Policing the plains

by R. G. MacBeth

It is not our duty in this book to follow the fortunes of "the Governor and Company of the Adventurers of England trading into Hudson Bay" as the Royal Charter described this little band of less than a score of men to whom had been handed over the control of half a continent. It is enough to say that the Hudson's Bay Company, as the popular habit of shortening long titles rendered it, held this vast region for two whole centuries. During that time the immense resources of the country tempted others to disregard the monopolistic provisions of the Royal Charter and to venture in upon forbidden ground. Companies such as the North-West Fur Company, formed by the Scottish merchants of Montreal, rushed to secure part of the rich harvest in trade that was being reaped by the English Company, whose employees, it may be said, were largely the hardy Scots from the Highlands and Islands. But the leaders of the Hudson's Bay Company, "stabbed broad awake" by this opposition and strengthened by the trustworthiness and endurance of their employees, held their ground and extended their operations till they by degrees absorbed all opponents and became in 1821 monarchs of all they surveyed.

Meanwhile in the Old Land many things of world-wide interest and influence had been transpiring. The years around the opening of the nineteenth century were made stormy by the Napoleonic effort to subjugate Europe and while their men of military age were away fighting for the liberty of Europe against "the little giant of Corsica," certain areas in the north of Scotland were "cleared" of their inhabitants by heartless landlords who felt that sheep were more profitable for the owner of estates than human tenants. To these evicted crofters in the Highlands came that noble altruist and philanthropic colonizer, the Earl of Selkirk, who, having obtained from the Hudson's Bay Company an immense district principally in what is now Manitoba, offered the outcasts of a tyrannous land system homes in the great free spaces of Rupert's Land, as the Hudson Bay territory was called. The offer was accepted thankfully, and in the years from 1812 to 1815 these Selkirk colonists came to the Red River of the North.

It is not part of this story to follow the fortunes of these famous colonists of whom I have written more particularly in The Romance of Western Canada. They encountered unaccustomed climatic obstacles, they were persecuted and hunted by the fur-trading opponents of their benefactor, they were tried by the disasters of floods and by plagues of devouring locusts, but with the dogged and stern determination of their race and creed they held on and demonstrated to the world the possibilities of a country which is now the granary of the Empire.

And the world got to hearing of this Arcadian Colony of Scots in the new North-West. So when the old Provinces of the East were brought together under the name of the Dominion of Canada in 1867, the men of light and leading at Ottawa lost no time in looking westward to secure the vast western domain for the new Confederation. Despite the difficulty of travel, settlers had already begun to percolate from Eastern Canada through the States or the wilderness spaces west of the Great Lakes, into the Red River country made famous by the Selkirk Colony. And it had been becoming more and more apparent to the Hudson's Bay Company itself as well as to others that the great fur-trading and mercantile organization could no longer adequately administer an area which was soon to overflow with the human sea of an incoming population. For many years previous to Confederation the Hudson's Bay monopoly in trade had been more or less of a figment of the imagination and no one knew that better than the Company itself. It still retained its monopoly nominally, but it made very little effort to restrain the half-breed and other "free traders" who opened up stores and bartered for furs with the Indians. In any case in one form or other all the trade of the country practically came, in the last analysis, through the Hudson's Bay Company, who controlled the money market by having their own bills in circulation. But the wise old Company saw what was coming and began to get ready to let go its monopolistic fur-trading charter and adjust itself to the new conditions.

Hence it was not a difficult matter to persuade the Company to give up its charter for a consideration. My father, who was a member of the Council of Assiniboia, a magistrate, and a close personal friend of Governor McTavish, who was in charge at Fort Garry on the Red River where settlement had begun, always used to say that the Hudson's Bay Company was glad to find a reasonable way of getting the responsibility for the government of the growing country off its hands.

Accordingly, when the Canadian Government deemed the time was ripe, two members of that Government, the Hon. Sir George E. Cartier and the Hon. William McDougall, were sent to London to negotiate with the Imperial authorities for the transfer of the North-West to Canada. In view of the attitude taken by the Hudson's Bay Company, as stated above, the matter was not difficult to arrange. And after a brief discussion in London, the famous old fur-trading organization, which had held charter rights since the days of Charles II, relinquished those rights to the Imperial Government for £300,000 sterling, certain reservations around their trading posts, along with one-twentieth of the land in the fertile belt. Then, as previously understood, the Imperial Government was to transfer the vast North-West to Canada, which in turn undertook to respect and conserve the rights of the people in the area thus added to the Dominion. This arrangement was concluded in the spring of 1869, and it was then expected that the purchase money would be paid on the 1st of October following, and that probably on the 1st of December the Queen's Proclamation would issue, setting forth these facts and fixing the date of the actual transfer to Canada.

So far all was well. The ideas leading up to the acquisition of this great domain were in every sense statesmanlike, and, if carefully carried out, were calculated to be of the greatest benefit to the people in the new territory and the Dominion as well. We should pay unstinted tribute to the men whose ideals were for an ever-widening horizon, and who felt that "no pent-up Utica should confine the powers" of the young nation just beginning to stretch out and exercise its potentially giant limbs. Once the older Provinces in the East were brought into Confederation it was wise to look forward to a Canada stretching from ocean to ocean, and to take the necessary legal steps to secure the broad acres of the West as part of the Dominion. But just when everything seemed to be going well a cog in the diplomatic equipment of the Canadian Government power-house slipped and taking advantage of the occasion, one Louis Riel, the son of the old hot-headed agitator on the Red River, threw a wrench into the machinery.

The Canadian authorities who wisely carried through the negotiations with the Hudson's Bay Company and the Imperial Government seem to have blundered by overlooking the fact that the new territory had within its borders some 10,000 people, apart from the Indians, who ought to have been informed in some official way of the bargain that was being made, and of the steps that were being taken to conserve the rights and privileges of these early settlers.

It is true that rumours of the transaction reached the Red River country through unauthoritative sources, but the main result was to produce a feeling of uneasiness amongst the people there. And especially was this the case when the rumours were given point by overt acts. Even before the transfer of the country had been legally completed men were sent out from the East to open roads from the Lakes into the settlements. Surveying parties entered the new territory and went hither and thither, driving their stakes and erecting their mounds, to the bewilderment of the people, and to cap all the indiscretions, a Governor, the Hon. William McDougall, was dispatched from Ottawa to the Red River before the Hudson's Bay regime was formally superseded and before a Queen's Proclamation, which would have been instantly recognized by all classes in the community, was issued.

The Selkirk Settlers and other people of that class, however perplexed at the procedure, had the utmost confidence that the Canadian authorities would ultimately do substantial justice to all, and hence they awaited patiently though somewhat anxiously the developments of time. But the French half-breeds, more fiery and more easily excited, more turbulent of spirit and warlike in disposition, accustomed to more or less fighting on the plains, and withal, as a class, less well informed than their white brethren, were not content to wait. They felt that the course being followed by the Canadian authorities might lead to the loss of their rights, and so they rose in a revolt, that while accomplishing some of the objects that could have been reached by constitutional means, left its red stream across that early page of our history. But in the midst of all our statements let it be remembered, in mitigation of the attitude of the Canadian authorities, that communication between Ottawa and the West at that period was very difficult. There were no railways nor telegraphs and the mails were few and far apart. Though, on the other hand, that condition of things should have made all parties more tolerant and cautious.