Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (45 page)

Of course the British Empire had neither forgotten nor forgiven the death of Thomas Scott, now elevated to martyrdom by patriots far away: and though the delegates had been expressly assured in Ottawa that Riel should remain in office until the arrival of the new Governor, and though Riel had actually prepared an address of welcome for him, and planned a guard of honour to receive him, still it was not really part of the imperial design to recognize this alien rebel as an interim ruler. The promised amnesty was never legally promulgated, and the armed force being sent to the west as a ‘benevolent constabulary’ thought of itself from the start as a punitive expedition, and much relished the prospect of an affray in Manitoba. As one of its officers wrote, it was a dull period for the fighting soldier. ‘There was not a shadow of war in the North, the South, the East or the West. There was not even a Bashote in South Africa, a Beloochie in Schinde, a Bhootea, a Burmese, or any other of the many “eeses” or “eas” forming the great colonial empire of Britain who seemed capable of kicking up the semblance of a row.’

Only Louis Riel in Fort Garry. The commander of the force dispatched to Manitoba was perhaps the most promising young officer of the British Empire, and probably the most cock-sure—Colonel Garnet Joseph Wolseley, quarter-master general in Canada, veteran of campaigns in Burma, the Crimea, India and China, and author of that well-known manual of military conduct,
The
Soldier’s
Pocket-
Book
.
1
He was 37 in 1870, and he saw things clearly in terms of right and wrong: he was almost always right, his opponents almost invariably wrong. A fervent Anglo-Irish Protestant himself, with an inherited antipathy towards Catholics, he considered himself God’s soldier always, and approached the innumerable battles of his imperial career with a courage formidably buttressed by piety. Wolseley was one of the few intellectual soldiers of his day. He was intensely interested in theories of war, and was as ambitious professionally as he was socially thrusting.

The Red River expedition was his first independent command, and he was ready to make the most of it. He saw the rising as an attempt by the resentful French Canadians, robbed of their sovereignty in Canada by British arms, to block the westward advance of the Empire with a French-speaking Catholic province of their own. Riel was no more than a ‘noisy idler’, the dupe of the ‘clever, cunning, unscrupulous’ Catholic bishop at Red River, and the whole affair was a conspiracy between French clerics in the field and French-Canadian wire-pullers in Ottawa. It was Wolseley’s job, as he saw it, to extinguish this subversion by force, and to humiliate its leaders.

Fortunately for this clever soldier, the little campaign posed problems of a peculiar and challenging kind. Washington refused to allow the troops passage through American territory, so instead of taking a comfortable train to St Paul Wolseley had to plan a route from the Great Lakes across hundreds of miles of almost impassable
forest territory to Lake Winnipeg and Red River. Many people thought it could never be done. Wolseley very competently did it.

His force might have been specifically recruited for the punishment of Catholics and French-Canadians. His intelligence officer, William Butler, was an Anglo-Irish Protestant. The kernel of his force was a battalion of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, stationed then at Halifax in Nova Scotia, and everyone’s idea of professional redcoats. Most of his other soldiers were Ontario militia-men, many of them avid Canadian expansionists, many more Orangemen, and nearly all congenitally anti-French and pro-Empire: 

‘Most of us felt,’ wrote Wolseley, ‘we had to settle accounts quickly with Riel, who had murdered the Englishman, Mr Scott.’ Invigorated by this sense of cause and of imperial brotherhood, the expedition was rapidly fitted out and organized, and set out by rail and steamer to Thunder Bay, on the western shore of Lake Superior.

From there it was some 660 miles to Fort Garry and Riel. A rough road had been hacked out for the first forty-five miles, to the remote and lovely Shebandowan Lake, deep in the forests: from there Wolseley planned to take his force by water, through the hidden mesh of rivers, across the water-maze called Lake of the Woods, into Lake Winnipeg and thence down Red River to the fort. In all military history, he loved to say, no such operation had ever been contemplated before. It would entail not only skilful boatmanship and navigation, but also an infinity of laborious portages. Wolseley had no proper maps, and most of his soldiers had never set foot in a canoe before.

Everything was geared to boatloads, for no supplies at all could be obtained between Thunder Bay and Red River. The boats themselves were specially designed, each to carry eight or nine soldiers and two or three
voyageurs
, together with supplies for sixty days—salt pork, beans, flour, biscuit, salt, tea, sugar and ‘preserved
potatoes’. Each boat also carried tents, ammunition, cooking gear, blankets, and American axes—the standard Army issue being, so Wolseley said, ‘so ancient in type that it might have come down to us from Saxon times’. They took nets to catch fish, six-pounders to blast fortifications, tools to mend boats, and Captain Redvers Buller, another rising young regular officer, to be quartermaster general. What would happen to them all if the Metis chose to mount a guerilla war against them, or incited the forest Indians to oppose the expedition, even the confident Wolseley could not foresee, but at least he had the logistics well in hand, and in May 1870, off the expedition set into the wilderness—the Empire on the march once more.

Wolseley was to talk about it for the rest of his life, so powerful an impact did it make upon his imagination. The professional friendships he made during the Red River expedition were to form the basis of his celebrated Wolseley Ring, the most influential cabal of the late Victorian army, which we shall repeatedly encounter later in our story. The techniques he learnt he was to use again, as we shall presently see, in a more famous venture far away. He remembered always the romance and strangeness of the campaign. ‘For Fort Garry!’ shouted the soldiers as they pushed off from the shore of Lake Shebandowan, and out they paddled across the still blue water, boat after boat crammed to the gunwales, their oars dipping, their big lug-sails bravely spread, their rifles stacked in the stern and their colourful
voyageurs
crouched forward. ‘It brought to my mind the stories read in boyhood of how wild bands of fierce Norse freebooters set out from some secluded bay in quest of plunder and adventure.’

