It is difficult to understand the West without having been there; it was, and is, a special world. The very air is different: the wind, the distances, the winters, the summers. And the prairie West is far from being monotonous: overwhelming, perhaps, is the word, especially with that blinding light, transparent, without haze. Across the immense sky, as Wallace Stegner once put it, move whole navies of clouds, their bottoms scraped flat, it would seem, against the earth. Across the vast miles pours the wind, a grassy, clean wind, something you have almost to tighten into, the way a trout tightens into a fast river.
The West had its own exigencies; on the prairie farm you starved for fruit, and sometimes you ached for water and shade. In the pioneer days at least it was always meat, meat, from an eternal stew pot on the back of the kitchen stove, as eternal as the Newfoundland or Nova Scotian fisherman’s fat teapot, which dispensed a liquid not dissimilar to stew, a tea of leather-like consistency. An easterner in Battleford, Saskatchewan, in the 1870s and 1880s would miss the pears, apples, cherries, peaches of Niagara, or the fat yellow Gravensteins of the Annapolis Valley—the sheer diversity of eastern farms. But then, the whole economy was different. Eastern farms were never completely self-sufficient, but they were not far from it. With thirty inches or more of rain a year in the East there was always a crop of something. But on the prairie there was that fundamental reliance on grain—on barley and oats where there was enough rain, and wheat everywhere.
In the West the harvest comes on with frightening urgency. Imagine 160 acres (65 hectares) of wheat dead ripe; it cannot wait, it has to be brought in at once, before rain, hail, or frost gets to it. That means rising before dawn and getting to sleep, half-dead, when the light has gone, and beginning again the next day. The women work as hard as the men: up at five a. m. getting a huge breakfast ready; in come the harvesters and clean out the food; there is just time after doing the dishes to get the potatoes started (and everything else) for the noon meal; and in the afternoon it is the same all over again for supper.
The urgency of the harvest also meant that your horses and, later, your machinery had to be as good as you could afford. A breakdown of the reaper or binder at harvest time was not to be contemplated. Massey, and Elarris, and other Canadian manufacturers, made good machines, but their prices were protected by the 25 per cent National Policy tariff which prevented the cheaper American farm machinery (longer Factory runs allowed them to put out similar machines more cheaply) from coming into the country; some western farmers began to think these eastern manufacturers were taking advantage of the fact. The whole point of the harvest was, however, the conversion of the 160 acres of grain into cash. The farmer was a businessman. He was converting his crop into clothing, harness, lumber, machinery, even some perhaps into savings. So he thought instinctively in terms of getting the product to market, about distances, freight rates, and prices in Winnipeg for Number 1 Northern wheat. There were success stories; had there not been more successes than failures, who would have come? John Fraser came out from Edinburgh, Scotland, to Brandon, Manitoba, in 1881 with $2,000 capital and bought a half-section of good black loam land from the Canadian Pacific Railway. Within two years it was worth $4,500, with forty acres (sixteen hectares) in wheat (at twenty to thirty bushels to the acre), twenty acres in oats, and twenty in barley. His cattle survived the winters on prairie hay.
John Fraser was luckier than some. To a large extent, he seems to have escaped the frost of September 1883 which affected Saskatchewan and Alberta. And the summer of 1884 was wet in Saskatchewan but not too bad in Manitoba. The prairie climates are not one! Some years there could be drought in southern Saskatchewan but bountiful crops in Manitoba and northern Alberta. Sometimes, an event like two bad years in a row (1883 and 1884) could produce, as it did in the Saskatchewan valley, conditions that nourished seeds of political and social discontent.
It has to be said at once that on balance the settlement of the Canadian prairies was peaceful: that in itself was a considerable achievement. We had not a tithe of the trouble the Americans had. This was largely because of the way we did it; we put the law and law enforcement in first, and the settlers afterward.
Louis Riel’s Red River Rebellion of 1869-70 had shown Ottawa that the West would need something less than, and more than, a military presence. For one thing, Indian treaties were needed, and there was an important series of treaties between 1871 and 1877. But a concomitant of that was control, not so much of the Native peoples as of white settlers. They were, potentially, the more disruptive, by weight of numbers and influence—at least if American experience was anything to go on. When the Sioux ambushed General Custer at Little Big Horn in Montana on June 25, 1876—“Custer’s last stand”—he was there because of an influx of white miners looking for gold. This was Sioux territory, and the miners had invaded it. In the year 1876 the Americans spent $20 million fighting the Native peoples. The whole Canadian federal budget was less than that; an Indian war would have been a disaster
Above; Red River Cart Train (c. 1862?) The carts were made wholly of wood, and could float if necessary. Below: Civilization and Barbarism, Winnipeg, Manitoba (c. 1871?) Both oils are by W. G. R. Hind, who participated in the cross-country trek of the “Overlanders” in 1862. Today we are less complacent about the “civilized” quality of modern society.
