Kanata (18 page)

Riel walked among his soldiers, holding a silver crucifix. “Fire!” he yelled. “Fire in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” His eyes were glazed. He hadn't slept. “The King of Syria,” he told his men as they fired at the red targets, “demanded of Israel all its gold and silver, all of its women and children. And a prophet came to the King of Israel and said, ‘I shall deliver the army of Syria to you and you will smite them in a great slaughter so that you know I am the Lord.'”

Riel's military commander was Gabriel Dumont, a marksman of legend. He had counselled guerrilla warfare, and had wanted to blow up the train tracks, both a symbolic and strategic strike. But Riel wanted Armageddon, a battle of biblical proportion. And here it was, his handful of men awaiting the inevitable.

The government men finally charged the Metis. And in that charge, Riel saw his empire vanish. His men disappeared into the woods, and he followed. The red-coated soldiers came looking, and first found Dumont sitting in a copse, his rifle resting on his knees. “I got ninety rounds here for any man wants to come and claim me,” he called out. They left in search of easier game.

When they found Riel he was wild looking though oddly peaceful, the mania having passed, and they took him to a jail in Regina. It lacked the penal majesty of Beauport; the jail was overflowing, filled with Indians and Metis.

In prison, Riel heard that Dumont had escaped to Montana, the place everyone seemed to escape to at some point, the West's refuge. Dumont's marksmanship was prized and he was working in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show
as “The Hero of the Half-Breed Rebellion.” History written as entertainment even as it was happening. Such was the modern age, Riel thought.

Riel's conscience was in good repair. He had done what he could. The half-breeds were deprived of responsible government, and he had made petition for one. When petitions failed, he had created his own. When that failed, he rebelled. I have been blessed by God, he thought. The half-breed hunters could foretell many things, an aching arm meant no meat that day, a twitching leg meant rain. Riel felt not despair, but something else.

J
ohn A. Macdonald weighed Riel's political value. Upper Canada was braying for his execution. It was unreliable political territory for Macdonald's Tories, and hanging Riel would likely bring it on board. In Quebec, however, Riel was seized as a hero, a champion of French Catholic rights. Quebec was Tory and would remain so, Macdonald reasoned. There would be cries in the streets when he was hanged, but they would forget Riel eventually, and they would remain loyal to the party. It was a calculated risk, but hanging Riel was his decision. He summoned McIlvoy.

“We have a problem,” he told McIlvoy. “Politically, Riel must hang. For the good of the Dominion. However, we need a law.” Riel was charged with treason, which wasn't punishable by death. “Our man must swing legally.”

McIlvoy blinked once, taking this in. Macdonald could be ruthless, but this was new territory, a kind of viciousness. Was Macdonald asking him for a means to legally kill Riel? It seemed so. Cold-bloodedly so. This was ethically questionable at best, but it was also, uncharacteristically, politically
risky. What would Quebec think of the government hanging a French Catholic? Riel was a hero. If his death was seen as political calculation, it might take a generation, perhaps longer, to restore their trust.

“Would this not be a grave political risk, Sir John?” McIlvoy asked. “Perhaps, if I may, an unnecessary, even a foolish one.”

“Quebec will be angry, to be sure,” Macdonald said. “But he shall hang though every dog in Quebec bark in his favour. The province will waver but won't fall. In the end, the sheep will return to the flock.”

This seemed to McIlvoy a reckless assessment of his support. The country was, in his own view, a bloody-minded electorate, as happy to vote against something as to vote for it. To give them a cause was a dangerous notion.

McIlvoy spent two days reviewing British law until he found something Macdonald could use: a 1342 law that stipulated high treason as punishable by death. The trial was planned for Winnipeg, and McIlvoy pointed out, against the misgivings he had with the whole enterprise, that the Superior court judge in Winnipeg was independent and his independence was guaranteed by law. West of Manitoba, in the territories, the judge was simply a stipendiary employee of the government. Try him in Regina and they would own the judge. Then Regina it was.

There was one last hurdle.

“In order for him to hang,” Macdonald noted, “he must be found sane.”

“That may prove difficult,” McIlvoy said. “He believes he is the Messiah.”

“I have had the same thought of myself on occasion,” Macdonald said. “Am I mad?”

McIlvoy looked at Sir John, his hair dry as straw and cut by his wife to resemble a recently harvested field, his face lined, his mouth, in unguarded moments, hanging in autumnal gape. He had created an ungovernable country, then tried to govern it. Who but a madman would do that?

“I
have the honour to answer that I am not guilty,” Louis Riel said to the Regina courtroom. It was July and the prairie heat descended on the proceedings like a shroud. Beneath their black suits, the men sweated heavily.

Riel's lawyers intended to plead that he was indeed insane. The evidence supported the claim, and recent events helped. Will Jackson, a Protestant who had sided with Riel and acted as his secretary, was declared mad after a thirty-minute trial. Like Riel, Jackson had made no plea for insanity, but the six Protestant jurors concluded that for a Protestant to follow a Catholic lunatic was itself a form of madness.

But Riel wanted no part of insanity. On this, he and Sir John were allied. His mind wasn't fevered now. And he realized that if he were declared a madman, his cause would be deemed a foolish one. In order to give the rebellion legitimacy, he must be found to be sane. And he was. In the peace of his cell, he didn't feel the demons, their agitating heat and spiked trail through his consciousness. He was the founder of Manitoba.

The next afternoon, Riel addressed the court. “There are those who brand me a madman. And to them I ask, ‘Who is mad; the person who rises against an injustice or the person who perpetrates it?' If you believe the plea of the Crown, that I am sane and responsible for my acts, acquit me. I have acted reasonably and in self-defence, while the government,
being irresponsible and consequently insane, cannot have acted wrongly, and if high treason there is, it must be on its side and not on mine.”

