Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont (13 page)

The guilt, now, of abandoning his friend, his family, his people, and his country begins to torture Gabriel. After all, he’s never run from a fight in his life, even when he was heavily outnumbered and even when death appeared to be the sure result. But isn’t this exactly what he’s just done? Gabriel makes it known through the newspapers in Montana that he was solely responsible for the violence that broke out in Saskatchewan and that Louis had always been for peace.

Gabriel finds out that Louis has been taken to Regina, where he is to stand trial for high treason. Gabriel, through his channels, lets Louis’s lawyers know that he wants to serve as a witness at the trial, that he wants to once and for all clarify that he was the general and it was he who led the troops. Louis was simply a spiritual adviser who never even fired a weapon. What court can sentence a man to death for carrying a golden crucifix? Gabriel has finally figured out a true way to help the prophet. Louis’s lawyers, in the few days of preparation they have before the trial, work feverishly to get the Crown to agree to allow Gabriel safe passage to Canada. This is Gabriel’s one real chance to help Louis, and he waits anxiously for word that he can safely return home.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Words

Louis’s confinement in his tent beside General Middleton is quite civil. But when it comes time, during the third week of May, to be taken to Regina, the feeling of safety that Louis has been lulled into begins to disappear. He boards the
Northcote,
the same steamer that Gabriel disabled and came close to capturing on the first day of the Battle of Batoche. On board are a number of wounded Canadian soldiers, and when they hear that the madman himself is along for the ride, they become hostile. A constant guard is posted to Louis, not so much to prevent his escape as to protect him from armed and angry soldiers.

Louis does find some solace in a young officer who has been assigned constant watch over him. His name is Captain George Young, and for the next eight days, he becomes a sounding board for Louis. Their conversations range over many topics, but Louis is smart enough to always return to Métis grievances and the reasons they were forced into conflict with the Canadian government. If this Captain Young is a spy planted to glean Crown evidence from Louis, he will not get it. In their conversations, Louis learns that the man’s father, a Methodist minister, is actually an old compatriot from Red River—in fact, quite astoundingly, he is the man who led the rabble-rouser Thomas Scott to his execution upon Louis’s orders. And now, Louis must wonder, does the son lead another man to his death?

When the
Northcote
ends its voyage at Saskatoon, Louis and Captain Young are taken by cart over rutted and rough terrain to Moose Jaw. Word has spread that Gabriel plans to attempt to free Louis and the going is slow and cautious. The dozens of heavily armed soldiers accompanying the cart are fearful that every grove of trees or clump of brush harbours expert marksmen waiting to pick them off. But the trip is uneventful, and when they arrive in Moose Jaw Louis is whisked by train to Regina, where he’s to stand trial.

If conditions with General Middleton were civil, Louis’s two-month stay awaiting trial is abysmal. A detachment of Mounties is now in charge of him, and the men’s disdain, even hatred, is obvious. They are English-speaking Protestants, many of them belonging to the Orange Order, and there’s no sympathy in their bones for a Catholic halfbreed agitator and murderer like Louis Riel. He is locked in a small, stone cell, his leg chained to the wall. His meals consist of potatoes with a few stringy bits of beef. The place is cold and dank at night, and hot and claustrophobic during the day. Louis’s only exercise is kept to short walks, during which he is forced to carry the heavy metal ball that is attached to his chain. He’s given a pen and paper, though, his only solace. Louis writes poems and reflections, and asks the Mountie in charge that his wife and children be looked after. While political prisoners should be handled with more respect than this, Louis’s spirit sinks when he realizes that he’s being viewed as the lowest common felon. He’s truly in the hands of the enemy now, and any hope that he’d be treated with the equality and respect his people deserve dissolves in the growing late-spring heat.

Information about and access to the outside world is kept from him, which only adds to his sense of doom. What he doesn’t know is that a number of Quebec Liberals, many of them old friends and allies, are rallying to his defence and starting a fund for him. They are able to hire four respected lawyers: François-Xavier Lemieux, Charles Fitzpatrick, James Greenshields, and T.C. Johnstone. The thinking is that Louis will need both French and English lawyers so that the trial isn’t too easily viewed as an English–French battle, a majority versus minority issue. In many ways this will be a trial about the future of all of Canada, and Louis’s defence team will symbolize this. Louis needs help from all corners if he’s to stand a chance.

