Canada - Sir John George Bourinot (thriller novels to read .txt) 📗

independent population with respect to the future government of their own country. The British as well as French settlers resented the {388} hasty action of the Canadian authorities. The halfbreeds, little acquainted with questions of government, saw in the appearance of surveying parties an insidious attempt to dispossess them eventually of their lands, to which many of them had not a sound title. The British settlers, the best educated and most intelligent portion of the population, believed that a popular form of government should have been immediately established in the old limits of Assiniboia, as soon as it became a part of Canada. Some of the Hudson's Bay Company's employes were not in their hearts pleased at the transfer, and the probable change in their position in a country where they had been so long masters. Although these men stood aloof from the insurrection, yet their influence was not exercised at the commencement of the troubles, in favour of peace and order, or in exposing the plans of the insurgents, of which some of them must have had an idea. The appearance of Mr. McDougall on the frontier of the settlement, was the signal for an outbreak which has been dignified by the name of rebellion. The insurgents seized Fort Garry, and established a provisional government with Mr. John Bruce, a Scotch settler, as nominal president, and Mr. Louis Riel, the actual leader, as secretary of state. The latter was a French half-breed, who had been superficially educated in French Canada. His temperament was that of a race not inclined to steady occupation, loving the life of the river and plain, ready to put law at defiance when their rights and privileges were in danger. This restless man and his half-breed {390} associates soon found themselves at the head and front of the whole rebellious movement, as the British settlers, while disapproving of the action of the Canadian Government, were not prepared to support the seditious designs of the French Canadian _Metis_. Riel became president, and made prisoners of Dr. Schultz, in later times a lieutenant-governor of the new province, and of a number of other British settlers who were now anxious to restore order and come to terms with the Canadian Government, who were showing every disposition to arrange the difficulty. In the meantime Mr. McDougall issued a proclamation which was a mere _brutum fulmen_, and then went back to Ottawa, where he detailed his grievances and soon afterwards disappeared from public life. The Canadian authorities by this time recognised their mistake and entered into negotiations with Red River delegates, representing both the loyal and rebellious elements, and the result was most favourable for the immediate settlement of the difficulties. At this critical juncture the Canadian Government had the advantage of the sage counsels of Sir Donald Smith, then a prominent official of the Hudson's Bay Company, who at a later time became a prominent figure in Canadian public life. Chiefly through the instrumentality of Archbishop Tache, whose services to the land and race he loved can never be forgotten by its people, an amnesty was promised to those who had taken part in the insurrection, and the troubles would have come to an end had not Riel, in a moment of recklessness, characteristic of his real nature, tried {391} one Thomas Scott by the veriest mockery of a court-martial on account of some severe words he had uttered against the rebels' government, and had him mercilessly shot outside the fort. As Scott was a native of Ontario, and an Orangeman, his murder aroused a widespread feeling of indignation throughout his native province. The amnesty which was promised to Archbishop Tache, it is now quite clear, never contemplated the pardon of a crime like this, which was committed subsequently. The Canadian Government were then fully alive to the sense of their responsibilities, and at once decided to act with resolution. In the spring of 1870 an expedition was organised, and sent to the North-west under the command of Colonel Garnet Wolseley, later a peer, and commander-in-chief of the British army. This expedition consisted of five hundred regulars and seven hundred Canadian volunteers, who reached Winnipeg after a most wearisome journey of nearly three months, by the old fur-traders' route from Thunder Bay, through an entirely unsettled and rough country, where the portages were very numerous and laborious. Towards the end of August the expedition reached their destination, but found that Riel had fled to the United States, and that they had won a bloodless victory. Law and order henceforth prevailed in the new territory, whose formal transfer to the Canadian Government had been completed some months before, and it was now formed into a new province, called Manitoba, with a complete system of local government, and including guaranties with {392} respect to education, as in the case of the old provinces. The first lieutenant-governor was Mr. Adams Archibald, a Nova Scotian lawyer, who was one of the members of the Quebec conference, and a statesman of much discretion. Representation was also given immediately in the two houses of the Dominion parliament. Subsequently the vast territory outside of the new prairie province was divided into six districts for purposes of government: Alberta, Assiniboia, Athabasca, Keewatin, and Saskatchewan. Out of these districts in 1905 were erected the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan, which were then given responsible government. In 1908, when the boundaries of the provinces were again defined, Keewatin was incorporated in the Province of Manitoba. In 1896 four new provisional districts were, marked out in the great northern unsettled district under the names of Franklin, Mackenzie, Yukon, and Ungava.

