Louis Riel

Louis Riel was born on October 22, 1844, in Saint Boniface, a French-speaking Catholic settlement in the Red River Colony, in what is now Winnipeg, Manitoba. He was the eldest of eleven children born to Louis Riel Sr., a Métis miller and political organizer, and Julie Lagimodière, the daughter of one of the first white women to settle in the Canadian West ^[1]. The Riel household was devout, French-speaking, and closely tied to the Métis community that had grown up around the fur trade, blending First Nations, French Canadian, and Scottish ancestry into a distinct people with its own language, economy, and sense of nationhood ^[2].

Riel showed academic promise early. In 1858, at the age of thirteen, he was selected by Bishop Alexandre Taché to study for the priesthood and was sent east to the Collège de Montréal, a Sulpician institution ^[1]. He spent nearly a decade in Montreal, excelling in classical studies, but the death of his father in 1864 shook him deeply. His enthusiasm for a clerical vocation faded, and he withdrew from the college in 1865 before completing his degree ^[3].

After leaving the seminary, Riel worked briefly in a Montreal law office and courted a young woman named Marie-Julie Guernon, whose family opposed the match because of his Métis ancestry. Disappointed in both love and career, he drifted through Chicago and Saint Paul, Minnesota, working odd jobs, before returning to the Red River settlement in 1868 ^[3]. He came home to a community facing profound uncertainty about its future.

Anyone asking who was Louis Riel usually begins with the events of 1869. That year the Hudson's Bay Company agreed to transfer Rupert's Land, the vast territory that included Red River, to the new Dominion of Canada. The roughly 12,000 residents of the settlement, most of them Métis, were not consulted, and Canadian surveyors began marking out land in a square township system that ignored the long river lots the Métis had farmed for generations ^[2]. Educated, bilingual, and a compelling speaker, Riel quickly emerged as the spokesman of Métis resistance.

In October 1869 Riel and a group of Métis horsemen stopped the survey crews. In November, armed Métis under his direction seized Upper Fort Garry, the Hudson's Bay Company post at the centre of the settlement, without firing a shot ^[1]. Riel then organized a provisional government, of which he became president in December 1869, to negotiate the terms under which Red River would enter Confederation. Delegates sent to Ottawa secured most of the Métis demands, and the resulting Manitoba Act of 1870 created the province of Manitoba with guarantees for the French language, Catholic schools, and 1.4 million acres of land set aside for Métis families ^[4].

One decision during the resistance shadowed Riel for the rest of his life. In March 1870 the provisional government tried and executed Thomas Scott, a Protestant Orangeman from Ontario who had taken up arms against it and proved a violent prisoner. Scott's death by firing squad outraged English Protestant Ontario, where he was cast as a martyr, and it hardened opinion against Riel just as his political achievement was taking legal form ^[5]. When Colonel Garnet Wolseley's military expedition reached Red River in August 1870, Riel fled to the United States rather than risk arrest or lynching.

The years after 1870 were an unsettled mixture of politics and flight. Although a bounty was placed on his head by the Ontario government and he could not appear safely in public in Canada, Riel remained a hero to many Métis and French Canadian voters. The electors of Provencher, a Manitoba riding, sent him to the House of Commons three times between 1873 and 1874 ^[1]. He travelled to Ottawa and signed the members' register in 1874, but he was expelled from the House and never took his seat. In 1875 the government of Alexander Mackenzie granted him amnesty for the events at Red River on the condition that he remain in exile for five years ^[4].

The strain of these years told on his mind. Between 1876 and 1878 Riel was confined, under assumed names, in asylums at Longue Pointe and Beauport in Quebec, where doctors treated him for religious delusions ^[3]. During this period he became convinced that he had a divine mission as a prophet of the New World, chosen to lead the Métis people. Historians and psychiatrists have debated ever since how to weigh his religious visions against his evident political skill ^[6].

After his release Riel moved to the United States. He worked as a trader and interpreter in Montana Territory, became an American citizen in 1883, and settled into a quieter life teaching school at St. Peter's Mission on the Sun River ^[1]. It was there, in June 1884, that four riders from the Saskatchewan country, led by the famed buffalo hunter Gabriel Dumont, arrived with a request that would end his American interlude: the Métis of the North-West needed him again.

By 1884 the Métis who had moved west from Manitoba to the South Saskatchewan River valley faced troubles much like those of 1869. The bison herds had collapsed, government surveys again threatened river-lot farms, and petitions to Ottawa about land title went unanswered ^[2]. Riel returned with his family to Batoche, the main Métis settlement, and spent the autumn drafting a petition that combined Métis, First Nations, and white settler grievances. Ottawa acknowledged receiving it but offered little of substance ^[4].

