Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (43 page)

T
HE British were now exporting to their dominions a kind of package civilization, offered in competition with the local product, and backed by powerful service arrangements. Sometimes this was conscious policy: Sir George Grey, Lord Melbourne’s Under-Secretary for the Colonies, had long before recommended the deliberate destruction of tribal systems everywhere in the Empire, and their replacement by societies of agricultural small-holders. Sometimes it was a matter of economic strategy: Manchester, for example, had virtually demolished the Indian textile industry, the basis of Indian folk-craft and a mainstay of traditional Indian life.
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 More often, though, it was instinctive, or even incidental, and was seen by the British, if they saw it all, simply as an aspect of historical determinism.

The indigenous cultures reacted variously to this assault. Some, like the Hindu and Muslim civilizations of India, yielded but did not break, treating the western culture as a transient phenomenon.
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 Some, like the Burmese, simply took no notice. The aborigines of Australia faded away uncomprehending. The Irish fitfully but furiously resisted. And there was one culture at least which, while its followers understood very well how powerful was the imperial challenge, threw everything into a last spasm of resistance, determined to do or die in defence of its own ways. This was the back-
wood culture of the Metis, into whose prairie fastness of Western Canada the power of the British Empire, in the later years of the 1860s, complacently and inexorably advanced.

We have already encountered these striking half-breeds, paddling Governor Simpson’s canoe flamboyantly to Norway House, or guiding the snowshoe traders of the Honourable Company through forest trails of Rupert’s Land. They remained, 20 years later, still a bold, free people, semi-nomadic—hunters, trappers, boatmen, guides, traders. They were a handsome and hospitable lot, with their rich strains of Indian, French and Scottish blood, and though they were given to heavy drinking and protracted roistering, most of them were devout Roman Catholics. In earlier years the Hudson’s Bay Company had generally approved of them. They made useful employees, they helped to keep unwanted settlers out, and they were valuable intermediaries with the full-blooded Indians. Most of the Metis were illiterate. They spoke a patois of their own, a mixture of antique French, Cree or Chippewa, English, and prairie terms of their own devising: and all their values, too, were mixed—half wild, half settled, half European, half Indian. They were a sensitive, proud, but troubled people, not quite sure where they stood in the world and its history.

By the 1860s the greatest Metis concentration was in the region of what is now Manitoba, in the heart of the Great Plains. Their chief market centre was Pembina, across the frontier in the United States, but their true homeland was the Canadian country to the north, along the banks of the Red and Assiniboine rivers, where some 6,000 of them still lived in a gaudy and heroic life-style. There they formed a relatively compact and recognizable community, hunting the dwindling buffalo herds in exciting horseback sweeps, and farming in the old French manner with strips of land running down to the river banks. They believed themselves to have inalienable rights in the country, to be its true masters if not actually its owners. They preserved a sense of brotherhood, and with their priests and their elected leaders, their bright clothes, their dashing songs and their
long adventurous memories, were able to sustain an inbred and truculent culture not quite like any other.

But it was in this very region, on the banks of the Red River, that the Hudson’s Bay Company had permitted the one permanent European settlement within their territories of the west. We have already seen how uncertain were the origins of this remote colony. At one time its survival had seemed unlikely, but it had persevered, put down roots, and eventually thrived. In the 1860s it was still theoretically governed by the Company, but had hardened into a self-reliant frontier community, each for himself and all for progress. By now about 2,000 Europeans lived in the Red River colony—mostly Scottish by origin still, but with admixtures of Englishmen and Americans. No less than the Metis, they were proud of their own accomplishments, and fiercely egalitarian. When Henry Hind, a well-known Cambridge geologist, called at one Red River farm in the course of a scientific journey, he was invited to sit down for lunch. The table was laid for one. ‘Where’s my plate?’ promptly demanded Mr Gowler, the master of the house. ‘Oh John,’ his wife cried, ‘you would not think of sitting at table with a gentleman?’ ‘Give me a chair and a plate!’ retorted the pioneer. ‘Am I not a gentleman too? Is not this my house, and these my victuals? Give me a plate!’

