Читать книгу A Critical History of the Red River Insurrection - Rev. A. G. Morice - Страница 16

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What were his qualifications for such a post? He had, we have seen, received an education such as no individual in the Colony enjoyed, outside of the ranks of the clergy. But personally what kind of a man was he? Here we cannot resist the temptation of giving the opinions of various authors, none of them Catholic, who quite often betray the prejudices proper to their class, while forced, as it were, to recognize in him an ability which only fools could deny.

According to Sir John A. Macdonald who, writing before the fiasco of the opposition to Riel’s rule, had no reason to feel sore about it, he was “a clever fellow” whom “you (Wm. McDougall) should endeavour to retain as an officer in your future police.”[143] On the same page on which Beckles Willson records that appreciation, he feels constrained to admit in his own name that “Riel was indeed a remarkable man,” though in a later work the same author takes the liberty of qualifying his original judgment by calling him “a young man of fiery and fanatical nature.”[144]

Donald A. Smith, afterwards Lord Strathcona, who was no great friend of his, for causes which fully justified his enemity, wrote himself: “Riel may have his faults and weaknesses [who has not at 25?], but he is decidedly a man out of the common. . . . His manner is restless and his assumption of dignity and coolness is constantly interrupted by explosions of temper which as quickly subside again. He seems fairly well educated and, on the whole, strikes me as a remarkable but ill-balanced man.”[145]

We cannot help remarking that, without excluding the stricture on his temper, this is the most faithful description of Louis Riel’s make-up we know of. Viewing him from a narrower angle, J. P. Robertson, the late Provincial Librarian of Manitoba, contented himself with stating that “he showed considerable skill as a diplomatist.”[146]

Mr. Robert Machrea, the biographer of his uncle of the same name, speaks of the Métis leader’s “astuteness,”[147] and declares that he was “more intelligent than the majority of his confreres (sic).”[148]

The same writer refers also to the megalomania attributed to him by Archbishop Taché. In connection with the 1869-’70 happenings, this is scarcely to the point. The great Catholic prelate used that expression of the Riel of 1885, never of his protégé of the former period, who may, however, have then harboured some germs of that mental disease which was later to come to a head in the Saskatchewan valley.

Machrea adds: “What is certain is that Riel possessed considerable courage, determination and force.”[149] The writer responsible for that rather flattering appreciation seems to have had before his eyes, and been intent in correcting, that of an earlier author, G. Mercer Adam, who had written: “Without physical courage,[150] he had considerable moral determination and a force of character which, however, had its fits of weakness.”[151]

In another of his books the same Adam, who, as we have seen, was an ex-officer, is bolder and less addicted to restrictions. Riel, he then affirms, was “daring, young . . ., wily as a savage, brilliant and energetic.”[152]

As to Major Boulton, his quondam prisoner and would-be victim, he deemed Riel “clever enough to make tools of every one who came in his way, not even excepting the clergy,”[153] which we doubt extremely. The author of the Life of Governor Dufferin merely calls him “a shrewd young French Canadian,”[154] whereby it is apparent that that historian was familiar with Wolseley’s error and shared it.

Note now the darkening of the picture as years go by and as this is undertaken by artists who never knew the subject, and painted him conformably to the grudges of those who had indeed been acquainted with him, but had had forcedly to bow to his superior ability. See the effect of the slanders of those he had worsted and remark the different psychical features of the man they pretend to depict.

With Miss E. L. Marsh, though still “a clever speaker,”[155] Riel descends to the rank of a “man of some ability” only. A recent writer makes him in turn “a man of some [!] education but little sense.”[156] In a still later pamphlet the same writes that Riel was “better educated and worse tempered than the majority of his people,”[157] which is, of course, very “smart.”

Another Englishman, more eloquent than truthful, says of the same: “Fluency of speech and magnetism of manner gave him ready control over his compatriots; unchecked ambition and extraordinary vanity blinded him to the folly of resisting the authority (sic) of the Dominion.”[158] If the poor man who has concocted the text-book (yea a text-book for the children of Manitoba and Ontario!) from which this is taken had not died some time ago, we would ask him to show what infinitesimal bit of “authority” the Dominion then had over what is now Manitoba, and how Riel tried to resist it. The same might also have shown us where lay the “folly” of resisting that pretended authority when the would-be “resister” got all he wanted therefrom.

Is it not a crime to feed our poor innocent school children on such untruthful trash?

