Then I was told that Colonel Wolseley had written, urging the
construction of a road between Fort Garry and Lake of the Woods, and that
it could not be done unless I visited the upper settlement.
I felt a wish, and a very strong one, to visit this upper Fort Garry and
see for myself its chief and its garrison, if the thing could be managed
in any possible way.
From many sources I was advised that it would be dangerous to do so; but
those who tendered this counsel had in a manner grown old under the
despotism of M. Riel, and had, moreover, begun to doubt that the
expeditionary force would ever succeed in overcoming the terrible
obstacles of the long route from Lake Superior. I knew better. Of Riel I
knew nothing, or next to nothing; of the progress of the expeditionary
force, I knew only that it was led by a man who regarded impossibilities
merely in the light of obstacles to be cleared from his path; and that it
was composed of soldiers who, thus led, would go any where, and do any
thing, that men in any shape of savagery or of civilization can do or
dare. And although no tidings had reached me of its having passed the
rugged portage from the shore of Lake Superior to the height of land and
launched itself fairly on the waters which flow from thence into Lake
Winnipeg, still its ultimate approach never gave me one doubtful thought.
I reckoned much on the Bishop's letter, which I had still in my
possession, and on the influence which his last communication to the
"President" would of necessity exercise; so I decided to visit Fort
Garry, upon the conditions that my baggage was restored intact, Mr.
Dreever set at liberty, and the nondescript flag taken down. My
interviewer said he could promise the first two propositions, but of the
third he was not so certain. He would, however, despatch a message to me
with full information as to how they had been received. I gave him until
five o'clock the following evening, at which hour, if his messenger had
not appeared, I was to start for the Winnipeg River, en route for the
Expedition.
Five o'clock came on the following day, and no messenger. Every thing
was in readiness for my departure: the canoe, freshly pitched, was
declared fit for the Winnipeg itself; the provisions were all ready to be
put on board at a moment's notice. I gave half an hour's law, and that
delay brought the messenger; so, putting off my intention of starting, I
turned my face back towards Fort Garry. My former interviewer had sent me
a letter; all was as I wished-Mr. Dreever had been set at liberty, my
baggage given up, and he would expect me on the following morning.
The Indians were in a terrible state of commotion over my going. One of
their chief medicine-men, an old Swampy named Bear, laboured long and
earnestly to convince me that Riel had got on what he called "the track
of blood," the devil's track, and that he could not get off of it. This
curious proposition he endeavoured to illustrate by means of three small
pegs of wood, which he set up on the ground. One represented Riel,
another his Satanic Majesty, while the third was supposed to indicate
myself.
He moved these three pegs about-very much after the fashion of a
thimble-rigger; and I seemed to have, through my peg, about as bad a time
of it as the pea under the thimble usually experiences. Upon the most
conclusive testimony, Bear proceeded to show that I hadn't a chance
between Riel and the devil, who, according to an equally clear
demonstration, were about as bad as bad could be.
I had to admit a total inability to follow Bear in the reasoning which
led to his deductions; but that only proved that I was not a
"medicine-man," and knew nothing whatever of the peg theory.
So, despite of the evil deductions drawn by Bear from the three pegs, I
set out for Fort Garry, and, journeying along the same road which I had
travelled two nights previously, I arrived in sight of the village of
Winnipeg before midday on the 23rd of July. At a little distance from the
village rose the roof and flag-staffs of Fort Garry, and around in
unbroken verdure stretched-the prairie lands of Red River.
Passing from the village along the walls of the fort, I crossed the
Assineboine River and saw the "International" lying at her moorings
below the floating bridge. The captain had been liberated, and waved his
hand with a cheer as I crossed the bridge. The gate of the fort stood
open, a sentry was leaning lazily against the wall, a portion of which
leant in turn against nothing. The whole exterior of the place looked old
and dirty. The muzzles of one or two guns protruding through the
embrasures in the flanking bastions failed even to convey the idea
of-fort or fortress to the mind of the beholder.
Returning from the east or St. Boniface side of the Red River, I was
conducted by my companion into the fort. His private residence was
situated within the walls, and to it we proceeded. Upon entering the gate
I took in at a glance the surroundings-ranged in a semi-circle with their
muzzles all pointing towards the entrance, stood some six or eight
field-pieces; on each side and in front were bare looking, white-washed
buildings. The ground and the houses looked equally dirty, and the whole
aspect of the place was desolate and ruinous.
A few ragged-looking dusky men with rusty firelocks, and still more
rusty bayonets, stood lounging about. We drove through without stopping,
and drew up at the door of my companion's house, which was situated at
the rear of the buildings I have spoken of. From the two flag-staffs flew
two flags, one-the Union Jack in shreds and tatters, the other a
well-kept bit of bunting having the fleur-de-lis and a shamrock on a
white field. Once in the house, my companion asked me if I would see Mr.
