Wikipedia Deep Dive

Louis Riel

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On a cold November morning in 1885, a man walked to the gallows in Regina, Saskatchewan, and the nation of Canada cracked along a fault line that has never fully healed. Louis Riel, founder of Manitoba and leader of the Métis people, was about to be hanged for treason. The jury that convicted him had begged for clemency. Thousands had signed petitions for his release. None of it mattered.

His death sparked fury among French Canadians who saw him as a martyr. English Canada, particularly Protestant Ontario, viewed his execution as righteous justice for a dangerous rebel. More than a century later, Canadians still argue about who Louis Riel really was.

Was he a religious fanatic who led his people into a doomed uprising? Or was he a visionary leader who saw, with painful clarity, that his people were about to be swept away by the tide of English-speaking settlement?

The answer, as with most things worth understanding, is complicated.

A Child of Two Worlds

To understand Louis Riel, you first have to understand the Métis. The word comes from the French for "mixed," and it described a distinct people who emerged in the Canadian prairies during the fur trade era. They were the children and grandchildren of European traders—Scottish, English, French-Canadian—who had married Indigenous women, primarily Cree and Ojibwe.

The Métis were not simply people of mixed heritage. They had developed their own culture, their own language (Michif, a blend of French and Cree), their own economic way of life centered on the buffalo hunt, and their own sense of themselves as a nation. By the mid-nineteenth century, they were the majority population in the Red River Settlement, a territory near present-day Winnipeg administered by the Hudson's Bay Company.

Louis Riel was born in 1844 in a small one-room house near the fork of the Red and Seine rivers. He was the eldest of eleven children in a prominent local family. His father had made the family name famous by organizing protests that effectively broke the Hudson's Bay Company's monopoly on the fur trade. His mother came from one of the earliest white families to settle in the region.

The Riels were devoutly Catholic and fiercely proud of their Métis identity. Young Louis showed early promise as a scholar, and at thirteen he caught the attention of Bishop Alexandre Taché, who was eager to train talented Métis boys for the priesthood. In 1858, Taché arranged for Riel to travel to Montreal to study at a seminary.

Riel excelled at languages, science, and philosophy. He also had a temperament that would follow him his entire life: hot-tempered, rigid in his views, intolerant of opposition, and not afraid to argue with authority figures. These traits would make him a powerful leader. They would also contribute to his downfall.

The Unraveling

In 1864, word reached Montreal that Riel's father had died. The news broke something in the young man. He lost interest in the priesthood and withdrew from his studies. For a time, he continued as a day student at a convent school, but was asked to leave for disciplinary problems.

What followed was a strange period of psychological crisis. Riel became convinced that Louis Riel was dead and that he himself was someone else entirely—a Jewish man named David Mordecai from Marseilles. He announced plans to start a new religious movement. These episodes of religious fervor and altered identity would recur throughout his life, and they would ultimately be used against him in court.

He drifted. He worked as a law clerk in Montreal but found legal work unpleasant. He fell in love with a woman named Marie-Julie Guernon and signed a marriage contract, but her family opposed the union because Riel was Métis. The engagement was broken.

Impoverished and humiliated, Riel left eastern Canada. He may have worked odd jobs in Chicago. He spent time in Saint Paul, Minnesota. In July 1868, he finally returned home to the Red River Settlement.

What he found there was a community on the edge of crisis.

The World Closing In

The Red River Settlement in 1868 was a place caught between worlds. The Hudson's Bay Company, which had administered the territory for two centuries, was negotiating to transfer the land to the newly formed Canadian government. But nobody was consulting the people who actually lived there—especially not the Métis.

Meanwhile, Protestant settlers from Ontario were arriving in increasing numbers, bringing with them attitudes that the Métis found threatening. Many of these newcomers viewed the Indigenous and mixed-race population with contempt. They looked at the Métis river lot system—where families held long, narrow strips of land running back from the waterways—and saw inefficiency. They looked at Catholic French-speaking people and saw obstacles to an English Protestant future.

The Canadian government made matters worse by sending survey crews without warning or consultation. These surveyors began marking the land using a grid system imported from the United States, one that completely ignored the existing Métis property lines. To the Métis, it looked like the first step in taking everything they had.

