Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont (15 page)

There, Louis has said it, and he thinks he’s said it in such a way that the jury and the judge and the people in fine clothes who listen to him won’t think he’s bragging. His own people declared Louis a prophet, not Louis. He feels steady with his words once more. Louis thinks he has found a way to finish this, to come to the sane conclusion of it all:

If you take the plea of the defence that I am not responsible for my acts, acquit me completely since I have been quarrelling with an insane and irresponsible Government. If you pronounce in favour of the Crown, which contends that I am responsible, acquit me all the same. You are perfectly justified in declaring that having my reason and sound mind, I have acted reasonably and in self-defence, while the Government, my accuser, being irresponsible, and consequently insane, cannot but have acted wrong, and if high treason there is it must be on its side and not on my part.

Judge Richardson asks Louis if he is done. Louis thinks about this for a moment. Is he? Is he done? So much to say. So little time. They all must understand him. “Not yet,” Louis says, “if you have the kindness to permit me your attention for a while.” Louis explains that despite what others see as his vanity, he has never been particular about his clothing. But more than that, others, including the priests, have often had to feed his family. He explains that he is simply a guest of this country, a guest who works tirelessly for the betterment of his people. But he has lost the thread again. He’s now begging for the mercy of the court, for its understanding. Rather than ending on a powerful note, the English words escape Louis, and his speech peters out trying to explain this. “I put my speech under the protection of my God, my Saviour, He is the only one who can make it effective. It is possible it should become effective, as it is proposed to good men, to good people, and to good ladies also.” This is not how he wished to end it, but this is how it ends.

The next morning, the final morning of the trial, Judge Richardson has strong words for the jury before they retire to decide Louis’s fate. He shoots down any possible defence that Louis is an American citizen and can’t be tried as a Canadian. He also tells the jury in no uncertain terms that their responsibility is two-pronged: first, is Louis guilty of treason? And second, if he is guilty, can he be held responsible mentally? But Richardson doesn’t stop there. In fact, he leads the jury to what its answer should be. “Not only must you think of the man in the dock,” Richardson says, “but you must think of society at large. You are not called upon to think of the Government at Ottawa simply as a Government, you have to think of the homes and of the people who live in this country, you have to ask yourselves: Can such things be permitted?” If ever a command by a judge on how he expects a jury to respond has been uttered, Louis has just heard it.

At 2
P.M.
on August 1, 1885, the six men leave to decide whether Louis Riel will live or not. The talking is done. The arguing is over. Louis, alone in the crush of people who chatter and sweat and laugh in their fine clothing, kneels down in the prisoner box and begins to pray. He speaks the words out loud, begs God for forgiveness and for enlightenment, unaware that he makes the white people who have now stopped chattering and begun staring at him uncomfortable with this display. Louis thinks of the small statue of Saint Joseph back in his cell, the one he holds and prays feverishly to every day. Not long ago he dropped it and to his horror, the head snapped off when it hit the hard ground. It’s clear to Louis what his own fate will be.

Less than an hour and a half later, at 3:20 P.M., the jury returns. None of them make eye contact with Louis. The clerk asks him to rise. He does. “Gentlemen,” the clerk says, “are you agreed upon the verdict?”

The foreman stands. “We find the defendant guilty,” he says, causing Louis to sway. The clerk asks all of the jury if this is their decision. They nod and mumble yes. But then the foreman speaks up. “Your Honour,” he says. “I have been asked by my brother jurors to recommend the prisoner to the mercy of the Crown.” Judge Richardson agrees to let this be known to the proper authorities. He then looks to Louis one more time, asks with a tinge of exhaustion in his voice if he has anything else to say.

Louis stands a final time. He expresses his relief that he isn’t judged an insane man and that hopefully, in this way, his mission can still be fulfilled. He thanks the jurors for recommending clemency and adds that he hopes the verdict just handed down might prove once and for all that he really is a prophet, just as his Biblical namesake was.

