Sundance 19
Page 13
Riel refused to be baited. “You sound as if you would prefer war to any kind of peace.”
“To the kind of peace Dumont seems to be talking about—peace without honor.”
For a moment it seemed as if the debate would end in a killing. Gabriel Dumont’s hand dropped to the hunting knife at his belt; his bearded face was twisted in sudden anger. “Are you saying I am without honor?”
Hardesty’s thumb was ready to flip up the leather cover of his army holster. The other Irishmen were waiting to see how it went. “Your words speak for themself,” Hardesty said, knowing that he had support from some of the métis leaders.
Riel got between the two men and ordered them to stop. “It would please Middleton and the Canadians if they could see you now. We are all men of honor. You, Hardesty, are so blinded by your hatred for the British that you can’t see anything else. Maybe it will turn out that you have been right all along.”
Hardesty said, “I know I’m right. They may accept your peace offer, but can you trust them? Once you lay down your arms, you will have nothing left to fight with, while they will still have their armies and their machine guns. A peace made with a halfbreed rabble! Do you think they will honor such a peace? Yes, Louis, a halfbreed rabble! That’s how they think of your people. I know, because that’s how they think of my people—and they are the same color and live in the same islands. If my people are dirt to them, dirty, drunken, illiterate peasants, then what are yours?”
“I don’t know,” Riel said calmly. “Worse, I suppose. What would you do?”
Hardesty was no longer excited. His eyes narrowed and he spoke quietly, though his voice carried to every corner of the big room. “What would I do?” he repeated. “If I had been your commander from the beginning, I would have waged total war against the Canadians. There would have been no indecision. None! I would have made them feel the armed might of the métis. There would have been no talk of peace, not even a hint. Peace would come only when they had left our borders, when every one of their soldiers and surveyors and land speculators had gone. Armed might is all they understand. Make no mistake about it. How do you think the British—and the men who control Canada are British—built their Empire? By force. And by force it shall be torn down—not by peace offers or debates in Parliament.”
Riel shook his head in wonder. “You would destroy the British Empire?”
“That will come, Louis, in a dozen small countries such as yours. Not now, but some day.”
“But what about now, Hardesty?”
“It is still not too late to show them what you—we—are made of. Don’t just fight Middleton to a standstill. Destroy him! Rouse up every métis, every Indian, who is not with you now. Let the English halfbreeds in Saskatchewan know that they must join our cause or be driven out. I would be ruthless toward our enemies and those who are waiting to see which side wins. After I destroy Middleton, I would turn the combined tribes against Prince Albert, the biggest Canadian stronghold in Saskatchewan, and burn it to the ground. With Prince Albert obliterated, its garrison wiped out, we would then control all of Saskatchewan except the towns in the south.”
Dumont yelled, “The Canadians would still come!”
Hardesty nodded and continued to speak quietly. “They would. But I would make sure that, south of Batoche, they came into a country where nothing lived, where not a house or village stood. I would clear the land of livestock, burn every homestead, dynamite every bridge. South of Batoche, they would not find one scrawny chicken to make a pot of soup. Summer here lasts only weeks and winter comes quickly. By the time the first snow came, they would have had enough.”
Some of the métis leaders murmured approval; others stared at the floor. Riel held up his hand. He spoke to Hardesty. “What you propose turns my blood cold, my friend. And yet … and yet. It may come to that if they refuse to meet our terms, or to offer terms of their own that we can accept.”
Hardesty turned away but didn’t leave. “Then all I’ve said hasn’t meant anything. You’re still ready to trust them after all I’ve said?”
“I’m ready to talk,” Riel said. “I am ready to give Gabriel’s plan a chance to work. And now, Gabriel, I am going to ask you a question, so there will be no misunderstanding later. What if they refuse to bargain?”
Gabriel Dumont’s eyes were sad. “Then we will fight the Irishman’s way.” He looked directly at Riel. “Am I to continue as leader of the métis? If not, Thibault is a good fighter. And there is always the Irishman.”
