The Red River Rebellion was an uprising that took place in Rupert's Land at Assiniboia, near present-day Winnipeg, when Métis rights were threatened by Canada's federal government. Led by Louis Riel, Métis insurgents took control of the area and prevented government surveyors from entering; the rebellion eventuated in a new province for Canada -- Manitoba -- but not without violence, and not without brewing a considerable amount of bad blood between the government and the people of the new province.
Rupert's Land and the Hudson's Bay Company
Rupert's Land was a vast tract of largely-unsettled prairie, forest, and tundra in what is now western Canada. Officially, it was made up of all the land with rivers and streams that drained into Hudson Bay; in modern terms, it covered the area that today comprises Manitoba, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Nunavut, the Northwest Territories, and a sizeable chunk of Ontario. In 1670, Charles II gave it to the Hudson's Bay Company; the area was filled with beavers and other fur-bearing creatures, and aboriginal hunters and trappers who would gladly exchange the furs for European goods, and the HBC fully intended to exploit it to its fullest potential to create a fur-trading empire.
Owning the land meant that the HBC held a trade monopoly, and could sell pieces of it to enterprising settlers at a premium. This was fine in the early days of the fur trade, when the west was still more or less an unknown territory and when Rupert's Land was still mostly unsettled; but by the mid-19th century there was pressure on the colonial government from people in the eastern settlements who wanted trade restrictions lifted and easier access to the West.
Canada became a dominion in 1867 when the British North America Act was signed into existence, but its border looked considerably different then from what it looks like now: it was made up of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick along the Atlantic coast, and Quebec and Ontario huddled around the St. Lawrence River. Rupert's Land was still owned by the HBC, but the pressure for western expansion was growing, exacerbated by fears for Canadian sovereignty in light of the fact that Alaska had just been purchased by the United States.
The simplest answer for the new federal government was to purchase the land from the HBC, thereby bringing it under Canadian control, removing the monopoly, and lifting company restrictions on expansion into the territory in one fell swoop. The Rupert's Land Act of 1868 provided government authorisation for the transfer, and the sale itself was set to take place in 1869.
What everyone failed to consider was that there were already settlers established in Rupert's Land -- the Métis, a minority group who were becoming increasingly concerned by the sudden interest in their territory and the influx of new settlers from the east.
The Métis and the Red River Settlement
In the nineteenth century, the term "Métis" was used almost exclusively to refer to people of mixed French and First Nations ancestry -- usually the products of intermarriage between French coureurs du bois (unlicensed fur traders) and aboriginal women. (The term has a considerably broader definition today; now it refers to anyone of mixed aboriginal and non-aboriginal background, not just French.)
In 1868, the place where the Red and Assiniboine Rivers converge was a prosperous Métis community called the Red River Settlement, and the region that surrounded it was called Assiniboia. The people here were mostly French-speaking farmers, with land divided up into parcels after the style of New France; each family possessed a long, narrow strip of land, with one of the short ends on the riverbank, so that everyone had access to the water. Like most Francophone Canadians at that time, they were also Roman Catholics. A small minority of English-speaking Protestants also lived along the Red River; their numbers were increasing steadily as more people moved westward in anticipation of the Rupert's Land purchase.
Many of the newcomers were perceived by the Métis as being hostile toward Roman Catholics, French-speakers, and the Métis way of life in general. This was only made worse when a federal government minister, William McDougall, gave a team of surveyors the go-ahead to move in to Rupert's Land and begin dividing it into English-style square lots before the land transfer had actually taken place, without consulting its Métis inhabitants -- the government's excuse was that though the Métis had been there for generations, they had no official claim to the land. The gravest insult of all was that the property lines that the Métis had drawn up were to be overruled by the ones created by the surveyors -- as though the Métis didn't even exist, as though their land were free for the taking.
What happened next could not have been entirely unexpected. Prime Minister John A. MacDonald's government had been warned several times that surveying Rupert's Land without consulting anyone who lived there would be unwise: first by a Roman Catholic bishop, next by Robert Machray, the Anglican bishop who presided over Rupert's Land, and finally by William Mactavish, the HBC councillor in charge of the Red River region. Nonetheless, McDougall and his team of surveyors set out for the Red River in late autumn of 1869. As had been predicted, they met with a great deal of resistance.
Rebellion
Rumours of the impending surveys and land transfer had been brewing in the Red River area for some time. To counteract the actions of the federal government, some Métis had banded together into a council to represent Métis interests, headed by Louis Riel. Riel was well-educated and a good orator, which made him eminently suitable for the position; under his guidance, the Métis resistance grew from a few handfuls of people who listened to him denounce the land surveys from the steps of the cathedral at St Boniface to a militia of several hundred strong that met McDougall's party when they attempted to enter Assiniboia. Heavily armed, the Métis turned them away at the border and forced them to retreat into North Dakota; later that day, the same militia took over Fort Garry, the HBC outpost that served as an administrative seat for Assiniboia.
In an attempt to defuse the situation before it became even worse, Mactavish issued a proclamation that called for the Métis to lay down their arms, promising that the council that had been looking after Assiniboia for the HBC would look after Métis concerns. But Riel had no reason to believe that the council would have his people's best interests in mind, and so on 23 November 1869 he proposed that a provisional government made up of Métis be put into place, to enter into direct negotiations with the Canadian federal government.
