Such, then, was the condition of Red River before the
person who is the subject of this book appeared upon the
scenes. But perhaps it is as well that I should relate
one occurrence which fanned into bright flame the
smouldering embers of discord between the half-breeds
and their white neighbours. An officer of the Hudson Bay
Company, living at an isolated post, had two daughters.
As they began to arrive toward young-womanhood he was
anxious that they should have an education, in order that
they might, in proper season, be able to take their
position in society. There were good schools at Red River,
and thither the officer sent his daughters, placing them
under the care of a guardian whom he knew would exercise
an authority as judicious as his own. The two girls were
remarkably handsome, and whenever they walked through
the settlement, or drove abroad with their guardian, they
attracted all the attention. Many a half-dusky heart was
smitten of their white skin, which he would compare in
colour to the pure snow that covers the plains. Now had
the faces of the Red River beauties been Parian white,
instead of dusky olive, the young _beaux_ of the settlement
would not have found their hearts beating half so wildly
about the two pale daughters of the Hudson Bay Company's
officer. They would indeed have languished for chestnut
eyes, and complexions of Spain and the southern vineyards
of France. But here amongst their sturdy "tiger blossoms,"
and passionate prairie roses blew two fair cold lilies;
and their hearts bounded beyond measure at the thought
of winning a look or a kindly smile. But the guardian
watched the two pale girls closely, and permitted them
to do little beyond his _surveillance_. There were not
many whites in the circle of their acquaintance, but of
this few, nearly every one was a suitor for one or other
of the girls, yet for all the advances their hearts were
still whole and they moved,
"In maiden meditation fancy free."
Now in Red River was a young half-breed, almost effeminate
in manners, handsome in face and form, and agreeable and
gentle in his address. He was indeed a sort of Bunthorne
of the plains, just such a person as a romantic, shallow
girl is most apt for a rose's period to sigh out her soul
about. You find his type in fashionable civilised circles,
in the languid dude who displays his dreams in his eyes
to captivate the hearts of the silly girls, and--discreetly
--keeps his mouth shut, to conceal his lack of brains.
The two white daughters of the Company's officer were
girls of ordinary understanding, but one of them had
gotten too much poetry into her sweet head, and stood on
the verge of a dizzy steep that overlooked a gulf, the
name of which was Love. At a party given by one of the
foremost of the half-breed families, this girl met
Alexander, the Scottish half-breed, whose person and
manners have been just described. There was something in
the dreamy, far-away expression of the young Metis' eyes,
which stirred the blood in the veins of the romantic
girl. When they rested upon her, the soul of their owner
seemed to yearn out to her. The voiceless, tender,
passionate appealing in the look she was unable to forget
when she walked along the grassy lanes, or trod the
flower-rimmed path of the prairie.
Coming along in the hush of the summer evening, when only
the lovemaking of the grasshoppers could be heard among
the flowers, Alexander met her, He spoke no word, but
there was the same tender, eloquent appealing in his
eyes. He thought the young lady would not take it amiss
of him, if he were to join her on her way over the fields;
so he had taken the liberty.
There was a flutter at her heart, and a great passion-rose
bloomed in each cheek.
No, she would not take it amiss. The walk was so pleasant!
Indeed it was kind of him to join her.
The dusky lover spake few words; but he indolently left
the path and gathered some sprays of wild flowers, and
offered them to the girl. His eyes had the same, wistful
look, and his brown fingers trembled as he offered the
bouquet. Receiving them, and pinning them under her
throat, she said in a low tone, while her voice trembled
a little,
"When these fade, I shall press the petals in my book,
and keep them always."
"Do you consider the flowers I gave you worth preserving?"
he asked, his low voice likewise trembling.
"I do."
"I would give more than that," he said, tenderly, "to
your keeping."
"Why," she enquired, with an unsuccessful attempt at
displaying wonder, "what is it that you would give to my
keeping?"
"My heart," the young man answered, his indolent eyes
lighting up in the gloaming. She said nothing, but hung
her head. The swarthy lover saw that she took no offence
at his declaration. Indeed he gathered from the quivering
of her red, moist lips, and from the tenderness in her
eye, that the avowal had more than pleased her. She
continued for a few seconds to look bashfully down at
the path; and then she raised her eyes and looked at him.
No more encouragement was needed.
"My beloved," he said, softly, and her head nestled upon
his shoulder. There in the shadow of a small colony of
poplars, on the verge of the boundless plain, shining
under the full, ripe moon, each plighted troth to the
other, and gave and received burning kisses. During the
sweet, fast-fleeting hours on the calm plain, in her
lover's arms, with no witness but the yellow moon, she
took no heed of the barriers that lay between a union
with her beloved; nor had he any foreboding of obstacles,
but heard and declared vows of love, supremely happy.