Riel was found guilty, though the jury pleaded for mercy on his behalf. When asked if he had anything to say to the court, Riel stood. “When I came into the North West in July of 1884, I found the Indians suffering, I found the half-breeds eating the rotten pork of the Hudson's Bay Company. No one can say the North West has not suffered. I am no more than you are. I am simply one of the flock, equal to the rest. I say my heart will never abandon the idea of having a new island in the North West, inviting the Irish; a New Poland in the North West, a New Bavaria, a New Italy. The Belgians will be happy here and the Scandinavians and the Jews who have been looking for a country for eighteen hundred years will perhaps hear my voice one day on the other side of the mountains. It is my plan, it is one of the illusions of my insanity. My thoughts are for peace. This is what I have to say.”

The judge stared at Riel and coldly announced, “You will be hanged by the neck till you are dead and may God have mercy on your soul.”

N
ine days before Riel's scheduled execution, Donald Smith, who looked like Methuselah and was as rich as the devil, hammered in the ceremonial final spike of Macdonald's railway at Eagle Pass in the Rocky Mountains. Smith distrusted Macdonald and was in turn hated by the man, and this animus filled his swing as he hammered the spike in. The transatlantic wonder. In little more than a week the country had an enduring symbol of unity in the railroad and
an equally potent symbol of division in Riel's execution. A foundation for the uneasy tension that nations crave.

I
t was clear and cold on November 16 as Riel stood on the gallows. He said a short prayer for Macdonald. “I pray that God will bless Sir John and give him grace and wisdom to manage the affairs of Canada well.” The hangman's hand rested heavily on the lever as Riel stared upward and began to recite the Lord's Prayer. “Pater noster, qui es in caelis: sanctificetur nomen tuum; adveniat regnum tuum; fiat voluntas tu

7

C
ATHERINE
M
OUNTAIN
H
ORSE,
M
ONTANA,
1881

Catherine Mountain Horse lay in the tall grass with her silent father, Jamieson. David Thompson begat the illegitimate Tristan who begat Jamieson who begat Catherine, an eleven-year-old girl as thin as a sapling, her black hair tied around an owl skull, wearing a long red skirt made from a blanket. The September sun was behind them, and she could feel it warm her back. The Sharps .45-calibre rifle was almost as long as she was. Her father was sighting along its octagonal barrel, resting on a tripod fashioned of sticks and pointed at two buffalo that walked warily in the valley below. The two buffalo in the Judith Basin were a remnant of the last great herd in North America. To the south, General
Sheridan had encouraged its slaughter as a military tactic, to starve the Indians into submission. Buffalo hunters killed thousands in a single day. The Sioux burned swaths of land along the border, destroying the grazing land in an attempt to keep the buffalo from moving north. British and German sportsmen shot thousands of buffalo from trains and left them lying on the prairie. Coyotes and carrion birds gorged on carcasses spread over miles. Bleached bones were shipped east in boxcars to be made into fertilizer.

The breeze moved her hair slightly as she lay on her stomach with her arms folded, her head resting on them, one elbow reassuringly touching her father. One of the conditions of this outing was silence. If she wanted to spend the day with her father, hunting the last buffalo on the continent, she had to remain silent. No girlish laughter, no foolish questions, no idle observations could escape her lips. No movement that could send this last, perilous food supply stampeding through the valley into the waiting guns of Big Bear or the Sioux. Catherine had taken this oath, the price of being near him. As they lay motionless, she conducted a conversation between them in her head.

“What is the colour you love above all others, my Flower?”

“Blue.”

“Do you know where the snow goes?”

“No.”

“It vanishes in the night, travelling to the north, running from the summer sun. It hides in the mountains and then comes back when the leaves turn, it creeps along the ground in the night and when you wake up, it is there.”

“Why does the coyote sing to the moon?”

“Coyote first sang to the sun, because he loved its warmth
in the morning. But the sun heard Coyote's singing, and it turned its back to that terrible noise. Coyote was hurt. He thought his singing was the most beautiful on the plains. From that day on, he only sang for the moon.”

“What else?”

“What is the colour you love above all others?”

“You asked me that.”

For an hour they lay still, watching the bull, which was seven hundred yards away. Jamieson thought the bull would wander toward him, the wind at its back, and that the cow would follow. The west wind was coming off the mountains and scoured the valley in twisting gusts. When the bull was a hundred yards away, he aimed high and slightly into the wind and squeezed the trigger. The explosion made Catherine jump slightly, and Jamieson was jarred by the recoil. There was a brief delay, then the muffled thud of the bullet hitting the buffalo. It walked two more steps, then sat down, as if confused, the huge head the last thing to hit the ground. The cow started toward it, unsure of where the sound of the rifle had come from as it echoed off the hills. Jamieson fired into the cow and it fell.

Catherine watched her father skin the male buffalo, his knife moving in a deliberate sawing motion then twisting and cutting, an intricate dance. They walked back to the Blackfoot camp as the sun rose high in the sky. From the hill Catherine saw their tents spread along the lower slopes. Once they had been the most feared nation on the northern plains, her father had told her. Now they huddled in fear, of hunger, disease, and, when the whisky traders came, fear of themselves.

Men and women both went to where the buffalo had fallen and hauled them back. The animals were cooked, every scrap
of meat roasted, the fat used for pemmican, the bones broken open for the marrow, the hides tanned into robes. Catherine sat by the fire with her father, the hunter, who was at a place of honour beside Crowfoot, their chief, a lean, tall man with a nose as thin as a knife. The fire was lulling and Catherine ate until she was full, something she hadn't done for a week. She fell asleep and her father carried her to the tent.