Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont (16 page)

The morning is bright and cold. Despite this, Louis sweats. He can feel the beads of it on his face. A cold sweat. A night sweat like one that comes with bad dreams. As Father André walks with him to where the rope awaits, the priest stumbles, and Louis whispers for him to have courage. By the gallows now, a rope is placed loosely about Louis’s neck. The deputy asks if there are any last words. Louis can hear Father André crying, his head turned away. “Shall I say something?” Louis asks, concerned now for the priest’s weakness. Maybe there is something still to be said.

“No,” the priest chokes.

Louis requests time to pray some more. He is given two minutes. The other priest accompanying the party, this one sent by sympathizers from Toronto, suggests that Louis recite the Lord’s Prayer. The priest then leans to the deputy and tells him to command the hangman to pull the lever when Louis reaches the line “… deliver us from evil.” The deputy nods. It isn’t so much an act of cruelty as one of mercy. Louis won’t suspect it at that moment.

Gabriel must shake with anger when he is told of this next part, the last cruel twist of injustice: the hangman approaches Louis, places a white cotton hood over his head, tucks it beneath the rope before roughly tightening the cord about his neck, then spits in Louis’s ear, “Louis Riel, do you know me? You cannot escape from me today!” As it turns out, a man who bears a personal grudge against Louis has been allowed to act as his executioner, something even the most barbaric of societies frown upon. The executioner claims to have been taken prisoner by Riel’s men in the Red River Resistance back in 1870, and he further claims to have been a friend of the rabid dog Thomas Scott. The executioner has waited fifteen years for the chance to whisper this to Louis. His ugly words mar an otherwise respectful day.

Ironically, the last words, the last prayer, of Louis’s life are spoken in English. As the Toronto priest has requested, while the last line of the Lord’s Prayer is being recited, the trap door springs open and Louis, not yet quite ready, falls nine feet before his body jerks to a stop and then begins to convulse. Over the course of two minutes the convulsions continue, slowing eventually to twitches and then, finally, to stillness. Father André, reporting it all to his superiors, writes, “Riel died a saint.”

SOMETHING BREAKS IN GABRIEL
on November 16, 1885. Something breaks in all of the Métis. Louis’s wife, Marguerite, dies of what the doctor labels tuberculosis only six months later, in May of 1886. She’d lost their third child to miscarriage just a month before Louis was executed and had stopped caring about life completely when her husband was taken away for good. Louis’s only daughter, Angelique, dies of diphtheria shortly before her fourteenth birthday, and his only son, Jean, dies in 1908 when his buggy overturns. There will be no direct descendants for Louis David Riel.

Tragedy visits Gabriel, too, not long after Louis’s death. His beloved wife, Madeleine, passes away in 1886, just a few weeks after Louis’s wife. Doctors claim consumption is the culprit. Childless, Gabriel is distraught. But he’s also the last of the leaders of the buffalo hunt and knows that he sets an example for all of his people. He makes a deal with himself to carry on.

Now that Gabriel is a full-fledged fugitive of Canadian law as well as a bona fide hero of the plains, it makes great sense to Buffalo Bill Cody to include him in his famous “Wild West” show. Cody was so intrigued that he sent emissaries shortly after Gabriel arrived in Montana following the failure at Batoche, but Gabriel summarily turned them down. He had Louis to try to save. But now Gabriel has very little to hold him in one place, and the money is tempting. Gabriel has always lived by the rhythms of the hunt, eating well when it was good, going lean when it wasn’t. But the hunting here in Montana cannot sustain a man. And besides, joining the show will allow Gabriel to see places he’s never imagined.

In June of 1886, just over a year after he’d fled his beloved home, Gabriel takes a train to New York and marks an X on the contract offered to him by Buffalo Bill. Gabriel’s act shows off his riding skills and especially his marksmanship. He shares the stage with Annie Oakley, shooting glass balls tossed up in the air as he charges full stride on horseback. He, along with the others, draws full crowds. He’s a real live outlaw, and he’s magic with his most prized possession, his rifle
le petit.
But Gabriel doesn’t speak English, doesn’t feel in the least bit at home as he travels the northeast coast of the United States, except for the times he shares meals with the Sioux warriors who have also joined the circus.

