease the duties of the few, overworked real judges in the area. Louis must wonder why a full-time judge isn’t assigned to sit on what should be regarded as an important trial. Worse, he finds out that Mr. Richardson, yet another Orangeman, served as counsel for the territorial governor in 1880 and once wrote a letter to the Ministry of the Interior strongly condemning the Métis leaders as “evil influences” doing “no good” for the half-breeds. />
  Louis must also be distressed to learn that, rather than the typical twelve jurors, with its greater chance to find empathetic men among that number, a trial under a stipendiary magistrate requires only six jurors.

  Louis’s lawyers are nine days away from arriving, and Richardson has scheduled the trial to begin on July 20, which means they will have only a few days to prepare. What more can possibly be stacked against him? As it turns out, plenty. When the jury is eventually selected, all six are white, English, and Protestant. When Louis’s lawyers move to have the trial taken to Winnipeg, where Louis might find a little sympathy, the judge quickly shuts them down. Louis Riel will face trial in hostile Regina, and his fate will be decided by a judge and six men who have very little in common with the Métis, who in fact have more interest in crushing the half-breed movement.

  On July 15, five days before the trial is to begin, Louis’s lawyers finally arrive in Regina. The one hotel in town is already filled with reporters and the curious, so the first night the lawyers are forced to sleep on a floor. In what can only be called a media scrum, Louis meets his defenders in front of a group of clamouring reporters. He immediately expresses how happy he is to see that these men represent different languages, nationalities, and religions. Louis, as always, firmly believes that inclusion, not exclusion, is what wins the day. For the first time in a very long time, he doesn’t feel quite so alone anymore, quite so vulnerable and in the dark. But this is not to last long.

  On July 20 Louis and his lawyers appear in the courtroom, where his indictment is read out. He is charged with six crimes: three counts of high treason as an alien, and the three identical charges as a citizen. The defence lawyers argue the unfairness of this, but the judge shuts them down. Louis is to stand trial both as a foreigner and as a subject of the Queen. The defence then questions the jurisdiction, hoping to move the trial closer to Louis’s home turf. Again, the judge shuts them down. Finally, the lawyers ask for the trial to be delayed by a month, so that they can prepare and, just as importantly, bring two doctors from asylums where Louis was kept back east. But the defence’s biggest surprise of the day is to request that Gabriel Dumont himself be allowed to testify, to tell the court that it was the Exovedate, not Riel, who voted to wage war against Canada and Gabriel, not Louis, who carried out military operations. The lawyers want a guarantee of immunity for Gabriel if he is to come back to Canada. And for a third time in a day, the judge refuses them. They will have one week only to prepare for what the Crown calls the most serious trial ever to be held in Canada.