by Jan Morris
Only Louis Riel in Fort Garry. The commander of the force dispatched to Manitoba was perhaps the most promising young officer of the British Empire, and probably the most cock-sure—Colonel Garnet Joseph Wolseley, quarter-master general in Canada, veteran of campaigns in Burma, the Crimea, India and China, and author of that well-known manual of military conduct, The Soldier’s Pocket-Book.1 He was 37 in 1870, and he saw things clearly in terms of right and wrong: he was almost always right, his opponents almost invariably wrong. A fervent Anglo-Irish Protestant himself, with an inherited antipathy towards Catholics, he considered himself God’s soldier always, and approached the innumerable battles of his imperial career with a courage formidably buttressed by piety. Wolseley was one of the few intellectual soldiers of his day. He was intensely interested in theories of war, and was as ambitious professionally as he was socially thrusting.
The Red River expedition was his first independent command, and he was ready to make the most of it. He saw the rising as an attempt by the resentful French Canadians, robbed of their sovereignty in Canada by British arms, to block the westward advance of the Empire with a French-speaking Catholic province of their own. Riel was no more than a ‘noisy idler’, the dupe of the ‘clever, cunning, unscrupulous’ Catholic bishop at Red River, and the whole affair was a conspiracy between French clerics in the field and French-Canadian wire-pullers in Ottawa. It was Wolseley’s job, as he saw it, to extinguish this subversion by force, and to humiliate its leaders.
Fortunately for this clever soldier, the little campaign posed problems of a peculiar and challenging kind. Washington refused to allow the troops passage through American territory, so instead of taking a comfortable train to St Paul Wolseley had to plan a route from the Great Lakes across hundreds of miles of almost impassable forest territory to Lake Winnipeg and Red River. Many people thought it could never be done. Wolseley very competently did it.
His force might have been specifically recruited for the punishment of Catholics and French-Canadians. His intelligence officer, William Butler, was an Anglo-Irish Protestant. The kernel of his force was a battalion of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, stationed then at Halifax in Nova Scotia, and everyone’s idea of professional redcoats. Most of his other soldiers were Ontario militia-men, many of them avid Canadian expansionists, many more Orangemen, and nearly all congenitally anti-French and pro-Empire:
Let them blow till they are blue and I’ll throw up my hat
And give my life for England’s flag—
You can bet your boots on that!
The flag that’s waved a thousand years,
You can bet your boots on that!
‘Most of us felt,’ wrote Wolseley, ‘we had to settle accounts quickly with Riel, who had murdered the Englishman, Mr Scott.’ Invigorated by this sense of cause and of imperial brotherhood, the expedition was rapidly fitted out and organized, and set out by rail and steamer to Thunder Bay, on the western shore of Lake Superior.
From there it was some 660 miles to Fort Garry and Riel. A rough road had been hacked out for the first forty-five miles, to the remote and lovely Shebandowan Lake, deep in the forests: from there Wolseley planned to take his force by water, through the hidden mesh of rivers, across the water-maze called Lake of the Woods, into Lake Winnipeg and thence down Red River to the fort. In all military history, he loved to say, no such operation had ever been contemplated before. It would entail not only skilful boatmanship and navigation, but also an infinity of laborious portages. Wolseley had no proper maps, and most of his soldiers had never set foot in a canoe before.
Everything was geared to boatloads, for no supplies at all could be obtained between Thunder Bay and Red River. The boats themselves were specially designed, each to carry eight or nine soldiers and two or three voyageurs, together with supplies for sixty days—salt pork, beans, flour, biscuit, salt, tea, sugar and ‘preserved potatoes’. Each boat also carried tents, ammunition, cooking gear, blankets, and American axes—the standard Army issue being, so Wolseley said, ‘so ancient in type that it might have come down to us from Saxon times’. They took nets to catch fish, six-pounders to blast fortifications, tools to mend boats, and Captain Redvers Buller, another rising young regular officer, to be quartermaster general. What would happen to them all if the Metis chose to mount a guerilla war against them, or incited the forest Indians to oppose the expedition, even the confident Wolseley could not foresee, but at least he had the logistics well in hand, and in May 1870, off the expedition set into the wilderness—the Empire on the march once more.