And then word comes in July of 1886 that Gabriel, along with all the other Métis who fled, is being offered amnesty by the Canadian government, something it hadn’t dared to do just one year before when Gabriel had hoped to defend his friend in court. Suddenly, Gabriel’s cachet as an outlaw is tarnished. He is also homesick for the west, so he and Buffalo Bill agree that he will be free after he completes his original threemonth contract. The two men also agree that Gabriel is at liberty to make special appearances whenever he likes, which Gabriel does, periodically, over the next number of years.

But now what to do? Gabriel has no trust for the words and promises of John A. and the others. This might all be a trick. Instead of rushing back home, he agrees to some speaking engagements for expatriate and well-to-do French Canadians living in the American northeast. For the next year, Gabriel accepts some of these invitations grudgingly. Louis was the orator, after all. Gabriel was simply the actor. In his simple and straightforward language, he hits this lecture circuit, a hero and an oddity to these people who are only partially his. He is given silver medals and a gold watch and money to live on, but this isn’t a natural act for Gabriel, this standing in front of an audience as he sweats in his suit, trying to explain his love for his land, how he misses his people, so many of them scattered to the wind.

IT’S VERY EASY
to become lost in such circumstances, Gabriel realizes, and he begins to wander, trying to figure out what to do in the years after Louis’s death. Some even claim that he travels as far as France, searching for what has been taken from him. He does certainly travel back and forth between Montana and New York. Even though he now knows he really is allowed to return home, he doesn’t. His wife is dead, his parents are dead, so many of his brothers are dead. Louis is gone forever, and so is Gabriel’s old way of life. Like his dear friend before him, he has been cast out into the wilderness. But this wilderness, part concrete and massive buildings in the east, part poverty and survival hunting in the west, is not the place Gabriel ever envisioned his life would lead him.

While the fame of being himself, the leader of the North-West Rebellion, is somewhat enticing, it’s always the Métis, his people, that keep Gabriel grounded. They are suffering miserably now that they have been beaten down. Gabriel finds a focus in the late 1880s, once again writing petitions with the help of his old friend, Maxime Lépine, urging the people of Quebec to not forget their western cousins, explaining that the Métis still deserve land scrip, and that Gabriel and others should be compensated for the loss of their properties.

Gabriel returns home to Canada in the spring of 1888, heading to Montreal with plans of lecturing and, in his own small way, picking up where Louis left off. He’s been told by people who claim to have his best interests in mind that it’s time to dictate his autobiography, but both plans are stymied by the powerful priests of Quebec, who fear he will agitate too much once more. Certain Quebec politicians see a wonderful tool in Gabriel if only they can get him to become a better public speaker. Quebec nationalism is rising, and Québécois politicians hope Gabriel can help them in their fight for stronger provincial powers. But Gabriel knows in his heart that, for all his desire, he will never be the speaker Louis was. In his speeches thus far, the only way Gabriel resembles Louis is that he opposes the priests who do more harm than good for his people, but in Quebec, loyalty to the Catholic Church is one rule that must not be broken.

Finally, in 1890, five full years after the fighting at Batoche and not long after Gabriel dictates his memoirs about that event, he returns home to Saskatchewan. He finds things so painfully changed—squatters on the land, his friends and family scattered, his Indian friends on their reserves in such dire poverty—that he realizes he doesn’t want to stay. He travels back to the U.S. once more, this time to Dakota and Métis hunting camps that promise him at least a semblance of his old life.

The last publicized event in Gabriel’s life is a violent episode, and it occurs, ironically, while he’s surrounded by friends. One night in 1891, as he sleeps in his tent in a Dakota hunting camp, Gabriel is attacked by an assassin wielding a knife. The man stabs Gabriel in the head and then in the body. Gabriel, strong as a buffalo—and as thickheaded as one, too, he later jokes—grabs the man’s knife with his hand, the blade lacerating his palm deeply, and in this way wrenches it away before wrestling the man into submission. Gabriel’s shouts bring the rest of the camp running, and after trying to surmise who the man is and especially who sent him, Gabriel magnanimously lets him go, possibly as a warning to the man’s bosses that they cannot kill Gabriel. He believes until the day he dies, fifteen years later, that the assassin was sent by the Canadian government.

