Minnesota and the Métis

Our last post left our story at the potential of the Red River Rebellion bringing Manitoba into the United States. However, we must now describe the relationship between the Métis and the state of Minnesota. Much of the state’s early commerce involved the Red River Métis. Recall, the Métis sustained themselves through buffalo hunting. Using the Red River Cart, a wheeled vehicle of Métis design, they brought thousands of buffalo hides and robes to the tiny cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul to trade for goods of European manufacture. (Note the steamer trunks and fancy plates in the image below.)

These were the years before the Great Northern Railway extended from St. Paul across the northern plains. Much of Minnesota’s commerce arrived via the Red River Cart trails pioneered by the Métis to towns such as Calgary and Fort Benton. When Washington’s first territorial governor, Isaac Stevens, traveled west from St. Paul in 1853, he traveled on Métis cart trails. His escorts were Métis guides such as Pierre Bottineau. US military engineer John Mullan, from whom the Mullan Road takes its name, found his route when he met Métis Johnny Grant in 1853.

But the relationship was about more than commerce. Consider the map of Minnesota Territory.

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Note the large swath of land to the west of the Red River that isn’t part of Minnesota today. There’s a story here, and it, too, involves the Métis. When Minnesota Territory applied for statehood in 1858, the Métis living in the Turtle Mountains/Pembina area participated in the vote on the new state constitution. In fact, the Métis provided the deciding votes that brought Minnesota Territory into the US in 1858. However, once Minnesota gained statehood, leaders (including Alexander Ramsey) placed the boundary with the Dakotas at the Red River. This left the Métis out of Minnesota and relegated them to Dakota Territory. They’d been used.

So, then, little more than one decade later, one can imagine the Métis might be wary of American advances. President Grant further reduced American chances when he announced that he favored acquisition of the northern plains above the 49^th parallel by any means short of war. In so doing, he gave up any chance of bluffing Britain and Canada into a land cession. For one of the rare times in the mid-19^th century, the US failed at the game of territorial acquisition.

Fallout for the Métis after 1869

There’s still more going on here, however. The importance for Canadian history is immense. Even with the chances of the northern prairies falling into US hands diminishing, the Canadian government still had to deal with the angry Métis of the Red River. Over the winter of 1869-70, occasional fighting took place between the Métis and Canadians from Ontario seeking to gain access to land. The Métis captured one of these men, Thomas Scott. They imprisoned him in Upper Fort Garry, then executed the trespasser. This enraged the Protestant population of Ontario, who then called for the blood of the Roman Catholic Métis.

Things might’ve gotten further out of hand. However, negotiations were in process, and the Métis and the Dominion of Canada agreed to the Manitoba Act in 1870. Besides creating the Canadian province of the same name, the act also provided the Métis with 1.4 million acres of land, so they could pursue their traditional lifestyle even as white Canadian settlers moved in around them.

The Canadian government, it seemed, had unraveled all the knots of the problem, and found a (mostly) peaceful solution. But it couldn’t stop there. Recall the anger in Ontario over the killing of Thomas Scott. Angry vigilantes swarmed into the Red River Valley. Canadian Prime Minister Sir John Macdonald finally had the military strength and troops to enforce order by the summer of 1870. He did not do so, however. Instead he placed a $5,000 bounty on Louis Riel’s head, forcing him to flee to the US. Violence against the Métis mounted. Soon, their lives were in such danger that many dispersed to the south and west.

Nor was that all. The 1.4 million acres guaranteed to the Métis? Well, in 1870 Canada passed an act that, essentially, stripped people involved in mixed Indian-white marriages of their property rights in the name of “civilizing” them. This, by definition, included all the Métis. It seemed Canadian authorities had taken good notes from American methods of dispossessing native people.

Denouement

This ends the story of how a modest community of a few thousand mixed-blood people played a critical role in shaping the destiny of two transcontinental nations. With the Red River cleared of opposition, Canadian settlers found their way west to populate the Prairie Provinces and extend Canadian authority from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It also closed the era of nation-building in North America—so far, for good.

Things ended less well for the Métis. They made one more attempt to establish themselves as a nation. This was the Northwest Resistance of 1885 in Saskatchewan. But the Battle of Batoche resulted in their defeat. Canadian authorities captured Louis Riel (who’d returned from Montana, where he’d been teaching at St. Peter’s Mission in the eastern foothills of the Rockies), hung him, and, once again, the Métis scattered. But with no homes to return to, and no more buffalo to hunt by the mid-1880s, they became the so-called “landless Indians” of Montana, scraping a meager existence on the outskirts of towns throughout eastern Montana or living in shacks of coulee logs scattered throughout the north-central part of the state.

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