A Snug Little Flock : the Social Origins of the Riel Resistance, 1869-70
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University of Calgary PRISM: University of Calgary's Digital Repository Libraries & Cultural Resources Libraries & Cultural Resources Research & Publications 1991 A snug little flock : the social origins of the Riel Resistance, 1869-70 Pannekoek, Frits, 1949- Winnipeg, Manitoba : Watson and Dwyer http://hdl.handle.net/1880/44197 book Downloaded from PRISM: https://prism.ucalgary.ca The Social Origins of the Kiel Resistance 1869-70 FRITS PANNEKOEK The spiritual staff provided for the snug little flock [to each clergyman 161 persons, based on the census of 1849] consists of one English Bishop and five Church of England missionaries, who are equally balanced by one Catholic Bishop and five French priests. Alexander Ross, Red River A SNUG LITTLE FLOCK The Social Origins of the Kiel Resistance of 1869-70 Frits Pannekoek Watson & Dwyer Publishing Winnipeg, Manitoba © 1991 Frits Pannekoek All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from Watson & Dwyer Publishing Ltd., except for brief excerpts used for critical reviews. Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Pannekoek, Frits, 1949- A snug little flock : the social origins of the Kiel Resistance of 1869-70 ISBN 0-920486-48-7 (bound) - 0-920486-50-9 (pbk.) 1. Red River Rebellion, 1869-1870. 2. Metis - Social conditions I. Title FC3214.P3 1990 971.05'! C90-097204-1 F1063.P3 1990 Watson & Dwyer acknowledges with gratitude the continuing support for its publishing program by the Manitoba Arts Council. PRINTED AND BOUND IN CANADA by Hignell Printing Limited Watson & Dwyer Publishing Ltd. 232 Academy Road Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada R3M OE7 To W. L. Morton vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the people that have helped see this manuscript through to publication. lan Clarke and Carl Betke have always been ready with a much appreciated careful and critical eye. John Foster and Shirlee Anne Smith read earlier versions of this manuscript and were ever helpful in their criticisms. Michael Carley deserves special thanks for the encouragement and gentle proddings he gave me to finish the manuscript. I am particularly indebted to the Aid to Scholarly Publishing Programme of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council which assisted in funding the publication of this book and to Helen Burgess whose keen interest in the manuscript ensured its publication. I also wish to acknowledge Lewis G. Thomas who first interested me in the history of the pre-1870 West and to William Lewis Morton who so thoughtfully and critically assessed many of my early ideas on Red River's social history. While I know that Irene Spry would want it known that she disagrees with many of the concepts in the book, her sharp and careful observations over the years have much improved many of the arguments. Most important I would like to thank Kit Merkel, my assistant, for entering in the manuscript and putting up with too many revisions. F. Pannekoek October 1,1990 Table of Contents Acknowledgements vi Preface 1 Introduction 7 1 The Red River Setting 17 2 A Question of Leadership 39 3 The First Years 59 4 A Little Britain in the Wilderness 79 5 Free Trade and Social Fragmentation 97 6 A Strife of Blood 119 7 The Rev. G. O. Corbett and an Uprising of the People 143 8 The Halfbreeds and the Riel Protest 171 9 The Me"tis and the Riel Protest 189 10 Conclusion 207 Historiographical Note 215 Selected Bibliography 229 End Notes 247 Index 269 This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Social Science Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Preface Questions about the identities of the mixed-blood Indian- European peoples of Canada and the United States have puzzled historians and anthropologists in both countries. Who are the mixed- bloods of North America? Why do they have a strong collective identity in Canada, and virtually none in the United States? Why is the collective identity in Canada largely French-Cree and Catholic? What happened to the English-speaking Protestant Halfbreeds? Why do the Protestant, English-speaking mixed-bloods no longer exist as a unique group either in Canada or in the United States, but identify themselves as White, Indian or Me"tis in Canada and Indian or White in the United States? While it has become commonplace to view mixed-blood peoples as products of the culture and economy of the fur trade, it is much more difficult to trace the roots of the process that created an identifiable Me"tis 'nation'. It is even more difficult to determine why no strong mixed-blood identity emerged in the United States. Nineteenth-century American fiction reflects the ambivalent American mind on the mixed-bloods