Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont (8 page)

Outnumbering the enemy so decisively, and boiling with anger upon witnessing his brother’s murder, Gabriel and his marksmen begin picking off the exposed policemen. He later states that he was reloading
le petit
when the police appeared, and that they would retreat once again, realizing that they were outnumbered and nearly surrounded. After a good half hour of men shooting wildly at each other, with Gabriel’s troops slowly tightening the noose around the enemy, he senses the crushing defeat the police are about to endure. It’s at that time that he spots one of the most striking—and one of the strangest—images of his life. Louis himself has emerged on horseback from the woods behind and trots bravely among the men, completely exposed to police fire, carrying a cross raised above his head, exhorting the Métis: “In the name of God who created us, answer their fire!”

Ever the tactician, even in the heat of battle Gabriel recognizes that the police are going to have to retreat through a clearing, and as they begin to do so, in his own fog of war, not sixty paces away, he exposes himself to too much of their fire. His men watch as Gabriel takes a bullet to the skull and immediately drops, blood gushing from his head. They can only believe that he is dead. His cousin eventually makes his way over to try to see, and as he discovers that Gabriel is alive, that the bullet has ricocheted off his thick buffalo skull (leaving a deep scar for the rest of Gabriel’s life), his cousin is shot dead by a retreating policeman. Gabriel has lost two family members in less than an hour.

Gabriel’s other brother, Edouard, takes control of the men and is about to deliver the
coup de grâce
by pursuing and killing the rest of the police force when Louis stops him in his tracks, declaring that enough death has happened for one day. Gabriel desperately wants Edouard to go ahead regardless, in part out of retaliation, in part knowing that Fort Carlton, then Prince Albert, and eventually Battleford will fall to the Métis and they will, in essence, control a huge swath of the North-West. Once again the warriors bow their heads to Louis even though their guts tell them not to.

The aftermath of this first battle finds twelve police and militiamen dead and many wounded. The Métis, after witnessing the slaughter of Isidore and Assiyiwin, lose three other men in the fierce fighting. It is a clear victory for the Métis, and Gabriel, tied to his horse and still bleeding profusely from the head, listens as Louis commands a cheer from the men for their brave general.

In this, the first violent uprising in Canada in fifty years, the Canadians of the North-West have suffered their first military loss. Crozier, who attacked instead of waiting for reinforcements that he knew were on their way, is blamed for his foolish decision and berated in reports accordingly.

As for the Métis, they have started on a road they’ve not taken before, one that they can’t turn back from now. Suddenly, the worst possible situation has begun to unfold. Gabriel knows this, knows that the choices have diminished to one: his people must hold off the might and anger of the Canadian military, and the only way to accomplish this will be through guerrilla tactics. This is no longer a billiards game. And more men are going to die before it is over.

CHAPTER SIX

Quickening

A week before blood reddens the snow at Duck Lake, on March 19, Louis instates the provisional government of Saskatchewan. He sees himself as taking on the role of a political and spiritual leader and appoints Gabriel as the adjutant-general who will be in command of the Métis army. Louis has put much thought into what to name the council that will run this nascent government and decides that he must create a new phrase if he’s to capture the essence of his vision. He calls this new council the Exovedate, meaning roughly “those who have left the flock.” Perhaps his friend Gabriel would have preferred a more masculine name that brought back to life the all-but-vanished buffalo herds rather than the docile and somewhat dumb beasts that a flock suggests, but Louis best understands the Christian symbolism of sheep and departing the fold. The Métis who have gathered around Louis and Gabriel have a difficult time pronouncing—or really understanding—Exovedate, and so they call the new government
le petit provisoire.

Louis, who believes his health has been pushed to its limit over the now dying winter, begins to feel the exhaustion leaving his body at the telltale signs of spring’s approach; the river ice will soon break and the water will surge. Louis’s life is like a river. He has been pulled along from his earliest days in a direction that’s been preordained. This river, this life, has led him finally here to Batoche, and now he senses the river quickening. The waters are beginning to eddy and swirl, indeed are beginning to froth underneath the winter ice. The power of the river, of Louis’s life, pushes hard against the ice that holds it down. This is all preordained, like the seasons, like winter to spring. Soon, very soon, the ice will give with an echoing boom that will be heard clear across the country, across the world, and the water will flow again, free of the ice’s constraints.