Wolseley was to talk about it for the rest of his life, so powerful an impact did it make upon his imagination. The professional friendships he made during the Red River expedition were to form the basis of his celebrated Wolseley Ring, the most influential cabal of the late Victorian army, which we shall repeatedly encounter later in our story. The techniques he learnt he was to use again, as we shall presently see, in a more famous venture far away. He remembered always the romance and strangeness of the campaign. ‘For Fort Garry!’ shouted the soldiers as they pushed off from the shore of Lake Shebandowan, and out they paddled across the still blue water, boat after boat crammed to the gunwales, their oars dipping, their big lug-sails bravely spread, their rifles stacked in the stern and their colourful voyageurs crouched forward. ‘It brought to my mind the stories read in boyhood of how wild bands of fierce Norse freebooters set out from some secluded bay in quest of plunder and adventure.’
The journey took ninety-six days, some of it in torrential rain, most of it tormented by blackflies and mosquitoes. Sometimes the boats were all together, sometimes 150 miles separated the first from the last. Sometimes the force scudded across calm water, smoking pipes and singing—
Come boys, cheer us! We’ll have a song in spite of our position
To help us in our labours on this glorious Expedition!
Jolly boys, jolly boys,
Hurrab for the boats and the roads, jolly boys!
Sometimes they spent entire days heaving their boats over miles of portage. They wound their way through the dark complexities of the Lake of the Woods. They leapt breakneck through the rapids of the Winnipeg River, the soldiers huddled beneath the gunwales or desperately rowing, until as they scudded to safety on the other side the bowsman threw his paddle into the air in exhilarated triumph, and the soldiers burst into hilarious laughter of relief. They grew fitter, and more skilful, and happier as the weeks passed, rising at dawn and travelling until dusk, and by the end of the adventure the clumsiest rifleman from Winchester or the East End, the flabbiest Toronto real estate agent, was adroitly mending his boat, cooking fresh-caught fish over a campfire, bargaining with Indians for souvenirs, or ranging the forest in search of wild berries. Their uniforms were cheerfully ragged, or patched with biscuit sacking, their faces and arms were burnt nearly black with sun. Not a man fell sick, and always in the van, in a light birch-bark canoe with a crew of sinewy Iroquois, travelled Colonel Garnet Wolseley himself, dapper and undaunted, intermittently moved to sketch book or purple passage by the beauty of the scenery, but dreaming more often, one suspects, of promotions and honours lists to come.
8
On August 21, 1870, the expedition camped for the night upon Elk Island in Lake Winnipeg, twenty-five miles from the mouth of Red River. It was a balmy evening. Camp-fires flickered in the sky, bugles echoed across the water, scaring the duck from the sedgy reeds. Lake Winnipeg was like an inland sea there, with real waves and seagulls, and Elk Island lay close to its eastern shore, thick with spruce and larch. With its white sandy bluffs and its gentle beaches it looked not unlike a Caribbean islet. The air was fragrant with conifer sap and birchwood, the lake water swished in the darkness, and sometimes a strong fresh wind blew off the prairie to the west, to whip up mares’ tails on the water.