Riel.
"To call on him, certainly not," was my reply.
"But if he calls on you?"
"Then I will see him," replied I.
The gentleman who had spoken thus soon left the room. There stood in the
centre of the apartment a small billiard table, I took up a cue and
commenced a game with the only other occupant of the room-the same
individual who had on the previous evening acted as messenger to the
Indian Settlement. We had played some half a dozen strokes when the door
opened, and my friend returned. Following him closely came a short stout
man with a large head, a sallow, puffy face, a sharp, restless,
intelligent eye, a square-cut massive forehead overhung by a mass of long
and thickly clustering hair, and marked with well-cut eyebrows--altogether,
a remarkable-looking face, all the more so, perhaps, because it was to be
seen in a land where such things are rare sights.
This was M. Louis Riel, the head and front of the Red River Rebellion-the
President, the little Napoleon, the Ogre, or whatever else he may be
called. He was dressed in a curious mixture of clothing--a black
frock-coat, vest, and trousers; but the effect of this somewhat clerical
costume was not a little marred by a pair of Indian mocassins, which
nowhere look more out of place than on a carpeted floor.
M. Riel advanced to me, and we shook hands with all that empressement so
characteristic of hand-shaking on the American Continent. Then there came
a pause. My companion had laid his cue down. I still retained mine in my
hands, and, more as a means of bridging the awkward gulf of silence which
followed the introduction, I asked him to continue the game--another
stroke or two, and the mocassined President began to move nervously about
the window recess. To relieve his burthened feelings, I inquired if he
ever indulged in billiards; a rather laconic "Never," was his reply.
"Quite a loss," I answered, making an absurd stroke across the table; "a
capital game."
I had scarcely uttered this profound sentiment when I beheld the
President moving hastily towards the door, muttering as he went, "I see I
am intruding here." There was hardly time to say, "Not at all," when he
vanished.
But my companion was too quick for him; going out into the hall, he
brought him back once more into the room, called away my billiard
opponent, and left me alone with the chosen of the people of the new
nation.
Motioning M. Riel to be seated, I took a chair myself, and the
conversation began.
Speaking with difficulty, and dwelling long upon his words, Riel
regretted that I should have shown such distrust of him and his party as
to prefer the Lower Fort and the English Settlement to the Upper Fort and
the society of the French. I answered, that if such distrust existed it
was justified by the rumours spread by his sympathizers on the American
frontier, who represented him as making active preparations to resist the
approaching Expedition.
"Nothing," he said, "was more false than these statements. I only wish to
retain power until I can resign it to a proper Government. I have done
every thing for the sake of peace, and to prevent bloodshed amongst the
people of this land. But they will find," he added passionately, "they
will find, if they try, these people here, to put me out-they will find
they cannot do it. I will keep what is mine until the proper Government
arrives;" as he spoke he got up from his chair and began to pace
nervously about the room.
I mentioned having met Bishop Taché in St. Paul and the letter which I
had received from him. He read it attentively and commenced to speak
about the Expedition.
"Had I come from it?"
"No; I was going to it."
He seemed surprised.
"By the road to the Lake of the Woods?"
"No; by the Winnipeg River," I replied.
"Where was the Expedition?"
I could not answer this question; but I concluded it could not be very
far from the Lake of the Woods.
"Was it a large force?"
I told him exactly, setting the limits as low as possible, not to deter
him from fighting if such was his intention. The question uppermost in
his mind was one of which he did not speak, and he deserves the credit of
his silence. Amnesty or no amnesty was at that moment a matter of very
grave import to the French half-breeds, and to none so much as to their
leader. Yet he never asked if that pardon was an event on which he could
calculate. He did not even allude to it at all.
At one time, when speaking of the efforts he had made for the advantage
of his country, he grew very excited, walking hastily up and down the
room with theatrical attitudes and declamation, which he evidently
fancied had the effect of imposing on his listener; but, alas! for the
vanity of man, it only made him appear ridiculous; the mocassins sadly
marred the exhibition of presidential power.
An Indian speaking with the solemn gravity of his race looks right manful
enough, as with moose-clad leg his mocassined feet rest on prairie grass
or frozen snow-drift; but this picture of the black-coated Metis playing
the part of Europe's great soldier in the garb of a priest and the shoes
of a savage looked simply absurd. At length M. Riel appeared to think he
had enough of the interview, for stopping in front of me he said,
"Had I been your enemy you would have known it be fore. I heard you would
not visit me, and, although I felt humiliated, I came to see you to show
you my pacific inclinations."
