Policing the Plains | Page 6

Mounted Police. (Photo, Pittaway Studios, Ottawa.)]
[Illustration: HUDSON BAY: R.N.W.M. POLICE WITH DOGS.]
The younger Riel had the "bad eminence" of leading two rebellions in
Western history before winding up his tragic career on the scaffold at
Regina. He it was who opposed the entrance of Governor McDougall to
the Red River in 1869. He it was who, after having stopped the
Governor, rode down and captured Fort Garry in which he and his men
fared sumptuously all that winter out of the Hudson's Bay Company
store. He it was who imprisoned those who opposed him and ordered
the shooting of Thomas Scott, a young Canadian prisoner--an act which
estranged from the rebel chief the sympathy of many who believed that
he had some grounds for protest against the incoming of authority
without any guarantee of the settler's rights.
But the reign of the rebel was not long. The Imperial authorities who
have never forgotten the teaching of history in the loss of the American
colonies, have more than once called the governments in free colonies
to a sense of their duty and have followed up their advice with military
backing if necessary. And both were forthcoming in this case. The hand
of the good Queen Victoria is seen in the following dispatch from Earl
Granville to Sir John Young, Governor-General of Canada:
"The Queen has heard with surprise and regret that certain misguided
persons have banded together to oppose by force the entry of our future
Lieutenant-Governor into our territory in Red River. Her Majesty does
not distrust the loyalty of her subjects in that settlement, and can only
ascribe to misunderstanding and misrepresentation their opposition to a

change planned for their advantage.
"She relies on your Government to use every effort to explain whatever
misunderstanding may have arisen--to ascertain the wants and
conciliate the goodwill of the people of Red River Settlement. But in
the meantime she authorizes you to signify to them the sorrow and
displeasure with which she views the unreasonable and lawless
proceedings which have taken place, and her expectation that if any
parties have desires to express or complaints to make respecting their
conditions and prospects, they will address themselves to the
Governor-General of Canada.
"The Queen expects from her representative that as he will be always
ready to receive well-founded grievances, so will he exercise all the
power and authority she entrusted to him in support of order and the
suppression of unlawful disturbances."
The closing paragraph of this fine message indicates the traditional
British Empire position, that though grievances will be heard and
remedied, there will be no quarter given to any nonsense on the part of
rebels. And it was in keeping with this position that Colonel (later Field
Marshal Sir Garnet) Wolseley was dispatched to the Red River country
with regular troops, who arrived at their destination only to find that
Riel and his forces had decamped before their arrival. Two regiments
from Eastern Canada came later and remained on duty at Fort Garry for
some time after the regulars under Wolseley had returned home.
The Red River country was ushered into Confederation as the Province
of Manitoba, and the Hon. Adams George Archibald, of Nova Scotia,
was sent out from Ottawa in 1870 as Lieutenant-Governor. He took a
rough census of the country and with the resultant crude voters' list the
first regular Western Legislature was soon elected and at work.
But west and north of this little Province of Manitoba, itself sparsely
settled, lay an immense hinterland stretching nearly a thousand miles to
the Rocky mountains and northward to the pole itself. This enormous
area, then commonly called "The Saskatchewan," was unpeopled
except for thousands of Indians, many groups of nomadic

buffalo-hunters mostly half-breeds, a few scattered missions of various
churches, and a large number of Hudson's Bay Company trading posts.
Manitoba was under the oversight of a regularly constituted
Government and Legislature. But out in the vast north-west hinterland
it was a sort of interregnum time, in view of the fact that the Hudson's
Bay Company, which had controlled the country for two centuries, had
given up its charter and authority to the Dominion of Canada which had
legally but not yet visibly taken possession. Or, to change the figure,
the period was, governmentally speaking, a sort of "No man's land"
with one party technically out of possession and the other not yet
recognized by the traders or Indians as being in control. Such a
situation gave a great deal of opportunity for lawlessness by warring
tribes, horse-thieves, whisky peddlers, boot-leggers and all the rest of
that ilk. And the proximity to the American boundary line making
escape easy was an additional temptation to the lawlessly inclined. That
this class did not allow the opportunity to go by unused