Louis, feeling the pulse of the river in his veins a few days before installing the Exovedate, makes his boldest public statement to date in front of the Saint-Laurent church. “Rome has fallen!” he declares to the priests and the Métis gathered on the steps of the church which Father Fourmond forbids him to enter. This is the first dove to burst forth from his chest. And the Métis are with Louis now, not with the priests.

More doves follow. It makes perfect sense for Bishop Bourget, the conservative and powerful bishop who has influenced so much of Louis’s thinking, to be the first pope of the New World. And so it should be. Rome has rotted from the inside and here, finally, on the soil of the grand North-West, a new Rome can be built. Louis has many more specific plans, from renaming the days of the week to praying for the resurrection of a dead American politician who will help the Métis cause, but first he must deal with the most daunting of issues: forcing John A. to recognize that the Métis have fair claim to the lands upon which they live.

Louis believes that
all
he wants is realistic, but there are those who have labelled him mentally unsound in the past. Indeed, he spent almost two years in an insane asylum for behaviour that those who care for and love him couldn’t understand. They couldn’t grasp that God spoke to Louis on the mountain near Washington, D.C., during the days he attempted to hold secret court with American president Ulysses S. Grant, during those days when Louis firmly believed nothing short of an American military invasion of western Canada could help secure a real Métis homeland.

Yes, Rome has fallen, and Bishop Bourget is the perfect man to become the new pope. Ten years before, Bourget himself sent a letter confirming Louis’s deep-seated belief that his path was a righteous and important one. Ten years ago, in July of 1875, Louis was deep in the wilderness of his soul, officially banned from Canada, a bounty on his head. The Orangemen clamoured for his assassination in a year when he had already been elected to the Parliament in Ottawa by the people of Manitoba but could not claim his seat. It was a year of torment and true suffering, made worse in that he was separated from his large and beloved family. But a letter from the bishop helped quell some of the pain, for the letter stated what Louis already knew. The bishop wrote, “I have the deep-seated conviction that you will receive in this life, and sooner than you think, the reward for all your mental sacrifices.… For He has given you a mission which you must fulfill in all respects.”

Five months after receiving that letter, while in the American capital and attending mass not long before Christmas, Louis was struck by an overpowering mystical experience. He writes in his journal,

I suddenly felt in my heart a joy which took such possession of me that to hide from my neighbors the smile on my face I had to unfold my handkerchief and hold it with my hand over my mouth and cheeks. In spite of my precautions a young boy about ten years old, who was a little in front of me, saw my great joy.… And if it had not been for the great efforts I made to restrain my sighs, my tears and cries would have made a terrible noise within the church.

Over the next while, visions continued to visit Louis, including one where the spirit of God comes to him, filling Louis with a divine light before transporting him to what he understands to be the fourth heaven, where he is instructed for at least an hour and a half about the nations of the earth. The visions culminate in a powerful one while Louis hikes up a mountain near Washington, D.C., the same spirit who visited Moses “in the midst of cloud and flame” appearing to Louis. It says to him in Latin, “Rise, Louis David Riel, you have a mission to accomplish for the benefit of humanity.”

Understandably, Louis’s friends are somewhat concerned. Louis takes to referring to himself as Louis “David” now, even though David is not his given name. More than that, he sinks into horrible places where he shouts and bellows, sometimes even in church, and most odd of all, a couple of times he tears his clothes from his body and rips them to ribbons, claiming that God wants us to be naked in front of Him, for it shows we have nothing to hide.

