Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont (2 page)

Gabriel is not a tall man. He’s compact and powerful though, thick as a bull moose through the chest, with the black eyes of a crow, the beard of the French, and the high cheekbones of the Sarcee. He is the leader of the buffalo hunt, a position of high respect and huge skill as well as crushing demand. The buffalo are mostly gone now, and the Métis people fall back on what they’ve always fallen back on in tight times: their farms here, in what is now Saskatchewan, laid out Red River style, long and narrow, using the riverfront for their thirst. Métis and crops alike need water, first and foremost. And the Métis allotments are sensible for this landscape.

But Gabriel is not a farmer. He knows that anyone who wishes to head west, or east for that matter, has to cross the wide and pretty South Saskatchewan River. With no buffalo to pursue, he’s built himself a good business here where the Carlton Trail nears Batoche. He runs a river ferry, and because Gabriel is a social man, he’s constructed a small store as an excuse for visitors to come in. When they do, they’re always surprised to find a billiards table at the centre of the room. There’s nothing Gabriel enjoys more than a good game, and he’s a talented player, rarely losing. Gabriel’s known across the North-West not only for his skills as a hunter and a leader but for his social skills, too. He’s a wellrespected man.

Canada has just turned seventeen, is prone to the moods and fears and stubbornness of a teenager. Surveyors, at the behest of John A. Macdonald, have arrived to tell the Métis that the Métis’ understanding of their environment does not correspond with Ottawa’s. The surveyors are just working men, for the most part, and must take little joy in squaring off imaginary parcels of wilderness. But their work inflames the Métis. The Métis, after all, have been pushed farther and farther west, following the buffalo, following a life in the wilds. They are a people of the land. The freedom and difficulty of the land is what they know.

And now that the American Civil War is a staunched but still festering wound, that hungry nation to the south looks north and west toward Manifest Destiny to try to quell its other appetites. The government of Canada understands this acutely, pushing its surveyors westward as fast as the surveyors can plot out squares of earth. A Canadian railroad, a sea-to-sea iron horse, is the only way to show the Americans that Canada is not a part of their destiny. Métis be damned if they will slow this progress.

To the men in Ottawa, the mixed-bloods are insolent and stubborn. The Métis represent two painful thorns in John A. Macdonald’s feet as he attempts his Anglo-Saxon stride to the Pacific. One foot swells with the Indian problem, the other with the French. While often illiterate, the Métis are better organized politically than the Indians. And they have a wanderlust that the Québécois do not. The Métis are both Indian and French. And they are neither. To make matters worse for Sir John, the Métis’ growing understanding that their actions have consequences Ottawa cannot ignore stems from the grassroots actions of one man, a man Sir John has long wished dead or gone. His name is Louis Riel.

Yes, the Métis are complicated in that they are halfbloods. The European blood—more often French, but also Scots, Irish, or English—understands but still despises the work of the surveyor. The Indian blood—Cree, Ojibwa and Saulteaux, Sarcee, Peguis, Blood, Blackfoot, Gros Ventre, Dene, among others—this Indian blood struggles against ownership of land by humans, and especially governments. But the Métis learned a hard lesson in Manitoba a number of years ago—that if they do not have title to their land, the bureaucrats in Ottawa sell it to others, to newcomers or men representing vested interests. And so far, the government has turned a deaf ear to Métis petitions for fair title to the land that they now settle and live on.

Gabriel, who sets out on his secret journey south early that June morning, is a man who’s always been ruled more by his Indian blood. He has lived off and from the land his whole life. He is a Métis leader whom the Indians see as a chief, respected and feared by those who’ve met him. As a young man, barely a teenager, he was forced to kill Sioux attackers at Grand Coteau. He can shoot a duck’s head clean off at a hundred paces, is one of the few who can call buffalo by mimicking the grunt of the bull, the whine of the cow. Gabriel is a master horseman, and besides French and a smattering of English, he speaks six Indian languages despite the fact that he cannot read or write.

Intelligence and wisdom, though, cannot be quantified by these abilities, especially in the wild lands of the Canadian West in 1884. After all, it would be a great joke to try to imagine a politician from Upper Canada surviving more than a couple of days in this beautiful but harsh place that the Métis have settled as they push farther and farther away from Ottawa, as they search for their own belonging, Israelites in a very different setting, in a very different time.