Dumont was so tall that Riel had to reach up to slap him on the shoulder. “You are still our general, Gabriel. So far you have led us well.”
“I don’t mind if you change your mind after I have left here. If there is any change, you will find me with my men.”
Riel protested a little too strongly, Sundance thought, not at all sure that Riel wanted peace, no matter how much of it he talked. He was even less sure that Riel was determined enough to stand up to firebrands like Thibault.
There was silence as Dumont and Sundance left the room. The door had hardly closed behind them when voices were raised in loud argument.
The two men walked away, their shoulders hunched against the wind. “Listen to them” Dumont said without bitterness. “A few small victories and everyone wants to become the new general.”
“What do you think?” Sundance asked.
“About what?”
“About Louis Riel? Will he turn against you?”
“Louis is my friend. I do not want to talk about it.”
“All right, we won’t talk about it,” Sundance said. “I shouldn’t have asked you.”
Dumont said gruffly, “That’s right. You shouldn’t have asked me.”
They walked in silence toward the barracks. The wind was very cold. Dumont stopped suddenly and looked at Sundance. “I don’t know what to think about Louis,” he said. “He is a good man, but … Hardesty knows where his weakness lies.”
“It’s still not too late to do something about Hardesty,” Sundance said.
Seventeen
In the morning, the strengthening of Batoche’s defenses began once it was light enough to see. Men wolfed down big breakfasts of fried meat and potatoes and mugs of scalding hot tea. For a while, it was quiet along the fog-shrouded river. Acrid wood smoke from cook fires mixing with the fog, as ice crackled in the river. Relieved after the long night’s watch, stiff-legged sentries hurried to get a few hours’ sleep before the work began again.
Dumont had worked during the night with a pencil on a rough map of the town and its approaches. Now it was morning, and he rubbed his eyes wearily while he speared chunks of hot ham swimming in raisin gravy and drank his third mug of tea. “We will dig more rifle pits and trenches,” he said, “but not one behind the other the way it is usually done. The first line of trenches will be very shallow. If the Canadians capture them, there will not be much cover.”
Dumont smiled grimly. “But before they capture anything they will have to get through the barbed wire—their own barbed wire. They left a lot of it behind when they surrendered Battleford. It was to be used to fence off the land the surveyors decided did not rightfully belong to the métis. Have you ever seen it used in a war, Sundance?”
“Only in range wars. Usually, it was the wire that started them. No, I’ve never seen it used in a war. It hadn’t come in yet while we were fighting the Confederates. It’s one thing the Canadians won’t be expecting. How do you figure to string it?”
“Not string it, Sundance. I thought about that during the night. There is enough to roll it, using X shaped supports. It will be rolled loosely but thickly. When it’s rolled, it can’t be cut, can’t even be moved. The deeper a man gets into it, the more tangled and helpless he becomes. A brutal way to fight? It is. And there will be more surprises for the Canadians, especially for those on the steamboat.”
Late the night before, they had discussed how the gunboat could be put out of action. It looked as if the plan would wo
rk. Dumont said it had to work, or the Northcote, sailing into the heart of Batoche, would play hell with its well-protected cannon.
Sundance was now thinking about the barbed wire. “They’ll hang you for that, Gabriel,” he said. “If they capture you, they will.”
“Because it’s against the rules of war? Do these rules really exist?”
“They claim they do. Both sides break them, but they’re written down somewhere. They dust them off when it suits their purpose.”
“There’s a rope waiting for my anyway. It’s been waiting since the first shot was fired at Duck Lake. I am not the brave man my people think I am. I think about that rope.”
The work went on all through the day. Ax blades bit into tree trunks, and far into the night the circular saw in the steam driven sawmill whined and snarled. Wagonloads of barbed wire were driven out past the first line of trenches and dumped in the mud; past there, the trees were cleared for three-hundred yards. Whips cracked, and men cursed as the felled trees were dragged by teams of horses and piled one on top of the other in an impenetrable wall of defense that stretched from the high ground down to the edge of the river. On a knobby hill that dominated the road, more trenches and rifle pits were dug. One of the two Gatling guns was hauled up there by ten sweating métis.
