The North-West Rebellion (French: Rébellion du Nord-Ouest) was an armed rebellion of Métis under Louis Riel and an associated uprising of Cree and Assiniboine mostly in the District of Saskatchewan, against the Canadian government. Important events included the Frog Lake incident, and the capture of Batoche.
The North-West Rebellion began in March 1885 after Louis Riel returned from political exile in the U.S. With the assistance of Métis leader Gabriel Dumont, Riel declared a provisional government on March 18, and rebel territory was carved out. As government forces responded, fighting broke out, with the last shooting over by the end of June.
Rebel forces included roughly 250 Métis and 250 First Nations men, largely Cree and Assiniboine, who were led by Big Bear and Poundmaker and other First Nations chiefs. A non-Indigenous man, Honoré Jackson, served as Riel's secretary. Defence of the government of Canada depended on a force of 5,500 men, including North-West Mounted Police, armed loyal residents of the North-West Territories, and Canadian militia units from Ontario and Quebec, brought west by train.
Riel's rebels seized many small settlements in what are now the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan, including Fort Carlton, Fort Pitt, Battleford and Frog Lake. They won victories at Duck Lake and Fish Creek. But overwhelming government forces and a critical shortage of supplies wore down the rebels. Government forces finally quashed the rebellion by winning the Battle of Batoche.
Cree and Assiniboine fighters suffered from the same imbalance and, despite achieving limited victories at Cut Knife, Frenchman's Butte and Loon Lake, surrendered in June and early July. Following the defeat of Indigenous forces, several chiefs were put on trial, found guilty, and served prison time. Eight Indigenous men were hanged in Canada's largest mass hanging, for murders committed outside the military conflict. Following the end of the Rebellion, Louis Riel was captured, put on trial, and convicted of treason. Despite pleas for clemency from many across Canada, he was hanged.
Nomenclature
The conflict is referred to by several names, including the North-West Rebellion, the North-West Resistance, the 1885 Resistance, the Northwest Uprising, the Saskatchewan Rebellion, and the Second Riel Rebellion. The conflict, grouped with the Red River Rebellion, is collectively referred to as the Riel Rebellions.
The terms rebellion and resistance can be used almost synonymously. Academics state the use of one term or the other changes the perspective of how a conflict is understood. Indigenous studies scholars and many historians refer to Indigenous uprisings in reaction to European colonization as resistances—Indigenous nations self-governed the land before the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) and then the Canadian government exerted its sovereignty over it. Use of the term resistance has spread to several organizations and publications - Canadian Geographic, The Canadian Encyclopedia, and the Provincial Archives of Saskatchewan.
Background
After the Red River Rebellion of 1869–1870, many Métis moved from Manitoba to the Fort Carlton region of the North-West Territories, where they founded the Southbranch settlements of Fish Creek, Batoche, St. Laurent, St. Louis, and Duck Lake on or near the South Saskatchewan River. In 1882, surveyors began dividing the land in the newly formed District of Saskatchewan according to the Dominion Land Survey's square township system. The established Métis farms were laid out in the seigneurial system, narrow strips stretching up from a river. The Métis were familiar with this system from their French-Canadian culture. After the experience of the 1869 Red River rebellion, surveyors were allowed to make exceptions to the standard survey practice, to accommodate pre-existing riverlot farms within two kilometres of a river. But that was scant consideration of the old-time communities. Outside accepted riverlot groupings, the survey imposed a standard grid on the land, allocating particular numbered sections in each township to the HBC and the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR).
The 36 families of the St. Louis settlement found, after the Dominion Land Survey was done, that the Crown had sold their farms and the village site, which included a church and a school (in Township 45, Range 7 west of the 2nd Meridian of the Dominion Land Survey), to the Prince Albert Colonization Company. The families feared the loss of their homes and farms, which, now that the buffalo herds were gone, were their primary source of sustenance.
In 1884, the Métis in the Southbranch settlements (including many Anglo-Métis) sent a delegation to ask Louis Riel to return from the United States, where he had fled after the Red River Rebellion, to appeal to the government on their behalf. He came and sent an appeal to the government. The government gave a vague response. The following year, on March 8, 1885, Riel and other prominent Métis at Batoche passed a 10-point "Revolutionary Bill of Rights" that asserted Métis rights of possession to their farms and demanded, among other things, that the government establish an office dealing with land issues in the North-West.
On March 18, 1885, Riel, Gabriel Dumont, Honoré Jackson (a.k.a. Will Jackson), and others took the seminal step of setting up the Provisional Government of Saskatchewan, believing they could influence the federal government in the same way as they had in 1869.
But much had changed since the Red River Rebellion. A railway had been completed across the prairies in 1883, though sections were not yet completed north of Lake Superior in Northern Ontario and in the Rockies. Even in its uncompleted state, the CPR eased the transit of government troops to Qu'Appelle. Qu'Appelle was more than 2,900 km (1,800 mi) from Toronto and 260 km (160 mi) in direct line from Batoche.
The North-West Mounted Police (NWMP), created in 1874, served as an armed force as well. Its local detachments provided government presence at some trouble spots, at least potentially protected vulnerable settlements, and also provided guidance and local knowledge to the neophyte Ontario and Quebec militia troops.
As violence broke out, it became clear that English-speaking settlers on the prairies and the great majority of First Nations did not support Riel. Catholic officials saw as heresy Riel's claim that God had sent him back to Canada as a prophet, and they tried to minimize his support. Catholic priest Albert Lacombe worked to obtain assurances from Crowfoot that his Blackfoot warriors would not participate in a conflict.