In the meantime, from North Dakota, McDougall declared himself the new lieutenant-governor of Rupert's Land, claiming that it no longer fell under the jurisdiction of the HBC. Unfortunately, what he didn't know was that the federal government in Ottawa had stalled the sale after hearing of the Métis resistance -- so while his position as a Cabinet minister granted him the authority to take Rupert's Land away from the HBC, ending Mactavish's council's control over it, the delay in Ottawa meant that the land was still not under Canadian jurisdiction. This left Assiniboia in the curious position of having no governing authority at all -- perfect for the implementation of a Métis provisional government.
To their credit, Riel's Métis council held off on establishing such a government for as long as they were able. They drew up a list of rights that they felt the Métis were entitled to and presented them to Mactavish's council. The list contained nothing unreasonable and was mostly composed of clauses to protect the French language and Roman Catholic religion, and conditions that would prevent the Métis culture from being swallowed by that of white European settlers from the east; in fact, the council was beginning to come around and accept that the Métis had legitimate concerns. But there still remained a minority of people who felt otherwise -- that the Métis had no right to be impeding the western expansion of Canada. This "Canadian Party" was led by a group of Anglophones: John Christian Schultz, Charles Mair, and two military men, Colonel Dennis and Major Charles Boulton. They attempted to incite Assiniboia's Anglophone minority to rise up against the Métis, but they met with only lukewarm enthusiasm; however, the small but fervent band was enough to cause concern amongst Riel's council, who took the threat seriously and imprisoned everyone they could find who was associated with the Canadian Party. Boulton managed to escape, fleeing to Ontario.
With no government in place and with the possibility of similar anti-Métis uprisings happening again, the Métis National Committee declared itself a provisional government on 8 December. Its leader was John Bruce; not three weeks later he resigned, and Louis Riel took his place.
Not wanting to appear hostile or unwilling to engage in negotiations with the federal government, Riel created a council made up of equal numbers of Anglophones and Francophones. Canada's Governor General declared an amnesty for all Métis insurgents who would lay down their arms during the negotiations, and a contingent was sent from Ottawa to hear out Riel's list of demands. After a series of meetings in Assiniboia, it was proposed that they relocate to Ottawa to engage in more direct communication with the federal government; Riel agreed, not wanting to prolong an already-unstable situation.
But all the progress came to a halt when the imprisoned members of the Canadian Party escaped from Fort Garry in late January and early February. Some of them fled to the safety of Ontario; but Schultz and Mair, the ringleaders from earlier, were hell-bent on getting rid of the Métis government at any cost. They were joined by another zealous Canadian, Thomas Scott; rejoining Boulton, they managed to muster enough support in parishes downstream from the Red River Settlement to pose a threat that was even more serious than the last time, until they were caught unawares by a contingent of the Métis militia and arrested.
To this point, there had been negligible bloodshed in Riel's rebellion -- diplomacy was working, and it looked as though the Métis would be given their own province, along with the right to self-government. But upon being faced with the Canadian Party for the second time, Riel decided that it was necessary to prove that the Métis ought to be taken seriously. To make an example for future rebels, Thomas Scott, by all accounts a vile and loathesome racist, was sentenced to death for insubordination. He was executed by a firing squad on 4 March 1870.
The federal government was unable to respond in kind for several reasons: Assiniboia was too far away from Canada to send an army, especially since there was no railway in between; it was the dead of winter, so for a force of any reasonable size, covering such a vast distance on foot was completely unfeasible; but most especially, the fact that Assiniboia was not under Canadian jurisdiction meant that Riel and his followers had not broken any Canadian laws. Diplomacy was still the only way forward, and so in April a small group of delegates (not including Riel) set off for Ottawa, where there was growing anger about Scott's execution. Upon their arrival they were immediately arrested for abetting murder; but they were released almost as quickly to enter into negotiations with the government again.
This time their efforts were actualised. John A. Macdonald's Conservatives accepted most of the demands from Riel's list of rights, and an agreement was drawn up that would form the basis of the Manitoba Act.
Aftermath
The Manitoba Act was passed by Parliament on 12 May 1870, formally bringing Manitoba into Confederation as a postage-stamp-sized province surrounding the Red River Settlement. It set forward the rules for government, along with regulations designed to protect the Métis: the Act made a provision for religious schools, a bilingual legislature, and land grants to Métis. Ungranted land would remain the property of the Crown.
Even though the violence had ceased, the government sent out a military detachment as soon as winter ended. It was described as "an errand of peace", but soldiers with muskets entering territory deemed unstable and possibly hostile hardly seem peaceful. There were still pockets of Canadian rebels seeking to bring down the Métis; and upon learning that they intended to lynch him once the military arrived, Riel was forced to flee. They reached the Red River on 24 August, and the rebellion was effectively over.
Already in hiding, Riel was denied amnesty for his execution of Scott and formally exiled for five years in 1875. He would return a decade later when Métis rights were threatened again to lead another uprising: the North-West rebellion.
Sources:
"Selkirk Settlement / Creation of Manitoba (1811 - 1870)". Canada in the Making. http://www.canadiana.org/citm/themes/pioneers/pioneers5_e.html (20 May 2005)
"Red River Rebellion". Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_River_Rebellion (20 May 2005)
"The Red River Rebellion". RCMP March West. http://www.rcmpmarchwest.com/eng/history/events/river/ (20 May 2005)
"The Riel Rebellions". Canada in the Making. http://www.canadiana.org/citm/specifique/rielreb_e.html (20 May 2005)