We will close this list of English Protestant appreciations of the personality of Riel by that of one who, though he never saw him, was nevertheless his contemporary, but is generally blinded by prejudice against anything or anybody Catholic—we mean of course, Dr. G. Bryce. This will be the bouquet of our array of quotations. Riel, he writes, was “a young man of fair ability, but proud, vain and assertive,[159] and had the ambition to be a Caesar or a Napoléon,”[160] a remark which is as preposterous as it is unfounded. But Bryce could not write otherwise. Was not Riel a Catholic? Had he not French blood in his veins?

Strangely enough, the one English author who is the most accurate in his general lines on Riel is W. T. R. Preston who, in his short account of the Red River troubles, manages to be the most inaccurate. He writes that “the leader of the rebellion (sic), Louis Riel, was an educated half-breed. . . . The Church had educated him hoping to capture him for the priesthood.”[161]

As to his manners and appearance, Dr. Mulvaney says that “he is a total abstainer,[162] can speak French, English and four Indian Languages”—he forgets his knowledge of Latin, with which every student of a French college is acquainted. “He speaks slowly, deliberately and with effect. He is strong, of fair stature, square-shouldered, with features of greater mobility and expression than most half Indians.”[163]

Lastly, the biographer of Lord Dufferin and his administration, Geo. Stewart, declares that “Riel was intelligent and wary,” while, of course, “the men under him were ignorant and superstitious,”[164] an old refrain of such authors.

Two years after the events we are about to recite, a French Huguenot, therefore still a Protestant, H. de Lamothe, found him “a tall young man with easy manners, an open-hearted, intelligent and sympathetic mien.”[165] A little further on, the same traveller has it that he talked at length with him of the past, present and future, and adds that, “though our interview lasted but a few hours, I kept of it the keenest and best recollection.”[166]

Such is the way a French Protestant, who was all the more disinterested and dispassionate as he did not entertain the grudge of a man wounded in his racial pride by a previous worsting, spoke of that horrible bugbear, that greasy, murderous tyrant, the “Ogre” of English Protestant authors.

Capt. Wm. F. Butler, that impressionable Irishman who had with the Métis chief an interview of a very different kind—because subjectively not so much of a gentleman as his French host showed himself to be—makes him, contrary to de Lamothe and others, “a short man,” after which he says that he had “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 clustered hair, and marked with well-cut eye-brows—altogether a remarkable looking face, all the more so, perhaps, because it was to be seen where such things are sights.”[167]

Then the doughty soldier falls heavily upon his, to him, unbecoming foot-gear, moccasins, which make him indulge in quite amusing spells of mirth. The effect of his costume, he says, was “not a little marred by a pair of Indian moccasins,” after which he launches his choicest gibes at “the mocassined President,”[168] remarking later that “the mocassins sadly marred the exhibition of presidential power,”[169] as if the powers of a statesman resided in his feet!

The poor stranger evidently did not know that these moccasins which so highly scandalized him were then in general use among all classes of people in the Settlement, as we read in the Earl of Southesk’s Saskatchewan and the Rocky Mountains. Speaking of the nunnery at St. Boniface, just across the Red, that gentleman formally states that “moccasins were worn instead of shoes, according to the universal custom of the country, to which even bishops conformed.”[170]

From a more strictly physical standpoint, Donald A. Smith wrote in a letter quoted in his Life: “His appearance is striking; he is swarthy, with a large head, a fine brow and a piercing eye.”[171]

According to the recollections of one Alfred Franks, who knew him at the Lower Stone Fort, Riel was “a man over medium height, stout, athletic, with black hair and clear eyes, neatly dressed and polite and manly in his bearing,”[172] while Hudson’s Bay Co. Chief Trader W. J. McLean remembers him as “a fine looking man, strong, stout and about five feet ten or eleven in height, a man who spoke well and was shrewd and clever.”[173]

Without being a very tall man, such as was, for instance, his brother Joseph who was very powerfully built, Louis Riel was certainly above the average in height. As to his features, several of his portraits scarcely do him justice, through no fault of the artist: they represent him as he was when disguising himself, owing to the relentless persecution of which he was the object at the hands of Orangemen. The photograph of him we reproduce in this work was given us by the aforesaid brother, who declared that no other was so resembling.

Now that, thanks mostly to what his enemies have been forced to write, we are fairly well acquainted with the person of the Métis leader, it behooves us, before relating the events of which he was the soul and prime mover, to ask ourselves whether he was really warranted in doing what he did.

