Half-breed Traders

(Provincial Archives of Manitoba)

CANADA and the MÉTIS, 1869 1885

D. N. Sprague

with a foreword by Thomas R. Berger

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Social Science Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Sprague, D. N. (Douglas Neil), 1944-Canada and the Métis, 1869-1885

Bibliography:p.

Includes index.

ISBN 0-88920-958-8 (bound) ISBN 0-88920-964-2 (pbk.)

1. Métis - Manitoba - History.* 2. Métis - Manitoba - Government relations.* 3. Red River Settlement - History. I. Title.

FC3372.9.M4S69 1988   971.27’02   C88-093344-5   F1063.S69 1988

Copyright © 1988

WILFRID LAURIER UNIVERSITY PRESS

Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3C5

88 89 90 91 4 3 2 1

Cover design by Vijen Vijendren

Map 2 drawn by Victor Lytwyn

Printed in Canada

Canada and the Métis, 1869-1885 has been produced from a manuscript supplied in electronic form by the author.

No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system, translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, microfiche, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgements

1. Historiographical Introduction

2. Acquiring Canada’s First Colony

3. Asserting Canadian Authority Over Assiniboia

4. Negotiating with Delegates from the North West

5. Eliminating the Riel Factor from Manitoba Politics

6. Unlocking the Territory for Actual Settlers

7. Amending the Manitoba Act

8. Completing the Dispersal of the Manitoba Métis

9. Reaching for the Commercial Value of the North West

10. Confronting Riel and Completing the CPR

Conclusion

Note on Sources and Method

Selected Bibliography

Index

List of Illustrations

Photographs

Frontispiece: Half-breed Traders

Sir John A. Macdonald, Nov. 1883

H.Y. Hind, ca. 1869

William McDougall, 1867

N.J. Ritchot, ca. 1870

Alexander Morris, 1875

Survey Party, ca. 1875

Gilbert McMicken, 1880

Archbishop Taché, ca. 1870

Joseph Royal, ca. 1880

George Stephen, ca. 1885

Lawrence Clarke, ca. 1880

Louis Riel, ca. 1880

Maps

Map 1. The Red River Settlement and the First Dominion Surveys

Map 2. Conflicting Claims to the Colony of St. Laurent

Foreword

The story of the Métis is one of the epics of Canadian history: the rise on the Prairies of a new nation of mixed blood ancestry, the emergence of a distinct culture, the formation in 1869-70 of the provisional government to defend their homeland, their dispersal. Yet in our own time the Métis have re-entered Canada’s history, seeking to discover their own past, and to find a place for themselves in Canadian life.

The crucial year for the Métis was 1870. In that year Canada acquired the Red River Settlement, the provisional government of Louis Riel fled, and the dispersal of the Métis began. But it was in that same year that the Manitoba Act was passed by Canada’s Parliament, and confirmed the following year by the Parliament of the United Kingdom, to ensure that the Métis would receive title to the river lots they occupied on the Red and Assiniboine and land for future generations. These were solemn promises made to the Métis by the Government of Canada—promises which were not kept.

In this book, Professor D.N. Sprague tells why the Métis did not receive the land that was supposed to be theirs under the Manitoba Act. John A. Macdonald and his Conservatives and Alexander Mackenzie and the Liberals did not honour the promises in the Manitoba Act. The Canadian Parliament passed a series of laws designed to undermine the rights the Métis had under the Manitoba Act. These laws prepared the way for settlers who moved westward to Manitoba from Ontario to acquire control of the provincial legislature. They, in turn, enacted a series of measures to ensure that the land allotted to the Métis would soon find its way into the hands of settlers entering the province from the East. Professor Sprague offers many examples of the methods used, such as legislation justifying the sale of land allotted to Métis children without any of the safeguards ordinarily required in connection with transactions with infants. Then there were powers of attorney, tax sales — any number of stratagems could be used, and were— to see that the land intended for the Métis and their families went to others. All branches of the government participated. It is a shameful tale, but one that must be told. It offers the explanation for the fact that today the Métis, once dominant at Red River, indeed the guardians of the community there, should now find themselves strangers in their own land.

In 1982, the Canadian Parliament belatedly recognized the Métis as one of the aboriginal peoples of Canada. It remains, to us, now that we know how they lost their land, to see that they get the land-base they were promised.

