One winter night in 1865 the missionary Albert Lacombe was the guest of the chief in a Blackfoot camp. Suddenly the crackle of guns awoke the sleeping Indians. “Assinaw! Assinaw! The Crees! The Crees!” shouted the braves, as they rushed out to defend the camp. Bullets whizzed through the tent; you could smell the powder—the Crees were as close as that. Now both tribes liked the missionary, as much as they hated each other. He ran out and shouted to the Crees, but his voice was drowned in the din. He found a Blackfoot woman, dying of wounds, and baptized her. A Cree came on her body, scalped her, and killed her child. The fight went on all night, and half the camp [a]Rupert’s Land Enters the Dominion] was captured. At dawn the missionary told the Blackfeet to stop firing, and went out again alone to parley with the raiders. A spent bullet struck his head, nearly stunning him, and he fell. “You have killed your friend,” a Blackfoot shouted. Then the Crees heard, and were horrified. The fight was at an end; the raiders turned right-about and made off.
Three years later, in 1868, the same Lacombe was in camp with the Crees. In the middle of the night, their scouts brought word that Blackfoot raiders were hiding in the brush across the valley. The missionary went out, and, standing unarmed in the moonlight, shouted—“Hey! Hey! Are you there and wanting to fight? Then my Crees are ready for you. Come on, and you will see how they can fight. They are brave, my Crees, if you come to kill their people!” The voice “sounded big over the great prairie”—but there was no reply. Not a shot was fired; the raiders slunk off to their homes.
Though the Indians did not know it, their country was then on the eve of a great change. The year before, in 1867, the old Province of Canada—Ontario and Quebec—had united with the Atlantic Provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to form a federation, a “Dominion of Canada.” To complete the Dominion, to unite all these British lands from sea to sea for ever in one strong federation, it was necessary first of all to bring in the vast territory of the Hudson’s Bay Company. This was done in 1869. The Company gave up all its exclusive privileges for a payment of $1,500,000 and 45,000 acres of land. The Company also kept all its forts, with full liberty to go on trading in free competition with others. This it continues to do, on the largest scale, and the white settlers whom it used to shut out are [a]The Red River Rising] now its best customers. As the furs obtained in two centuries of trading had sold for about $100,000,000, the shareholders had no cause to complain of their bargain.
The French Métis on the Red River, however, were uneasy when they heard of this transference of the country to new rulers, and even some of the white settlers at first objected to the change, for which their opinion had not been asked.
The Government, to get the country ready for settlers, sent land surveyors up from the East. The Métis took fright. Seeing those strangers running straight lines across the land, the ignorant people thought their farms were going to be taken away from them—the long narrow strips of land running back from the river front.
A Governor was appointed by the Dominion authorities, and came round through the United States, for there was no other railway communication between Eastern and Western Canada. When he came to the frontier, at Pembina, he found a barricade across the trail, and was ordered by a “Comité National des Métis de la Rivière Rouge,” or “National Committee of Red River Métis,” to turn back and go home again. A “provisional government” was set up; Louis Riel, a halfbreed of some education but little sense, the leader of the insurrection, seized the Hudson’s Bay post of Fort Garry, and imprisoned a number of loyal settlers. One of them, a young man from Ontario named Scott, was tried by a rebel court-martial and shot; his body was pushed through a hole in the ice of Red River.
A storm of helpless indignation swept over Canada—helpless because the rebels were separated from the seat of power and population in the East by more than a thousand miles of lake and river. An officer then [a]Birth of First Prairie Province] known only as Colonel Wolseley, later on Commander-in-Chief of the British Army, was put at the head of a boat expedition, which arrived after a three months’ journey—to find that the mere news of an army’s approach had put down the rebellion. The government made it clear to the Métis that none of their rights would be interfered with: the Red River district was organized as the Province of Manitoba and gave no more trouble.
CHAPTER VII
The Mounted Police
NO; BUT out in the vast beyond were the makings of trouble enough. From little Manitoba to the mountains, the thousand miles of plain, then vaguely known as “The Saskatchewan,” lay unguarded and unwatched. The old ruling company had given up its power, and no new ruler had appeared. The throne was empty.
The Company’s authority over most of the tribes had been extraordinary. By treating the Indians as its children, with a wise mixture of patience and firmness, by avoiding interference as a rule and acting swiftly and sharply when action was both necessary and possible, the Hudson’s Bay men had won both affection and respect. More than once a young clerk had walked alone into an Indian camp after a murderer, shot the fellow where he stood, and walked out untouched without a word.