The right to his political conduct we might consider as flowing from what we have said of the causes of the outbreak, several—not all—of which we have exposed in our preceding chapter. But Riel may have gone too far? It must be admitted that the population, especially that of French origin, was warranted to rise before it was too late against the prospect of illegal eviction and unprovoked grievous annoyances with regard to civil, religious and educational right. But was revolt against proper authority allowable, under the circumstances? In other words, was not the Red River Insurrection a rebellion.

It has been very commonly so styled by English writers, and continues to be so called by ignorant or careless people who do not know the value of words or labour under a total misconception as to the real happenings of 1869.[174] This accusation is simply preposterous, nay, perfectly ridiculous, in the eyes of such as are familiar with history and have not abdicated all claims to be regarded as endowed with the faculty of reasoning.

There never was a rebellion at Red River.[175] For against whom did the Métis rise? Against the Government of Ottawa, such as represented by their agents, Schultz and Bown and Dennis and McDougall. But what manner of a right had that government to the colony of Assiniboia? Absolutely none until the 15th. of July, 1870, when, in virtue of a formal transfer effected by the Imperial Cabinet after that of Ottawa had expressly consented to do what it should have thought of before sending any agents west (that is, after it had guaranteed the rights of the colonists detailed in the Bill of Rights), Assiniboia became part of the Dominion under the name of Manitoba.

Before that date Assiniboia was, with regard to Canada, in the same position as Newfoundland is today, with this aggravating circumstance that over one-half of her population differed in language and religion from that part of Canada, Ontario, which insisted on the acquisition of the western territories. This is so evident that the Colonial-Secretary, Lord Granville, plainly admitted in a letter to Father Lestanc the privilege of the half-breeds to refuse to enter Confederation. Nay, as late as the 22nd., of March, 1870, Sir Frederic Rogers, his private secretary, was writing that “troops should not be employed in forcing the sovereignty of Canada on the population of Red River.”[176]

Moreover when the Canadian authorities asked London for troops to facilitate the transfer of the country to Canada, Lord Granville cabled that “Her Majesty’s Government will give military assistance provided reasonable terms are granted Red River settlers.”[177] Was not this plain intimation from the most authoritative party in the Empire that the Assiniboians had a right to seek those “reasonable terms?” What else did they do?

And, under the circumstances such as we know them, where is the sane man who can show that they would have received what they were given if they had not forced the Ottawa politicians to grant it in advance, after negotiations which would have otherwise been ineffectual? How could such negotiations have so much as taken place if the Métis had not risen in arms?

The very fact that, owing to the objections of the latter, the date of the transfer of their country to Canada was shifted in London from December 1, 1869 to July 15th. of the following year is clear evidence that they were perfectly justified in declining to play into the hands of the wily ones of the Ottawa cabinet.

The reader must not lose sight of this all-important fact if he wishes to be in a position to judge sanely what was to follow. It is a fact which the most bigoted writer cannot deny, and which ought to shame him into refraining from using in connection with the Red River troubles a word, rebellion, which is in itself a slander.

There would have been a rebellion if Riel and his friends had ever renounced their allegiance to the British Crown. But, in spite of the most violent hatred and unfounded prejudices, which his very name has long sufficed to conjure among a certain class of Canadians, it is now proved beyond contest, and admitted by all fair-minded Protestants who are at all conversant with the question, that Riel was, and remained to the last, favourable to the British connection.

Great were the inducements offered him by Americans[178] to falter in his allegiance, but he would not hear of any proposals the acceptance of which would have made him traitor to his Sovereign. We might add that his loyalty was all the more commendable as he had to struggle against one of his own associates, whom the wish to secure the goodwill of the Irish portion of the population had led him to admit in his Administration.[179]

In fact, we will even see in its proper place that Riel and his Métis have probably to be thanked for the fact that the immensities to the west of Ontario and east of the Rockies are to-day Canadian and not American.

Owing to an unfortunate occurrence which raised anti-French passions to the boiling point, most of the English writers can scarcely have a kind word for Louis Riel. Nevertheless, even his greatest enemies could not help acknowledging his fidelity to the British institutions, a fact which is all the more significant as his well-known impulsiveness and excitable dispositions might, in the face of the provocations from those who seemed to claim a monopoly of loyalty, have betrayed him into imprudent acts or words, had he not been so firmly rooted in his pro-British sentiments.

A few passages from the official documents of the time will amply corroborate our assertions. Under date December 16, 1869, Mr. (afterwards Sir) John A. Macdonald admitted in his Report of a Committee of the Honourable the Privy Council that the resistance of the half-breeds (and consequently of their leader as well) “is evidently not against the sovereignty of Her Majesty or the government of the Hudson’s Bay Company, but to the assumption of the government by Canada.”[180] Can any proof of our contention be stronger than this confession of him who, with Sir Georges Cartier, had been the chief, though involuntary, cause of the whole trouble?