In not only human but financial terms. Canada had to have peace. The Canadian equivalent of Custer’s last stand was Treaty No. 6, the Fort Carlton-Fort Pitt Treaty of August-September 1876 with the Plains and Woods Cree of the North Saskatchewan valley. When the Canadian Minister of the Interior, David Mills, went to Washington a year later, his American counterpart. Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz, asked him, “Fiow do you keep your whites in order?” Mills’ response is unknown, but the answer was that the Canadian government got to the West first, with the Indian treaties, with a comprehensive and accurate survey, and with the North-West Mounted Police, in roughly that order. Each reinforced the others, and all of it was in place before the settlers really started to arrive.
The North-West Mounted Police were created in 1873 by Sir John A. Macdonald on strong recommendations from officials in the North-West, especially from Alexander Morris, Lieutenant-Governor of Manitoba and the Northwest Territories (1872-77). The nwmp was highly unusual in function and in organization, quite unlike anything in eastern Canadian experience. The eastern system—imported from England, the way the law was—worked reasonably well. It was local justice, very local, and the law was literally a common law. In times of real social crisis the militia could be called out, but those times were uncommon.
But this eastern law did not work well in the volatile and primitive communities west of Lake Superior. The Hudson’s Bay Company had had its own legal system, but by 1869 that had really broken down, as Riel’s seizure of Fort Garry showed. When there were British troops in Red River, as in 1846-48 and 1857-61, there was no problem. Once it was established as a province Manitoba would of course have to take on its own law enforcement, but that left Alexander Morris, and Macdonald, with the Northwest Territories to worry about.
Macdonald’s nwmp was an inspired creation. The new force had powers and discipline unlike any British system of law enforcement except perhaps the Irish Constabulary. The brilliant idea of the scarlet Norfolk jacket was not original with Macdonald, but came from the adjutant-general of the Canadian militia. Colonel Robertson-Ross. (The colour was, of course, originally that of British army regulars.) Wallace Stegner was a boy of five in 1914 when he saw his first mounted policeman at Weyburn, Saskatchewan;
The important thing is the instant, compelling impressiveness of this man in the scarlet tunic. I believe I know, having felt it, the truest reason why the slim force of Mounted Police
Was so spectacularly successful____Never was the dignity of the uniform more carefully
Cultivated, and rarely has the ceremonial quality of impartial law and order been more
Dramatically exploited One of the most visible aspects of the international boundary was
That it was a colour line: blue below, red above, blue for treachery and unkept promises, red for protection and the straight tongue.
The NWMP were soldiers and police at the same time. They were more like the centrally controlled French gendarmes than the British police, but they were unlike French or British police in that they acted also as magistrates. The constables of the NWMP apprehended criminals; the officers tried them. Such formidable powers were
Sheet music for waltzes composed by George B. Crozier and dedicated to Lieutenant-Colonel J. F. Macleod, who founded Fort Macleod in southern Alberta in 1874 and became commissioner of the North-West Mounted Police in 1877. Crozier’s son was also with the nwmp, and led their advance against the Metis at Duck Lake.
Dangerous in combination: everything depended on the integrity and fairness of officers and men. Macdonald justified the radical departure from English legal traditions by the necessities of justice on a distant frontier. He also believed that the Mounted
Police would be temporary, that as soon as provincial administrations were established they would no longer have any function. In fact, the Mounted Police were so successful that the two new provinces of 1905, Alberta and Saskatchewan, begged Laurier to keep tbe force on. Not only did they stay on, but they spread to all other provinces but two (Ontario and Quebec), although shorn of their judicial powers.
Even in the early 1880s, the disaffection in Saskatchewan—which would bring Louis Riel back to Canada and climax with the Saskatchewan rebellion of March-May, 1885—was not so much a reaction to the nwmp, but to long-distance government. It was a long way from Regina or Prince Albert to Ottawa. The grievances in the Saskatchewan valley were, some of them, minor. Could Metis claim land as homesteaders? They could and, as in the case of the popular Metis leader Gabriel Dumont, did, although not if they had had land in Manitoba. Could they have their land on the old Metis river-lot principle? This was awkward administratively and was generally discouraged. But neither the land claims nor the river-lot principle seemed At all minor to the Metis. Both were central to their way of life. Without effective representation in Ottawa, their only resort was memorials, letters, and petitions. Over the years these had come to Ottawa but the Department of the Interior was slow to respond, slower to act, leaving the Metis feeling much as they had a decade and a half before at Red River; a beleaguered, vulnerable people. Other substantial grievances remained, ones which the Canadian government could do very little about. The old life of the Metis as carriers and freighters for the hbc was mostly gone now that there were steamboats on the Saskatchewan River, and the new Canadian Pacific Railway (cpr); and they took ill to farming. With the buffalo largely gone too, there was hunger and restlessness in the Saskatchewan country by 1884.