And so Gabriel, captain of the hunt, a role passed down from his father and his father’s father, leaves his home before sunrise so as not to inform those who wish him ill and begins the ride south, seven hundred miles through rolling prairie, with three trusted allies—one French Métis, one an English half-breed, the third his brother-in-law. Two others join them for a while but decide not to complete the journey.

What Gabriel doesn’t know, though, is that the local factor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, that dog Lawrence Clarke, has heard the whisperings of Gabriel’s secret mission and has sent an urgent wire to government officials saying action must be taken and Gabriel stopped. Clarke’s an excitable man and has had run-ins with Gabriel in the past, has even tried to have him arrested. Clarke claims that Gabriel wishes to start a rebellion and is not afraid of bloodshed. Clarke says many demeaning things about the Métis, but what Clarke doesn’t say is that he himself is set to profit financially and politically if Gabriel Dumont and his ilk fail in their mission. What’s so sadly ironic is that bloodshed is indeed on the horizon, plenty of it, and much of the blame can be placed squarely on the shoulders of Lawrence Clarke.

WHILE DUMONT KNOWS
his own country as only the leader of the buffalo hunt can, his seven-hundred-mile trip south from Batoche into Montana is one he’s never travelled before. It fills him with the excitement of adult purpose but also the wanderlust of his youth. He’s not seen this new land south of what is today the city of Saskatoon, country as pretty as his own, the prairie awakening in late May with rosy everlasting, purple rock cress, shining arnica and ground plum, larkspur, shooting star, and prairie onion.

Those who have never seen prairies imagine them as nothing more than mile after mile of flat and redundant land. This is far from the truth. The earth unfolds in slow rises and low dips under Gabriel’s cart wheels, and he keeps a sharp eye for possible enemies who might be hiding in the bunches of cottonwood, burr oak, or trembling aspen or in the deeper valleys leading to rivers. He easily avoids the North West Mounted Police patrols. They are noisy and leave their mark wherever they go. It’s the hostile bands of Indians who might see him as an unwanted visitor that worry him most. But as it turns out, the Blackfoot of this part of Canada know him and welcome him; they suggest routes he might take to slip into the United States.

Averaging forty miles a day, Dumont and his party wind through the Cypress Hills, the haunt and hiding place of whisky runners and smugglers. Eventually he crosses into the States near Fort Assinniboine, Montana. The party knows to follow the Missouri River to where it meets another river called the Sun. Now Gabriel must worry about avoiding the U.S. Army patrols and Indians who don’t know his reputation. Indeed, the story goes that Gabriel and his group come across a group of Gros Ventres who’ve not traded with the Métis before. But in Gabriel’s forthright and charismatic way, he talks his way out of paying for passage through the tribe’s land.

Early on the seventeenth morning, on June 4, with spring now in full bloom, Gabriel and his emissaries ride into Saint Peter’s Mission, a small and poverty-racked community of mostly Blackfeet. Finding the man they’ve come for proves easy in such a little place. An old woman informs the travellers that Louis Riel is attending mass, his daily custom. Dumont asks her to go into the church and tell Riel of the visitors who need to speak to him urgently. If Dumont is nervous about meeting this man upon whom the Métis of Canada have decided to pin their hopes, he knows not to show it.

Looking back into history, into the past, invariably leads to disagreement. Some say that Dumont and Riel had already come across each other during the Métis struggles in Manitoba in 1870, fourteen years before. Others say that Dumont and Riel had never met in person but had only corresponded through one or two letters of support Dumont had asked others to write on his behalf and then sent to Riel those many years ago.

What does appear clear from the works of prominent Canadian historians like George Woodcock and Maggie Siggins is that when Riel, a black-bearded man with the intense eyes of a prophet, emerged from the church, he did not recognize Dumont. And according to Woodcock, Dumont’s pre-eminent biographer, Riel approached and took Dumont’s hand in his own, saying, “You seem to be a man from far away. I do not know you, but you seem to know me.”

