Lower Fort Garry overlooks Manitoba’s Red River, which flows north to form the broad Lake Winnipeg. The fort rises up on a lonely, quiet stretch of the river, not too far from the geographical center of the North American continent. If one drew a large X on a map of North America, running one line from northern Quebec to Baja California in Mexico, and the other from Florida to the northwestern tip of Alaska, the lines would intersect in southern Manitoba, near Lower Fort Garry.
At only a little over fifty degrees north of the equator, Lower Fort Garry lies only a few hundred miles north of the halfway point between the equator and the North Pole. Despite this equidistance, the climate of the area seems markedly more regulated by the Arctic than the tropics. This part of Canada feels the full blast of the winter winds that blow in from the north and make the area a zone of transition between the agricultural prairie of southern Canada and the northern tundra.
Trees grow in this area, but they are small, stunted things, barely higher than the single-story houses that dot the fields. Few of them grow large enough for a person to wrap both hands around the trunk without being able to touch fingers. In most years, ice still covers parts of Lake Winnipeg in May.
The creamy limestone walls of the fort form a nearly perfect square, and the bastions built at each corner make it look, in fact, like a military fort. But since construction began on the fort in 1846, it always served as a trading fort of the Hudson’s Bay Company in what the traders then called Rupert’s Land. The bastion that seems to protect the fort actually served as washrooms, cookhouses, and storerooms rather than as shelters for cannons or sentries.
Because the fort occupies a high river bluff near a good limestone source, the typical visitor might assume that the builders of Lower Fort Garry had a major military, political, or perhaps economic reason for building it where they did. The fort seems to be the type that would protect the intersection of two great rivers, guard the crossing point of a traditional Indian trail, or serve as a northern boundary against attack.
Any of these could have been the reason, but cursory inspection dispels them all. The fort does not lie at the confluence of rivers or on the intersection of trails. It does not straddle an important boundary, and seems merely to divide one stretch of flat plain from another.
An older fort, the original Fort Garry, occupied a much better spot to the south at the confluence of the Assiniboine and Red rivers in the heart of what became the city of Winnipeg. Old Fort Garry to the south, and not Lower Fort Garry to the north, served as the crossing point of major trails and offered easier connection down to Lake of the Woods on the United States border, and from there into the Great Lakes and the cities of Ottawa and Montreal.
To find the reason why Governor George Simpson of the Hudson’s Bay Company built Lower Fort Garry in 1839, we need to look beyond colonial policy, corporate interests, and economic accounts to Simpson’s sex life. He built it because he had married a respectable white woman, his eighteen-year-old cousin Frances Simpson, and he wanted the fort to protect her. He did not need to protect her from the Indians or from the savage Americans to the south or the French to the east. Simpson built Lower Fort Garry to protect his new bride from having to socialize with his Indian wives and children, who lived at Old Fort Garry.
Like virtually all the men who worked for the Hudson’s Bay Company, Simpson had a succession of Indian wives. Unlike most of these men, who acknowledged Indian women as their “country wives” for at least a few years, and in some cases for life, Simpson led a debauched life with a succession of women whom he acknowledged as merely mistresses and “bits of brown.” At least four Indian and mixed-blood women bore Simpson five children, in addition to two illegitimate daughters born of two white women before he emigrated from Britain (Newman). Some estimates of the number of Simpson’s illegitimate children have been as high as seventy, which led to his being called, insightfully, “the father of the fur trade.”
To accommodate the flow of women in and out of his bedroom, Simpson insisted on a private entrance to his rooms. He dismissed these short liaisons curtly. Even Simpson’s country wives who lived with him a long time and bore his children received scantily better treatment than the women hustled in and out of his special love door.
Simpson deserted one of his country wives pregnant and under the charge of his associate with the instruction to “keep an Eye on the commodity and if she bring forth anything in proper time and of the right color let them be taken care of but if any thing be amiss let the whole be bundled about their business.” At another time Simpson gave the same associate instructions about another of his Indian women: “If you can dispose of the Lady it will be satisfactory as she is an unnecessary and expensive appendage … but if she is unmarketable I have no wish that she should be a general accommodation shop to all the young bucks at the Factory.” If the wife could not be disposed of, Simpson instructed his associate that she be padlocked into a chastity belt to keep her from cavorting with men of lower class (Newman).