In this beguiling spot, spoiled only by the unspeakable insects, Wolseley and his officers planned their advance upon Fort Garry. They called it an ‘assault’
, for by now Wolseley was more than ever persuaded that this was war. Riel, he had learnt, had assembled 600 fighting men at the fort—news which ‘cheered our men’s hearts’, for it seemed to mean that he was going to put up a fight. When the expedition set off in the morning, it paddled in battle order into the Red River, six-pounders cleared for action. Up the soldiers resolutely rowed, against the sluggish current of the Red, and as they approached the first farms and churches of the Protestant settlers, church bells rang out to welcome them, and crowds of people ran waving to the river’s edge to watch them pass—flags flying, guns ready, Colonel Wolseley proud and eager in the lead. Drama was promised them upstream. It was said that Riel might suddenly ambush their flotilla out of the woods, or that he would blow up the fort with himself inside it, or destroy it with time fuses when the British were already there.
But when they turned the last river-bed, and disembarked below the fort on the morning of August 23, the anti-climax was pathetic. By now it was pelting with rain. The sky was grey, the ground deep in mud, and all the fun went out of the action. Wet through, not quite steady on their legs, the soldiers laboured up the soggy bank pulling their little brass guns behind commandeered Red River carts, whose wheels howled to their curses as they stumbled through the rain. Everything around them looked run-down and deserted, and when they topped the bank and saw the fort in front of them, clustered about by the shuttered dripping village, there was no sign of life. The south gate was open. Two mounted men entered it at full gallop, but nobody fired at them. Riel and all his men, realizing in their innocence what kind of expedition this was, had prudently disappeared. The Union Jack was hoisted above the fort, and a Royal Salute was fired from the guns, in lieu of more exciting fusillades.
9
‘Personally I was glad,’ wrote Wolseley, ‘that Riel did not come out and surrender, as he at one time said he would, for I could not then have hanged him as I might have done had I taken him prisoner while in arms against his sovereign.’ But then Wolseley, without the advantages of hindsight or historical perspective, never grasped the true implications of the Red River affair. To such an imperial soldier it was rebellion pure and simple. To contemporary Canadians it was never so straight-forward, if only because it had become infected with the racial and religious rivalries of the nation as a whole. To us it seems sadder still. It was a timeless tragedy, the intuitive protest of a people whose manner of life was doomed by the no less instinctive progress of an empire: a gesture from that older, simpler world, impelled by airier aspirations, and worshipping more fragile gods, which it was so often the destiny of the British Empire to destroy.1
Wolseley’s expedition effectively ended the Metis resistance. The troops soon returned east, and Wolseley went home to prepare for the later discipline of the Ashanti, the Zulus, and the Sudanese. The village around Fort Garry presently grew into the city of Winnipeg, the principal base from which the Canadians made the west ordinary. It was there that Indian Treaty No 1 was signed, the first of a sequence of agreements which, while sparing Canada the miseries of Indian wars, effectively dampened the fire of Chippewa and Cree, and settled those wastelands for the grain farmers to come.2 From Winnipeg, too, the first contingent of the North-West Mounted Police rode out in 1873 to police and pacify the more distant west, away to the Rockies and the Pacific coast, arresting the smugglers, keeping the bad men out, checking the flow of guns, demolishing the strongholds of the whiskey smugglers—Forts Whoop-up, Stand-off, Slide-out—and clearing the way for that great artery of imperial authority, the Canadian Pacific Railway. Across the American frontier all was still lawless vigour and excitement: north of the border the British imperial presence made the development of the Canadian west almost decorous.
Riel had one last try, in 1885. He had escaped over the frontier before Wolseley’s approach, had spent some time in a lunatic asylum, and was a much stranger and less stable man than he had been in 1870. Called back to their forlorn leadership by the Metis of Saskatchewan, he allied himself with dissident Indians of the prairies, under Poundmaker and Big Bear, and fought a pitched battle with the Canadian forces—sent there, in sad symbolism, in wagons of the C.P.R. He lost of course, and this time the Empire-builders did not spare him. They put him on trial at Regina, formerly known as Pile o’Bones, and hanged him in the winter of 1885. He was buried in Winnipeg in the churchyard of St Boniface, his coffin being covered with three feet of masonry to deter body-snatchers, and ‘no murderer’, commented Wolseley, voicing the imperial conviction, ‘ever better deserved his fate’.1
1 While making shameless use of its designs: Forbes Watson, who assembled a pioneer collection of Indian handloom fabrics in the interests of art and scholarship, was actually subsidized by the Lancashire manufacturers in the interests of profit.
