Louis Riel founded a Canadian province and was hanged for treason
Louis Riel led the Métis of the Red River in a resistance that forced Ottawa to negotiate the birth of Manitoba. Fifteen years later he led a second, armed uprising, lost at Batoche, and was hanged in 1885 despite the jury urging mercy. Canada still argues over whether he was prophet, patriot or rebel.
Riel was born on 22 October 1844 in St-Boniface, the eldest of eleven children in a devout Métis family. His father had become well known locally for backing Guillaume Sayer, a Métis trader whose case helped break the Hudson's Bay Company's trade monopoly. Bishop Alexandre Taché, keen to steer gifted Métis boys towards the priesthood, sent Riel to the Petit Séminaire de Montréal in 1858. Teachers found him brilliant at languages and philosophy but hot-tempered and intolerant of opposition. After his father died in 1864 he dropped the priesthood, clerked for a lawyer, and saw an engagement collapse because his fiancée's family objected to a Métis husband.
He came home in July 1868 to a settlement under strain. Protestant English-speaking settlers from Ontario were arriving, and the company that had long run Rupert's Land was handing it over to Canada without asking the Métis. When surveyors appeared in August 1869 laying out square townships that sliced across the narrow Métis river lots, Riel's group halted the work, seized Fort Garry and in December declared a provisional government with Riel soon its president. Its demands became the basis for Manitoba's entry into Confederation.
The resistance was stained by one decision. In March 1870 a Métis firing squad executed Thomas Scott, an Ontario man who had quarrelled constantly with his guards. Protestant Canada swore revenge, and biographer Lewis H. Thomas later called it Riel's one great political blunder. Riel fled to the United States, won election to the House of Commons three times without daring to sit, and came to believe he was a divinely chosen prophet.
In 1884 Saskatchewan Métis asked him back, and the North-West Rebellion of 1885 followed. After defeat at Batoche he was tried in Regina for high treason and hanged on 16 November 1885. French Canadians saw a martyr, and the execution split the young country along ethnic and religious lines.
Source: Louis Riel