Then darting quickly from the room he left me. An hour later I left the
dirty ill-kept fort. The place was then full of half-breeds armed and
unarmed. They said nothing and did nothing, but simply stared as I drove
by. I had seen the inside of Fort Garry and its president, not at my
solicitation but at his own; and now before me lay the solitudes of the
foaming Winnipeg and the pathless waters of great inland seas.
It was growing dusk when I reached the Lower Fort. My canoe men stood
ready, for the hour at which I was to have joined them had passed, and
they had begun to think some mishap had befallen me. After a hasty supper
and a farewell to my kind host of the Lower Fort, I stepped into the
frail canoe of painted bark which lay restive on the swift current. "All
right; away!" The crew, with paddles held high for the first dip, gave a
parting shout, and like an arrow from its bow we shot out into the
current. Overhead the stars were beginning to brighten in the intense
blue of the twilight heavens; far away to the north, where the river ran
between wooded shores, the luminous arch of the twilight bow spanned the
horizon, merging the northern constellation into its soft hazy glow.
Towards that north we held our rapid way, while the shadows deepened on
the shores and the reflected stars grew brighter on the river.
We halted that night at the mission, resuming our course at sunrise on
the following morning. A few miles below the mission stood the huts and
birch-bark lodges Of the Indians. My men declared that it would be
impossible to pass without the ceremony of a visit. The chief had given
them orders on the subject, and all the Indians were expecting it; so,
paddling in to the shore, I landed and walked up the pathway leading to
the chief's hut.
It was yet very early in the morning, and most of the braves were lying
asleep inside their wigwams, dogs and papooses seeming to have matters
pretty much their own way outside.
The hut in which dwelt the son of Pequis was small, low, and
ill-ventilated. Opening the latched door I entered stooping; nor was
there much room to extend oneself when the interior was attained.
The son of Pequis had not yet been aroused from his morning's slumber;
the noise of my entrance, however, disturbed him, and he quickly came
forth from a small interior den, rubbing his eyelids and gaping
profusely. He looked sleepy all over, and was as much disconcerted as a
man usually is who has a visit of ceremony paid to him as he is getting
out of bed.
Prince, the son of Pequis, essayed a speech, but I am constrained to
admit that taken altogether it was a miserable failure. Action loses
dignity when it is accompanied by furtive attempts at buttoning nether
garments, and not even the eloquence of the Indian is proof against the
generally demoralized aspect of a man just out of bed. I felt that some
apology was due to the chief for this early visit; but I told him that
being on my way to meet the great Ogima whose braves were coming from the
big sea water, I could not pass the Indian camp without stopping to say
good-bye.
Before any thing else could be said I shook Prince by the hand and walked
back towards the river.
By this time, however, the whole camp was thoroughly aroused. From each
lodge came forth warriors decked in whatever garments could be most
easily donned.
The chief gave a signal, and a hundred trading-guns were held aloft and a
hundred shots rang out on the morning air. Again and again the salutes
were repeated, the whole tribe moving down to the water's edge to see me
off. Putting out into the middle of the river, I discharged my four teen
shooter in the air in rapid succession; a prolonged war whoop answered my
salute, and paddling their very best, for the eyes of the finest canoers
in the world were upon them, my men drove the little craft flying over
the water until the Indian village and its still firing braves were
hidden behind a river bend. Through many marsh-lined channels, and amidst
a vast sea of reeds and rushes, the Red River of the North seeks the
waters of Lake Winnipeg. A mixture of land and water, of mud, and of the
varied vegetation which grows thereon, this delta of the Red River is,
like other spots of a similar description, inexplicably lonely.
The wind sighs over it, bending the tall reeds with mournful rustle, and
the wild bird passes and repasses with plaintive cry over the rushes
which form his summer home.
Emerging from the sedges of the Red River, we shot out into the waters of
an immense lake, a lake which stretched away into unseen spaces, and over
whose waters the fervid July sun was playing strange freaks of mirage and
inverted shore land.
This was Lake Winnipeg, a great lake even on a continent where lakes are
inland seas. But vast as it is now, it is only a tithe of what it must
have been in the earlier ages of the earth.
The capes and headlands of what once was a vast inland sea now stand far
away from the shores of Winnipeg. Hundreds of miles from its present
limits these great landmarks still look down on an ocean, but it is an
ocean of grass. The waters of Winnipeg have retired from their feet, and
they are now mountain ridges rising over seas of verdure. At the bottom
of this bygone lake lay the whole valley of the Red River, the present
Lakes Winnipegoos and Manitoba, and the prairie lands of the Lower
Assineboine, 100,000 square miles of water. The water has long since been
drained off by the lowering of the rocky channels leading to Hudson Bay,
and the bed of the extinct lake now forms the richest prairie land in the
world.