2 As late as 1969, so the anthropologist Sol Tax reported, the North American Indians seemed to be ‘waiting for us to go away’.
1 Which he took with him on all his campaigns, together with the Bible, Shakespeare, The Imitation of Christ, the Book of Common Prayer and the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, an old favourite of imperialists. On page 285 of his lengthy memoirs, Wolseley rashly suggests that his wide military experience may have made him bumptious. ‘Clearly’, comments an astringent contemporary scrawl in the margin of my copy.
1 For parallel cross-purposes, misunderstandings, streaks of pathos and stubborn innocence, I recommend the study of the Welsh nationalist movement in the 1970s.
2 Besides guaranteeing the signatory chiefs and their descendants a new suit of clothes every three years for ever: in 1969 Chief David Courchene of the Ojibways got a blue serge suit made by prisoners at Kingston gaol in Ontario, with red stripes down each trouser leg, brass buttons, gold braid and a black bowler hat.
1 Frome time to time it is rumoured that Riel’s corpse has been removed by vandals—‘from over the river’, as the St Boniface caretaker told me in 1969, for Winnipeg is still recognizably segregated, most of the French-speakers living on the east bank of the Red, most of the English-speakers on the west. Of the original Fort Garry there remains only a reconstructed gateway beside the railway tracks, but every incident of the Red River rebellion is familiar still to the French Canadian community of Manitoba. Riel, whose execution made him a martyr and eventually destroyed the Canadian Conservative Party, remains one of the few truly striking figures of Canadian history, and arouses passionate controversy to this day.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
In the Pacific
STILL the British as a nation were not conscious expansionists. Power for power’s sake had not yet seized the public imagination. Painting the world red was not a popular purpose. British industry, commerce and finance remained supreme, and did not seem to need new imperial markets—Free Trade still worked well enough in the British interest, and British investors found plenty of scope in the developing economies of Europe and the United States. Considerations of prudence, of expense and of morality restrained the nation, and made its empire-building still a fitful, unpremeditated and often reluctant process.
In particular we sense this restraint in the Pacific Ocean, where the British were always conscious of another grand dynamic on their flanks or over their shoulders: the growing power, still half-flexed and half-realized, of that incorrigible ex-colony, the United States.
2
To many Englishmen the United States was still hardly a foreign country at all. When the young politician Charles Dilke travelled through the republic in 1866, he thought of it essentially as a projection of England, and all its phenomena, from Manhattan to the Mormons, seemed to him only new extensions of the English genius.1 The Illustrated London News‚ in its Christmas issue for 1849, said that though the British race would undoubtedly continue to rule the world, it would presently be from the other side of the Atlantic— ‘the genius of our people can exert itself as well on the banks of the Ohio, or the Mississippi, as on the banks of the Thames, and rule the world from the White House a
t Washington with as much propriety as from the Palace of St James’. Romantics often foresaw a reconciliation between the two peoples, even a reunion, to form an Anglo-Saxon super-power of limitless potential, and if travellers like Dickens or Trollope did not much take to the Americans in practice, British spokesmen generally lauded the American ideal in principle. ‘Our American cousins’ were frequently buttered up at banquets, or fed with snobbism and Scotch whiskey in Royal Navy-wardrooms.
Yet the Great Republic was the chief foreign threat to the well-being of the British Empire—more immediate by far than the Russian bogey which so haunted addicts of the Eastern Question, let alone the impotent rebellions of sepoys and Riels. The Empire remained the hereditary enemy of the United States, and throughout the century good little Americans had been taught, in history book or fireside tale, embroidery sampler or handwriting text, never to forget their revolutionary origins:
