Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 727
The dissatisfaction felt in Nova Scotia was shared in all the A. H. F. Lefroy, “Legislative Power in Canada,” 1897 Maritime Provinces. In part it was due to the nature of the new federation. The British North America Act had left the existing provinces practically unaltered in their constitutions. But it superimposed a federal government made up of a Governor-General, an elected House of Commons, an appointed Senate and a responsible Cabinet. The essence of the Act lay in the distribution of power. The intention was to place the main authority firmly in the centre. The privileges of minorities as to religion and schools were safeguarded. The French language was made equal with English in the Dominion administration and in Quebec, and in any province which wished it so. But there provincial autonomy was meant to end. The union was made in full view of the object lesson of the American Republic, thrown B.N.A. Act, s. 91 into civil war over States’ rights. The statute gave all legislative power to the Federal Government except over matters expressly reserved to the provinces; power to levy any kind of taxes, to make any and every regulation of commerce, of money and banking, and to disallow any provincial statute it proposed to disallow. Nothing was clearer in intent; nothing has proved more fallacious in its issue. The lean kine were to eat up the fat. The feeble provinces of 1867, apparently denuded of revenue and devoid of all but meagre and necessary power, were to be changed by altered circumstances and by judicial interpretation into the autonomous units of seventy years later, a sort of heptarchy whose members control the whole public domain and vast revenues from sources unknown at Confederation.
All that, however, was to come later. For a time the Provinces felt themselves overshadowed by the Dominion and no longer in control of their own home and patrimony. But once in, there was no way out. Nova Scotia appealed in vain to Westminster for repeal. For at least a generation the Maritime people felt that Confederation was like the lion’s den in the Latin fable — no foot-tracks led out of it. Newfoundland seemed to be the wise fox who had noted this in time.
Queen Victoria’s reign began in Canada with the Canadian Rebellion. The Dominion of Canada began its rule in the North-West with the Red River Rebellion. Both came from the same cause. The queen knew nothing of Canada and Canada knew nothing of the North-West. The troubles on the Red River arose essentially from the fact that the time had come when the North-West must wake out of its two-hundred-years’ sleep. It Sir E. Walkin, “Canada and the States,” 1887 could not remain a fur-trade preserve. The world needed it. Civilization began to throw its advancing shadow on the rich land of the west and the shadow at its first touch struck chill. For years before Confederation the British Government had been considering the reorganization of the Hudson’s Bay Company, the restriction of its activity to trade and the resumption of its land and sovereignty. The question of an overland telegraph to Europe loomed large before the underwater cable of 1866 made it unnecessary. A first cable had been laid in 1858. Queen Victoria and President Buchanan exchanged congratulations. Then silence fell. There was no cable through the Civil War and its absence was an object lesson. If a submarine cable was not feasible, then a land telegraph must reach Europe from America by way of Alaska and Siberia. On the map of north-west British Columbia may still be found the name Telegraph Creek beside the Stikine River. It is not so much a name as an epitaph. A new cable was laid by the Great Eastern in 1866. By 1869 there were three. Telegraph Creek was all in. But in the early sixties the overland telegraph project seemed certain of execution.
So the Hudson’s Bay Company’s sovereignty had to end. D. MacKay, “The Honourable Company,” 1936 High finance, buying up its shares through a syndicate, with government approval, was busy in London with that peculiar air of wickedness that high finance always wears. The loyal servants of the Company in North America grew apprehensive. Till now the profits of the Company had been handled on that grand old maritime system of something for everybody — a system that came down from the Saxon Vikings and obtains still with prize money, salvage, and the spoils of the sea. The ‘wintering partners,’ as the factors and traders were called, received 40 per cent of the Company’s profits which meant at this time, over and above all cost of living, about £800 sterling each year for the factors (there were fifteen), and £400 for each of the thirty-seven traders. When retired, a factor kept an interest worth in all over £3,000. Clerks received salaries of about £100 a year but stood in line for promotion to traders. Boatmen and labourers were on wages, but with living and old-age assured. All this was now to be reorganized on ‘business lines.’ It seemed that the good old times would end. Until this period the proprietors in London used to sign their letters to Rupert’s Land, “Your loving friends.” Would the new International Finance Society of London do that?
When the Hudson’s Bay officers in North America learned of the proposed changes they felt as if they had been bought and sold. Hence their peculiar attitude of inactivity — one must not say apathy — towards the proposed transfer to Canada that was to consolidate the change, and their failure to oppose the protests of the half-breeds who had been their servants and associates for a lifetime. These Métis half-breeds formed the larger half of the people of Assiniboia (5,757 out of 11,500). They were attached to Company rule, looking to its paternal care of their interest. They were Roman Catholics, speaking French and seeing in their French cathedral-village of St. Boniface the abiding shelter of their religion and language. Not without hope were some people, both there and in old Canada, that this nucleus might grow to a French North-West and guarantee for ever the racial duality of Canada, or even restore the racial dominance of the French-Canadians. This frustrated vision, presently to be clouded and lost in the mass migration that followed, added a touch of bitterness to the attitude of the French-Canadians towards the Dominion in the West. They had lost French Canada over again.
W. J. PHILLIPS, R.C.A., WINNIPEG, MAN., 1941
“Agents and surveyors had been sent to the Red River country . . .” — page 165
But there were other settlers, especially newcomers from Ontario, whose view was entirely different. These people wanted the end of Company rule, the ownership of the land and the full status of citizens, not the tutelage accorded to a subordinate class. They welcomed the proposed transfer as the beginning of a provincial freedom. Their demands were voiced in their Nor’-Wester, the first local paper of the plains.
The Confederation of Canada had given the British government just the chance needed. The transfer of the North-West to Canada would escape the seeming bad faith of taking back rights once given. The price arranged (£300,000) and the liberal land grant which went with it could satisfy the claims of both shareholders and faithful servants. The transfer would solidify British North America from sea to sea, and dissipate the American ambitions that might repeat the quarrel over Oregon. A British 30 and 31 Victoria, c. 105 statute authorized the surrender to the Crown of the Company’s rights concerned, and a Canadian statute provided for temporary 32 and 33, Victoria, c. 33 government of Rupert’s Land and the North-West Territories. The transfer was all set for December 1, 1869.
But when the date came transfer was not possible. Trouble had begun. Agents and surveyors had been sent to the Red River G. Stanley, “Birth of Western Canada,” 1936 country in the autumn of 1869. The people on the spot watched them mark out square township lines that seemed to disregard the river-lots of the actual occupiers and obliterate the squatters’ rights on the plains. To the half-breed Métis and to many of the old-time Red River Scots, Canada seemed as distant and alien as it had to the Maritime people. There was at once protest, meetings, anger.
It is generally agreed now that up to this point the protest G. Denison, “Soldiering in Canada,” 1901 was warranted, the anger justified. The government of Canada had been guilty at least of gross neglect. In reality all that the protesting settlers wanted — their own land, their own church, school and language, their own right of government — was presently granted under the Manitoba Act of 1870. Nor had any one wanted to take it away. But suppression came first and explanation after.
Meantime the disaffected had found a leader in Louis Riel, a cracked visionary who had enough megalomania for two rebellions and not enough capacity for one. That Louis Riel ever wanted to fight anybody is very doubtful. His idea of a rebellion, as amply appeared fifteen years later, was taken from the rhetoric class of a secondary college. It meant talk, oratory and then a settlement and the award of a prize with applause. But his leadership dragged him on. Of those who might best have held him back, Archbishop Taché, the beloved prelate of the North-West, was absent in Rome. The Hudson’s Bay Governor, William MacTavish, was old and mortally ill. Riel and his armed Métis seized Fort Garry unopposed. They held MacTavish as a prisoner. They hoisted a flag that combined a French fleur de lys with an Irish shamrock, a gesture to Fenianism over the American border. Riel set up a provisional government but neither then nor later explicitly repudiated the sovereignty of the queen. Meantime the opposing Canadians and British, led by Colonel Dennis of the survey party and Major Boulton, rallied under arms to the Stone Fort, Lower Fort Garry, twenty miles down the river, and called for volunteers. Riel seized a group of these volunteers in Winnipeg, and held them prisoners. Among them was an Irishman, Thomas Scott, a man reckless and fearless, jeering at Riel with the contempt of a brave man for a coward. Thus stood affairs on the Red River Settlement as the winter of 1869 closed in. Riel and his adherents in Fort Garry fed fat and waxed strong on Hudson’s Bay food and supplies. But there was no disorder.
Meantime the new Commissioner and Lieutenant-Governor from Canada, the Hon. William McDougall, arrived at the Minnesota border seeking entry. He expected to ‘take over’ on December 1, 1869. The date had been postponed at Ottawa on news of trouble. McDougall didn’t know this and in what followed played the part of a sort of comic relief, alternately entering Assiniboia and being chased back to Minnesota, and issuing proclamations on his own from across the border.
McDougall mattered not a rush. The man of the hour was coming. Here first appears on the public scene of our history that man of iron, Donald Smith. He was sent to Fort Garry by Sir John A. Macdonald as a special commissioner for information Sir Donald, 1886, Lord Strathcona, 1897 Beckles Willson, “Life of Lord Strathcona,” 1915 and advice. We commonly associate his fame with the West. He never saw it till now in his fiftieth year. Donald Smith had come to Canada in 1838; had served the Hudson’s Bay Company for six years on the St. Lawrence north shore — the land which Jacques Cartier allotted to Cain. He had served the Company for twenty further years in Labrador. Even in that desolation his energy, his instinct for trade, his capacity for saving and management, impressed all who saw him. In 1868 the Company made him Resident Governor at Montreal.
Smith went by rail to St. Paul, then six hundred miles by Dec. 27, 1869 sleigh to Fort Garry. He arrived just as the year ran out. Riel kept him under arrest at the Fort. Smith, being a Scot, said nothing. He gathered information as he could. Riel’s vacillating mind was now this now that. In three weeks he let his prisoner address the citizens, a thousand of them, at the safe temperature of 20 below zero. They were persuaded to elect a convention. French ancestry woke within them. They drew up a Bill of Rights. They arranged for a delegation to Ottawa. They liberated the Fort Garry prisoners.
Up to this time no harm had been done, only one life — of an escaping prisoner — had been taken and that by a sort of accident. A new provisional government was organized, asking nothing better than full provincial status. But Louis Riel now shifted from majesty to murder and that changed everything.
What happened was this. The Canadian and English party, mustering at Portage la Prairie, made an unsuccessful march on Winnipeg. They were too few to fight. Riel gathered in forty-eight as prisoners. Major Boulton was ordered for immediate execution but Riel’s nerve, under Smith’s warning, failed. Thomas Scott, liberated before, had been retaken. He struck at a guard, defied Riel and swore to kill him when free. Riel’s S. Steele, “Forty Years in Canada.” 1915 council condemned Scott to death. He was put against a wall of Fort Garry, where a firing squad shot him half dead. Someone with a revolver finished him. A hundred and fifty people looked on. A story runs that later he stirred again in his coffin in the Fort, and was again despatched. This was plain, brutal murder. That was all Ontario knew or ever wanted to know about Louis Riel. That was the reason for the singular satisfaction in the province at his execution in 1885. Till this moment Ontario cared little about the Red River troubles. It was now lashed to a fury of anger. The ‘delegates’ arriving from the West were arrested for the murder, then released for want of cause.
Meantime a strange calm settled over Fort Garry. There was no more violence. Sir John A. Macdonald at Ottawa knew exactly what he wanted — to get the outbreak in the palm of his hand and then close it. Till he could have force, he spoke Fort Garry fair. Parliament drew up and adopted the Manitoba Act for provincial government as of July 15, 1870. But Riel’s delegates had no part in it.
At Macdonald’s request the Imperial Government organized Lord Wolseley, 1885 a Red River Expedition under Colonel Garnet Wolseley. In it were 400 Regulars, and 800 Canadian militiamen, mostly of Ontario. It was announced as gently as if the men were missionaries. They were to guarantee peace. But the Ontario militia at least knew exactly what they meant to do to Riel. Their route lay by way of the Lakes and the Lake of the Woods portages. The story of this expedition reads like an Odyssey of shout and song and feats of strength. With them were Crimean veterans of the past like Wolseley himself, and soldiers of the future — Captain Redvers Buller, a giant in strength, an ideal soldier whose fame was later on to be eclipsed by the Tugela disaster. There were Canadian soldiers of the future, too, such as young Sam Steele, the famous Major-General of the Great War. The Aug. 29, 1870 Expedition reached its goal but the rebels had long since received news of its coming and had vanished to their homes. They had nothing to stay for. Wolseley’s own advance message assured them of amnesty. They knew already that the Manitoba Act (Sir) W. Butler, “The Great Lone Land,” 1872 granted them full provincial government. Riel stayed awhile with the idea of a formal reception of Wolseley. Then he thought better of it and vanished over the border.
The Government, as said, had already adopted the Manitoba Act which guaranteed the Roman Catholic religion and schools in almost, but unfortunately not quite, the same words as those of the B.N.A. Act. This was to make it a lawyer’s harvest when the Manitoba School Question convulsed Canada twenty years later.
Meantime the province began its life inside its ‘postage stamp’ boundaries of 1870. Donald Smith had become the man of destiny of the West. Chief Commissioner of the Hudson’s Bay Company in Canada, he refused the new Lieutenant-Governorship of Manitoba. He had seen enough of small puddles. He was elected in 1871 and re-elected 1872 and 1878 to the Ottawa House of Commons, becoming a master of politics. When he had too few votes in a riding he made a temporary move of Hudson’s Bay half-breeds out of another. For this he was unseated in 1879. But his vision for some time was elsewhere than on politics. If the North-West was to be opened, he proposed to open it himself. His foresight saw already the approaching Manitoba boom and the coming of a Pacific railway.
With the end of the Red River troubles and the organization of Manitoba, settlers began moving in by way of the Minnesota Railway to St. Paul and the stage and river-steamers beyond, and presently (1880) by rail from Minnesota clear to Manitoba itself. The occupation of the land was facilitated by the Homestead Act of 1872, modelled on the United States legislation of 1862 which was rapidly filling the American west. Meantime new surveys struck out across the plains, looking for the railway G. Grant, “From Ocean to Ocean,” 1873 route to the Pacific that was to consolidate the union. The stage was all set for the Manitoba boom.
The admission of Manitoba to the Dominion was followed in 1871 by that of British Columbia. This magnificent province of 366,000 square miles in extent, with its happy climate, immense resources and its Pacific outlook, is an empire in itself. Yet for three centuries it lay all unknown to the world while Europe struggled for America. The Spaniards coasted its shores as far back as 1774. Later they made landings at Nootka Sound. Even before that, Russian whalers and explorers descended the upper west coast of America. British knowledge of the Pacific coast begins with Captain Cook’s voyage of 1778 along its shores to the Behring Strait. Captain Vancouver followed in 1792, discovering E. S. Meany, “Vancouver’s Discovery of Puget Sound,” 1907 the entry to Puget Sound. Alexander Mackenzie came overland to the Pacific in 1793. Simon Fraser, another North-Wester, followed, established Fort George just over the divide, and in 1786 a fort on the river that bears his name. David Thompson descended the upper Columbia in 1811. When the fur trade was consolidated the Hudson’s Bay Company made the Pacific slope their Western District. Their chief representative was James Douglas, whose long career fills the annals of the Sir James, 1863 Pacific till Confederation.
The stockaded Fort Vancouver on the Columbia was the original centre of the trade. Other traders found their way from England round the Horn. The independence of the United States after 1783 brought American traders. The ship Columbia sailing 1792 out of Boston found the mouth of a great river, south of Puget Sound, and gave its name to it. The Columbia sailed home by way of China, traversing fifty thousand miles of sea. At Boston they R. H. Coats and R. E. Gosnell, ‘Sir James Douglas,’ “Makers of Canada,” 1908 struck medals for it. Lewis and Clark made their way overland in 1805-6 from the Missouri down the Columbia to the sea. John Jacob Astor founded his Pacific Fur Company in 1811. The Americans called the whole country by the vague Indian name of Oregon. The Hudson’s Bay Company traders, mostly Scottish, unable to use ‘Nova Scotia’ twice, called their part of it New Caledonia. The Spanish claims had been extinguished by a convention of 1794. The Russian boundary was settled by a treaty of 1825.