“I have been hunted like an elk for fifteen years,” Louis says to the court. “David had been [hunted for] seventeen [years]: I think I will have to be about two years still. But I hope it will come sooner.” He again apologizes for his poor English. He speaks of how he helped Manitoba come into existence but once more loses the thread and finds himself droning on about the seven nationalities settling the North-West and of the Americans coming to help his cause and then of his dear friend Gabriel who works this very moment to free him. He feels weak and stops speaking for a minute. Where is the thread?

Judge Richardson asks if Louis is done. No, Louis and his work will never be done. He explains that the Manitoba Act of 1870 has not been fulfilled, that he has never received compensation for his hard work. Louis says he believes that a special commission should be convened to hear his case. This can’t possibly be all there is to it, to his work, to his life! For the first time, for the last time, Louis finds the thread, wraps it around his hands so tightly that he will never lose it again. He recognizes this very moment that he is on trial for being Métis, that he is on trial for daring to have decided that white men, especially those dogs like Thomas Scott, could indeed be forced to answer to the Métis people. Louis is on trial for being a half-breed, a half-breed who refuses to bow down to the people in front of him. He is being judged for his inability to bow down.

Judge Richardson is cold in his answer. He wishes, Louis realizes, to crush him and crush his people, once and for all. “For what you did the remarks you have made form no excuse whatsoever. For what you have done the law requires you to answer.” The judge goes on, explaining to Louis that he should not expect the hand of clemency, that Louis will now be taken back to his cell where he will be kept until September 18, where he will be “taken to the place appointed for your execution, and there be hanged by the neck till you are dead. And may God have mercy on your soul.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Hunting

As the summer of 1885 blossoms, more Métis from Saskatchewan join Gabriel in Montana. Gabriel listens to them chatter like evening birds about invading the North-West, but he’s given up on the plan. He will travel to Regina and serve as a witness for Louis. This is the most realistic course. But when he hears word that he won’t be offered amnesty and then, not long after this, that his friend has been handed the death penalty, Gabriel resurrects his plan to rescue Louis from his jail cell. He rides restlessly through the communities of Montana, drumming up support and even organizing a route from Saskatchewan into the U.S. with a number of safe houses where he and Louis can rest briefly, be fed, and change horses.

For reasons only Gabriel knows, though, the plan is never enacted. Part of it, surely, is that whatever ragged force he can drum up will be no challenge for the hundreds of Mounties currently guarding Louis. But Gabriel’s never been afraid of a fight before. It isn’t simply that he’s outnumbered. He looks around him at the defeated Métis, like his friend Michel Dumas, who has turned to drinking heavily and is making a fool of himself. Gabriel finds out that he too is being watched closely by spies of the Canadian government, some of them Métis who have been tempted by a few dollars of dirty money. His wife has just joined him here in Montana and frets when Gabriel collapses and blacks out from the head wound that still haunts him. The Métis, he sadly realizes, are in no shape to put up another fight against the Canadians. Gabriel will just lead more of them to slaughter. He instead prays to the Virgin Mary that his friend Louis will be saved from the gallows with a pardon from John A. It’s all, depressingly, out of Gabriel’s hands now.

He begins to believe the Virgin is listening to him when friends read him stories in papers from all over the world condemning Louis’s execution. The government of France speaks out strongly against such a barbaric act as hanging a man who never fired a shot in anger and who is a political prisoner, not a criminal one. England and the United States follow suit, editorials from papers across both countries urging the government to reconsider. Politicians from around the world write letters to the Canadian government condemning the planned execution. Gabriel smiles the day in September that he hears Louis’s execution has been postponed. Surely John A. will bow to international pressure.

But the Ontario papers rage with anger and scream for Louis’s head. And, as if to let the Orangemen know exactly where he stands and what will indeed happen to Mr. Riel, John A. makes his infamous remark to critics of his decision to kill Louis: “He shall hang, though every dog in Quebec bark in his favour!”