But three days earlier, Mr. William McDougall himself admitted this loyalty in a letter he wrote to Riel, wherein he said: “As the representative of the Sovereign,[181] to whom you and they [the half-breeds] owe, and I am told do not wish to deny allegiance, it is proper that some such communication should reach me.”[182] This trust in Riel’s pro-British sentiments was based on the reports of spies the would-be governor was keeping among the disaffected half-breeds.

Such were the loyal feelings of the latter that, on December 6, 1869, the same party wrote to the Secretary of State at Ottawa that the production of his own spurious proclamation “had a most tranquillizing effect. Riel said: ‘This puts a different face on the matter,’ and, as my informant says, ‘expressed much loyalty.’ He appealed to the English delegates (some of whom still remained in his Convention to watch his proceedings) to help him peacefully get their rights.”[183] The italics are McDougall’s.

That this attachment to the British connection was persevered in is shown by a dispatch from the Governor of Canada to the British Colonial Secretary. That high official wired Lord Granville: “The latest news from Red River is that a convention, half French, half English, met on January 25th. Riel opened the proceedings with a loyal speech.”[184] This was dated February 15, 1870.

In case the reader should require additional evidence of Riel’s sympathies for the British tie, here is a passage from the sworn deposition of a prominent English speaking and Protestant Assiniboian, Mr. Bannatyne, which refers to a period, late in the history of the Red River troubles, when the half-breed leader was beset by Americans bent on bringing him over to their own political aspirations.

“At the time of the publication of the New Nation,[185] it was altogether American. I heard from Riel that he would never work for annexation to the States. I saw Mr. Coldwell, who was connected with the paper, and told him that Riel had told me that the next issue would be stronger than the previous one, but that it would be the last. Mr. Coldwell said that if he could do that he was an abler man than he believed him.

“Immediately after, the editor was put out of place, and another editor put in, and the tone of the paper was changed. Riel said he was willing to take assistance from all quarters; but as soon as he was strong enough, he would repudiate the American element. I know that Stutzman [a pro-American agitator] came down from Pembina, and shortly after was sent away by Riel on short notice.”[186]

Useless to add to the foregoing any further remark than this: Riel’s loyalty to the British Crown was so intense that, later on, when he had been proscribed as a criminal and a premium had been placed on his head by the Government of Ontario, which had then no more jurisdiction over Manitoba than Canada had in 1869 over Assiniboia; when the fate of the new province and the Northwest was in his hands, and he had only to join with his sympathizers the Fenian invaders of that territory, who had counted on his co-operation for the success of their cause, to see the entire Northwest pass into the hands of the Americans, he manfully forgot the wrongs heaped upon his devoted head, and offered his services to the representative of the Queen, thereby rendering abortive efforts which could not succeed without his assistance.

Nay more, not only were not Riel and his people against the British connection, therefore not rebels, but we cannot even truthfully represent them as averse to their country being annexed to Canada, to which the British Secretary of State confessed they had a right to object, and into which they could not be incorporated by force of arms. “There did not seem to be any disposition on his [Riel’s] part or that of his people to oppose the cession of the country to Canada,” writes one of his greatest, though loyal, foes, Major Boulton, who must have been familiar with his plans, since he had occasion to remain in his company much longer than he would have wished; “but the opposition he offered seemed to be confined to the entrance of the Governor (sic for McDougall) or the establishment of the authority of Canada until certain rights, which he and his supporters claimed to be their privilege . . . had been conceded.”[187]

And a few pages further on, “the Imperial Government, when it realized that there was opposition to the transfer on the part of the local population, refused to consummate the bargain made, or to send troops to establish the sovereignty of Canada without the people’s consent, or rather without a due recognition of their claims.”[188] Italics ours.

Finally, “with tears in his eyes [Riel] told them how earnestly he desired an arrangement with Canada.”[189] All of which is confirmed by Tuttle’s declaration that “the avowed object of [Riel’s] Council was to prevent the entry of Mr. McDougall[190] and his followers until ‘Terms’ had been made.”[191] Italics ours again.