His lawyers have a few options. First and foremost, they want to change the charge against Louis from high treason to treason-felony. In the case of treason-felony, the presiding judge and jury are given complete discretion as to punishment, which can range from a few days in prison to life. But the other charge, high treason, carries only one penalty: death by hanging. There are solid arguments for why Louis should be charged with the former rather than the latter; there is plenty of set precedent for this charge, and besides, Louis is an American citizen, having become one not long before Gabriel found him in Montana. How can he be charged with high treason, then, when he isn’t even a subject of the Queen? His lawyers, though, are not novices, nor are they naive. The Crown is out for blood, so the chances of the lesser charge being applied are minimal.

There are other options. One is to begin to plan a defence claiming that Louis’s rebellion was justified and a product of acute and continued federal mishandling and even criminal ignorance of Métis petitions for land claim review. But this route is complicated, time-consuming, and dangerous. The chances of getting a sympathetic hearing from a jury likely composed mainly of English-speaking Orangeman are slim at best.

The option that quickly becomes most useful is to pursue the obvious: Louis Riel is not guilty by reason of insanity. It’s no secret that he spent a long time in different asylums in the 1870s. His writings are laced with what are clearly insane ramblings. He has acted in countless bizarre ways over the course of the rebellion, including stating his belief that he is a prophet of the New World. He’s even taken on the Biblical name “David.” It would be far easier to convince a jury— even a hostile one—that the man is insane. This will at the very least spare him from the gallows.

After six weeks languishing in his tiny jail cell, Louis, with little knowledge of what his lawyers are thinking or even when they might arrive so that he can meet them, is taken to the courthouse in Regina a few miles from his jail cell. Still fearing that the warrior Gabriel Dumont will stage a daring rescue, the Mounties go to strange lengths to foil such an attempt, dressing Louis up as a policeman and sitting him in a wagon for his first ride to court, with three real policemen at his side. It’s a large and daunting caravan, and Gabriel, hundreds of miles away, is unaware of the stir he continues to cause.

According to the court system, Louis must be charged with an actual crime by someone called a claimant. For reasons that remain murky, the man chosen to be the claimant is the police chief of Hamilton, Ontario, a town thousands of miles away. In what seems for Louis another sure sign that he’s doomed, this police chief is a member of the Orange Order. Louis is charged with high treason—waging war on representatives of the Queen’s government. As Louis knows only too well, death by hanging awaits upon conviction.

Louis is very smart, but he has no legal training. When he finds out that the acting judge will be a man named Hugh Richardson, he has even more reason for deep concern. Richardson is not a judge in the proper sense. He’s what’s called a stipendiary magistrate, a barrister of at least five years’ experience who serves as a part-time judge in the thinly populated North-West Territories. Stipendiary magistrates are hired by the administration in Ottawa, an administration that holds no love for Louis; their job is to help ease the duties of the few, overworked real judges in the area. Louis must wonder why a full-time judge isn’t assigned to sit on what should be regarded as an important trial. Worse, he finds out that Mr. Richardson, yet another Orangeman, served as counsel for the territorial governor in 1880 and once wrote a letter to the Ministry of the Interior strongly condemning the Métis leaders as “evil influences” doing “no good” for the half-breeds.

Louis must also be distressed to learn that, rather than the typical twelve jurors, with its greater chance to find empathetic men among that number, a trial under a stipendiary magistrate requires only six jurors.

Louis’s lawyers are nine days away from arriving, and Richardson has scheduled the trial to begin on July 20, which means they will have only a few days to prepare. What more can possibly be stacked against him? As it turns out, plenty. When the jury is eventually selected, all six are white, English, and Protestant. When Louis’s lawyers move to have the trial taken to Winnipeg, where Louis might find a little sympathy, the judge quickly shuts them down. Louis Riel will face trial in hostile Regina, and his fate will be decided by a judge and six men who have very little in common with the Métis, who in fact have more interest in crushing the half-breed movement.