In March 1885 Riel took a fateful step beyond constitutional protest. He declared a provisional government at Batoche, with himself as its spiritual and political head and Dumont as military commander. On March 26 fighting broke out at Duck Lake, where Métis fighters defeated a force of North-West Mounted Police and volunteers ^[5]. Unlike 1870, however, the government could now respond quickly: the nearly completed Canadian Pacific Railway carried thousands of troops west within weeks.

The resistance was crushed in less than two months. Métis and First Nations fighters won or held their own at Fish Creek and Cut Knife, but the decisive engagement came at Batoche, where Major General Frederick Middleton's force of about 900 men overwhelmed roughly 250 to 300 defenders between May 9 and May 12, 1885 ^[2]. Riel, who had refused to allow guerrilla tactics and spent much of the fighting in prayer, surrendered to Canadian scouts on May 15. Dumont escaped to the United States.

Riel's trial in Regina in July 1885 was among the most consequential court proceedings in Canadian history. He was charged with high treason under an old English statute that carried a mandatory death sentence, and he faced a six-man jury of English-speaking Protestants ^[5]. His lawyers, hoping to save his life, argued that he was insane. Riel rejected the defence in two remarkable courtroom speeches, insisting that the Métis cause was just and that he was sane, telling the court that he had acted for his people ^[1].

The jury deliberated briefly, found him guilty, and recommended mercy. The judge nonetheless sentenced him to death. Appeals failed, and two medical commissions gave Prime Minister John A. Macdonald equivocal findings on Riel's sanity. Under intense pressure from Ontario to proceed and from Quebec to commute, Macdonald let the sentence stand ^[4]. Louis Riel was hanged at the North-West Mounted Police barracks in Regina on November 16, 1885. He was forty-one. His body was returned to Saint Boniface, where he was buried in the cathedral churchyard, a grave that remains a place of commemoration ^[1].

The execution split the country along linguistic and religious lines. In Quebec, mass protest meetings denounced Macdonald, and the affair helped propel Honoré Mercier's nationalist government to power in 1886. In Ontario, most opinion held that justice had been done for Thomas Scott and for the deaths of 1885 ^[5].

In 1881, while living in Montana, Riel married Marguerite Monet dit Bellehumeur, a young Métis woman, in a union first solemnized in the traditional Métis fashion and later blessed by a priest ^[3]. The couple had three children: a son, Jean-Louis, a daughter, Marie-Angélique, and a third child who was born in October 1885 and lived only a few hours. Marguerite herself died of tuberculosis in May 1886, six months after her husband's execution ^[1].

Riel was a writer all his adult life, and this side of him is central to any full Louis Riel biography. He composed poetry from his student days in Montreal, published a volume of verse, and filled notebooks with political argument, prayers, and theological speculation during his imprisonment in Regina. Scholars gathered this large body of prose and poetry into a five-volume edition of his collected writings published in 1985, a resource that lets readers hear his voice directly ^[6]. His diaries and letters reveal a man who understood himself less as a rebel than as a religious leader entrusted with the survival of a people.

Few reputations in Canadian history have travelled as far as Riel's. Hanged as a traitor in 1885, he is now commonly described as a father of Confederation for Manitoba. The Manitoba legislature formally recognized him as the founder of the province, and since 2008 the province has marked Louis Riel Day as a statutory holiday on the third Monday of February ^[7]. Statues of Riel stand on the grounds of the Manitoba Legislative Building in Winnipeg and near the Saskatchewan legislature in Regina, and his grave at Saint Boniface Cathedral draws visitors year round ^[1].

Among Louis Riel achievements, the Manitoba Act remains the most concrete: a negotiated provincial constitution that protected, at least on paper, the language, schools, and lands of a minority people. That many of those guarantees were later eroded, and that most of the promised Métis land grants never reached Métis families, is part of why his story still carries political weight. The Supreme Court of Canada ruled in 2013 that the Crown had failed to implement the Manitoba Act land provisions honourably, a decision that opened the door to the 2021 self-government agreement between Canada and the Manitoba Métis Federation ^[7].

Riel's afterlife in culture is equally large. He has been the subject of plays, an opera (Harry Somers's Louis Riel, first staged in 1967), novels, films, and Chester Brown's widely read 2003 graphic biography ^[6]. For the Métis Nation he is simply the central national figure, and among the basic Louis Riel facts taught in Canadian schools is his own often-cited faith that his people would one day reclaim their place in the country he helped to shape.