Red River was the only sizeable settlement in central Canada. To the west of it the open prairie extended to the Rockies. To the east lay an appalling barrier of forest, quagmire, lake and rocky outcrop, smothering northern Ontario, and so impenetrable that the only really practicable route to Red River from Ottawa or Toronto lay south of the frontier,
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Chicago and St Paul. The settlement was rough-and-ready, but not unattractive. Its nucleus was the Company post called Fort Garry, a fortified compound at the confluence of the two rivers. This was the centre of Red River life. Here the traders brought their pelts and their produce, the courts sat, the administration had its offices. The rooms were painted in garish reds, yellows and oranges, to break the monotony of the endless blues, whites and greens outside, and life around the fort, too, was always full of colour. In summer flotillas of canoes were drawn up on the river bank outside, and from the gate convoys of Red River
carts, drawn by horses or oxen, set off into the prairie barked about by dogs—carts designed specifically for the prairie, whose high wooden wheels made, as they turned on their ungreased wooden axles, a high screeching noise, nerve-racking and distinctive, which became to most visitors the unforgettable theme of Red River. In winter horse-drawn sledges galloped in and out, their passengers swathed in furs and bright striped blankets, or long trains of dog-teams arrived over the snow from outlying settlements—St Andrew, Little Britain, or Old England. Indians and Metis crowded around the stores and the purchase offices, huddled hangdog outside the courtroom door, or plodded in with piles of skins or horned elk-heads on their shoulders.

Around the fort was a little clutter of log houses, shops and warehouses. A handsome stern-wheeler puffed up and down the river, and along its banks, for ten or twenty miles, there extended the homesteads of the English-speaking farmers, with their stout granite houses, their churches and their gardens, comfortably above the water. An air of rural contentment hung about these country parts, tinged with nostalgia—there could hardly be a more homesick church than the Anglican church of St Andrew’s, peaceful beside the river, with its imported English trees doing well in the churchyard, its authentic English smells of church must and hassock (though the hassocks were made of buffalo hide), its notices of church functions pinned in the little stone porch, its cosy rectory muslin-curtained around the corner, and even the skylarks which, especially brought from the Old Country, often soared and sang in the cold empyrean.

But through this analogue of the imperial order swirled and swaggered the Metis—improvident, merry, drunk, quick-witted, cherishing little love for the Company and its traditions, and no loyalty to the misty congeries of British colonies known as Canada. They mostly lived along the banks of the Assiniboine, and there they had their own Catholic basilica of St Boniface, with a bishop and a school. The Metis had repeatedly clashed with authority in the Red River, chiefly because of the Company’s trading policies. They were fierce free enterprisers, and they had many friends and relatives across the American frontier. In particular they looked for profit and pleasure to the thriving American city of St Paul, 400
miles to the south, where trade was free and liquor ran more freely than the Company ever allowed. The Metis of Red River were like running fire in a warm haystack, and they often exploded into violence. To the Anglo-Saxon settlers they were dangerous and volatile aliens, not to be trusted with guns, spirits or women: and the Metis, for their part, often egged on by French Canadians, by Americans, by Irishmen, and other inveterate enemies of the British Empire, viewed the settlers with implacable distrust.

In 1867 the four most populous colonies of British North America, Quebec, Ontario, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, confederated themselves into the Dominion of Canada, a self-governing possession of the Crown, under the leadership of Sir John Macdonald—‘Old Tomorrow’, as the Indians called him. Two years later the Hudson’s Bay Company surrendered to the new Government all its political and territorial rights, and the whole of the west became part of the confederation. All at once Canada became a nation, coast to coast, and the politicians, the financiers, the engineers and the surveyors began planning a railroad which, by linking the Atlantic and the Pacific shores, would make the whole enormous territory an exploitable British whole, proof against the expansionist tendencies of the Americans to the south.

