Heaven’s Command

by Jan Morris

  The surveyors had been told to keep well clear of the river-side lots, to avoid trouble with the Metis, but they were hazy about the existing property system, and one team trespassed upon the grazing land of a Metis farm some two miles from Fort Garry. The farmer violently objected, and ran off to get help: and presently the disconcerted Canadians saw, striding menacingly across the land, a group of young Metis bravos. There were fifteen or sixteen of them, unarmed but belligerent, dressed in the usual Metis gear of skins and fringed leathers, and looking distinctly unfriendly: lithe slim-waisted young men, different in physique, in temperament, in language, in values, in origins and in manner from the stolid soldiers—who, pausing with their surveyor’s chain in their hands, incomprehendingly awaited their arrival.

  Their leader was a stocky, white-skinned man in his late twenties, with curly hair and dark eyes: and while his companions stared silently at the surveyors, this man walked up to their chain, and in a gesture of theatrical affront, placed his foot upon it. ‘You go no farther’, he said. The country south of the Assiniboine was the country of the Metis, and no survey would be allowed. ‘You go no farther’. The surveyors argued, the Metis were inflexible, and the soldiers, baffled, outnumbered and probably rather scared, gave up the attempt and returned to camp.

  So Canada learnt of the existence of Louis Riel, an archetypal resistance leader of the British Empire. His father, half-French, half-Indian, was himself a well-known Metis activist: his mother was a Frenchwoman, daughter of the first white woman in the north-west. Riel was thus as genuinely rooted to the soil as a Metis could be: to his one-eighth Indian blood had been added a heritage of pioneers and ardent Catholics, and he had been educated at a seminary in Montreal, and politically indoctrinated during a stay at St Paul. He was a passionate patriot, emotional, volatile, often naïve, and was to prove one of the most poignant figures of the imperial story, moving through the pages of Canadian history in a mist of tears. He was like a child. Quick to temper or to forgive, vain, oddly guileless, his touchiness was partly a sense of racial humiliation. His religion was mystic. The British never knew where they stood with him, and we too are left disturbed by his memory, not sure whether he is hero, charlatan or madman. William Butler, one of the most sensitive British Army officers of his generation, met Riel at Fort Garry and thought him preposterous but compelling—‘a sharp, restless, intelligent eye, a square-cut massive forehead overhung by a mass of long and thickly clustering hair, and marked with well-cut eye-brows—altogether a remarkable-looking face, all the more so, perhaps, because it was to be seen in a land where such things are rare sights’.

  4

  The first Lieutenant-Governor of the North-West Territories, William MacDougall, left Ottawa well ahead of time to travel to Fort Garry via St Paul. He was known to be an inflexible Scottish Canadian businessman with no taste for half-castes or Catholics, and under Riel’s fervent leadership the Metis determined they would have nothing of him. They raised a para-military force of their own, strictly disciplined, well-organized, and prudently sworn to drink no alcohol, and when MacDougall arrived with his staff at the Canadian frontier, he found no loyal reception committee with flags and testimonials. Instead he was handed, the moment he stepped on to the soil of the new province, a brusque decree. ‘Monsieur,’ it said, ‘Le Comité National des Metis de la Rivière Rouge intime à Monsieur McDougall l’ordre de ne pas entrer sur le Territoire du Nord-Ouest sans une permission spéciale de ce Comité.’

  This blunt instruction took MacDougall aback. He was not legally Lieutenant-Governor yet, as the transfer of authority was not yet complete, so to the entertained delight of the Americans he did what he was told, and withdrew huffy and bewildered to rented quarters at Pembina. In the meantime Riel rode into Fort Garry with a hundred horsemen, and seized authority from the Company. He and his people, he announced, were not rebels. They were not disloyal to the British Crown. They merely wanted to negotiate with the Canadian Government their own terms for entry into the new confederation. Riel summoned a convention, half English-speaking, half French, to meet at the fort, and when a group of settlers showed signs of resistance, he promptly imprisoned seventy of them inside.

