For the relatively young Dominion of Canada, no single year was more fraught with triumph and tragedy than 1885, a year that physically united and spiritually tested the country to the limit. The drama was played out mainly in what is now the western territory of Saskatchewan by a cast representing all the elements making up the Canadian identity: territorial and provincial governments, French, Scottish and Anglo-Canadians, Indians, soldiers, the railroad and, of course, the North West Mounted Police. At center state, however, was a unique race of Franco-Indian mixed-bloods called Métis and their charismatic leader, Louis Riel.

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in Wild West magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

The Métis, common to the prairies northwest of the Great Lakes since the 1650s, are believed to have originated with members of Samuel de Champlain’s expedition, which founded Québec in 1608. As bronze differs from the copper and tin that comprise it, so the Métis seemed handsomely distinct from their white and Indian progenitors. Fiercely proud of their heritage, the Métis enjoyed a reputation for courage, honesty, hospitality and joie de vivre. Like their French fathers, they were devoutly Catholic, although they coexisted cordially with their neighbors of English or Scottish ancestry. They generally got along well with the Indians in the region, too, with the exception of the ever-aggressive Lakota.

The Lakota, however, were nowhere near as threatening to the Métis’ world as were the Anglo-Canadian settlers who began trickling into the Red River region during the 1860s. With whiskey as their main currency, they purchased tracts of land from Indians who had no concept of private ownership. The newcomers, who called themselves Canada Firsters, openly boasted of taking over the entire region from what they called the ‘indolent tribes,’ a reference as much to the Catholic Métis mixed-bloods as to the Indians.

Since 1812, the dominant political force between Lake Superior and the Rocky Mountains had been the Hudson’s Bay Company, whose trading policies largely gave the Métis what they wanted most — to be left alone. All that would change in 1867, however, with the Union of four British provinces, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Ontario and Quebec, into the Dominion of Canada.

Feeling themselves threatened by the heavy-handed encroachment of the first wave of Canadian government surveyors, the Métis sought a spokesman to voice their concerns. They found him in the person of Louis Riel. Born in 1844, Louis David Riel was one-eighth Chippewa and the eldest of three sons and five daughters born to Louis and Julie Riel. Literacy was uncommon among the Métis, but young Louis showed such intellectual promise that he was sent to the seminary of the Gentlemen of St. Suplice in Montreal. There, Riel excelled in Latin, Greek, French, mathematics and the sciences. At age 19, he was studying the philosophers, writing poetry and considering a career in the priesthood. After the death of his father in 1864, however, Riel became moody, intolerant of criticism and somewhat disoriented as to what direction his life should take. When a love affair crumbled because the girl’s parents would not allow her to marry a Métis, an embittered Riel left the seminary without completing the term.

By October 1869, Riel had returned to the Red River territory, where he confronted government surveyors on behalf of Métis rights. As armed Canadians began arriving, Riel organized a Comitié National des Métis and a force of 400 men to block their entry into the territory, at the same time occupying Fort Garry, the Hudson’s Bay Company’s central establishment in the region, without a fight. From that position of strength, Riel and his confederates drafted a List of Rights, 18 demands that included protection of Métis land, religion and language, and a democratic voice in Canada’s new government.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to