“Don’t drop that gun, you donkeys,” Dumont roared, matching anxiously as the heavy rapid fire gun was dragged up the steep slope. Five of Hardesty’s Irishmen went up after it, carrying boxes of ammunition. During the day, another hundred Irishmen, looking hunted and tired, had arrived from the west, after having managed to evade the military patrols in Alberta. They had sailed from San Francisco to Seattle, then crossed the border into Canada from Washington state. They had hoped to follow the Canadian Pacific tracks into Saskatchewan but were forced to abandon the idea because military traffic was so heavy on the line. Instead, they had struck north into Alberta and headed due east toward Batoche. All Alberta, they reported, was up in arms.
“How do you like that?” Hardesty sneered at Dumont while the leaders were gathered around a fire for a late afternoon meal. “Does that sound as if they’re getting ready to make peace.”
Instead of answering, Dumont took his plate of food and walked away from the fire to sit on a tree stump some distance away. Sundance joined him, deciding he would never get used to drinking tea, no matter how strong it was brewed.
“What are you looking so gloomy for?” he asked Dumont. “The work here is going well. Even if they attack now, you are prepared. I can’t say I ever saw a town as well defended as this.”
Dumont chewed his meat without enjoyment. “I am not worried about the town,” he said. “I think Middleton can be stopped. I think they will fight harder this time. But that isn’t what is on my mind.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know. I have a bad feeling. I don’t like the way Hardesty keeps talking to Louis. Every time I look, he is telling him something else. You are my friend, so I can speak plainly to you. This war seems to be affecting Louis more than I thought it would. I talk to him of one thing and he talks of another. One of the things he keeps coming back to is this church of his, this new Universal Church of North America. We are preparing for battle and he talks of a church. I talk to him of drafting a list of peace terms, but his concern is who shall be the pope of his church. He asked me if I thought Bishop LaFarge of Montreal might not be a good choice. Sundance, I don’t even know who Bishop LaFarge is.”
Sundance didn’t know what to say.
“I am far from sure that the Canadians will even talk terms,” Dumont continued. “It may well come down to the kind of war the Irishman wants so much. But Louis’s mind seems to have gone beyond even that. You know what he asked me today? I was working with the men on the barbed wire and Louis walked all the way out there and called me aside. His face was pale and strained, and I thought it was something important. Do you know what he wanted to talk about? He wanted to know what he should call himself when Saskatchewan becomes independent.”
“What did you say?”
“If it hadn’t been Louis, I would have thought he was joking. I was so surprised at first I didn’t know what to say. ‘I suppose president,’ I said. We hope to be a free people with no allegiance to kings or queens, so I said president for want of a better word. Louis admires the French; they have a president. I thought that would satisfy him. But he shook his head and said that wouldn’t do. All this time the men are waiting for me to get back to the wire. Louis then said perhaps ‘protector’ was a better title. He had other names written on a piece of paper; he didn’t tell me what they were. He just walked away, still looking at the names on the paper. Later, I saw him talking to Hardesty; they were both looking at the list of names he had picked out for himself. Hardesty looked most interested, and they talked for a long time. It is possible that Hardesty added some grand sounding titles to the list.”
Sundance agreed that the Irishman was crafty enough to do just that—anything to get closer to the erratic man who held the fate of the métis in his hands. “But what does it matter what he calls himself?” he asked, knowing full well what Dumont was driving at but not wanting to put it into words. He knew the doubts that were going through the other man’s mind. On the other hand, Dumont and Riel had been together for a very long time.
“If Louis’s ideas become too grand, he won’t be able to settle for a limited freedom,” Dumont said. “Freedom within Canada won’t be enough for him. My greatest hope is that the Canadians will agree to let him rule as governor of the métis province of Saskatchewan, our independence and land claims to be guaranteed by Ottawa as the rights of the other provinces are guaranteed.”