  Now Red River was in a constitutional limbo. Its de jure Government was still the Company, its de facto ruler was Riel, and to complicate the issue further the Canadian Government decided to postpone the transfer of power until things had quietened down at Red River. Unfortunately they omitted to tell the unfortunate MacDougall of this decision, and when the original date for the transfer arrived, December 1, 1869, though still on the wrong side of the frontier he drew up a proclamation in the Queen’s name. Headed ‘Victoria, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Queen’, it announced that ‘our trusty and well-beloved William MacDougall’ was given governmental authority over the territory from that day.

  This was a fraudulent text, not even having the authority of Ottawa, let alone London, and not as it happened being true: but that night MacDougall, with seven companions and two pointer dogs, crossed the Canadian frontier in carriages after dark, evaded the Metis patrols, and drove to a deserted Hudson’s Bay post two miles inside British territory. It was nearly midnight when they arrived, and a blizzard was blowing, but there in the driving snow, with full if chill solemnity, a Union Jack was unfurled in the darkness: and by guttering candle-light, shielded by his companions from the wind, and grimly holding the parchment in mittened hands, the debilitated politician read aloud his spurious decree. There was not a soul to hear, except for his own aides and animals, and when the ceremony was over the eight men clambered into their carriages, and followed by the despondent pointers, clattered and slithered through the snow ruts back to the United States.

  News of this silly ritual soon reached Riel, but he dismissed it as illegal. Red River, he said, now had no official Government at all. ‘A people, when it has no Government, is free to adopt one form of Government in preference to another, to give or to refuse allegiance to that which is proposed.’ So the Metis established a regime of their own, ‘and hold it to be the only and lawful authority now in existence in Rupert’s Land and the North West, which claims the obedience and respect of the people’. A new flag was raised above Fort Garry, a fleur de lys and a shamrock on a white ground, and an official newspaper appeared, The New Nation. Riel seized the monies held by the Company at Fort Garry, and on December 27, 1870, was elected President of the Provisional Government of Rupert’s Land and the North-West (an honorific which made him, in theory at least, ruler of the largest republic in the world).

  So the Metis, instinctively throwing everything into the ring, became masters of Red River. They had done it by force but without bloodshed, and their legal case was, if scarcely foolproof, at least arguable. At the end of the year MacDougall, recognizing a fait accompli, quit Pembina to the catcalls of the American frontiersmen, and returned ignominiously to Ottawa.

  5

  In London the Imperial Government viewed these events with a remote patrician calm. Lord Granville, Colonial Secretary in Gladstone’s Liberal Government, was no imperialist, and he urged restraint upon Ottawa. ‘The Queen has heard,’ he cabled the Canadian Prime Minister, ‘with surprise and regret that certain misguided persons have bonded together to oppose by force the entry of the future Lieutenant Governor into Her Majesty’s settlements on Red River. Her Majesty does not distrust the loyalty of Her subjects in these settlements, and can only ascribe to misunderstanding or misrepresentation their opposition to a change which is plainly for their advantage. She relies on your Government for using every effort to explain whatever is misunderstood, to ascertain the wants and to conciliate the goodwill of the Red River settlers. But meantime she authorizes you to signify to them the sorrow and displeasure with which she views their unreasonable and lawless proceedings….’

  The Governor-General of Canada was Sir John Young, who had previously been Lord High Commissioner in the Ionians, and knew all ab
out fractious un-Britons. He used the Queen’s message as the basis of a proclamation, promising that if the Metis obeyed and dispersed, no action would be taken against them: but the mood in Ottawa, itself hardly more than a lumber village above its river, was scarcely conciliatory. To orthodox Canadians Riel’s rebellion was only symptomatic of Canada’s deep inner stresses: they saw it as French, Catholic, reactionary and probably treasonable. It flew in the face of progress. It was a gesture from the ignorant past. Within a few months of Confederation, it seemed, the young Dominion had a separatist movement on its hands, and from a quarter even the prescient Lord Durham could never have foreseen.

  So the agitated Ottawa politicians were relieved when help came from an unexpected quarter—Hudson’s Bay Company, the traditional enemy of western settlement. The Company was adroitly modifying its public image. Sir George Simpson was dead and gone, the monopoly was abolished, and the Honourable Company, handsomely compensated with land grants for its loss of sovereignty, was busily preparing itself a new future in retail trade and land development. Donald Smith, Simpson’s successor as chief representative in Montreal, was a Company Factor of the new school, and he soon saw the possibilities of the Red River imbroglio. He offered the Government the loyal cooperation of all his officers to ‘restore and maintain order throughout the territory’, and humbly suggested that he might himself go to Fort Garry as Special Commissioner, charged with investigating the situation, explaining things to the Metis, and taking such steps ‘as may seem most proper for effecting the peaceable transfer of the country’.

  Smith was as figurative to one side of the dispute as Riel was to the other. As Lord Strathcona he was presently to be the prime begetter of the Canadian Pacific Railway, which was largely built on Company land, and which more than any other agency distributed the imperial civilization across the Canadian west. He was an immigrant from Scotland, the son of a Moray tradesman, who had risen from the ranks in the Company’s service, and had grown rich by his canny manipulation of the stock market—not least by buying shares in his own company, of which he presently became chief shareholder. His colleagues among the factors thought this process smacked of corruption, and all his life Smith was attended by a detectable aura of double-dealing: but he was a strong, courageous man, charmless, ambitious, ill-educated, without many principles but admirably resourceful. He was 50 years old when, two days after Christmas, 1870, he arrived by sleigh at Fort Garry to put matters straight with the reactionary primitives of the prairies.

  He knew that a settlement at Red River would be a great personal triumph, perhaps the first step in a political career: and Riel too recognized that his arrival at Fort Garry turned the issue into something like a trial of personalities, the self-controlled scheming Scot versus the passionate and unstable half-breed. For this duel of semi-heroes a public assembly was summoned, in a field near the fort: and from all over the settlement the people came by sledge or snowshoe to pass their judgement. The temperature was 20 degrees below zero, the snow was deep, but more than a thousand people gathered there, and stood huddled and frosty in their heavy furs, when a ragged salute from the Metis riflemen announced the arrival of President Riel of the Provisional Republic and Mr Smith from Montreal.

  They mounted the platform, the meeting was called to order, and the two men faced their audience: Smith as speaker, to present Ottawa’s case, Riel as translator to interpret it. The cold was terrible. All over the field little fires were lighted, fed by small boys with wood, and the listeners crouched silently over them as hour by hour, translated phrase by phrase, Smith talked. It took all day, and next day, still translated by Riel himself, Smith continued his argument. This time his appeal was personal, even emotional. He was, he said, not associated with MacDougall. He only wanted to be useful. He was an independent Scot, married to a wife from Rupert’s Land itself, interested only in the well-being of the Red River settlement, and even willing to resign from the Company if it would help.

  Gradually, to Riel’s chagrin, Smith won the people over. He assured them that all their civil and religious rights would stand, that their existing properties would be respected, and that all Red River people, whatever their race, would enjoy exactly the same status as British subjects in any other part of the Dominion. Finally he invited the convention to send its own delegates to Ottawa, to confirm all this for themselves, and ‘to explain the wants and wishes of the Red River people, as well as to discuss and arrange for the representation of the country in Parliament’. The meeting broke up to cheers, an astonishing triumph for Smith, and for a moment it seemed that the rebellion was peacefully over, and that the Metis would come to terms with the British Empire.

  6

  But at this moment blood was shed. Riel’s prisoners were still held inside the fort, and now a posse of Canadian settlers, with a few Indians, gathered outside the town to assault the fort and release them. They took as hostage a young Metis. He escaped, and in doing so killed a local Scotsman: the infuriated Canadians pursued him, caught him, and killed him in return. Advancing with blood up through the snow towards the fort, the Canadians were greeted by a conciliatory message from Riel, announcing that he had already released the prisoners. He urged the settlers to support the Provisional Government, and signed his message ‘Your humble, poor, fair and confident public servant’.