By keeping his new white wife at Lower Fort Garry, Simpson sought to protect her from association with the racially mixed couples and their mixed-blood offspring who lived at Old Fort Garry and the nearby community of St. Boniface. The children of Indian women and Scottish or English men became known as half-breeds. The even more numerous offspring of French-Indian alliances became known as Métis, from the French word for “mixed.”
The French colonial government of Canada never succeeded in stimulating massive immigration of French settlers to America the way the British did in the South. From earliest colonial times the French government and religious hierarchy encouraged intermarriage of French soldiers and traders with Indian women as a way of bringing the Indians into the power of the French state and the Catholic Church. As early as 1628, the charter of the New French Company, issued by Cardinal Richelieu, provided that any Indians who converted to Christianity “shall be held to be native Frenchmen.” This enabled them to “inherit and accept gifts and bequests in the same way as subjects born in the realm and native Frenchmen” (Borah). This acceptance of Indians as Frenchmen according to their religion (or culture) rather than a mythical or quasi-scientific notion of “blood” made the French much more accepting of intermarriage with Native Americans.
The contrast between French and British policy appeared clearly in early travel commentaries, such as that of Thomas Forsyth, who visited North America in 1818. According to him, the French Canadian men within one year of arriving in America “will eat, drink, sleep and be hail fellow well met with the Indians, will learn in the course of a few months the Indian language by which means the Indians become attached to the Frenchmen.” He wrote further that most of the French villages consisted of men “who were married to Indian women and followed a life similar to that of the Indian themselves such as hunting, fishing & by which means the Frenchman’s children were related to both parties.” (Forsyth).
The intermarriage of Frenchmen with Indians continued after Canada passed to British control. Britain encouraged Scottish immigration to America, and the Scots also intermarried frequently with Indians, although the English did so only rarely. Following American independence from Britain, many of the loyalist Scots from the south moved north, and they added to the number of mixed marriages in Canada.
With the shortage of white women in the western and northern British colonies in Canada, men practiced a lively commerce in female Indian slaves. Although not legally recognized by the government, men bought and sold women, or even leased them for a certain number of years. They trafficked in Indian and mixed-blood women for cash, to repay gambling debts, and in trade for horses and rum. They auctioned women to the highest bidder much the way Africans were sold at public auctions for Southern plantations. Sometimes Indian or mixed girls as young as nine or ten years of age were sold in this trade (Newman).
After such extensive interbreeding through marriage, slavery, or casual relations, a large mixed-blood population emerged in western Canada. In the nineteenth century the Métis people formed a distinct ethnic group centered on the site of modern Winnipeg. They spoke Michif, a Cree-French creole, and adhered to a mixture of Catholicism and native spiritual belief. For subsistence they depended on the buffalo, which they hunted in annual maneuvers that approached the scale of a military operation complete with ranks and officers. The Métis formed annual caravans of two-wheeled ox-drawn carts that ventured south to St. Paul on the Mississippi River for supplies, which they hauled to Manitoba.
Métis culture combined elements of both Woodland and Plains Indian culture with European heritage. The men wore a bright red sash that readily identified them as Métis, and both men and women wore elaborate beaded patterns on their clothes. Because of their extensive use of floral motifs in their beadwork, the Dakota called the Métis “the flower beadwork people” (McMillan).
While the Métis (Indian-French) controlled the buffalo hunt, the half-breeds (Indian-English and Indian-Scottish) worked as laborers for the Hudson’s Bay Company and as small farmers along the Red River. They grew vegetables, potatoes, and grains for the local trade forts and for York Factory on Hudson Bay, where the growing season was too short even for garden crops.
This complex cultural and economic system of commerce and ethnic relations had been well established in the area for generations when Simpson arrived, but attitudes were changing. The new Victorian era of the nineteenth century looked with increasingly diminished tolerance on the interbreeding of whites with native peoples. New and supposedly scientific theories predicted dire consequences from race mixing: at best it led to criminal behavior and sexual wantonness; at worst it threatened to corrupt and eventually destroy the white European race and thus bring down the British Empire.