On July 15, five days before the trial is to begin, Louis’s lawyers finally arrive in Regina. The one hotel in town is already filled with reporters and the curious, so the first night the lawyers are forced to sleep on a floor. In what can only be called a media scrum, Louis meets his defenders in front of a group of clamouring reporters. He immediately expresses how happy he is to see that these men represent different languages, nationalities, and religions. Louis, as always, firmly believes that inclusion, not exclusion, is what wins the day. For the first time in a very long time, he doesn’t feel quite so alone anymore, quite so vulnerable and in the dark. But this is not to last long.

On July 20 Louis and his lawyers appear in the courtroom, where his indictment is read out. He is charged with six crimes: three counts of high treason as an alien, and the three identical charges as a citizen. The defence lawyers argue the unfairness of this, but the judge shuts them down. Louis is to stand trial both as a foreigner and as a subject of the Queen. The defence then questions the jurisdiction, hoping to move the trial closer to Louis’s home turf. Again, the judge shuts them down. Finally, the lawyers ask for the trial to be delayed by a month, so that they can prepare and, just as importantly, bring two doctors from asylums where Louis was kept back east. But the defence’s biggest surprise of the day is to request that Gabriel Dumont himself be allowed to testify, to tell the court that it was the Exovedate, not Riel, who voted to wage war against Canada and Gabriel, not Louis, who carried out military operations. The lawyers want a guarantee of immunity for Gabriel if he is to come back to Canada. And for a third time in a day, the judge refuses them. They will have one week only to prepare for what the Crown calls the most serious trial ever to be held in Canada.

Move ahead a week: the trial of Louis Riel for high treason opens on the morning of July 28, 1885. Six male jury members are seated. The Crown then outlines its evidence against Louis, including his breaking with the priests of Saskatchewan and his offer to return to Montana if he was given a large sum of money from the federal government. The Crown then declares, “I think you will be satisfied before this case is over that it is not a matter brought about by any wrongs so much as a matter brought about by the personal ambition and vanity of the man on trial.”

Not a matter brought about by any wrongs?
Louis thinks. The Métis have been wronged countless times by the government and by greedy land-grabbers. It is completely based on wrongs! As for personal ambition and vanity, Louis knows that his ambition is for his people and that God disdains vanity. The Crown doesn’t know him at all. Louis looks around this tiny courtroom, no more than fifty feet by twenty and filled with reporters and the fancily dressed wives of the Crown prosecutors and General Middleton and the judge. No, these people don’t know him at all, and they are a world away from the hardscrabble life of the children of the prairies. His stomach must sink at this thought. He will not be given a fair trial. It is impossible.

The Crown’s first witness is John Willoughby, a Saskatoon doctor who’d purportedly talked to Riel at the outset of the rebellion. When it comes time for the defence to cross-examine him, Louis listens as his lawyers question Willoughby about what had been discussed. Mainly, it seems they’d talked about Louis’s idea to divide up the vast lands of the North-West, not just among the Métis but among different groups of immigrants who were arriving weekly to settle and farm. The defence makes it sound as if Louis’s idea that there is enough land for everyone isn’t a sane one. When one of Louis’s lawyers asks Willoughby if this seemed like a very rational proposition, the witness replies quickly, “It did not.” But it is! What exactly is the defence up to? They’ve kept their strategy quiet. Louis suddenly feels worried.

Witnesses for the Crown continue to line up through the rest of the day, each piling on more and more damaging evidence. A man who was a prisoner of Riel’s testifies that he witnessed the prophet commanding armed Métis and remembers hearing Louis brag about ordering his men to open fire at Duck Lake, as well as talking of needing another victory. Other witnesses acknowledge that Louis was the brain behind the whole operation. Again and again in cross-examination, Louis watches in growing horror as his lawyers push the witnesses to discuss what will surely be viewed as his oddities, including frequent mood swings and eating cooked blood for his health. While the Crown tries to make Louis appear cold and calculating, his own lawyers are clearly building the argument that Louis is sick mentally. He now sees where this is leading: they will argue that he is insane, and therefore not guilty as charged. But if they are successful in arguing this, then the rest of Canada and the world may think that the Métis cause is just as insane. Louis ponders this as the day wears on, realizing with each attack against his sanity that he cannot allow this to happen, for it will destroy his people, and his dream.