  The Canadians were mollified by this appeal, and began to disperse to their several homesteads: but as one group passed the main gate of the fort a group of Metis horsemen suddenly emerged, surrounded them, herded them into the courtyard and locked them up. Two weeks later, when Smith had returned with his good news to Ottawa, one of them was taken from his cell and charged with having taken up arms against the Provisional Government. He was Thomas Scott, a half-caste Irish Protestant with a long record of enmity to the Metis, and it did not take the ad hoc court long to find him guilty. A firing squad well-primed with liquor shot him in the snow outside the walls of the fort, watched by a crowd of citizens.

  This savage and deliberate act infuriated public opinion in Ottawa, but at first Riel himself did not seem to realize its gravity. ‘We must make Canada respect us’, he merely said, and settled down to show that the Metis were capable of running the affairs of the colony. Trade was resumed. A new code of laws was published. Money circulated, and daily life returned to normal In Washington the State Department, fondly imagining the detachment of the whole north-west from the British Empire, seriously considered recognizing the Provisional Government as an independent State. Riel ran up the Union Jack beside his Metis ensign, and two Red River delegates left for Ottawa, as arranged by Smith, carrying a firm but moderate List of Rights.

  There, too, it seemed at first that bygones were to be bygones. Most of their demands were met. A new province would be established with its capital at Fort Garry, and 1,400,000 acres of it would be reserved for ever for the Metis. There would be separate schools, guaranteeing the security of the French language, and all existing titles and occupancies would be respected. The new province would be called Manitoba—‘a very euphonious word’, the Dominion Parliament was told, meaning ‘The God That Speaks’. It was true that an imperial armed force would be sent to Fort Garry, to take over security duties from the Metis militia: but this was really intended, Riel’s delegates were told confidentially, to appease the angry Ontarians.

  Riel had apparently triumphed. The Metis were satisfied with the agreement. Their way of life had been saved, and though the Manitoba Act made no mention of an amnesty, still the delegates had been repeatedly assured that one would be arranged, and that the events of the past few months would be forgiven and forgotten. Subject to such an amnesty, the Provisional Government accepted the terms, and Manitoba came into being on July 15, 1870. The Metis forces were dispersed from Fort Garry, and the Dominion Government agreed that Riel should remain in charge until the arrival of a new Governor. ‘I congratulate the people of the North-West,’ he told the members of his Assembly, in his stilted formal
English, ‘upon the happy issue of their undertaking. I congratulate them on having trust enough in the Crown of England to believe that ultimately they would obtain their rights…. Let us still pursue the work in which we have lately been engaged … the cultivation of peace and friendship, and doing what can be done to convince these people that we never designed to wrong them….’ Riel certainly contemplated his own part in the affair with sincere pride, and years afterwards, when his glory was gone and he looked back upon these events from a nadir of despair, he remembered them only with pride. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘that through the grace of God I am the founder of Manitoba.’

  7

  His trust in the Crown of England was not altogether misplaced. The Canadians in Ottawa had been repeatedly restrained or prodded in the liberal direction by cables from London, and the British Government had agreed to the dispatch of an armed force to Red River only in the understanding that the troops would have no ‘co-ercive’ mission. Riel underestimated, though, the force of the imperial conviction. This was a sovereignty approaching the peak of its confidence, unlikely to permit a semi-literate Papist half-caste to impose his own terms upon the course of progress. Reason might urge restraint upon the imperial activists: instinct egged them on.

  Of course the British Empire had neither forgotten nor forgiven the death of Thomas Scott, now elevated to martyrdom by patriots far away: and though the delegates had been expressly assured in Ottawa that Riel should remain in office until the arrival of the new Governor, and though Riel had actually prepared an address of welcome for him, and planned a guard of honour to receive him, still it was not really part of the imperial design to recognize this alien rebel as an interim ruler. The promised amnesty was never legally promulgated, and the armed force being sent to the west as a ‘benevolent constabulary’ thought of itself from the start as a punitive expedition, and much relished the prospect of an affray in Manitoba. As one of its officers wrote, it was a dull period for the fighting soldier. ‘There was not a shadow of war in the North, the South, the East or the West. There was not even a Bashote in South Africa, a Beloochie in Schinde, a Bhootea, a Burmese, or any other of the many “eeses” or “eas” forming the great colonial empire of Britain who seemed capable of kicking up the semblance of a row.’