In late August 1869, Louis Riel gave a speech denouncing the survey. In October, he led a group of Métis who physically stopped the surveyors from continuing their work. The Red River Resistance had begun.

The Provisional Government

Events moved quickly. Riel and his followers organized themselves as the National Committee of the Métis. When the Canadian government sent a lieutenant governor-designate named William McDougall to take control of the territory, Riel's forces turned him back at the border. On the same day, November 2, 1869, Métis fighters seized Fort Garry, the main Hudson's Bay Company post.

Riel was not interested in war. He was interested in negotiation from a position of strength. He invited English-speaking settlers to join Métis representatives in a convention to discuss their collective future. He proposed a list of rights that would have to be guaranteed before the territory would accept Canadian authority.

Many settlers, English and French alike, came to see the Métis point of view. But a minority of passionate Canadian nationalists—loosely organized as the Canadian Party—began plotting to overthrow the provisional government that Riel established in December 1869.

The provisional government was remarkably democratic for its time. It established the Legislative Assembly of Assiniboia, the first elected government at Red River, with twenty-eight representatives. It published its own newspaper. It passed laws. It sent delegates to Ottawa to negotiate terms of union with Canada.

And then Louis Riel made a decision that would haunt him for the rest of his life.

The Execution of Thomas Scott

In February 1870, the Canadian Party attempted an armed uprising against Riel's government. It failed. About fifty men, including a man named Thomas Scott, were captured and imprisoned at Fort Garry.

Scott was an Orangeman from Ontario—a member of a Protestant fraternal organization known for its hostility toward Catholics. He was also, by all accounts, obnoxious. He treated his Métis captors with open contempt, repeatedly quarreling with his guards and apparently making violent threats. The guards demanded that he be tried for insubordination.

A Métis tribunal found Scott guilty and sentenced him to death. Riel was urged repeatedly to commute the sentence. He refused. His reasoning, as he explained it, was grimly pragmatic: the Canadians needed to understand that the Métis were serious. They were not going to be pushed aside.

On March 4, 1870, a Métis firing squad executed Thomas Scott.

It was, as one of Riel's biographers later wrote, "his one great political blunder." Protestant Canada erupted in outrage. The Canada First movement mobilized around Scott's death, demanding revenge. Whatever sympathy might have existed in English Canada for Métis grievances evaporated in the heat of religious and ethnic fury.

Victory and Exile

Paradoxically, even as the Scott execution poisoned English Canadian opinion, Riel's provisional government achieved most of its political goals. Delegates negotiated directly with Prime Minister John A. Macdonald and reached agreement on language rights, religious rights, and land protections for the Métis. This agreement became the Manitoba Act of 1870, which formally created the province of Manitoba and brought it into the Canadian Confederation.

The Legislative Assembly of Assiniboia unanimously approved the deal. Louis Riel, at twenty-five years old, had founded a province.

But there was one thing the negotiators could not secure: amnesty for the provisional government, and especially for Riel himself. The British government, which technically had to approve such matters, refused. And the Canadian militia units sent to establish order in the new province made clear that they intended to lynch Riel if they caught him.

In September 1870, just as the new provincial government was being established, Riel fled across the American border. He would spend most of the next fifteen years in exile.

The Years in the Wilderness

Exile did strange things to Louis Riel. Despite being a wanted man in Canada, he was elected to the House of Commons three times. He never took his seat—he was too afraid of assassination to try—but the fact that Métis and French Canadian voters kept electing him showed how deeply they supported his cause.

Riel's mental state deteriorated. He became increasingly convinced that he had a divine mission, that God had chosen him as a prophet and leader of a new religious movement. In 1876, he was committed to an asylum in Quebec under an assumed name. He was released in 1878, still believing in his sacred calling but better able to function in daily life.

He drifted south into Montana Territory, where he married a Métis woman named Marguerite Monet in 1881. He became an American citizen. He worked as a schoolteacher. He seemed to be settling into a quiet life.

But history was not finished with Louis Riel.

The Call to Return

While Riel lived in exile, the Métis in the Saskatchewan territory were facing a crisis. The buffalo herds that had sustained their way of life were nearly gone. The Canadian government was pushing for settlement of the prairies, and once again, Métis land claims were being ignored. Appeals to Ottawa went unanswered.