As if in foreshadowing, Wandering Spirit and ten other Indians are hanged for their involvement in the uprising, eight of them together from the same scaffold in a ghastly scene of mass execution as witnesses cheer. Gabriel takes some solace, though, when he hears that a number of his men from the Exovedate who had been charged with felonytreason have been handed between one and seven years in prison instead of the noose. Big Bear, who has finally surrendered after a lengthy running battle with the Canadians, is sentenced, along with Poundmaker, to three years. They are both released early, in 1887, and both die shortly thereafter, their spirits and their people crushed by the continued onslaught of the settling of the Dominion.

What Gabriel can’t know is that John A. has once again called a secret enquiry to weigh the current state of Louis Riel’s mind. John A., it appears, wants to cover his own political assets by having a group of doctors tell him what he wants to hear: that Louis Riel is indeed sane and fit to be hanged by the neck until dead. When one doctor argues that Louis is in fact insane, his report is slashed from the enquiry. The heavily censored document finally gives John A. the green light. He is not putting to death a madman. Despite numerous appeals, Louis’s execution is scheduled for November 16, 1885. The Canadian government has pushed hard to get this done as expediently as possible, so that they might leave this most distasteful mess behind and get on with completing the railway and furthering the business of the Dominion.

Gabriel, like his dear friend and leader Louis, hopes against hope that some justice will eventually visit the Métis and that Louis will be spared the gallows. They both hope until the eve of November 16, right up until it becomes clear that all appeals have failed and the scaffold has been built beside Louis’s cell. Friends tell Gabriel about the last hours of Louis’s life, of how he never wavers, never cries out or begs for mercy, never shows weakness. Instead, Louis stays up the night before his execution with Father André; by a strange twist, the man who was once Louis’s nemesis has now become his confessor and his spiritual counsellor.

In the last months of Louis’s captivity, Father André had made sure to make himself available for confession and for communion, and he’s worked diligently to convince Louis that what he did was wrong and a sin in God’s eyes. Louis, beaten down now by a system bent on his destruction, must get a strong whiff of his own mortality as the hammers echo out the construction of his gallows right next to his window. On this last night of his life, he kneels for hours with his confessor, prays to the Lord for his forgiveness and for the protection of his friends and family and his Métis people. Louis writes letters to his wife and to his mother and to his children, is focused and appears as far away from insanity as any man can be. Louis’s mission now is to face his own death with the calm and the pride of the Métis. He is indeed focused, has been since that last day of his trial when he realized so absolutely that this was not just about him, but about his people, a people too free to surrender.

At 5
A.M.
, Father André administers Louis’s last mass and communion. Louis asks permission to bathe, and then frets after as he dresses that the clothes in which he is to die—a white shirt, a black jacket, brown coarse trousers, and a pair of well-made and prettily beaded moccasins—are too shabby. The guardroom in which he is kept has a second floor and a blacksmith cuts away the iron bars on the window from which Louis will emerge onto the scaffolding. The precautions taken to prevent Gabriel from sweeping in and rescuing Louis are quite extraordinary. A high fence has been built around the gallows, which angers locals and travellers alike, who now won’t be able to witness the violent death of this man. And every Mountie in Regina and beyond stands guard with a loaded weapon.

At 8:15
A.M.
, as Louis and Father André are talking quietly, the deputy in charge appears at Louis’s cell door. “You want me?” Louis asks him. “I am ready.” With that, Louis stands and, policemen on either side, walks up the steps slowly but steadily to the second floor and waits in front of the barless window, a small crucifix in his hand. Father André follows, shaking so much that he cannot make it up the stairs without the help of officials and another priest. One last time, Father André and Louis kneel, and Louis whispers that he forgives his enemies, repents his sins, and offers his life as a sacrifice to God. When his friends tell Gabriel this last part, he understands how it is that Louis went so bravely. He has always acted best and strongest when he sacrificed for the people, and especially for God.

Before they stand, Father André requests that Louis keep his promise to refrain from speaking any last words in public when asked if he wishes to do so. He doesn’t want Louis undoing in the last minutes what André has worked so hard these last months to accomplish: the return of his ward to the fold. Louis promises he won’t. Kneeling now in the shadow of the gallows, Louis has no more speeches in him. With that, they stand. The police take Louis’s hands, bend his head forward, and help him step out the window and onto the scaffold.