Thomas R. Berger

April 1987

Preface

The author’s central purpose is to explain how the Red River Settlement, one of the most persistent¹ populations of North America from 1820 to 1869, dispersed almost entirely in the 1870s and failed to secure a new homeland by migration to the Canadian North West in the early 1880s. While students of other migrations are certain that push factors are as important as pulls in any mass exodus, in the case of the Red River Métis, the dispersal is usually attributed to some fatal flaw in the Métis character rather than to external pressures arising after 1870. The present study is an inquiry into the discouragements, formal and informal, that forced most of the Red River Métis from Manitoba to Saskatchewan and culminated in the rebellion of 1885.

Informal discouragements included intimidation of the original population by hundreds, then thousands of ultra-Protestants from Ontario who intended to establish new homes for themselves and to become a new majority transforming the Quebec of the West into a new Ontario. Newcomers appropriated Métis land and made the old settlers feel like strangers in a new land.

The Métis might have mounted an effective defence against such informal pressure had they not faced overwhelming formal discouragement from the acts of a colonial establishment created by the Government of Canada. Ottawa witheld self-government from Manitoba until a preferred majority was established. Facilitating the process were numerous Orders in Council and Statutes of Canada, which shifted the administration of insecure land titles from a legislature of the old settlers to a federal department whose primary mission was guaranteeing the security of the newcomers.

Since the formal process of discouragement was the more irresistable one, the operations of the Canadian bureaucreacy are the main focus of the study. The important evidence is communication between officials in the field and policy-makers in Ottawa. The highest level of consideration was frequently the office of the Prime Minister, occasionally operating independently of Cabinet or Parliament. And since Sir John A. Macdonald was the individual who occupied the prime ministerial position for eleven of the years between 1869 and 1885, his decisions are central to the story of formal discouragement. Yet Macdonald was only one of many unsympathetic actors in the drama. Given the pressure from the informal side, opportunities for accommodation of the Métis were easily missed by all operators of the apparatus of formal control. Whether such moments passed by mere carelessness or by deliberate inaction cannot be known with certainty in every instance, but one overall conclusion is inescapably obvious: the Government of Canada conceded a legal framework for the permanence of the Red River Settlement as a province in response to force in 1870, and subsequently presided over the dissolution of the terms of the Manitoba Act with approximately the same regret as would be exhibited by an unwilling victim escaping from a sales contract negotiated under duress.

Acknowledgements

Research support was provided by the Manitoba Métis Federation, the Canadian Department of Secretary of State (Canadian Studies Directorate), and the University of Manitoba Research Board. In the preparation of the manuscript, helpful criticism came from sceptical colleagues: Professor Thomas Flanagan at the University of Calgary, Dr. Philippe Mailhot at the Saint-Boniface Museum, Professor J.E. Rea at the University of Manitoba, and Professor Irene Spry of the University of Ottawa.

Sir John A. Macdonald, Nov. 1883

(Public Archives of Canada [C5332])

... forgery of medical evidence... uncontrolled terror in early Manitoba ... mock diplomacy in 1869-70. Certain nasty bits had been uncovered by establishment historians since 1936.

1. The evidence for the remarkable persistence of the Red River Settlement is census data compiled by the Hudson’s Bay Company before 1849 in comparison with the figures reported in the first Canadian enumeration of the district renamed Manitoba in 1870. See D.N. Sprague and R.P. Frye, The Genealogy of the First Métis Nation (Winnipeg, 1983). Most of the families included in the earlier enumeration were included in the first census by Canada twenty years later. (The typical rate of persistence elsewhere in North America in the mid-nineteenth century was around thirty per cent for ten-year intervals). See David Gagan, Hopeful Travellers: Families, Land, and Social Change in Mid-Victorian Peel County, Canada West (Toronto, 1981), pp. 6, 95.

Chapter 1

Historiographical Introduction

Rebellions of native peoples disturbed Canadian history in 1869 and again in 1885. Neither encounter involved a massive number of rebels, and both tended to be identified with a single person. In the first Riel rebellion, Louis Riel probably had no more than 700 active adherents. In the second, the number of Métis taking up arms was less than 400. Not surprisingly, neither event was significant by the number of casualties. Only a few people died in the first instance; about fifty were killed on each side in the second conflict with Canada. Still, few historians would quarrel with the assertion that the Red River Resistance of 1869-70 and the North West Rebellion of 1885 had profound significance for the country as a whole because Canadians have debated heatedly and persistently the rights and wrongs of the roles played by the various participants for more than a century.

In the first frankly polemical accounts,¹ the most salient theme was the struggle of civilization against barbarism because the rebels in each case were the natives of a newly acquired country. An aggressive but compassionate New Dominion had defeated semi-savage obstacles to progress. And since the defeat of the Métis represented a conquest of persons whose language was French and religion was Roman Catholicism, the victory was a triumph for English-Protestant ascendancy at the same time. But so long as the French-Catholic minority in the rest of the country was not similarly vanquished, it would be impossible to achieve a Canadian consensus on the larger significance of the two Riel Rebellions. Several traditions of hagiography and demonology posed conflicting claims to the larger truth.

In addition to the government-vindication tradition suggested above (the story with the New Dominion of Canada in the role of hero, the part of arch-villain played by Dictator Riel, and the Roman Catholic missionaries to the Métis falling somewhere in between), there was a French-Canadian version articulated by spokesmen for Canada’s largest minority.² Here the tendency was to glorify saintly bishops and missionaries for their heroic struggle to civilize the Métis and to resist the tide of Orange-Protestant fanaticism emanating from Ontario. In the pro-French polemical tradition, Riel was a demented leader of a flawed but pitiable people. Louis Riel and the semi-civilized Métis ranked between the heroic clergy, on the one hand, and the anti-Catholic fanatics in and out of government, on the other hand.

Clearly, the government-vindication and the clerical-beatification polemics did not serve the national pride of the Métis who believed that they had followed neither dictator nor madman. Their version of events— largely a matter of oral tradition—passed from generation to generation in a number of different stories, occasionally surfacing in written petitions, then finally appearing as a comprehensive history published in 1935.³ The official history of the Métis Nation depicted Riel as visionary and martyr. Neither insane nor dictatorial, he operated with foresight and consensus. The clergy were well meaning but cowardly; ultimately their cowardice turned them into betrayers of the cause and prime speculators in Métis land. Still, the clerical sin of cowardice paled beside the treachery of strangers who plotted the destruction of Riel and his people through the power of the state.

Sifting a more comprehensive truth from the competing polemical traditions became the challenge to academic historians in the twentieth century. To George Stanley, what was needed was to establish the good faith of each set of principal actors. His Birth of Western Canada (first published in 1936)⁴ adopted a tragic stance. While praising the New Dominion for its zealous expansionism (a sign of nationalism and aggressive civilization, both worthy attributes for Stanley), he still expressed sympathy for the frustrations of the clergy and the tragic losses of the Indians and the Métis. The tragedy was their doom as a people.

The natives had to fail. They were primitive peoples standing against the march of civilization (p. 88). At the minimum, they had to be pushed aside to make way for newcomers. The Métis plan to resist Canada in 1869 was absurd. Still, they did not deserve hatred for the attempt. Their one contemptible action in 1869-70 was the cruel act of bloodshed in the matter of Thomas Scott’s execution for counter-insurgency. The charges brought against Scott... were hardly offences that demanded the death penalty (pp. 105-106). And even if Scott did deserve a form of punishment used only as a last resort in civilized communities, his execution was politically inexpedient. The Métis invited terrible reprisals. Up to March 4, 1870 their resistance had been peaceful, almost bloodless, but this regrettable event aroused those latent racial and religious passions which have been so deplorable a feature of Canadian history, and left bitter memories that were not soon forgotten (p. 106).

Stanley’s evidence that Canada might have forgiven the Métis for non-violent rebellion was that the Government of Canada continued to follow a process of conciliation through the passage of the Manitoba Act in May; the fatal error of the Scott matter meant that the government had to turn a blind eye to the violence of newcomers entering the new province thirsting for the blood of Scott’s murderers. And since the key people of the provisional government had to be denied amnesty for the same reason, no Métis person could lead the government of Manitoba in the first critical years of the province’s history.

Sullen, suspicious and estranged from their [new] white neighbours and by the actions of the Canadians and the non-promulgation of the amnesty, almost immediately many métis began to look for new homes (p. 179). Ineffectively led in their homeland, they sought a land of second chance west and north on the Saskatchewan River. Unfortunately, they soon discovered that their status as first settlers in the North West Territories did not exempt them from the provisions of the Dominion Lands Act (p. 251). Stanley believed Canada was wrong to have disregarded their new claims. The attempt to impose an unfamiliar, and to the Métis, unsatisfactory system of survey, and thus deprive them of their river-frontages and destroy their village community life, invited armed resistance (p. 255).

No one could be surprised by the displaced Manitobans’ retrieval of Louis Riel from exile in 1884. Nor surprised that he, in his turn, decided to follow the tactics which he had employed in 1869 and 1870 (p. 314). He formed a second provisional government even though the clergy advised against such a move and condemned him for it. Their reaction was too strong, in Stanley’s view. Riel had no intention of fighting the Dominion with arms; it had not been necessary in 1869; it would not be necessary in 1885. Canada would be shocked into a negotiated settlement as before. But instead of commissioners came troops (p. 314).

Stanley did not hesitate to proclaim the justice of the Métis case (p. 251). Canada’s disregard of the Saskatchewan land question was clear. The case against the Government is conclusive (p. 261). Canada was guilty of ministerial incompetence, parliamentary indifference, and administrative delay (p. 244). Officials had committed serious blunders (pp. 260-61) even though Canadian native policy in general was well intentioned, exhibiting honesty, justice, and good faith; Canada caused no wars of extermination or compulsory migrations (p. 214). In suppressing the rebellion of 1885, Canada’s troops did little burning, looting, property damage, or killing. And reason and conciliation ultimately prevailed (p. 407).

Such was the first attempt at balanced interpretation. Stanley’s curious mix of shallow praise and weak condemnation suggested that his Birth of Western Canada was merely the beginning of the larger task of mediation. The work attracted little attention in Canada at the time of publication in 1936. Reviewers tended to pass his conclusions with little criticism and less praise.⁵ g No one challenged his tortuous sequence: the Métis were determined to win a secure land base and political control over their homeland in 1869-70, showed no interest in land or politics in Manitoba in the 1870s, then became remarkably interested and determined again in Saskatchewan in 1884-85. Stanley attributed the erratic course of events to a certain petulance likely to be encountered in all primitive peoples who felt that the country was theirs (pp. 48-49).

The concept of primitivism disturbed a young W.L. Morton, as evidenced in an article (published in 1937) on the development of Red River institutional structures.⁶ Without citing Stanley by name, Morton still presented a sharply contrasting analysis. He agreed that the Red River Settlement had become more and more Indian by intermarriage from 1820 to 1870, just as he readily conceded that most people in the Red River Settlement were more involved in freighting and the production of plains provisions than with full-time field agriculture. The contrast emerged in Morton’s insistence that the settlement’s striking backwardness was in government institutions because the Hudson’s Bay Company had imposed a seigniorial despotism on the colony. The HBC-appointed council was mild, often benevolent but in no sense accountable to the residents of the parishes, not until 1869 (pp. 95-96). Then parish representatives united, perhaps not as a single unit (as one English-speaking member of the provisional government asserted) but the degree of unity was sufficient to give good ground for Riel’s attempt to form a united front and present terms to Canada (p. 98).

What the rebels had done was not entirely well done. The Scott matter in particular was a fatal blunder but overall they had acted with dignity and true to the old, proud claim of the Métis to be a ‘new nation’ [they had] mustered a militia and created representative institutions (pp. 99, 102). When Canada admitted the Red River Settlement to Confederation as Manitoba, the Dominion recognized rather than created (p. 105). The question remained: if Manitobans were a well-rooted national people determined to defend their homeland from invasion by what Stanley had called an almost foreign country (pp. 48-49), why then was the dispersal of population so sudden and complete after winning a charter for national survival in the Manitoba Act?

Morton kept working on the problem and eventually found all that he cared to know in a two-volume monograph on the Canadian half-breed written in Paris by a French ethnographer during the Nazi occupation.⁷ According to Marcel Giraud, the Métis were a mixed-blood people incapable of responding to their own best interests. Well-intentioned agents of civilization had tried to educate and mould them to greater competence but had failed. The Métis rejection of proper educational and moral instruction resulted in their decline, ruin, and extinction as a people.

Giraud saw nothing dignified or reasonable in their nation claim; he saw only vanity and violence. Defiance of Canada invited reprisal; the murder of Scott invited murders in revenge. The proof of Métis inferiority was their inability to fight an effective defence. The attacks, the violent acts of every kind that were now directed against the Métis ... aggravated the inherent weaknesses of their nature, of their upbringing and their antecedents, and precipitated the disintegration of their group (p. 374). The reign of terror that began, paradoxically, with the arrival of troops sent to guarantee an orderly beginning for the new province continued with the arrival of new settlers because Ontarians, grouped around their Orange Lodge, could commit the worst excesses with impunity (p. 377). Yet Giraud refused to connect such violence to a larger pattern of denial of rights. Any injustices by the Government of Canada were unintended (pp. 381-382). The root cause of the dispersal was the fatal inferiority of the Métis themselves.