of North America. In his The Half Blood: A Cultural Symbol in 19th Century American Fiction (Lexington, 1979), William J. Scheick wonders about the mixed-blood in the nineteenth-century American mind: Does he represent a new, wonderful natural link between red and white races symbolizing an emergent American identity or does he represent a degenerate, abnormal amalgamation of the worst vices of both races menacing the promise of a New World civilization? Half-blood characters [in American fic- tion] seesaw on this question... He suggests that white Americans saw mixed-blood people more as agents of the French/Indian menace than as allies of New England. But they did not see a new nation symbolizing the strength and future of the American frontier. The lack of a clear place for the American mixed-blood was behind much of the American government policy that endeavoured to 2 A Snug Liale Flock treat the mixed-blood as either White or Indian, but certainly not as the unique manifestation of a separate identity expressing distinctive aspirations. Even more peculiar than the American mixed-blood acceptance of either Indian or European identification, was the Canadian Mdtis response. Adamant about their 'nationhood' in Canada, they nevertheless accepted American designation as Indian or European when they crossed the 49th parallel! Here is a strong suggestion that the Me'tis identity was understood to apply only in British North America, particularly British Rupert's Land. Most scholars accept the concept of the Red River valley of the North as the cradle of Me'tis culture and identity in North America. They agree that it emerged out of the traumatic events of the early nineteenth century, when a long struggle between the London-based Hudson's Bay Company and the various Montreal fur partnerships (which eventually merged as the North West Company) ended in a rationalization of the fur trade. The surplus workforce began to migrate to the agricultural settlement that Lord Selkirk had founded at the forks of the Red and Assiniboine rivers. The mixed-blood settlements at Pembina, now in North Dakota, and nearby St. Joseph, both extensions of the Red River mixed-blood communities, numbered some 2,000 by the mid-1860s. These southern members of the extended Red River mixed-blood family shared with their Red River relatives the buffalo herds on the plain and in the last decades of the nineteenth century pursued the diminishing remnants westward as far as Fort Benton and Wood Mountain. There are those who are prepared to argue that the real ancestors of the Metis of the northern-tier states, and to a lesser degree of Red River, are the fur trade families of the old North West, the area south and west of lakes Superior and Huron that was the heartland of the eighteenth-century fur trade. Unfortunately, a comparative examina- tion of M6tis surnames in American settlements with those in Red River has not been conclusive and much work needs to be done to confirm what is at this moment only an interesting hypothesis. Whatever the origins of the American mixed-bloods, today their descendants live in Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota and Montana. In 1879 Dr V. Havard, Assistant Surgeon to the American government, attempted a very detailed calculation of the mixed-blood population of North America. He found 1,008 mixed- bloods located in Montana, distributed as follows: 15 at the Crow Agency, 20 at Fort Benton, one or two at Wolf Point on the Missouri, 650 on the Milk River near Fort Browning, one to two families at Fort Belknap, one family at Carroll on the Missouri and 300 families in Missoula Country. He further located 25 individuals in Iowa, 130 in Nebraska, 15 in Wyoming, 23 in Idaho, 300 in Oregon, 250 in Washington Territory. If all minor settlements were included, Havard counted a total of 21,691 mixed-bloods in the Northwestern United States. In comparison, he found approximately 11,230 in the British territories: 6,500 in Manitoba, 500 in the Rainy Lake area, and 2,500 in the Saskatchewan country. He extrapolated from these figures an estimated of 40,000 mixed-bloods in North America. Virtually all these M6tis he described in one way or another as 'Canadians' or as descendants of 'Canadians'. To Havard, the Me"tis were Canadians whose culture was rooted in the British Imperial experiences originat- ing north of the 49th parallel. This perception may have emerged from American government policy. American governments had insisted from the beginning that mixed-bloods were either Indian or European and to be treated as such; more importantly they were the responsibility of the British Crown. A case in point showed up in the American government's position on Louis Riel's request for special status on behalf of the American M£tis in 1879.