The First Nations were also frustrated at conditions at the time. By the end of the 1870s, the stage was set for discontent among the Indigenous people of the prairies: fur-bearing animals and bison were scarce (causing enormous economic and food supply difficulties) and, in an attempt to assert control over the Indigenous population, federal government officials sometimes held back rations, violating the terms of the treaties they had signed just prior.
First Nations' dissatisfaction with the treaties and rampant poverty spurred Cree chief Big Bear to embark on a diplomatic campaign to renegotiate the terms of the treaties. (The timing of this campaign coincided with widespread frustration among Métis but it seems the Cree and Métis did not act in unison.)
Some Cree took violent action in the spring of 1885, when the rebellion of Riel and the Métis was happening at same time, but at least one researcher states that they were almost certainly unrelated. In both the Frog Lake Massacre and the Looting of Battleford, small dissident groups of Cree men revolted against white authorities, ignoring the leadership of Big Bear and Poundmaker. Although he quietly signalled to Ottawa that these two incidents were the result of desperate and starving people and were, as such, unrelated to the ongoing Métis rebellion, Edgar Dewdney, the lieutenant governor of the North-West Territories, publicly claimed that the Cree and the Métis had joined forces.
Demographics
The 1885 census of Assiniboia, Saskatchewan and Alberta reported a total population of 48,362. Of this, 20,170 people (about 40 percent) were Status Indians.
The District of Saskatchewan, part of the North-West Territories in 1885, was divided into three sub-districts and had a population of 10,595. To the east, the Carrot River sub-district, with 1,770 people, remained quiet. The Prince Albert sub-district in the centre of the district had a population of 5,373 which included the Southbranch settlements with about 1,300. The South branch settlement was the centre of Louis Riel's Provisional Government of Saskatchewan during the conflict. To the west, the Battleford sub-district where the Cree uprising of people in bands led by Poundmaker and Big Bear occurred, had 3,603 people.
The largest settlement and the capital of the district was Prince Albert with about 800 people followed by Battleford with about 500 people who were "divided about equally between French, Métis and English".
The Métis population in Saskatchewan in 1885 was about 5,400. A majority tried to stay neutral in the dispute with the national government, as the priests recommended. About 350 armed men supported Riel. A smaller number opposed him, led by Charles Nolin. In addition, he had the support of a small number of members of First Nations. Riel's supporters included the older, less assimilated Métis, often with close associations with the First Nations population. Many moved back and forth into First Nations communities and preferred to speak Indigenous languages more than French. Riel's opponents were younger, better educated Métis; they wanted to be more integrated into Canadian society, not to set up a separate domain as Riel promised.
Course and suppression
On March 18, 1885, Riel, Gabriel Dumont, Honoré Jackson (a.k.a. Will Jackson), and others set up the Provisional Government of Saskatchewan. Riel had been invited in to lead the movement, but he turned it into a military action with a heavily religious tone, thereby alienating the Catholic clergy, the whites, nearly all of the First Nations, and most of the Métis. He had a force of a couple hundred Métis and a smaller number of First Nations at Batoche in May, confronting isolated groups of armed settlers, HBC trading posts and NWMP detachments, and two small militia units at Winnipeg.
Reports of the provisional government were discredited at Ottawa and at first thought to be a device of the Liberal party, but on March 23 Prime Minister Macdonald publicly confirmed the news of the rebellion. Immediately the federal government sent Major General Frederick Middleton, the commander of the Canadian Militia, to Winnipeg, where a militia unit, the 90th Winnipeg Rifles, and a militia artillery unit, the Winnipeg Field Battery, already existed. Eventually, over a period of many weeks, Middleton brought 3,000 troops to the West, and incorporated another 2,000, mostly English-Canadian volunteers, and 500 North-West Mounted Police into his force. They were formed into three columns that independently marched north from separate points along the CPR main-line.
Hearing that rebels had seized Duck Lake, a settlement near Batoche, a force of 90 Prince Albert Volunteers and North-West Mounted Police, led by their superintendent Leif Newry Fitzroy Crozier, set off from Fort Carlton on March 26 to confront the rebels. They were stopped and turned back by 150 to 200 Métis and Aboriginal fighters, under the command of Gabriel Dumont, in the Battle of Duck Lake.
On March 30, a group of armed Cree, short of food due to declining bison populations, approached Battleford. The inhabitants fled to the nearby North-West Mounted Police post at Fort Battleford. The Cree then took food and supplies from the abandoned stores and houses.
In March, Fort Carlton was destroyed by fire accidentally as it was being evacuated.
Government mobilization
After the declaration of a provisional government, lawlessness in the Batoche area, and the Battle at Duck Lake, the government immediately commenced the mobilization of some of Canada's ill-equipped part-time militia units (the Non-Permanent Active Militia), as well as the units of cavalry, artillery and infantry regulars that made up the tiny Permanent Active Militia, Canada's almost-nonexistent regular army.
By March 30, after hasty mobilization in Toronto, two trains containing the 10th Royal Grenadiers and the 2nd Queen's Own Rifles militia battalions were ready to leave Toronto. Other militia units, the 9th Voltigeurs from Quebec City and the 65th Mount Royal Rifles from Montreal, were also quickly mobilized. Soon every major city in the East was the scene of embarkation for inexperienced young militiamen cheered by immense crowds.
Many of the soldiers suffered from the winter weather during the transit to the trouble spot. The militia struggling westward had to contend with the many large breaks in the CPR line in northern Ontario. They marched through snow or were carried in exposed sleighs. They rode on rustic railway flatcars over the completed stretches of track, which did not shelter them from the cold. During the campaign the troops dealt with snow, muskeg and black mud.