In 1884, a delegation of Métis leaders traveled to Montana to find Louis Riel. They asked him to return to Canada and lead them in pressing their grievances against the government. Riel agreed.

At first, Riel pursued peaceful political agitation, much as he had in 1869. He drafted petitions. He organized meetings. He presented lists of demands. The government's response ranged from indifference to hostility.

In March 1885, Riel declared another provisional government at Batoche, a Métis settlement on the South Saskatchewan River. This time, violence erupted almost immediately. Unlike the relatively bloodless Red River Resistance, the North-West Rebellion of 1885 became an armed conflict.

The Battle and the Trial

The Canadian government responded with overwhelming force, dispatching thousands of troops westward on the newly completed Canadian Pacific Railway. The Métis fighters won early skirmishes, but they were outnumbered and outgunned. In May 1885, Canadian forces broke through Métis lines at the Battle of Batoche.

Riel surrendered on May 15. He was taken to Regina to stand trial for high treason.

The trial was extraordinary. Riel's lawyers wanted to argue that he was not guilty by reason of insanity—his history of mental illness, his religious delusions, all could be used to spare his life. Riel refused to cooperate with this defense. He was not insane, he insisted. His cause was just. His religious beliefs were genuine prophecy, not madness.

He gave a long, passionate speech to the jury, defending his actions and explaining his vision for the Métis people. It is one of the most remarkable documents in Canadian political history.

The jury convicted him but recommended mercy. The judge sentenced him to death. Appeals failed. The Canadian government refused to intervene despite massive protests, particularly in Quebec, where the execution of a French-speaking Catholic leader by an English-speaking Protestant government struck at the deepest fears of the community.

On November 16, 1885, Louis Riel was hanged in Regina. His last words were the Lord's Prayer.

The Fracture

Riel's execution tore Canada apart along fault lines that had existed since Confederation but had never been so brutally exposed. In Quebec, massive rallies denounced the federal government. Politicians who had supported the hanging were vilified. The sense that French Canadians were second-class citizens in their own country, subject to the whims of an English majority, became a defining grievance that shaped Quebec politics for generations.

In Manitoba and across the prairies, the Métis were pushed to the margins of society. Their promised land grants were distributed through a scrip system that was easily exploited by speculators. Many Métis families lost everything. The proud nation that Riel had tried to protect was scattered and impoverished.

In English Canada, particularly Ontario, Riel remained a villain for decades—a traitor who had murdered Thomas Scott and led an armed rebellion against the legitimate government. Streets and schools were named for the soldiers who had suppressed the uprising, not for the man who had founded Manitoba.

Reckoning

The rehabilitation of Louis Riel has been a slow process. In 1992, the Canadian Parliament passed a resolution recognizing his "unique and historic role as a founder of Manitoba." In 1998, the federal government formally apologized for the historical mistreatment of the Métis people. A statue of Riel now stands on the grounds of the Manitoba Legislature.

But the question of who Louis Riel really was remains contested. Was he a Father of Confederation, as his defenders argue, a man who should be celebrated alongside John A. Macdonald? Or was he, as his critics contend, a mentally unstable religious fanatic who led his people into a catastrophe?

Perhaps the most honest answer is that he was both—and neither.

He was a man of extraordinary ability who found himself at the center of an impossible situation. The Métis world was ending. The buffalo were gone. The settlers were coming. The Canadian government was determined to impose its will on the prairies with or without Métis consent. Someone was going to resist, and Louis Riel became that someone.

He made mistakes. The execution of Thomas Scott was a blunder that cost his cause dearly. His religious visions, whatever their ultimate nature, alienated potential allies and provided his enemies with ammunition. His decision to lead an armed rebellion in 1885, when the odds were so clearly hopeless, raises questions about his judgment.

But he also founded a province. He forced the Canadian government to recognize, at least on paper, the rights of the Métis people. He articulated a vision of a bilingual, bicultural Canada at a time when many English Canadians wanted to simply absorb or eliminate the French fact. He died refusing to deny his beliefs or his people.

Few figures in Canadian history provoke such strong feelings, and perhaps that is the point. Louis Riel forces Canadians to confront uncomfortable questions about their past—about whose land this was, who had the right to decide its future, and what was lost in the building of a nation. Those questions have no easy answers, and they echo still.