Читать книгу A Critical History of the Red River Insurrection - Rev. A. G. Morice - Страница 15

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The causes of the discontent in the Colony of Assiniboia being thus well established, the legitimacy of an opposition to the unwarranted aggression of outsiders becomes just as patent. What were the poor natives to do in order to counteract the effects of the strangers’ audacity and bring them to terms? Were those “ignorant half-breeds” able to cope with the pretentious, well-read (?) invaders from Canada?

Yes, and that is why some English writers have ever felt so sore about it. Yes, because by the side of other well-educated Métis such as Louis Schmidt, the son of a German father,[130] who had gone through a classical course in the East, Ambroise Didyme Lépine, an ex-Brother of the Christian Schools, who had been a school teacher, as well as Charles Nolin, himself a former professor, they had a man in the very prime of life, that terrible, that hateful Louis Riel, who had likewise enjoyed a classical education and was to show himself the equal, nay the superior, of any of the new-comers from the East.

Louis Riel was the eldest son of a Métis of Ile à la Crosse who, in 1849,[131] played the part of a tribune among his compatriots, and of the daughter of the first white woman of the West, Marie-Anne Gaboury, who died in St. Boniface in the course of 1878.[132] Born at St. Boniface[133] on the 22nd. of October, 1844, he was through his father a half-breed, and because of his mother a quarteroon, which categories are for practical purposes confounded into one, that of the Métis—all this in spite of Lord Wolseley’s pronouncement that he “was born of French Canadian parents” and “had not a drop of Indian blood in him.”[134]

The boy grew up to be not only active and studious, being constantly at the head of his class, but kindly and most charitable, often sharing his meal with a poorer fellow student, while he constantly entertained the greatest respect for his parents. It is even on record that, having one day been challenged to fight by a class-mate, young Riel refused “unless his father would sanction it.”[135]

His undeniable intelligence and general good conduct, in spite of a certain excitability which was in after years to somewhat cloud for the public his native kindness and other qualities, soon attracted the attention of Bishop Taché, of St. Boniface, who became his great protector and who, because of the youth’s religious dispositions, thought that he might have a vocation for the ecclesiastical state.[136]

In recognition of this promising make-up the prelate sent him (1858), to the College of Montreal, where, thanks to the liberality of Madame Masson, of Terrebonne, the wife of the author of that invaluable compilation Les Bourgeois de la Compagnie du Nord-Ouest,[137] he went through a complete classical course, in company with, among others, a French Canadian boy, Joseph Dubuc, who was in after life to succeed so highly in the same western field where Louis Riel was ultimately to occasion such a torrent of vituperation, on the one side, and of gratitude, on the other.[138]

Young Riel had commenced the study of Latin at the College of St. Boniface. As he remained nine years in that of Montreal,[139] he had plenty of time to get a thoroughly good education, an education of which some of those who called him “half-educated”[140] could certainly not boast.

At the close of his studies, he went to the United States, and stayed in St. Paul, where he made the acquaintance of Father (afterwards Archbishop) Ireland, until he returned to his mother’s, Red River Settlement, in the early fall of 1868, according to some, in June, 1869, if we are to believe others.[141] He then used to go on an occasional trip between that place and the capital of Minnesota—a circumstance which probably gave rise to those reports we see in some publications to the effect that he was leading the life of a freighter before turning to politics.

However this may be, he was soon to find a more congenial occupation nearer home. From the parental domain in St. Vital, he was a witness to the outrages and threats his fellow Métis had to undergo at the hands of the new-comers, and little by little, though he was as yet scarcely 25 years of age—not 27 as some have it[142]—he was drawn by the vortex of events into taking the lead in the movement of protestation against the encroachments of Ottawa’s minions.