The same historian is still more explicit further on. “The French half-breeds,” he says, “did not consider that they ever rebelled against British authority; but, on the contrary, that they had only asserted their rights as British subjects to a voice in the management of their own affairs by resisting the encroachments of Canada on those rights, and that they would not have obtained those rights had they not taken up arms against Canada. They laid down their arms when they thought that the object for which they had been taken up was accomplished.”[192]

This is the best, the clearest explanation of their aims that could be given. We cannot improve on it. The book in which we find it was published only ten years after the Insurrection; why did not the other historians avail themselves of it as we do? Why did they not get at those facts as did Tuttle before they wrote? Was it their love of historical truth which prompted them to disregard them?

If we now turn to the most authoritative source of information on that question, the official British Blue Book, what do we learn, what could have learned the romancers who imagine that the Métis had risen in order to form a new State, bound ultimately to fall into the arms of Uncle Sam? In the very beginning of the Insurrection, not only they time and again protested that their movement was not directed against the authority of the Queen, but when Mr. McDougall’s own secretary, Mr. J. A. N. Provencher, was sent to Fort Garry, he was arrested at St. Norbert, and had a formal interview with the leaders, whom he asked whether they absolutely refused to enter the confederation of Canada.

Now here is their answer: “If the Canadian Government [were] willing to do it, they [the Métis] were ready to open negotiations with them, or with any person vested with full powers, in view of settling the terms of their coming into the Dominion of Canada.”[193]

Are we not then warranted to ask, in the face of the foregoing quotations, not one of which is from a Catholic or French writer, where is the “rebellion” of our veracious authors? If they do not know what a rebellion is, let them consult their dictionary.

One who badly needs to do so is the Rev. A. C. Garrioch, to whom we have already referred more than once. While, after our argument in our History of the Catholic Church in Western Canada, historians have become more cautious in the use of a word which, we repeat, is of itself a calumny, and others have shown themselves fully convinced of the appositeness of our contention, he is the only one who has boldly come out in defence of the word rebellion as applied to Riel’s Rising.

Thus we read in his Correction Line, an enlarged edition of his First Furrows, that it is regrettable that said rising cannot be designated by some “less harsh word than Rebellion.”[194] And why? Whereas the Standard Dictionary defines rebellion a “deliberate organized resistance, by force of arms, to the laws or operations of a government by those who owe it obedience,” Garrioch will no doubt proceed to show that the then Assiniboians owed obedience to Canada.

But he does nothing of the kind. He gives two other reasons to prove that Riel’s action was rebellious. The first is that the half-breed seized Fort Garry, which he must know was on the point of being taken by the so-called Canadian party, whereby all redress of local wrongs would have been rendered impossible, and would have occasioned a bloody civil war. Where is the resistance to “a government by those who owe it obedience” in that?

In the second place, according to our author, “the word rebellion, applied to the movement from beginning to end, is perfectly correct” because, forsooth, his Provisional Government “took on itself to court-martial and execute a Thomas Scott for resisting its authority!”[195] Again we ask anyone who knows the value of words where is the rebellion in that? How did the Métis “resist” the British Government, the only one to whom they owed obedience, by executing a rebel to their own commands? In so doing they may have been right or wrong; that is not the question. The question is how, by slaying one man, good or bad, they went against the obedience they owed lawfully constituted authority.

A bad son in his anger strikes his mother, and you are justly horrified. Will you, for that reason, call his assault a murder? Mother-beating is not any more a murder than Riel’s uprising was a rebellion. Twenty murders will not turn a legitimate insurrection into a rebellion, and when you write for the printer you should know it.

Two points are therefore established beyond cavil: the people of Assiniboia had excellent reasons for rising in 1869—for which see our preceding chapter—and their rising was not a rebellion against legitimate authority. This we have just established with the help of Riel’s enemies themselves.

Having thus cleared the way of all possible misapprehensions as to the real character of the Red River Insurrection, we shall now proceed to candidly relate the various phases of a movement which we are satisfied was intended as a protest against the encroachments of Ottawa and a bid for negotiations therewith, remarking at the same time that Mgr. Alexandre Antonin Taché, O.M.I., Bishop of St. Boniface, had left for the Œcumenical Council of the Vatican, entrusting the Rev. Jean-Marie Lestanc, O.M.I., an austere and conscientious Oblate, with the care of his diocese.

While few English writers have a good word for the saintly religious[196] because all the trouble took place under his administration, there is not one amongst them, outside of the raging bigots blinded by uncontrollable prejudice, who can gainsay the statement that the absent prelate himself was the very soul of honour, a man of most suave and kindly manners. He was moreover, in the words of Beckles Willson, a man “of unusual sagacity and enlightenment.”[197]

Now for history proper.