According to Giraud, the principal activities of freighting and the production of plains provisions for the Hudson’s Bay Company were distractions rather than occupations; they were reflections of origin rather than rational adaptations likely to give way to new responses in subsequent historical development. Métis reluctance to take up full-time farming was proof that they were incapable of understanding any plan of life other than nomadism. The few Métis who pretended to be farmers showed they were incapable of caring for them in a sensible manner (p. 388). They rapidly ran into debt and many sold their land to clergy hoping to substitute for these unambitious individuals a race whose qualities were in no way inferior to those of the immigrants of English or Germanic language (p. 390). It was no surprise to Giraud that the same cycle of agitation and violence followed the exodus to Saskatchewan and aggravated the causes of the decay from which this people was suffering (p. 452).

For the Manitoba historian learning to react against the word primitive as an interpretive category, the discovery of Marcel Giraud must have been disturbing. What W.L. Morton should have pointed out in his review of the Canadian half-breed⁸ in 1950 was that Giraud appeared to have done pioneering research in vast arrays of new material without learning to see beyond the literal to the functional meaning of written testimony, a weakness that was particularly evident in Giraud’s use of missionary chronicles and clerical correspondence. Here, for example, was Giraud using Bishop Grandin of Saskatchewan to paint a gloomy prediction of Métis failure for Archbishop Taché of Manitoba: It will be just the same here—neither worse nor better as at St Boniface. Our poor Métis will leave their lands to strangers and withdraw as far as they can withdraw. They are a people without energy on whom one cannot count (p. 430). Instead of interpreting the letter as an indication of pedagogical frustration, Giraud cited Grandin’s words for their literal meaning. He did not read the missionary bias. The same point missed Morton’s notice.

Giraud presents the Métis four square, in all his vivacity, colour and historical significance, depicts the first beginnings of the mixed race, its swift rise to ‘national’ consciousness, its half century of coherent life, and demonstrates the inevitability and pathos of its doom (pp. 61-62). Thus Morton abandoned his previous celebration of the autocthonous people settled in their neat little white washed houses clustered on the points and bays of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers.⁹ Following Giraud, Morton began to think of the Métis as the misfits of the West, distracted from true civilization by hunting and voyaging, activities that bound them ineluct-ably to nomadism and to barbarism. Their riverfront habitations were just rude log cabins, places for keeping their few possessions, carts, horses, perhaps a few cattle. There they cultivated rudely their potato patches, and tiny fields of grain. But the hunt, the trapline, the ‘free’ fur trade, drew them seasonally away (p. 65). They clung stubbornly to their primitive barbarism and followed the easier course away from field agriculture to the end of the wandering life, defeat, and the scaffold at Regina (pp. 6263). If the Métis were victimized, they were willing victims, defeated finally by their own defects of character. It was their tragedy that the instability and violence of Riel, reflecting the inherent instability and ready violence of his own uncertain people, ruined his achievement and destroyed his nation (p. 67).

Six years later Morton was still endorsing Giraud’s magnificent study but managed to cling to a fragment of his earlier denial of Red River primitivism. His history of the Red River resistance,¹⁰ published in 1956 (and his general history of Manitoba¹¹ which appeared one year later), suggested that the nomadic Métis rebelled in 1869 not because they resisted learning the ways of a settled agricultural existence—not from an irrational defence of their alleged primitivism—but because they preferred instruction by French-speaking, Roman Catholic newcomers. What the Métis chiefly feared in 1869 was not the entrance of the agricultural frontier of Ontario into Red River—and they would have welcomed that of Quebec—but the sudden influx of immigrants of English speech and Protestant faith (p. 2). Riel recognized that their evolution away from nomadism was incomplete and feared that his people would be overwhelmed by the "inrush of British Canadian land-seekers from Ontario before the Métis had finally abandoned the wandering life of hunters and tripmen and settled down as farmers in the parishes of the Red and Assini-boine" (p. 5). They strove to protect the stake of each individual to his rude private plot by protecting the French-Catholic character of the group as a whole.

It was the second more ambitious goal that brought them into conflict with Canada. Morton believed that "the Canadian government was entirely ready to grant the normal rights of British subjects to all civilized individuals