The journey took ninety-six days, some of it in torrential rain, most of it tormented by blackflies and mosquitoes. Sometimes the boats were all together, sometimes 150 miles separated the first from the last. Sometimes the force scudded across calm water, smoking pipes and singing—

Sometimes they spent entire days heaving their boats over miles of portage. They wound their way through the dark complexities of the Lake of the Woods. They leapt breakneck through the rapids of the Winnipeg River, the soldiers huddled beneath the gunwales or desperately rowing, until as they scudded to safety on the other side the bowsman threw his paddle into the air in exhilarated triumph, and the soldiers burst into hilarious laughter of relief. They grew fitter, and more skilful, and happier as the weeks passed, rising at dawn and travelling until dusk, and by the end of the adventure the clumsiest rifleman from Winchester or the East End, the flabbiest Toronto real estate agent, was adroitly mending his boat, cooking fresh-caught fish over a campfire, bargaining with Indians for souvenirs, or ranging the forest in search of wild berries. Their uniforms were cheerfully ragged, or patched with biscuit sacking, their faces and arms were burnt nearly black with sun. Not a man fell sick, and always in the van, in a light birch-bark canoe with a crew of sinewy Iroquois, travelled Colonel Garnet Wolseley himself, dapper and undaunted, intermittently moved to sketch book or purple passage by the beauty of the scenery, but dreaming more often, one suspects, of promotions and honours lists to come.

On August 21, 1870, the expedition camped for the night upon Elk Island in Lake Winnipeg, twenty-five miles from the mouth of Red River. It was a balmy evening. Camp-fires flickered in the sky, bugles echoed across the water, scaring the duck from the sedgy reeds. Lake Winnipeg was like an inland sea there, with real waves and seagulls, and Elk Island lay close to its eastern shore, thick with spruce and larch. With its white sandy bluffs and its gentle beaches it looked not unlike a Caribbean islet. The air was fragrant with conifer sap and birchwood, the lake water swished in the darkness, and sometimes a strong fresh wind blew off the prairie to the west, to whip up mares’ tails on the water.

In this beguiling spot, spoiled only by the unspeakable insects, Wolseley and his officers planned their advance upon Fort Garry. They called it an ‘assault’, for by now Wolseley was more than ever
persuaded that this was war. Riel, he had learnt, had assembled 600 fighting men at the fort—news which ‘cheered our men’s hearts’, for it seemed to mean that he was going to put up a fight. When the expedition set off in the morning, it paddled in battle order into the Red River, six-pounders cleared for action. Up the soldiers resolutely rowed, against the sluggish current of the Red, and as they approached the first farms and churches of the Protestant settlers, church bells rang out to welcome them, and crowds of people ran waving to the river’s edge to watch them pass—flags flying, guns ready, Colonel Wolseley proud and eager in the lead. Drama was promised them upstream. It was said that Riel might suddenly ambush their flotilla out of the woods, or that he would blow up the fort with himself inside it, or destroy it with time fuses when the British were already there.

But when they turned the last river-bed, and disembarked below the fort on the morning of August 23, the anti-climax was pathetic. By now it was pelting with rain. The sky was grey, the ground deep in mud, and all the fun went out of the action. Wet through, not quite steady on their legs, the soldiers laboured up the soggy bank pulling their little brass guns behind commandeered Red River carts, whose wheels howled to their curses as they stumbled through the rain. Everything around them looked run-down and deserted, and when they topped the bank and saw the fort in front of them, clustered about by the shuttered dripping village, there was no sign of life. The south gate was open. Two mounted men entered it at full gallop, but nobody fired at them. Riel and all his men, realizing in their innocence what kind of expedition this was, had prudently disappeared. The Union Jack was hoisted above the fort, and a Royal Salute was fired from the guns, in lieu of more exciting fusillades.

‘Personally I was glad,’ wrote Wolseley, ‘that Riel did not come out and surrender, as he at one time said he would, for I could not then have hanged him as I might have done had I taken him prisoner while in arms against his sovereign.’ But then Wolseley, without the
advantages of hindsight or historical perspective, never grasped the true implications of the Red River affair. To such an imperial soldier it was rebellion pure and simple. To contemporary Canadians it was never so straight-forward, if only because it had become infected with the racial and religious rivalries of the nation as a whole. To us it seems sadder still. It was a timeless tragedy, the intuitive protest of a people whose manner of life was doomed by the no less instinctive progress of an empire: a gesture from that older, simpler world, impelled by airier aspirations, and worshipping more fragile gods, which it was so often the destiny of the British Empire to destroy.
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Wolseley’s expedition effectively ended the Metis resistance. The troops soon returned east, and Wolseley went home to prepare for the later discipline of the Ashanti, the Zulus, and the Sudanese. The village around Fort Garry presently grew into the city of Winnipeg, the principal base from which the Canadians made the west ordinary. It was there that Indian Treaty No 1 was signed, the first of a sequence of agreements which, while sparing Canada the miseries of Indian wars, effectively dampened the fire of Chippewa and Cree, and settled those wastelands for the grain farmers to come.
2
 From Winnipeg, too, the first contingent of the North-West Mounted Police rode out in 1873 to police and pacify the more distant west, away to the Rockies and the Pacific coast, arresting the smugglers, keeping the bad men out, checking the flow of guns, demolishing the strongholds of the whiskey smugglers—Forts Whoop-up, Stand-off, Slide-out—and clearing the way for that great artery of imperial authority, the Canadian Pacific Railway. Across the American frontier all was still lawless vigour and excitement: north of the border the British imperial presence made the development of the Canadian west almost decorous.