Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/144909
Then the coyotes begin a music of their own, ancient and dissonant. A fog rolls in and it seems a good time to slip across the grass to tent and sleep. I drift off thinking how Dumont himself might well have slumbered in this exact spot on the ground, he who knew the prairie before roads and fences yet saw the future as the statesman he was. There is no better way to understand the Metis circa 1885 than to peer into the life of this remarkable man who has been called a 19th-century Che Guevara. Dumont was born in 1837 in the Metis Red River Settlement of what is now Manitoba. Like his father, he made the usual Metis living hunting bison. He migrated slowly west with his kinsmen and met his bride, Madeleine Wilke, in the Dakota country. Even by 1860, the Dumonts knew the bison and the old ways were fading. So Gabriel set himself up as a ferryman on the South Saskatchewan, opening a general store near his landing and becoming leader of the Saint Laurent Settlement in 1873 – the first local government between Winnipeg and the Rockies. He could not read or write, but he spoke six languages and concluded formal treaties with the Cree and Sioux. Visionary and pragmatic, Dumont saw that the French language and the Catholic faith would be second-class in the new Canadian West. The narrow river-lot farms of the Metis laid in the seigneurial system were bound to conflict with the grid of the advancing Dominion Land Survey. Dumont sent word to Louis Riel to return from exile in the United States and asked him to lead the St. Laurent Metis to statehood – as Riel had very nearly done in 1870 in Red River. Riel did return, and on March 19, he announced a Metis-led provisional government at Batoche. It would last just three months. Riel would be dead on a Regina gallows November 16 of that year, hanged as a traitor, and Dumont would take his own turn in exile in the U.S. In the morning sunshine it is hard to tear ourselves away from Petite Ville. We walk the site in little groups, pick berries and talk about how the Metis got brushed aside when the country was born. Literally the children of a new society, with ties to both First Nations and European cultures, the Metis were our natural diplomats. But unlike the similarly placed mestizos, who became the face of modern Latin America, Canada's Metis were sidelined. Their sensible ideas about protecting minority language and culture, formed in 1870, would eventually become enshrined in the constitution. Too bad it took more than 100 years. It is nearly noon before we get on the water, though it is not far to the take-out point at the National Historic Site of Batoche, even with a stiff headwind. We soon pass the bend in the river that many still call Gabriel's Crossing, though a metal highway bridge now stands at his ferry landing. After a few hours of easy paddling, a cross high on the riverbank marks Dumont's grave at Batoche and the end of our trip. Following the failed uprising, Dumont went south and joined Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show as a marksman. When amnesty was granted to the "rebels," he returned to the St. Laurent Settlement in time to see the province of Saskatchewan born. He died a year later. Allan Casey is a long-time contributor to Westworld. His book, Lakeland: Ballad of a Freshwater Country, won the 2010 Governor General's Award for non-fiction. Visit allancasey.ca. WESTWORLD p22-27_MetisCountry.indd 27 >> S U M M E R 2 0 1 2 27 4/13/12 12:01:06 PM