After another stint trying to raise money in Quebec for impoverished Métis out west, Gabriel returns home for the final time in 1893. He’s fifty-six years old now and ready for the last battle of his life. He first settled his land at Gabriel’s Crossing in 1872, and still, twenty-one years on and despite all that’s happened, the government has ignored his repeated requests for official ownership. It won’t be for another nine years—in a new century, in the year 1902—that the government finally agrees to give him title to it. Thirty years he’s struggled to be recognized as the one who lives on this land honestly, and thirty years later he finally wins what, in the scheme of things, is a small but decisive victory.

These last years of his life, as an old century becomes a new one, Gabriel turns inward and to the land, as always, hunting, trapping, and fishing it for his survival. Rather than rebuilding at Gabriel’s Crossing, he lives on his relatives’ land in a small log cabin. Perhaps there are too many painful memories at the Crossing on the South Saskatchewan, or perhaps now that he finally has title to the land, the Sarcee in him tells him that to think one can actually own the earth is the white man’s folly. Perhaps it’s Gabriel’s quiet way of telling John A. and the rest that they will never control him. Perhaps it’s all these things and more.

After returning from a hunting trip in mid-May of 1906, sixty-nine-year-old Gabriel complains of pain in his chest and arms. The pain goes away in a day or two, and Gabriel, thinking it tired muscles, visits an old friend on May 19. As is the custom, he’s offered some food, and after a couple of bites, Gabriel stands up and walks a few steps before collapsing. He’s dead before he hits the floor.

Only a few tiny local papers report the death of the man who, twenty years before, held the fear and grudging respect of a nation. But on the day Gabriel is buried in the tiny cemetery on the rise at Batoche, nestled in along with his comrades from that long-ago fighting, Métis in their sashes begin to arrive, Cree from Beardy’s and One Arrow’s reserves, too. They come streaming in on horse and by foot, in Red River cart or by canoe, to celebrate the life of the last of the leaders of the buffalo hunt. Some of the wiser ones burn sweetgrass and sage and tobacco, do it knowing that each morning, as the sun begins to rise, the spirit of Gabriel will rise with it. He is a real hunter, a real leader, after all, and so he will always have no choice but to rise with the sun.

EPILOGUE

I stand with my hands up on the chain-link fence, staring at the place, a stone’s throw away, where Louis Riel was hanged. There’s no statue, no marker, no way you’d ever know that this is the spot without some pretty serious research and a touch of the detective in you. I’m on the edge of a property called the “Depot,” in Regina, Saskatchewan. It’s the home and training grounds of our country’s RCMP. I’d wanted to stand in that place where Louis hovered above the ground in the last instant of his life, but no one with the proper authority is available today to accompany me. And so I’m here, with my hands up on the fence, a Métis outsider staring in at the old chapel that was once the guardhouse that held Louis.

Maybe it’s a little morbid, but I can picture Louis stepping out of the second-storey window of this chapel that was once the guardhouse and onto the scaffolding of the longgone gallows, bookended by policemen and followed by a crying Father André with his long white beard and black robes. I can picture Louis with the rope around his neck staring ahead and mumbling prayers under his breath, questioning for a moment how he ended up here in this place on this day, the last one of his life. Does he regret his actions as he stands on the scaffold?

THE YEAR BEFORE MY VISIT
to Regina I fly to Saskatoon, rent a car at the small airport, and begin to drive. It’s a gorgeous summer day, the prairie fields exploding with wildflowers. I’m surprised as I drive north how these prairies aren’t flat at all but undulate like waves on a great ocean. I try to picture Gabriel riding through this same country, hunting buffalo as a younger man or, as he hits middle age, evading the military as he rides away from Batoche to a different kind of captivity from Louis’s, this one in the States.

I turn east off the main highway onto a secondary one and then onto an even smaller road. Following this, I’m surprised to feel my heart rate quicken as I close in on my first destination. As the wide river comes in sight, sparkling in the brilliant sunshine, I smile to myself, understanding now in this very moment why a people would be willing to fight and die for such a place. It’s beautiful, the poplar leaves along the river shimmering in the breeze, the South Saskatchewan curving like a smile. I drive slowly over the steel bridge that is Gabriel’s Crossing, taking it all in: the shining water, the thick growth of trees along the bank, the fertile ground sloping up and stretching out for miles. The only structure around, a well-kept house with a large teepee in the backyard, piques my interest. I won’t bother the owner today. Instead, I continue my exploration.