In June of 1886, just over a year after he’d fled his beloved home, Gabriel takes a train to New York and marks an X on the contract offered to him by Buffalo Bill. Gabriel’s act shows off his riding skills and especially his marksmanship. He shares the stage with Annie Oakley, shooting glass balls tossed up in the air as he charges full stride on horseback. He, along with the others, draws full crowds. He’s a real live outlaw, and he’s magic with his most prized possession, his rifle le petit. But Gabriel doesn’t speak English, doesn’t feel in the least bit at home as he travels the northeast coast of the United States, except for the times he shares meals with the Sioux warriors who have also joined the circus.
And then word comes in July of 1886 that Gabriel, along with all the other Métis who fled, is being offered amnesty by the Canadian government, something it hadn’t dared to do just one year before when Gabriel had hoped to defend his friend in court. Suddenly, Gabriel’s cachet as an outlaw is tarnished. He is also homesick for the west, so he and Buffalo Bill agree that he will be free after he completes his original threemonth contract. The two men also agree that Gabriel is at liberty to make special appearances whenever he likes, which Gabriel does, periodically, over the next number of years.
But now what to do? Gabriel has no trust for the words and promises of John A. and the others. This might all be a trick. Instead of rushing back home, he agrees to some speaking engagements for expatriate and well-to-do French Canadians living in the American northeast. For the next year, Gabriel accepts some of these invitations grudgingly. Louis was the orator, after all. Gabriel was simply the actor. In his simple and straightforward language, he hits this lecture circuit, a hero and an oddity to these people who are only partially his. He is given silver medals and a gold watch and money to live on, but this isn’t a natural act for Gabriel, this standing in front of an audience as he sweats in his suit, trying to explain his love for his land, how he misses his people, so many of them scattered to the wind.
IT’S VERY EASY to become lost in such circumstances, Gabriel realizes, and he begins to wander, trying to figure out what to do in the years after Louis’s death. Some even claim that he travels as far as France, searching for what has been taken from him. He does certainly travel back and forth between Montana and New York. Even though he now knows he really is allowed to return home, he doesn’t. His wife is dead, his parents are dead, so many of his brothers are dead. Louis is gone forever, and so is Gabriel’s old way of life. Like his dear friend before him, he has been cast out into the wilderness. But this wilderness, part concrete and massive buildings in the east, part poverty and survival hunting in the west, is not the place Gabriel ever envisioned his life would lead him.
While the fame of being himself, the leader of the North-West Rebellion, is somewhat enticing, it’s always the Métis, his people, that keep Gabriel grounded. They are suffering miserably now that they have been beaten down. Gabriel finds a focus in the late 1880s, once again writing petitions with the help of his old friend, Maxime Lépine, urging the people of Quebec to not forget their western cousins, explaining that the Métis still deserve land scrip, and that Gabriel and others should be compensated for the loss of their properties.
Gabriel returns home to Canada in the spring of 1888, heading to Montreal with plans of lecturing and, in his own small way, picking up where Louis left off. He’s been told by people who claim to have his best interests in mind that it’s time to dictate his autobiography, but both plans are stymied by the powerful priests of Quebec, who fear he will agitate too much once more. Certain Quebec politicians see a wonderful tool in Gabriel if only they can get him to become a better public speaker. Quebec nationalism is rising, and Québécois politicians hope Gabriel can help them in their fight for stronger provincial powers. But Gabriel knows in his heart that, for all his desire, he will never be the speaker Louis was. In his speeches thus far, the only way Gabriel resembles Louis is that he opposes the priests who do more harm than good for his people, but in Quebec, loyalty to the Catholic Church is one rule that must not be broken.
Finally, in 1890, five full years after the fighting at Batoche and not long after Gabriel dictates his memoirs about that event, he returns home to Saskatchewan. He finds things so painfully changed—squatters on the land, his friends and family scattered, his Indian friends on their reserves in such dire poverty—that he realizes he doesn’t want to stay. He travels back to the U.S. once more, this time to Dakota and Métis hunting camps that promise him at least a semblance of his old life.