In the course of a few years a handsome, well-built city arose on the site of old Fort Garry, and with the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway--a national highway built with a rapidity remarkable even in these days of extraordinary commercial enterprise--and the connection of the Atlantic sea-board with the Pacific shores, villages and towns have extended at distant intervals across the continent, from Port Arthur to Vancouver, the latter place an instance of western phenomenal growth. Stone and brick buildings of fine architectural proportions, streets paved and lit by electricity, huge elevators, busy mills, are the characteristics of {393} some towns where only yesterday brooded silence, and the great flowery stretches of prairie were only crushed by the feet of wandering Indians and voyageurs.

Fourteen years after the formation of the province of Manitoba, whilst the Canadian Pacific Railway was in the course of construction, the peace of the territories was again disturbed by risings of half-breeds in the South Saskatchewan district, chiefly at Duck Lake, St. Laurent, and Batoche. Many of these men had migrated from Manitoba to a country where they could follow their occupation of hunting and fishing, and till little patches of ground in that shiftless manner characteristic of the _Metis_. The total number of half-breeds in the Saskatchewan country were probably four thousand, of whom the majority lived in the settlements just named. These people had certain land grievances, the exact nature of which it is not easy even now to ascertain; but there is no doubt that they laboured under the delusion that, because there was much red-tapeism and some indifference at Ottawa in dealing with their respective claims, there was a desire or intention to treat them with injustice. Conscious that they might be crowded out by the greater energy and enterprise of white settlers--that they could no longer depend on their means of livelihood in the past, when the buffalo and other game were plentiful, these restless, impulsive, illiterate people were easily led to believe that their only chance of redressing their real or fancied wrongs was such a rising as had taken place on the Red River in {394} 1869. It is believed that English settlers in the Prince Albert district secretly fomented the rising with the hope that it might also result in the establishment of a province on the banks of the Saskatchewan, despite its small population. The agitators among the half-breeds succeeded in bringing Riel into the country to lead the insurrection. He had been an exile ever since 1870, and was at the time teaching school in Montana. After the rebellion he had been induced to remain out of the Northwest by the receipt of a considerable sum of money from the secret service fund of the Dominion Government, then led by Sir John Macdonald. In 1874 he had been elected to the House of Commons by the new constituency of Provencher in Manitoba; but as he had been proclaimed an outlaw, when a true bill for murder was found against him in the Manitoba Court of Queen's Bench, and when he had failed to appear for trial, he was expelled from the house on the motion of Mr. Mackenzie Bowell, a prominent Orangeman, and, later, premier of the Canadian Government. Lepine, a member also of the so-called provisional government of Red River, had been tried and convicted for his share in the murder of Scott, but Lord Dufferin, when governor-general, exercised the prerogative of royal clemency, as an imperial officer, and commuted the punishment to two years' imprisonment. In this way the Mackenzie government was relieved--but only temporarily--of a serious responsibility which they were anxious to avoid, at a time when they were between the two fires: of the people of Ontario, {395} anxious to punish the murderers with every severity, and of the French Canadians, the great majority of whom showed a lively sympathy for all those who had taken part in the rebellion of 1869. The influence of French Canada was also seen in the later action of the Mackenzie government in obtaining a full amnesty for all concerned in the rebellion except Riel, Lepine, and O'Donohue, who were banished for five years. The popularity enjoyed by Riel and his associates in French Canada, as well as the clemency shown to them, were doubtless facts considered by the leaders in the second rising on the Saskatchewan as showing that they had little to fear from the consequences of their acts. Riel and Dumont--the latter a half-breed trader near Batoche--were the leaders of the revolt which broke out at Duck Lake in the March of 1885 with a successful attack on the Mounted Police and the Prince Albert Volunteers, who were defeated with a small loss of life. This success had much effect on the Indian tribes in the Saskatchewan district, among whom Riel and his associates had been intriguing for some time, and Poundmaker, Big Bear, and other chiefs of the Cree communities living on the Indian reserves, went on the warpath. Subsequently Battleford, then the capital of the Territories, was threatened by Indians and _Metis_, and a force under Big Bear massacred at Frog Lake two Oblat missionaries, and some other persons, besides taking several prisoners, among whom were Mrs. Delaney and Mrs. Gowanlock, widows of two of the murdered men, who were released at the close {396} of the rising. Fort Pitt, on the North Saskatchewan, thirty miles from Frog Lake, was abandoned by Inspector Dickens--a son of the novelist--and his detachment of the Mounted Police, on the approach of a large body of Indians under Big Bear. When the news of these outrages reached Ottawa, the government acted with great promptitude. A French Canadian, now Sir Adolphe Caron, was then minister of militia in Sir John Macdonald's ministry, and showed himself fully able to cope with this, happily, unusual, experience in Canadian Government. From all parts of the Dominion--from French as well as English Canada--the volunteers patriotically rallied to the call of duty, and Major-General Middleton, a regular officer in command