But although Winnipeg has shrunken to a tenth of its original size, its
rivers still remain worthy of the great basin into which they once
flowed. The Saskatchewan is longer than the Danube, the Winnipeg has
twice the volume of the Rhine. 400,000 square miles of continent shed
their waters into Lake Winnipeg; a lake as changeful as the ocean, but,
fortunately for us, in its very calmest mood to-day. Not a wave, not a
ripple on its surface; not a breath of breeze to aid the untiring
paddles. The little canoe, weighed down by men and provisions, had
scarcely three inches of its gunwale over the water, and yet the
steersman held his course far out into the glassy waste, leaving behind
the marshy headlands which marked the river's mouth.
A long low point stretching from the south shore of the lake was faintly
visible on the horizon. It was past mid day when we reached it; so,
putting in among the rocky boulders which lined the shore, we lighted our
fire and cooked our dinner. Then, resuming our way, the Grande Traverse
was entered upon. Far away over the lake rose the point of the Big Stone,
a lonely cape whose perpendicular front was raised high over the water.
The sun began to sink towards the west; but still not a breath rippled
the surface of the lake, not a sail moved over the wide expanse, all was
as lonely as though our tiny craft had been the sole speck of life on the
waters of the world. The red sun sank into the lake, warning us that it
was time to seek the shore and make our beds for the night. A deep sandy
bay, with a high backing of woods and rocks, seemed to invite us to its
solitudes. Steering in with great caution amid the rocks, we landed in
this sheltered spot, and our boat upon the sandy beach. The shore yielded
large store of drift-wood, the relics of many a northern gale. Behind us
lay a trackless forest; in front the golden glory of the Western sky. As
the night shades deepened around us and the red glare of our drift-wood
fire cast its light upon the woods and the rocks, the scene became one of
rare beauty.
As I sat watching from a little distance this picture so full of all the
charms of the wild life of the voyageur and the Indian, I little
marvelled that the red child of the lakes and the woods should be loth to
quit such scenes for all the luxuries of our civilization. Almost as I
thought with pity over his fate, seeing here the treasures of nature
which were his, there suddenly emerged from the forest two dusky forms.'
They were Ojibbeways, who came to share our fire and our evening meal.
The land was still their own. When I lay down to rest that night on the
dry sandy shore, I long watched the stars above me. As children sleep
after a day of toil and play, so slept the dusky men who lay around me.
It was my first night with these poor wild sons of the lone spaces; it
was strange and weird, and the lapping of the mimic wave against the
rocks close by failed to bring sleep to my thinking eyes. Many a night
afterwards I lay down to sleep beside these men and their brethren--many
a night by lake-shore, by torrent's edge, and far out amidst the
measureless meadows of the West--but "custom stales" even nature's
infinite variety, and through many wild bivouacs my memory still wanders
back to that first night out by the shore of Lake Winnipeg.
At break of day we launched the canoe again and pursued our course for
the mouth of the Winnipeg River. The lake which yesterday was all
sunshine, to-day looked black and overcast--thunder-clouds hung angrily
around the horizon, and it seemed as though Winnipeg was anxious to give
a sample of her rough ways before she had done with us. While the morning
was yet young we made a portage--that is, we carried the canoe and its
stores across a neck of land, saving thereby a long paddle round a
projecting cape. The portage was through a marshy tract covered with long
grass and rushes. While the men are busily engaged in carrying across the
boat and stores, I will introduce them to the reader. They were four in
number, and were named as follows:-Joseph Monkman, cook and interpreter;
William Prince, full Indian; Thomas Smith, ditto; Thomas Hope, ci-devant
schoolmaster, and now self-constituted steersman. The three first were
good men. Prince, in particular, was a splendid canoe-man in dangerous
water. But Hope possessed the greatest capacity for eating and talking of
any man I ever met. He could devour quantities of pemmican any number of
times during the day, and be hungry still. What he taught during the
period when he was schoolmaster I have never been able to find out, but
he was popularly supposed at the mission to be a very good Christian. He
had a marked disinclination to hard or continued toil, although he would
impress an on looker with a sense of unremitting exertion. This he
achieved by divesting himself of his shirt and using his paddle, as Alp
used his sword, "with right arm bare." A fifth Indian was added to the
canoe soon after crossing the portage.
A couple of Indian lodges stood on the shore along which we were
coasting. We put in towards these lodges to ask information, and found
them to belong to Samuel Henderson, full Swampy Indian. Samuel, who spoke
excellent English, at once volunteered to come with me as a guide to the
Winnipeg River; but I declined to engage him until I had a report of his
capability for the duty from the Hudson Bay officer in charge of Fort
Alexander, a fort now only a few miles distant. Samuel at once launched
his canoe, said "Good-bye" to his wife and nine children, and started
after us for the fort, where, on the advice of the officer, I finally
engaged him.