If these words hurt Dumont, again he does not show it. Instead, Gabriel replies, “Indeed I do, and I think you should know me as well. Don’t you know the name of Gabriel Dumont?”

It is only now that Riel’s eyes spark with recognition. Every Métis knows the name of one of their great hunters and chiefs. After a couple more pleasantries, Riel informs the men he needs to return to mass, pointing out the way to his cabin where his wife, Marguerite, will offer them something to eat.

Later that day, Riel listens as Dumont and his companions explain the concerns of the Métis back in Canada. The federal government has been sending surveyors, and as they all know so well, when surveyors appear they are hated and feared more than locusts on the horizon because outsiders hungry for land soon follow. Although the Métis have settled in the areas around places like Batoche and Saint-Laurent for many years, even generations, the government refuses to recognize the Métis’ stake in their own land, is in fact telling the Métis that their way of allotting land in the Red River style won’t be recognized. In the eyes of John A. Macdonald, the Métis are nothing more than squatters.

The buffalo are all but gone, and the Métis desperately need the basic insurance of their small plots for subsistence farming. But the prime minister refuses to even admit he’s received their many petitions. Clearly, the government has no qualms about ignoring the Métis and their land, culture, and rights. The government hopes that if it ignores the Métis problem long enough, the problem will cease to exist.

Dumont, despite his illiteracy, is a wise man. He knows that Riel will recognize how history seems to repeat itself. Doesn’t all of this sound so similar to what happened in Manitoba fourteen years before? The Métis’ rights are trampled, the authorities expect them to behave sheepishly and accept their lot (or lack thereof), and the work of nationbuilding can resume, government and big business—in the form of the Hudson’s Bay Company—marching ever westward, hand-in-hand.

But a decade and a half ago, grounded by his deep faith in Catholicism and backed by the determination of his people not to be trodden upon, Louis Riel made a stand for the Métis. The government eventually, stubbornly, recognized that if Manitoba were to be admitted as a province of the confederation, it would be wise to accept the Métis’ petitions and grant them some parcels of land. To try to quash this belligerent group of half-breeds, inflaming along the way relations with the Indians and the Québécois alike, didn’t make the sense that acquiescence did.

The price of resistance proved high for Riel, though. Despite eventually being voted into Parliament as a member, he was so hated by the English Protestants that a bounty was put upon his head by no less a figure than the premier of Ontario. A quiet and sour deal with John A. Macdonald banishing Riel from Canada followed. And like an Israelite prophet, Riel has wandered the northern border of the United States from Vermont to Minnesota to Montana ever since, dreaming of his return to his own promised land.

This repetition of events separated by fifteen years, this back-and-forth between the Métis and the Canadians, maybe it’s all really a game, like billiards. Shoot straight and leave your opponent with only the options you wish him to have. Force him to scratch then take advantage. But John A. Macdonald refuses to even come to the table, refuses to even admit that Gabriel, the Métis, own their own table. Gabriel understands that when the government hears that Louis Riel has returned from his banishment, it will have to come, will have to play this game of strategy with the half-breeds.

And, smart billiards player that Dumont is, he lays out the table for Riel, then petitions him to come and once again play the game Riel cannot resist. Dumont assumes that Riel hasn’t lost his fire, that his love for his people will dictate that he come back home with Dumont and company to try to leverage the Canadians in the proper way.

Riel’s well-documented answer to the mission’s plea is classic Riel in that to the outsider it sounds bizarre, even a bit mad. But to those who know Riel well, especially in these last years wandering the wilds of America, maybe it makes its own strange sense.

“God wants you to understand,” Riel begins, the four men listening intently at his table, “that you have taken the right way, for there are four of you, and you have arrived on the fourth of June. And you wish to have a fifth to return with you. I cannot give you my answer today. Wait until tomorrow morning, and I will have a decision for you.”

Does Riel’s coyly bizarre response concern Gabriel? If so, he never speaks of it, though Gabriel confesses that he never forgets Riel’s words. At this point, maybe he and company view Riel as a mystic, a man in tune with energies not understood or felt by the commoner. Or maybe some niggling doubt worms its way into the base of Gabriel’s spine, forcing him to question the wisdom of travelling this far to ask a man who might not be totally sane to lead the people to freedom.