Woman is a sort of Pandora's Box, the lid whereof is
being forever raised, revealing the secrets within. The
plighted maiden was flushed of cheek and unusually bright
of eye when she returned to her home that evening. She
could give her guardian no satisfactory account of her
long absence, and told a very confused story about two
paths, "you know," that were "very much alike"; but that
"one led away around a poplar wood and out upon a portion
of the prairie" which she did "not know." Here the sweet
pet had got astray, and wandered around, although "it
was so silly," till the sound of the bells of St. Boniface
tolling ten had apprised her of the hour and also let
her know where she was. Her guardian took the explanation,
and contented himself with observing that he hoped it
would be her last evening upon the prairie, straying
around like an elk that had lost her mate.
"Jennie," said her sister, when they were alone, "you
have not been telling the truth. You did not get astray
on the prairie. Somebody has been courting you, and you
are in love with him."
"I am in love; and it is true that some one has been
courting me. I had intended to tell you all about it, my
heart is so full. Now can you tell me who may my lover
be?"
"I hope, Jennie," and the sister's eyes showed a blending
of severity and sorrow, "that it is not Alexander."
"It is Alexander. Why should it not be? Is he not handsome,
and gentle, and good? Wherefore then not he?"
"My God, do you know what such an alliance would cost
you, would cost us all? Marriage with a half-breed would
be a degradation; and a stain upon the whole family that
never could be wiped out. O my poor unfortunate sister,
ruin is what such a marriage would mean. Just that, my
darling sister, and no less."
"I care not for that. I love him with all my heart and
soul, and pledged myself to-night a hundred times to be
his. I never can love another man; and he only shall
possess me. What care I for the degradation of which you
speak, as measured against the crowning misery, or the
supreme happiness of my life? No; when Alexander is ready
to say to me, Come, I shall go to him, and no threat nor
persuasion shall dissuade me."
She spoke like all the heroic girls who afterwards meekly
untie their bonnets just as they were ready to go to the
church to wed against their keeper's will; and then sit
down awaiting orders as to whom they must marry. Jennie
was not the only girl who, in the first flush of passion,
is prepared to go through fire, or die at the stake for
the man she loves. Withal,--but that the proprieties
forbid it--whenever young women make these dramatic
declarations, the most appropriate course would be to
give them a sound spanking, and put an end to the tragic
business.
Nellie thought it her duty, and I suppose it was, to tell
her bear-like guardian what had befallen to her sister.
He was less disturbed on hearing the intelligence than
Nellie supposed, and merely expressed some cold-blooded
surprise at the presumption of the half-breed. He sat
at his desk, and taking a sheet of paper, wrote this
letter:
"To Alexander Saunders:
"DEAR SIR,--Would you be good enough to call at my house
this evening at eight o'clock?
"Yours truly,
"Thomas Brown."
Having sealed and dispatched this note he resumed his
work, without showing or feeling any further concern
about the matter. When it was growing dark over the
prairie that evening, the love-lorn Jennie saw her
pleading-eyed lover pass along in the shadow of the
poplars toward her guardian's house. She heard his ring
at the door, and his step in the hall. Her heart was in
a great flutter; but her sister was at her side giving
her comfort. The doors were wide open, but everything
was so husht, that the girls could plainly hear the
following words spoken in the guardian's library:
"I understand, Mr. Saunders, that you have been taking
the astonishingly presumptuous course of soliciting the
hand of one of my wards. I am not given to severity, or
I do not exactly know how I ought to resent an act which
exhibits such a forgetfulness of what your attitude should
be towards a person in the station of my ward. You are
merely a half-breed; you are half-Indian, and for that
matter might as well be Indian altogether. My ward's
position is such that the bare idea of such a union is
revolting. She is a lady by birth and by education, and
is destined for a social sphere into which you could
never, and ought never, enter. You may now go, sir, but
you must remember that your ignorance is the only palliation
of your presumption. Laurie, show this young man the way
out."
"O, my God, what will become of me?" sobbed poor Jennie.
"I cannot live! O, I will go after him! I will fly with
him! I cannot endure this separation! O, sister, will
you not intercede for my beloved? Tell uncle how noble
and manly, and honourable he is! Can you not do anything
for me? My God, what shall I do?"
In this fashion did poor Jennie's grief find words, and
we leave her alone with her sore heart, while we follow
the rejected suitor. He walked swiftly down the lawn,
turning not his eye, or he might have seen in the window
his lover, stretching imploring arms toward him. All his
blood was running madly in his veins, and it burned like
fire. His heart was hot, and his temples throbbed.
"So I am only a half-breed, and might as well be all
Indian for that matter! O, God! A despised half-breed!