The last publicized event in Gabriel’s life is a violent episode, and it occurs, ironically, while he’s surrounded by friends. One night in 1891, as he sleeps in his tent in a Dakota hunting camp, Gabriel is attacked by an assassin wielding a knife. The man stabs Gabriel in the head and then in the body. Gabriel, strong as a buffalo—and as thickheaded as one, too, he later jokes—grabs the man’s knife with his hand, the blade lacerating his palm deeply, and in this way wrenches it away before wrestling the man into submission. Gabriel’s shouts bring the rest of the camp running, and after trying to surmise who the man is and especially who sent him, Gabriel magnanimously lets him go, possibly as a warning to the man’s bosses that they cannot kill Gabriel. He believes until the day he dies, fifteen years later, that the assassin was sent by the Canadian government.
After another stint trying to raise money in Quebec for impoverished Métis out west, Gabriel returns home for the final time in 1893. He’s fifty-six years old now and ready for the last battle of his life. He first settled his land at Gabriel’s Crossing in 1872, and still, twenty-one years on and despite all that’s happened, the government has ignored his repeated requests for official ownership. It won’t be for another nine years—in a new century, in the year 1902—that the government finally agrees to give him title to it. Thirty years he’s struggled to be recognized as the one who lives on this land honestly, and thirty years later he finally wins what, in the scheme of things, is a small but decisive victory.
These last years of his life, as an old century becomes a new one, Gabriel turns inward and to the land, as always, hunting, trapping, and fishing it for his survival. Rather than rebuilding at Gabriel’s Crossing, he lives on his relatives’ land in a small log cabin. Perhaps there are too many painful memories at the Crossing on the South Saskatchewan, or perhaps now that he finally has title to the land, the Sarcee in him tells him that to think one can actually own the earth is the white man’s folly. Perhaps it’s Gabriel’s quiet way of telling John A. and the rest that they will never control him. Perhaps it’s all these things and more.
After returning from a hunting trip in mid-May of 1906, sixty-nine-year-old Gabriel complains of pain in his chest and arms. The pain goes away in a day or two, and Gabriel, thinking it tired muscles, visits an old friend on May 19. As is the custom, he’s offered some food, and after a couple of bites, Gabriel stands up and walks a few steps before collapsing. He’s dead before he hits the floor.
Only a few tiny local papers report the death of the man who, twenty years before, held the fear and grudging respect of a nation. But on the day Gabriel is buried in the tiny cemetery on the rise at Batoche, nestled in along with his comrades from that long-ago fighting, Métis in their sashes begin to arrive, Cree from Beardy’s and One Arrow’s reserves, too. They come streaming in on horse and by foot, in Red River cart or by canoe, to celebrate the life of the last of the leaders of the buffalo hunt. Some of the wiser ones burn sweetgrass and sage and tobacco, do it knowing that each morning, as the sun begins to rise, the spirit of Gabriel will rise with it. He is a real hunter, a real leader, after all, and so he will always have no choice but to rise with the sun.
EPILOGUE
I stand with my hands up on the chain-link fence, staring at the place, a stone’s throw away, where Louis Riel was hanged. There’s no statue, no marker, no way you’d ever know that this is the spot without some pretty serious research and a touch of the detective in you.
I’m on the edge of a property called the “Depot,” in Regina, Saskatchewan. It’s the home and training grounds of our country’s RCMP. I’d wanted to stand in that place where Louis hovered above the ground in the last instant of his life, but no one with the proper authority is available today to accompany me. And so I’m here, with my hands up on the fence, a Métis outsider staring in at the old chapel that was once the guardhouse that held Louis.
Maybe it’s a little morbid, but I can picture Louis stepping out of the second-storey window of this chapel that was once the guardhouse and onto the scaffolding of the longgone gallows, bookended by policemen and followed by a crying Father André with his long white beard and black robes. I can picture Louis with the rope around his neck staring ahead and mumbling prayers under his breath, questioning for a moment how he ended up here in this place on this day, the last one of his life. Does he regret his actions as he stands on the scaffold?