Because of Governor George Simpson’s disregard for his own Indian wives, he broke up the traditional system of Hudson Bay men and their country wives. When he brought his white wife Frances to the Red River, he started a new tradition of higher-class men bringing white wives out to the Canadian west. For the first time in that area, men could no longer bring their country wives out in public. He forbade his men to bring their mixed-blood wives even to visit the new fort, much less to meet or in any other way interact with the minute collection of white women housed there.
As early as 1806, the North West Company, the fur-trading rival of the Hudson’s Bay Company, tried unsuccessfully to stop intermarriages between its employees and Indian women by levying a fine of one hundred pounds for engaging in such unions (Newman). As the century progressed, the pressures against mixed marriages increased across North America. Traders, officers, and men who had the slightest claim to being part of educated or polite society followed Simpson’s example and yielded to social pressure and the newly stringent Victorian morals to withdraw from their Indian families. Three centuries of racial mixing in North America suddenly became shameful, unhygienic, unpatriotic, immoral, and in many places illegal.
The history of America is a history of racial and ethnic mixtures from the earliest contacts, and that mixture predates the arrival of European settlers. The Pilgrims, the first Europeans to make permanent settlements in New England, arrived in Massachusetts in 1620, but they found that other whites had already been there. They discovered this inadvertently while robbing Indian graves in search of goods they might use or trade. They were startled by one grave, which contained, in addition to all of the usual Indian goods next to the skeleton of a small child, the skeleton of a man with “fine yellow hair.” This blond-haired man had many typical Indian possessions, but he also had some of the clothing and accoutrements of a European sailor (Cronon). No one knew whether the sailor had been involuntarily cast up on the shore or whether he had voluntarily sought refuge among these people, but the grave made it apparent that he had lived among them for some time. It would be mere guesswork to speculate whether or not this particular blond man sired Indian children who lived, but such unions were common.
White settlers frequently deserted their own communities to live in the civilization of the Indians. White captives who lived among the Indians often refused to return to their own people, preferring to live among the Indians and raise their mixed children as Indians. This reluctance of whites to return created great theological and cultural problems for the settlers, who could not understand how a “civilized” Christian could possibly adopt the life and beliefs of “uncivilized savages.” To combat such losses to the Indians, several colonies passed laws forbidding “Indianizing.”
To help people resist the temptation to join the natives, colonial writers began a wholly new, American genre of literature in their “captive accounts” that depicted Indian capture of settlers in horrifying detail. These tales induced fear of Indians in the reader, but also helped serve as a guide and supposedly as Christian inspiration to the reader who might one day become a captive.
Despite the horrors described in captive accounts, a white trader among the Indians might find that his business thrived if he married an Indian woman. She gave him a status within the kinship organization of the tribe, and her relatives gave him a network of trading partners and helpers. Throughout North America we see evidence of such unions, and the children often attained positions of great respect within the native nations. Alexander McGillivray, the son of a Scottish trader and a Creek mother, became the Emperor of the Creeks in the southeastern United States. The Scottish Ross family produced many generations of leaders among the Cherokee nation.
Even within the white American elite, some important cases of intermarriage with Indians occurred, particularly during the early and crucial years of colonization. After the Virginia settler John Rolfe married Pocahontas, they had a son, Thomas Rolfe, whom Pocahontas bore in England. After his mother’s death he returned to his maternal homeland, where he became a scion of the great families of Virginia including the Randolphs and Bollings (Robert).
Ely S. Parker and his brother, Nicholson Parker, both married white women of prominent families. In 1867, Ely Parker married Minnie Orton Sackett, the daughter of a fellow general in the army. She was a popular socialite in Washington, and General Ulysses S. Grant gave her away at her wedding in the place of her deceased father.
In Alaska, unions of Russian men and native women produced many offspring to whom the Russians usually gave equal rights as Russian citizens and subjects of the czar. When the United States acquired these territories, however, officials sought to deny the mixed-bloods recognition as whites, and to force them into the ranks of Indians.
Some of the Founding Fathers openly encouraged such mixtures. Patrick Henry proposed to the Virginia House of Delegates that the state promote Indian-white marriages by exempting such couples from taxes. He further proposed that the state subsidize Indian-white marriages by offering money as an incentive for mixed couples and to supplement that marriage fee with additional gifts of money at the birth of each mixed-blood child (Johansen and Grinde).