Louis is certainly beginning to understand that he has a mission to fulfill, and it’s becoming clearer to him that he is a prophet of the New World, but family and friends can’t quite wrap their heads around this. Within a year of receiving his visions, out of concern for his mental wellbeing, Louis is spirited back into Canada to Montreal, where he is placed in the care of his uncle. But the man soon realizes he can’t do enough for his nephew after Louis, among other tantrums and strange behaviours, has an embarrassing outburst during mass, and so Louis is committed to an asylum just outside of Montreal. He’s admitted in March 1876, under the pseudonym Louis R. David, but not long after the doctors, fearing he will be discovered and captured by the authorities, move him to another asylum near Quebec City. This time, Louis enters the asylum under the name Louis Larochelle.

And so Louis spends twenty-two months under the care of doctors who are impressed by his intelligence and his great knowledge of philosophy, Christianity, and Judaism, one by the name of Dr. Howard even going so far as to comment that he’s never quite sure if Louis’s grandiose talk isn’t acting rather than actual hallucinations. And while Louis continues to have irrational outbursts, the rest seems to do him well. He continues his religious exploration through his writing, composing theological tracts that attempt to explain his stance, his hopes, and his vision. In late January of 1878, Louis is finally released with the stern warning to lead a quiet life. He tried, didn’t he? But his mission was reawakened when Gabriel called on him, back in Montana, months ago, what feels here in March of 1885 like years ago. And so Louis finds himself in Batoche, on the verge of creating the New World he’d so long imagined.

Now, though, there’s no denying that blood stains the snow at Duck Lake. The Canadians fired first and left the Métis no other option but to defend themselves. It’s not at all too late to try to hammer out a fair truce, a just solution, for his people. The government should be amazed that this truce actually held for so long, for fifteen years, since the Red River resistance. For this is how Louis has seen the last decade and a half: as only a truce. The government has never properly dealt with the Métis situation. But now they’ll have to, won’t they?

Louis has told Gabriel and the others that the British are tying themselves up with a war overseas and that the chances of British troops coming here are slim. He reminds Gabriel and the others how long it took, months and months after the Red River provisional government was created, before the Canadian troops even threatened to arrive. What Louis does not take into account is that even though great swaths of the Canadian Pacific Railway lie incomplete between here and Ontario, great lengths of it are finished, and the Canadians have no intention of letting things slide. News of the battle of Duck Lake has spread rapidly, and the clamour for Louis’s head across English-speaking Canada is growing as fast as only hatred can grow. Already more than three thousand troops and volunteers are heading here from Ontario to join up with the two thousand police and volunteers in the North-West. In the next weeks, that number will grow to eight thousand men.

News of the Métis victory doesn’t travel only to the whites. Indians on reserves across the North-West take the news with mixed reactions. Some see joining the bearded holy man and his tough war chief as a sure way to end up in an even worse place than the one they’re in now. All Indians know the vicious savagery a white government will bring down upon red people who dare try to protect themselves. The ghost dance movement is still a few years away, a desperate last chance for some prairie peoples to stave off their own destruction, but already so many Indians recognize the misery of their situation. Others are far too proud to consider joining forces with a group they have a difficult time considering themselves part of and understand that patience is a very important part of Indian life. Besides, who is this Riel who preaches of the god of the whites and dismisses the old ways?

But important men do seem to share the same vision as Louis: that the government must be forced if it is to be fair. The Cree leader Big Bear, who was the last to accept reserve life and its restrictions just a few years before, and Poundmaker, the peace-loving chief whose young warriors push hard against patience, watch as their people starve, their young men growing restless and speaking with the anger that comes when your loved ones grow skinny with sickness.

Just one week before, Louis and Gabriel had shown that you can stand up to the police, to the authority of the government and win, and some young Cree men begin to allow this to fill their bellies. Big Bear pleads with his warriors to not act rashly, but one of his war chiefs, Wandering Spirit, has gained a voice among the young and angry. All of them, fed up with the position they find themselves in, break away from Big Bear and enter the community of Frog Lake, taking hostage the Indian agent Thomas Quinn in his home before dawn on the morning of April 2. Quinn, who treats the Cree with arrogance, is a tall man whom the Cree see as short. He’s become the focus of their anger because of his harshness and his racist world view. Against his father’s wishes, Imasees, Big Bear’s younger son, is among the party. They take more prisoners as the morning progresses and begin to occupy the village, gathering the locals in the church.