But if the Metis had difficulties, the plains Indians had disaster. The buffalo herds had been disappearing since the late 1870s. The repeating rifle was the cause; the Native peoples, not knowing the ravages it could make, looked in vain for the great herds that once had been their whole livelihood. Nor were the treaties much help to them. Broadly, the treaties gave them reserve lands in proportion to population, at 128 acres (52 hectares) per capita, a token annual payment, medals and uniforms for the chiefs, farming and agricultural assistance, with rights to fishing and hunting to
Continue as before. The treaties took time to negotiate and then had to be translated into Native languages. The combination of
Gabriel Dumont (1837-1906), leader of the Metis bison hunt in Saskatchewan until 1881, was an able guerrilla tactician and a natural soldier. This famous photograph shows Riel’s lieutenant after his flight from Batoche in May 1885. Failing to rescue Riel from execution, Dumont joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show as a crack marksman, returning to Canada in 1893 after the amnesty for rebels in 1886.
White perception of law and white language did not translate well. The Native person almost certainly had a different view of treaties than the white man. He thought he was agreeing to share land with the whites, as one shares the very air and sunshine. He had never seen a city, he had no notion that what the white man took by the treaties was the right to take over the land in fee simple. It was when he started seeing houses and farms and fences, and the cpr slowly coming onward in the summers of 1882 and 1883, that he began to understand what he had given up.
The whites in the Saskatchewan valley also had grievances. The cpr had changed route. The original line was to go north-west from Winnipeg to Edmonton; on this promise much land had been bought close to the projected line. Suddenly in 1882 the new CPR company changed all that and pulled the route drastically to the south, to go through Regina and Calgary. That dished the speculators and disappointed the farmers—often one and the same. With the bad frost of 1883 and the wet harvest of 1884 piled on top of all the rest, they kicked—or tried to. The trouble was that they had no voice in Ottawa, no mps at all. Their only representative government was the NorthWest Territorial Council at Regina, while the very things that mattered most, land and its regulations, were wholly in the hands of the Department of the Interior and its officials in Ottawa and Winnipeg. That department was not well administered, especially after Macdonald gave it up in 1883. And too many of its officials, in Ottawa and in the field, were ineffective, inexperienced, or political appointees after a cushy job.
The English-speaking mixed-bloods and Metis of Saskatchewan combined to bring Louis Riel up from Montana to help them in the summer of 1884. Riel’s political (and in the end military) support came mainly from the Metis, and to a lesser degree the Indians. But, his five-year banishment over, he was also welcomed by the whites of Prince Albert. He was brought in to help remedy the grievances, especially land claims, but his main weapon, a petition he prepared to the federal government, seemed to get nowhere. Within a few months he was being taunted by his friends for having accomplished nothing. A Riel so put on his mettle was dangerous. In January 1885, after being six months in the Saskatchewan valley. Riel shifted to more radical positions in both religion and political action. He lost the support of the Catholic church with the first—claiming that he was a “Prophet of the New World”—and that of the Prince Albert whites with the second—armed rebellion. On March 19, Riel, with armed followers, seized the parish church at Batoche, formed a provisional government, and demanded the surrender of Fort Carlton.
Riel believed that armed blackmail, which had worked so well in Manitoba
A Riel Ugly Position: J. W. Bengough enjoys Macdonald’s dilemma as French Canadians demand that Riel’s death sentence be commuted. Macdonald held to the decision of the court. Anyone who had called up and led the Saskatchewan rebellion would probably have suffered the same fate, regardless of background. Engraving published in Grip (August 29, 1885).
A ItlKI, UOI. V POSITION,
In 1869-70, could be effective in Saskatchewan in 1885. But Sir John A. Macdonald was not having it, not a second time, especially not a second time from Louis Riel. And the cpr, almost finished now, was one solid reason why. Back in 1869 Riel had been master of Manitoba, and there had been no way Macdonald could get at him save by laborious negotiation. But in 1885 Macdonald and the Canadian government had troops unloading at Qu’Appelle station within eleven days of the first shooting at Duck Lake on March 26. Riel tried to carry the Native peoples with him, and after the abandonment of Fort Carlton it looked as if he might succeed. But although the loss of Fort Carlton was serious, unhinging as it did government control of northern Saskatchewan, Riel lacked the skill and communications for so delicate an operation as raising an Indian war.