They have shown the fangs at last. We now see how they
regard us." And he went forth among his friends, and told
the story of the insult and humiliation. A thousand
half-breed hearts that night in Red River burned with
vengeance against the white man; French Metis and English
Metis alike had felt the sting of the indignity; and
these two bodies, sundered before through petty cause,
now united in a brotherhood of hate against the white
population. It needs no further words to shew how ready
these dusky people would be to rise and follow a crafty
leader, who cried out:
"We are despised by these white people. We want no social
or political alliance with them. We shall live apart,
rather than in ignominy and union with them." Louis Riel
was not ready the next morning to rise and lead the people
to revolt, for this occurred some years before his bloody
star reached the zenith; but the same hatred was there
years later, when he turned the governor sent to the
colony by the Dominion out of the territories, and set
up an authority of his own. Well might the French historian,
cognisant of the fate of the luckless suitor, and the
consequences of the rejection, cry out with the poet:
"_Amour tu perdis Troie._"
[Footnote: Love thou hast conquered even Troy.]
As for poor Jennie, heroic Jennie, who would follow her
lover to death itself, she submitted, after a few sleepless
nights, and days that for her were without a breakfast,
to the mandate of the guardian, and to the philosophy of
her sister. A little later, a tall, ungainly young
Highlander came, offered himself, and took to his home
the poetic and tragic daughter of the Company's officer.
Despite the blizards that sometimes come sweeping across
the prairie, smothering belated travellers, and un-roofing
dwellings, notwithstanding the frequent incursions from
regions in the far west of myriad-hosts of locusts and
grasshoppers, Red River settlement throve in wealth and
population, till, when the period with which I shall now
deal arrived, it numbered no fewer than 15,000 souls.
Upon the completion of the great Act of the Confederation
of the British North American Provinces in 1867, the
attention of Canadian statesmen was turned to this distant
colony, and negotiations were opened for the transfer of
the Territory to the Dominion. The back of great monopolies
had now been broken. In 1858, England had resumed its
great Indian empire and extinguished John Company; and
this act had paved the way for a similar resumption of
the vast prairie domain granted by King Charles to "the
Governor and Company of Adventurers of England trading
into Hudson Bay." The transfer was to be effected, as
one writer puts it, by a triangular sort of arrangement.
All territorial rights claimed by the Hudson Bay Company
--and Red River lay within the Company's dominions--were
to be annulled on payment of 300,000 pounds by Canada,
and the country would then be handed over by Royal
proclamation to the Dominion Government, the Company
being allowed to retain only certain parcels of land in
the vicinity of its trading posts. I may as well go upon
the authority of the same writer. [Footnote: Captain G.
L. Huyshe.] The transfer was dated for the 1st of December,
1869; but the Dominion Cabinet, eager to secure the rich
prize, appointed its Minister of Public Works, the Honourable
William McDougall, C.B., to be Lieutenant-Governor of
the North-West Territories, and sent him off in the month
of September, with instructions to proceed to Fort Garry
"with all convenient speed" there to assist in the formal
transfer of the Territories, and to "be ready to assume
the Government" as soon as the transfer was completed.
So far so well, but let us pause just here.
There is something to be said even on the side of revolt
and murder, and let us see what it is. Since the foundation
of the colony the people had lived under the government
according to the laws propounded by the Hudson Bay Company.
The people had established a civilization of their own,
and had customs and rules which were always observed with
great reverence. When tidings reached them that they were
to be transferred to the Dominion of Canada, they began
to have some misgivings as to how they should fare under
the new order. Of late years, too, there had come into
prominence among them a man whom early in these pages we
saw bid good-bye to his father upon the plains on his
way to school in the East. The fire seen in young Riel
at the school, and when he turned his face again for the
prairies that he loved, had now reached full flame. He
had never ceased to impress upon the people that the
Hudson Bay Company was a heartless, soulless corporation,
and that the treatment accorded to the Metis was no better
than might have been given to the dogs upon the plains.
There never was public peace after the tongue of this
man had begun to make noise in the settlement.
When, therefore, it became known that the Canadian
Government had determined upon taking the colony to
itself, an ambitious scheme of the highest daring entered
into the brain of Louis Riel. He lost no time in beginning
to sow seeds of discontent.
"Canada," he said, "will absorb your colony, and as a
people you will virtually be blotted out of existence.
White officials will come here and lord it over you; the
tax-gatherer will plunder the land for funds to build
mighty docks, and canals, and bridges, and costly buildings,
and numerous railroads in the East. The poor half-breed
will be looked upon with contempt and curiosity: no
custom that he regards as sacred will be respected; no
right which is inherently his, will be acknowledged.
They will send their own henchmen, who have no sympathy
in common with the half-breeds, to rule over us; no
complaint that the people make to the Central Government
will be regarded; yea, this new rule will fasten itself
upon us as some inexorable tyrant monster, driving deep
its fangs into a soil that has been yours so long. Yes;
you will be of _some_ interest to them. You have some
handsome wives and pretty daughters, and those virtuous
pale-faces from the East have a strong admiration for
lovely women. In this respect, you shall receive their
attention."