THE YEAR BEFORE MY VISIT to Regina I fly to Saskatoon, rent a car at the small airport, and begin to drive. It’s a gorgeous summer day, the prairie fields exploding with wildflowers. I’m surprised as I drive north how these prairies aren’t flat at all but undulate like waves on a great ocean. I try to picture Gabriel riding through this same country, hunting buffalo as a younger man or, as he hits middle age, evading the military as he rides away from Batoche to a different kind of captivity from Louis’s, this one in the States.
I turn east off the main highway onto a secondary one and then onto an even smaller road. Following this, I’m surprised to feel my heart rate quicken as I close in on my first destination. As the wide river comes in sight, sparkling in the brilliant sunshine, I smile to myself, understanding now in this very moment why a people would be willing to fight and die for such a place. It’s beautiful, the poplar leaves along the river shimmering in the breeze, the South Saskatchewan curving like a smile. I drive slowly over the steel bridge that is Gabriel’s Crossing, taking it all in: the shining water, the thick growth of trees along the bank, the fertile ground sloping up and stretching out for miles. The only structure around, a well-kept house with a large teepee in the backyard, piques my interest. I won’t bother the owner today. Instead, I continue my exploration.
I take my time, travelling unimpeded through the square miles surrounding Batoche, surveying a couple of the original rifle pits protecting the village, spending a few hours at the annual Back to Batoche Festival, driving out to Fish Creek and seeing first-hand the place where Gabriel not only held off Middleton and his army but beat them soundly when they dared encroach too close to his home. It’s almost as if I wander through a dream, traversing this country that was Gabriel Dumont’s. Something tells me he never did regret his actions. And I can see now, absorbing the majesty of this land, that neither did Louis.
The fenced-in Depot in Regina and the wide-open country surrounding Batoche could not be more different. They represent the two worlds of the Métis experience: the open freedom they continually sought as they pushed farther and farther west and the fences that Canadian authorities never stopped building to try to contain a people who were too free, too “Indian” in their outlook. These two places encompass both the promise and the near destruction of a people. They also speak to the two opposing forces that have always made up this country: the wilderness and the desire to constrain it.
During the long voyage of writing this book, I came, early on, to the understanding that in some ways Gabriel represents the “Indian” in the Métis and Louis the European. Gabriel, a master hunter and speaker of indigenous languages, lived on and for the land. Louis, universityeducated and deeply Catholic, never seemed fully comfortable in the wilderness and instead continually strove for a way to build his vision of a new church, a new society, in the wilds of the West. And when these two powerful men came together in 1884 and 1885, a truly united Métis world view emerged, one that John A. Macdonald quickly recognized was a threat to his vision of Canada.
These Métis, these half-breeds, our first prime minister realized, could not be controlled on reserves in the same way he tried to control the “Indians.” Depending on how one sees it, John A.’s strategy of simply ignoring Métis petitions for so many years either backfired tragically or succeeded brilliantly when Dumont and Riel forced his hand by announcing a provisional government. Ironically or not, John A.’s inaction created the military action that attempted, once and for all, to crush the Métis Nation.
Clearly, though, this nation is resilient. Well over three hundred thousand people in Canada are enrolled Métis, and many, many thousands more self-identify as Métis. The Métis homeland includes regions in nine of our ten provinces as well as the North-West Territories. Métis populations are also found in parts of Montana, North Dakota, and Minnesota. The people, they aren’t going anywhere. They—we—are a part of the landscape that is our country.
But do characters like Gabriel Dumont and Louis Riel matter in our contemporary world? Do we need the ghosts of these men in our busy, modern lives? I believe the answer is self-evident, especially when I look across Canada in the twenty-first century. The rebel in me, that person who won’t be pushed around by bullies or faceless institutions, sees a direct link between the struggle of a people 125 years ago and the struggles of so many average Canadians today.