The bill failed to pass, but a similar sentiment was expressed in less monetary though far more ideal terms by Thomas Jefferson at a presidential reception for “Delawares, Mohicons, and Munries” in 1802 when he invited the assembled Indians to mix with the white settlers in every way. In a paternalistic manner he addressed them as his children and said that if they agreed to live under American law and understand private ownership of property, they would join white society.
Jefferson said, rather overoptimistically, “you will unite yourselves with us, join in our great councils and form one people with us, and we shall all be Americans; you will mix with us by marriage, your blood will mix with ours, and will spread, with ours, over this great island” (Padover).
From the time of De Soto’s arrival in Florida, Africans found refuge from European slavery by fleeing to Indian communities. Three of De Soto’s slaves, two Africans and a Moor, became so enchanted with the land of the Lady of Cutifachiqui that they escaped from De Soto and found refuge with the Indians. They stayed on in Cutifachiqui, and according to one narrative account, one of the escaped slaves became the husband of the famed Lady of Cutifachiqui. Throughout De Soto’s rampage from modern South Carolina to the Mississippi River, slaves of African descent escaped and intermarried with the local Indians, making these escaped slaves the first Old World settlers throughout much of the Southeast and the Gulf Coast.
Over the next three centuries, Indian groups throughout the Southeast provided a sanctuary for escaped slaves from the plantations. Some groups, such as the Choctaw and the Seminole, took in large numbers of slaves with ease. Other groups sometimes enslaved the runaways in imitation of colonial practices, but even in these cases the Indians often allowed the slaves to marry and become members of the tribe. The Seminole leader Osceola himself married an African-American woman of slave descent.
Indians and Africans also intermarried on the Southern plantations where both groups were enslaved. The slaveowners cared little which dark-skinned slave married which other dark-skinned slave. It quickly became difficult to tell Indian from African slaves, as is evidenced in many of the newspaper advertisements for runaway slaves. In New Jersey, a 1747 advertisement for a fifty-three-year-old man named Cohansie describes him as having “some Indian blood in him,” and accompanied by an adolescent boy, Sam, who “was born of an Indian woman, and looks like an Indian.” The advertisement continues to say that “they both talk Indian very well, and it is likely they have dressed themselves in the Indian dress and gone to Carolina (Forbes).
Many of the African-Indians appear to us in history only in these rather anonymous forms. We have reports of them, but we do not know them by name or by any other information. One of the first African-Indians whose name was recorded in history was Cripus Attucks, who fell in the Boston Massacre of March 5, 1770, and thus became known as the first patriot to die in the struggle for American independence.
Although little is known about Attucks, he was probably in his early thirties when he died, and was of mixed parentage. He may have been an escaped slave from Framingham, Massachusetts. His Indian heritage is usually cited as Natick, but he is frequently called a mulatto in the historical literature. Attucks was described as a “stout” young man who carried “a large cord-wood stick” at the front of a crowd protesting on the Boston public square against British colonial policy. When the British soldiers fired on the crowd, Attucks dropped after the first volley, with two musket balls lodged in him. He died immediately, as did three other men. Of the eight other men wounded, two subsequently died as well. In the words of the poet John Boyle O’Reilly, published in 1889 to honor the men who fell in the Boston Massacre, Attucks had been “the first to defy, and the first die” (Quarles).
People of African descent found their way into many groups of Indians in some of the most distant parts of the continent. When Henry Rowe Schoolcraft visited the Fond du Lac Ojibwa community near the eastern shore of Lake Superior on one of his early trips of “discovery” in 1820, he found that an African-Canadian had already found them. Bungo, a free African, had traveled through Canada with the British army in the War of 1812, and had married an Ojibwa woman with whom he reared four children at Fond du Lac before Schoolcraft ever arrived.
In colonial North America, intermarriage among Europeans and Indians occurred most frequently in Spanish-controlled lands, including Mexico, Florida, the Caribbean, and the western half of the United States. Like the French, the Spanish government sent soldiers to settle in America, but did relatively little to stimulate the emigration of women. Without European women around them, the soldiers married Indian women. The resulting mestizo class gradually became a majority of the population throughout most of the Spanish areas of North America.