The effect of such arguments among these credulous people,
who saw not the wily traitor behind the rich, eloquent
voice, quivering with indignation, was similar to that
which would follow were you to fling a flaming torch upon
the prairie in midsummer after a month of drought. Then
the cunning deceiver went secretly to several of the
leading half-breeds in Red River, and whispered certain
proposals in their ear.
Meanwhile, events were transpiring which furnished
just the very fuel that Riel wanted for his fire. During
the summer of 1869, a surveying party, under Colonel
Dennis, had been engaged surveying the country, and
dividing it into townships, etc., for future allotment by
government. According to good authority, the proceedings
of this party had given great offence to the Metis. The
unsettled state of the half-breeds' land tenure not
unnaturally excited apprehension in the minds of these
poor ignorant people that their lands would be taken from
them, and given to Canadian immigrants. Then they had
the burning words of Louis Riel ringing in their ears
saying that the thing _would_ be done. To lend colour to
the mistrust, some members of the surveying party put up
claims here and there to tracts of land to which they
happened to take a fancy. But this was not all. Some of
these gentlemen had the habit of giving the Indians drink
till they became intoxicated, and then inducing them to
make choice lands over to them. One could not pass through
any superior tract of land without observing the stakes
of some person or other of Colonel Dennis's party.
"I foretold it," cried Riel. "Go out for yourselves and
see the marks they have set up bounding their plunder."
Nor was this the only grievance presented to the
half-breeds. The very survey then being carried on they
looked upon as an act of contempt towards themselves;
for Riel had put it in this light.
"The territory has not yet passed into the hands of the
Canadian government"--and in saying this the Disturber
was accurate--; "what right have they, therefore, to come
here and lay down lines? It is as I have already told
you: You are of as much importance in the eyes of the
Canadian authorities, as would be so many dogs."
Nor were these the only grievances either. A "big man,"
a white, living at the settlement, had made himself
obnoxious to the whole of Red River. He well knew how
the people hated him, and he retorted by saying:
"Your scurvy race is almost run. Presently you will get
into civilized hands, and be put through your facings.
You disrespect me, but my counsels prevail at Ottawa.
Only what I recommend, will the Government do; so that
you see the settlement is very completely in my hands."
This man was a valuable ally to Riel; for almost literally
did he, while portending to speak for the Dominion
authorities, corroborate the allegation of the arch
agitator. Then two officials, Messrs Snow and Mair, sent
out by Mr. McDougall, while he was yet Minister of Public
Works, had established an intimacy with the obnoxious
white man, received his hospitality, and given acquiescent
ear to his advice. These two gentlemen looked upon the
half-breeds as savages. They sent letters to the newspapers,
describing Red River and its people in terms grossly
unjust, and inaccurate. M. Riel got the communications
and read them to the people.
"This," he said, "is the manner in which they describe
our customs, our social life, and the virtue of our
women." The women tossed their heads haughtily.
"We do what is right," they said, "and they can slander
us if they will. We shall not prove, perhaps, so easy a
prey to those white gallants as they seem to suppose."
One high-spirited girl, and very beautiful, vowed that
during the run of her life, she never would speak to a
white man for this insult, or let him see her face. Yet,
if the gossip is to be trusted, before the flowers bloomed
thrice, after that, upon the prairie, she was sighing
her sweet soul away, through her great gazelle eyes, for
love of a sturdy young Englishman, who had taken up his
abode upon the plains. And better than all the young
fellow married her, and she is now one of the happiest,
not to say one of the prettiest, women in Manitoba.
Strong words of determination by a young woman are the
most conclusive evidence that I know of the weakening of
her resolve.
But Messrs Snow and Mair went on with their creditable
work, and to their other good deeds it was alleged they
added that of grabbing choice plots of land.
These two men were, of course, known to be the accredited
agents of the Minister of Public Works; and Riel succeeded
in convincing the credulous people that the Minister,
indeed the whole government, were cognizant of their acts
and approved of the same. "While public indignation was
at its height, it was announced that a Lieutenant-Governor
had been appointed for Red River, and that the man chosen
was the very person through whom the chief indignity had
been put upon the settlement. It was also shown with
burning force by Riel that in a matter so important as
the transfer of fifteen thousand people from one particular
jurisdiction to another, they, the people transferred,
had not been consulted. They had not, he also pointed
out, been even formally apprised of the transfer.
"This Canadian Government take Red River and its half-breeds
over, just as they would take over Red River and fifteen
thousand sheep." And some of the men swore terrible oaths
that this change should not be without resistance, and
resistance to the death.
Riel said that the determination was good.