As representatives of their community, Louis and Gabriel struggled against the entity that called itself “progress” and took the physical, often bullying form of the surveyor, the politician, and finally the railroad. This, to me, is the same struggle so many of us face today. Modern industry and multinational corporations are our very own contemporary “progress.” From our hunger for oil to our over-reliance on personalized technology, we sometimes lose ourselves. I don’t argue that progress is a bad thing, just as Gabriel and Louis would not have argued that. But the lesson learned from Riel and Dumont is that progress, in whatever form it takes, should never be allowed to trample the rights of the community or the broader culture. Progress, in all its forms, should serve us, not us it.
That history lesson, for me, is the most important one of all.
SOURCES
When it comes to the life of Louis Riel and, to a much lesser degree, of Gabriel Dumont, the sheer number of primary sources is tremendous. So I focus here on more contemporary explorations of these two men.
Please also note that the following shortlist is by no means complete but just a taste of the brilliant explorations out there. My deep apologies to the authors of the many great books about Riel and Dumont that I’ve left off the list.
George Woodcock’s biography Gabriel Dumont: The Métis Chief and His Lost World (Edmonton: Hurtig, 1975) is invaluable and a fantastic read.
Gabriel Dumont: Memoirs (Brandon, MB: Brandon University Press, 2006), edited by Denis Combet, is second to none and simply amazing.
Joseph Kinsey Howard’s Strange Empire (New York: William Morrow, 1952), considered a mid–twentieth-century gem, is a fount of great research on Riel, Dumont, and the North-West in the second half of the 1800s, but it certainly shows its age at times.
Despite covering only a relatively small part of his extensive journals, The Diaries of Louis Riel (Edmonton: Hurtig, 1976), edited by Thomas Flanagan, is a must-read if you want to begin to try to understand the mindset of this man.
The Selected Poetry of Louis Riel (Toronto: Exile, 1993), translated by Paul Savoie and edited by Glen Campbell, is another fantastic way to begin trying to decipher the man’s heart.
Maggie Siggins’s much debated and studied tome, Riel: A Life of Revolution (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1994), is a fine read. Siggins does that thing so many academics fail to do: she brings the man and his world to life.
The False Traitor: Louis Riel in Canadian Culture by Albert Braz (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003) is fascinating.
Prairie Fire: The 1885 North-West Rebellion by Bob Beal (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1999) is a solidly researched and written account.
Chester
Brown’s Louis Riel: A Comic Strip Biography (Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, 2003) is brilliant and beautiful and moving, a great example of how history can be told in a new and refreshing way.
G.F.G. Stanley’s The Birth of Western Canada: A History of the Riel Rebellions (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1936) and Louis Riel: Patriot or Rebel? (Toronto: Ryerson, 1963) remain early cornerstones of serious research and discussion of Riel and the North-West.
Thomas Flanagan’s Louis “David” Riel: Prophet of the New World (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979) and Riel and the Rebellion: 1885 Reconsidered (Saskatoon, SK: Western Producer Prairie Books, 1983) are thoroughly researched and singularly driven.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The writing of this book was one of the tougher creative struggles of my life. It’s very easy to feel overwhelmed by the vast quantity of information on Louis Riel and, to a much lesser extent, Gabriel Dumont. Throw into the mix the debate that continues to wage about whether Riel was a prophet or a madman, and it makes for some daunting subject matter. I’ve learned that writing a historical biography such as this means treading on the sacred ground of a people, and for that, one should always ask permission and seek out the experts in the community.
And so I thank Denis Combet, Métis scholar and gentleman, who read my manuscript with a keen and careful eye. I also wish to thank Sherry Farrell Racette for allowing me to pick her brilliant Métis brain. Another Métis scholar and gentleman, Warren Cariou, gave me incredibly insightful feedback. Thank you for your generosity and time, Warren. To round out my Métis posse, I need also to thank the wonderful poet Kate Vermette for her insightful commentary and Niigonwedon James Sinclair, the man with a plan, not only for his excellent commentary but also for introducing me to so many fine, fine people. Any mistakes or inconsistencies in this book are wholly mine.
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