“It sounds reasonable,” Sundance said. “I can see the Canadians agreeing to that, even Macdonald, for all that he hates Louis Riel.”
“Yes,” Dumont said, “but will Louis agree even if Macdonald agrees?” He scraped out his plate without having finished all the food on it.
“You’re not telling me everything, Gabriel.”
Dumont looked at Sundance, then far out over the river, a grim gray in the gathering dusk. His dark eyes were as bleak as the icy river and the bare hills beyond.
“I think Louis is going to try to make it hard for the Canadians to talk peace.”
“He’s the leader; he doesn’t have to talk at all.”
“One side of him knows he has to talk, wants to talk, He would be going against everything he has ever said if he refuses to make the offer. Always, he has said that the Canadians forced this war on the métis. He is the peacemaker; they the warlike ones. Besides, our people do not want this war to continue. What do they care of governments or titles? As long as they can live freely in the old ways, they do not care who rules. They are simple people, but they are not stupid. No matter what Louis says, and they love him no less for his wild dreams, they know there will always be somebody in a frock coat who claims to rule them. The priest rules the village, and so on up the ladder to Ottawa. All my people ask is that their ruler’s hand be light.
“But I think Louis wars against himself. Now, instead of drafting reasonable proposals, he is drawing up a list of personal grievances. That’s right, Sundance, personal grievances. He has not talked to me of this, but I have been told that is what he is doing. He says the wrongs done him, including the years in exile, must be paid for with money. The sum is huge. The Canadians will certainly not accept that. That is why I think he does not want to talk.”
“Then the war can only get worse.”
“I know, and that is what worries me. It sickens me. It means that all this,” Dumont waved his hand, “will come to nothing but more bloodshed. We have food now, but how long will it last? Hardesty talks of total war. Even if that fails, he can sneak back across the border and work his mischief somewhere else. Fools and rogues will always thrust more money upon him. Oh yes, Hardesty and his kind always manage to survive. But what of the métis? Where can they run to?”
Soon it was dark. Sundance went to Dumont’s cabin; after lying on his bunk for an hour, he got up and cooked a solitary meal of steak and potatoes. There was some stale coffee, and he cooked that in one of the tea canisters until it was as black as he could get it. The steak was thick and juicy; he didn’t have to do much except singe it on both sides. It was warm in the cabin, and it was good to be in there with the wind buffeting the doors and windows. He ate slowly. It was an hour before he finished the last of the coffee, and still Dumont hadn’t showed up. Sundance washed up and went back to his bunk.
Lying there with his hands clasped behind his head, he thought of all that had happened since he had left Chicago. So far he had accomplished nothing except to earn the friendship and trust of Gabriel Dumont. He realized there was nothing he could have done to prevent this war. Killing Louis Riel had never been an answer, even if he could have brought himself to kill the métis leader. There was something about the man that compelled respect, even when you knew he was more than a little crazy. All men that others followed blindly were like that. It had been a small war thus far, hardly a real war at all; there was still a chance it could be settled peacefully if Riel could be made to see reason. But as Dumont had pointed out, that wasn’t going to be easy to do. When the time came, Sundance knew, there would be a split between those who wanted peace and those whose blood was hot for war.
Hardesty, of course, would be on the other side, and the Irishmen would follow where he led. Thibault would side with Hardesty. How many others? The ordinary métis soldiers, the ones who dug the ditches and did the fighting and the dying, all looked up to Gabriel Dumont. Even so, there was Riel to be reckoned with. Even from an exile in Montana, he had maintained powerful grip on his people. The fact that he had been able to defy their priests, the center of their lives, and still maintain his popularity was proof of this. If it came to a showdown between Riel and Dumont, which man would the métis follow? It was hard to say. Riel appealed to their wild imaginations, but Dumont spoke in practical terms.