The rebellion in Saskatchewan Territory did not much affect Assiniboia Territory or Alberta Territory, not in anything like the same degree. True, there was decided unease in Calgary early in April 1885 when news arrived of the rebellion in the Saskatchewan valley, but this fear was much relieved when the troops, French Canadians of the 65th Carabiniers regiment, arrived from Montreal. They were greeted at the Calgary train station with open arms;
Before the arrival of the troops the Canadian Government was freely sworn at. Many did not know there was a Government, and a number who were aware of it did not desire to cultivate its acquaintance; but the fact that it was sending troops here to protect the people... struck a responsive chord. The officers and men had come a long way...
Group of Rebel Leaders Taking a Prominent Part in the Armed Rising of 1585, in the North-West Territories of Canada. Left to right: Beardy, Big Bear, Louis Riel, White Cap, Ciabriel Dumont. This romanticized image, by a French-Canadian illustrator working for an English-Canadian paper, conflicts with the Anglophone view of Riel and his cohorts as swarthy villains. At the time of the 1885 uprising. Riel—never a horseman—wore a full beard, but the portrait may be based on an earlier photograph. Lithograph by Octave-Henri Julien, published in The Illustrated War News (May 2, 1885).
The Calgarians were particularly worried about the Blackfoot tribes who lived 100 to 110 kilometres (60 to 70 miles) south-east. But the Blackfoot were kept quiet by promises and blandishments made in the name of the Dominion government by the missionary Father Lacombe, called by the Indians “The Man of the Good Heart.”
Despite their small numbers, the Saskatchewan Metis put up a remarkable resistance to the militia. The Metis had an exceptionally able military leader in Gabriel Dumont. He read the prairie, its weather and its terrain, like a book, and had he had his way the Metis might have given the troops an even tougher time of it. Even so, the battle of Fish Creek, where he halted General Middleton’s army, was bad enough.
At Frog Lake, Crees seized twelve whites and mixed-bloods. The Indian agent, a mixed-blood named Thomas Quinn, was too confident; he even sent away the Mounted Police detachment, believing he could command the respect of the local Natives. And on April 2, the Cree shot nine people including Quinn and two Roman
Catholic priests; only two women and the Hudson’s Bay agent survived. As for Riel, he never fired a shot the whole time; he led his followers with a crucifix, saying, “Fire, in the name of the Father! Fire, in the name of the Son! Fire, in the name of the Holy Ghost!” Wlien he was captured, the government had to decide what to charge him with. His Metis and Indian followers had certainly committed murder, but Riel had not murdered anyone. What he had done was raise a major insurrection. In the end he was charged with treason, under an ancient 1352 blunderbuss of a statute of Edward in. Macdonald knew the statute for it had been used by the Crown back when he was a young defence lawyer; he had thought then that it had a lot of holes in it.
But in 1885 Louis Riel was convicted and sentenced to death. Some said he was insane; he denied that himself, but there was doubt and the Macdonald government appointed a commission to decide. In the end they concluded he was sane. It was not surprising. Charles Guiteau had assassinated the American president, lames Garfield, in 1881, and had been judged sane though his symptoms of insanity were much more obvious than Riel’s. Both might have been held to be insane by twentieth-century definitions. The jury, in fact, recommended mercy for Riel. That was something the Cabinet would have to consider as they weighed his sentence. In the end Cabinet let the sentence stand. On November 16, 1885, Riel was hanged at Regina, as the Native people of the Frog Lake massacre would be eleven days later.
Riel’s hanging created a furor in Quebec. The Quebec ministers in Macdonald’s cabinet had given out hints that Riel would have his sentence commuted. The newspapers
Poundmaker, a Cree chief. During the North-West Rebellion his followers ransacked the abandoned village of Battleford, and subsequently routed a force led by Colonel W. D. Otter. Poundmaker had no part in the fight, and prevented his warriors from pursuing the retreating soldiers, but when he was later captured and tried he was sentenced to prison; he died soon after his release, his health and spirit broken.
Tried to pressure Macdonald to step in, but Macdonald was not going to be pressured. Macdonald would have hanged anyone who did what Riel had done, whatever his name, whatever his origin. John Thompson of Nova Scotia, who was at this point Macdonald’s new Minister of Justice, explained to Parliament that anyone who roused the Native peoples to war could not expect to get off with punishment less than that which the Native peoples themselves received.
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