Persistent prejudice in the Spanish colonies against Indian blood caused most people to obscure their Indian heritage and emphasize their Spanish blood. In this way, everyone strove to move up in the racial hierarchy. Indians who could speak Spanish and who wore Mexican clothing became known as mestizos, while many mestizos became white. The eighteenth-century Spanish colonial government sold “certificates of whiteness” to Indians who had mastered Spanish language and culture sufficiently to make enough money to buy such a certificate. Obviously white people, of course, needed no such document to vouch for their Europeanness.
In North America during the nineteenth century, the new social order of the modern industrial and scientific world had no room for mixed-blood and Métis. Excluded from Canadian society and losing their economic position, the Métis began to push for their own land. As pressures increased against them, and as the railroads simultaneously threatened their former livelihood, the Métis began to advocate independence from Britain. Because they were the New People born of both Indians and Europeans, they wanted to create a New Nation on the Red River with its capital at Winnipeg.
The quest for independence became even greater in 1869 when the Hudson’s Bay Company gave its past North American holdings to newly emerging Canada. Known as Rupert’s Land, this region included vast tracts of Indian territory. Under the Montreal-educated Métis Louis Riel, the Métis seized Fort Garry in revolt. The rebels established a provisional government in Winnipeg, and petitioned for admission to Canada as a new province. Even though supported by full-blood Indians and by many of the Anglophone mixed-bloods, Louis Riel and his New Nation failed. By 1870, British authorities had crushed their New Nation.
After the failure of his rebellion, Louis Riel fled to the United States while many of his followers dispersed through Manitoba and Saskatchewan, as far from colonial authorities as possible. Many other Métis also found refuge in Montana as well as North Dakota and Minnesota, but they did not surrender the dream of a new, mixed-blood nation that would include all Americans. Meanwhile, the Canadian government admitted Manitoba as a new, but non-Indian, province, whereupon the Métis repeatedly elected Riel to represent them in the Canadian parliament. But he was never seated.
It was a difficult time for Indians, but it was also a time for exaggerated hopes. The Sioux defeated Custer and his Crow allies at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, and this victory excited many Indian people with new hope for freedom and independence. Like the newly emerging Balkan nations, which had managed to throw off the yoke of Ottoman government, and like many European ethnic groups experiencing a growing sense of nationalism, the American Indians began to see themselves as a united group deserving better treatment.
When deprived of any hope of economic or political solutions to their problems, oppressed people often search for salvation in the spiritual realm. Just as the French had followed the mystic Joan of Arc in their struggle against English occupation, and just as the Spanish had liberated themselves from Muslim occupation by a fanatical Catholicism, Indian leaders in the nineteenth century often turned to spirituality as a means to redress their subjugation. In the United States, the Shawnee prophet Tecumseh led a religious and political movement. In the Southern states, the Red Sticks rose in rebellion under Chief Red Eagle. In the Yucatàn, the Maya revolted while following a blend of traditional and Christian beliefs known as the Talking Cross.
Louis Riel also had a religious vision that he hoped would help his people to find salvation. Like many Catholics of the time, he resented the 1870 declaration of the Church proclaiming the infallibility of the Pope. He felt that the European Church, like the European governments, was out of touch with America. He favored a new religion for the New World, one that would be free of the Pope and would unite American Catholics and Protestants. Like the traditional Indians of his area, the new religion would allow polygamy, but it gave new rights to women, who would always be allowed to select their own mates and not be compelled by a father or anyone else to marry.
Riel showed a scholarly awareness of the hundreds of religious movements across North America during his time, and he borrowed or considered ideas from a variety of them. He thought of celebrating the Sabbath on Saturday as the Jews and the Seventh Day Adventists did. He accepted the Mormon teaching that the Indians of America were related to the Jews. He also supported the creation in Poland of a Zionist homeland for Jews that would be like the new Indian and mixed-blood homeland he wanted to create in America.