The Metis were not forewarned of these developments. Nobody asked their opinions. They merely learnt, in 1869, that henceforth the Red River area would be governed by an altogether new authority, appointed from Ottawa and doubtless dedicated to the extension of British civilization throughout the spaces of the west.

The first suggestion of resistance to this change occurred in the autumn of 1869, shortly before the transfer of authority. The Canadians had already decided that the Red River settlement must be reinforced by good Anglo-Saxon stock from Ontario, to act as a base for the opening of the whole west, to keep out the Americans, and to balance the influence of the French Canadians and their Catholic missions. A military survey party was sent to Fort Garry to choose the best sites for new settlement, and was instructed to
use the Ontario system of settlement survey—square blocks, that is, instead of the linear system of ‘river lots’ traditional throughout French-speaking Canada. The Metis were fiercely resentful. They well understood the implications of the survey. They knew that it meant the influx of large numbers of diligent Canadian farmers, to turn the whole prairie into a grain factory, and put an end to the buffalo hunting and the easy-going Metis life.

The surveyors had been told to keep well clear of the river-side lots, to avoid trouble with the Metis, but they were hazy about the existing property system, and one team trespassed upon the grazing land of a Metis farm some two miles from Fort Garry. The farmer violently objected, and ran off to get help: and presently the disconcerted Canadians saw, striding menacingly across the land, a group of young Metis bravos. There were fifteen or sixteen of them, unarmed but belligerent, dressed in the usual Metis gear of skins and fringed leathers, and looking distinctly unfriendly: lithe slim-waisted young men, different in physique, in temperament, in language, in values, in origins and in manner from the stolid soldiers—who, pausing with their surveyor’s chain in their hands, incomprehendingly awaited their arrival.

Their leader was a stocky, white-skinned man in his late twenties, with curly hair and dark eyes: and while his companions stared silently at the surveyors, this man walked up to their chain, and in a gesture of theatrical affront, placed his foot upon it. ‘You go no farther’, he said. The country south of the Assiniboine was the country of the Metis, and no survey would be allowed. ‘You go no farther’. The surveyors argued, the Metis were inflexible, and the soldiers, baffled, outnumbered and probably rather scared, gave up the attempt and returned to camp.

So Canada learnt of the existence of Louis Riel, an archetypal resistance leader of the British Empire. His father, half-French, half-Indian, was himself a well-known Metis activist: his mother was a Frenchwoman, daughter of the first white woman in the north-west. Riel was thus as genuinely rooted to the soil as a Metis could be: to his one-eighth Indian blood had been added a heritage of pioneers and ardent Catholics, and he had been educated at a seminary in Montreal, and politically indoctrinated during a stay at St Paul.
He was a passionate patriot, emotional, volatile, often naïve, and was to prove one of the most poignant figures of the imperial story, moving through the pages of Canadian history in a mist of tears. He was like a child. Quick to temper or to forgive, vain, oddly guileless, his touchiness was partly a sense of racial humiliation. His religion was mystic. The British never knew where they stood with him, and we too are left disturbed by his memory, not sure whether he is hero, charlatan or madman. William Butler, one of the most sensitive British Army officers of his generation, met Riel at Fort Garry and thought him preposterous but compelling—‘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 eye-brows—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’.

The first Lieutenant-Governor of the North-West Territories, William MacDougall, left Ottawa well ahead of time to travel to Fort Garry
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St Paul. He was known to be an inflexible Scottish Canadian businessman with no taste for half-castes or Catholics, and under Riel’s fervent leadership the Metis determined they would have nothing of him. They raised a para-military force of their own, strictly disciplined, well-organized, and prudently sworn to drink no alcohol, and when MacDougall arrived with his staff at the Canadian frontier, he found no loyal reception committee with flags and testimonials. Instead he was handed, the moment he stepped on to the soil of the new province, a brusque decree. ‘Monsieur,’ it said, ‘Le Comité National des Metis de la Rivière Rouge intime à Monsieur McDougall l’ordre de ne pas entrer sur le Territoire du Nord-Ouest sans une permission spéciale de ce Comité.’