Riel wanted to create a pan-Indian confederacy, including all of the Indians and mixed-bloods of the central part of North America. This new nation would offer refuge to all the oppressed of the world, particularly to groups such as the Irish, who had suffered so severely under the British in much the same way that the Indians had suffered under British colonial rule. Riel’s ideal Indian nation would also have close ties with the Indian peoples of Mexico and South America. He wanted to make St. Boniface in Manitoba an educational center that would teach children from throughout Latin America as well as Canada and the United States.
Although Riel hoped for assistance from the American government and repeatedly petitioned President Grant for support, he hoped to position his new nation as a counterweight to the United States, because it would keep the United States from dominating all of North America. Prophetically, he foresaw that Britain needed North America more than America needed Britain; he even predicted that Britain would need help in future wars with Germany (Flanagan).
Riel traveled extensively throughout the United States and returned secretly to parts of Canada in pursuit of his mission. On one of his trips back into Canada, the Canadian authorities seized and imprisoned him in a Quebec insane asylum at St.-Jean-de-Dieu, outside of Montreal. In a preview of twentieth-century treatment of political dissidents, the forces of medical science and the newly emerging field of psychiatry were marshaled against Riel, and he was diagnosed as suffering from delusions of grandeur (Flanagan). He spent much of his time in solitary confinement, tied by modern restraining devices. The authorities released Riel after he recanted his heretical political and religious beliefs.
In 1885 the Métis once again called on Riel for help, but this time the struggle erupted farther west, in Saskatchewan, rather than in Manitoba. The Métis had once taken arms against white settlers who wanted to take over the new farms the Métis had scratched out on the Saskatchewan plains after fleeing the Red River Valley in Manitoba. Knowing the importance of public and world opinion, Riel drew up petitions and wrote defenses of the creation of his new nation. He sought to solve the problem through diplomatic and political means rather than military ones, but that was not to be. This new revolt failed even more quickly than the first. Government forces rushed into Saskatchewan, dismantled the provisional government established by the Métis, and captured and imprisoned Riel. Despite the jury’s plea for mercy toward Riel, the government hanged him on November 16, 1885, in Regina, the new city named for Queen Victoria and her new age of enlightenment and science.
After their crushing defeat, the Métis went through a long period of decline during which most of them had to choose between being Indian or white. Many joined their Indian relatives as Cree or Ojibwa around the western Great Lakes and central plains of Canada and the United States. Many of the Métis families, especially those headed by French-speaking men, settled down to become farmers. They joined the white settlers moving in from Scotland and Eastern Europe. Other Métis moved east, where they joined French-speaking communities in Quebec, Vermont, and Maine.
The nineteenth century proved a hard epoch for North American Indians. In some ways it was the hardest of all since the Europeans had first arrived in America. During that century, white society tried in many ways to bar Indians and mixed-bloods from membership in the greater society; academic, government, and religious leaders tried to purge the white race and to undo three hundred years of race mixing.
Today the body of Louis Riel lies in a simple graveyard in St. Boniface, on the banks of the Red River, across from modern downtown Winnipeg. He lies in the graveyard of what was the Basilica of St. Boniface, but today the building is only a hulking shell, gutted by fire in 1968. The massive neo-classical facade stands hollow, deserted, and naked. The giant hole in the front left by the shattered stained-glass rose window stares out at the river like the blind eye of a giant cyclops. It seems ironically fitting that Riel should be buried before a destroyed church, since he spent so much time trying to rip the American church out of European hands.
Riel remains today as controversial a figure in Manitoba and Saskatchewan politics as he was in his own lifetime. Graffiti on odd walls around Winnipeg glorify or vilify him, and on radio stations the visitor can still hear songs dedicated to him. Riel symbolizes the rich mixture of cultures, genes, and ideas that created the modern population of North America. He also symbolizes the independent-minded people of the West who sought control over their own communities against the political, religious, and financial powers of the East.
English, native, and French musicians composed ballads, reels, and jigs in English and in French dedicated to Louis Riel and his quest for a totally new nation for the new mixed-blood culture that arose in North America. One such ballad, commonly available on cassette tape throughout Indian lands in the Canadian west, poses the question of who Louis Riel was, and answers that Louis Riel lives in all North Americans. The mixed-blood singers repeatedly emphasize their loud refrain, “It is we who are Louis Riel.”