Gabriel Dumont (Métis Leader)

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Gabriel Dumont

Gabriel Dumont (* December 1837 in the Red River Colony , † May 19, 1906 in St-Isidore-de-Bellevue , Saskatchewan ) was a fur hunter and dealer as well as political and military leader of the Canadian Métis . During the Northwest Rebellion in 1885, he was elected President of the Saskatchewan Provisional Government and was the rebel military leader.

youth

Gabriel's father Isidore was the son of a French fur trader and a Sarcee woman. After their marriage, Isidore and his wife Louise Laframboise moved from their native Fort Edmonton to the Red River Colony in 1833 , where they lived near Saint-Boniface in what is now Saskatchewan on a small farm for farming, buffalo and fur hunting . Gabriel was born there in 1837 as the couple's third child.

In the 1840s, the buffalo hide trade boomed and the family moved to Fort Pitt (now Saskatchewan), closer to the hunting grounds. In 1848 they moved back to the Red River to White Horse Plain , but buffalo hunting remained, as with most Métis, their main occupation, and Gabriel participated in the hunt at the age of 14. In 1853 he was also involved in a battle in the Plains against a group of Sioux around hunting grounds, and experienced the tactics typical of the Métis of shooting from shooting pits. However, this would be his only battle experience before the Northwest Rebellion.

Life on the prairie

In the years that followed, the family followed the declining buffalo populations westwards. Dumont's mother died in 1858, and in the same year he married Madeleine Wilkie, the daughter of the hunt leader of the White Horse Plain. In 1863 he himself became the leader of around 200 hunters at Fort Carlton , a position he held until the buffalo disappeared from the Plains around 1880. In 1868 his hunting community settled near Batoche on the South Saskatchewan River . During the Red River Rebellion of 1869–1870 in what is now Saskatchewan's neighboring province of Manitoba , Dumont claims that he offered his people's support to rebel leader Louis Riel , but there is no evidence to support this claim, and it seems likely that Dumont didn't meet Riel for the first time until 1884.

In the wake of the Red River Rebellion, many Métis fled to South Saskatchewan and Dumont directed and organized their activities and the collaboration with the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC), which administered the entire west of Canada. He himself achieved relative prosperity during this time with trade and a ferry across the river. The new congregation organized itself into an administration whose president Dumont became in 1873. Some Métis opposed the new administration and complained to the HBC representative, who passed the complaint on to Governor Alexander Morris . A division of the new North-West Mounted Police found the complaints on site to be unfounded.

The resistance of some Métis to the traditional hunting rules did not come by chance. The buffalo populations continued to decline and the economic basis of everyone was endangered by the lower hunting yield, as their traditional agriculture alone could not feed them. Dumont realized that after the disappearance of the buffalo he and his entourage would have to rely on cooperation with the Canadian government and sought their representation on the Council of the Northwest Territories, agricultural instructors, schools and confirmation of the ownership of the land they farmed. In 1880 he protested the efforts of the British Crown to tax logging, and in 1881 he again requested written recognition of land ownership.

The Northwest Rebellion

In 1882 the buffalos' permanent disappearance from the prairie was an inevitable fact. The striving for recognition for land ownership became all the stronger, but this failed less because of indignation than because of organizational negligence, as the Canadian government stuck to its land allocation in mile squares, in which the river farms of the Métis could not be recorded. A plan to recognize river farms that actually existed in 1878 was only partially implemented and was discontinued at the end of the year. At the end of March 1884 Dumont called for a meeting of representatives of the Métis and it was agreed that the government's lack of cooperation could only be overcome together with Louis Riel, since only he was trusted to unite Métis, white settlers and Indians in a common approach .

Dumont called all the residents of the region together for another meeting, which took place on April 28, but was only attended by Métis. A committee of six men was appointed, which included Dumont and Charles Nolin , to formulate a constitution for a community to be created and to submit it to the Canadian government in Ottawa . On April 8, they met with the other settlers, but it was decided to have the draft constitution presented to the government by Riel, which was requested for this purpose from exile in South Saskatchewan , where he also met at the Dumonts house in early July. From then on, the committee relied mainly on the trained lawyer Riel for its correspondence with Ottawa, but there was no further progress with him either, the Canadian government under Prime Minister Macdonald rejected a separate province for settlers and Métis and declared it in February 1885 Dumont and Riel's negotiations for final failed.

In the weeks that followed, Dumont and his influential relatives pushed for an armed uprising and prevailed over the resistance of Charles Nolin and the concerns of Riel, whereupon Anglo-Canadian settlers and church officials distanced themselves from the company. Dumont now also solicited support from the neighboring Cree , who also suffered from the disappearance of the buffalo and whose reservation contracts regarding food aid were often not kept by the Canadian government. In mid-March, Dumont learned that the NWMP had sent a squad to arrest him and Riel, whereupon he and 60 to 70 men confiscated weapons and ammunition in two shops (presumably the HBC). On March 19, Riel announced the new Provisional Government , the highest office of which was elected Governor of the Métis Nation Dumont. An army of 300 men was formed to defend the settlements around Batoche.

The Council of the Provisional Government agreed that any military activity should be confined to the immediate vicinity of the Batoche settlement area it claimed, and Dumont did not contradict this either, although he would later claim, only from Riel of the immediate Attack also to have been held on Prince Albert or Fort Carlton . In a very close vote, it was decided on March 24th to capture the Duck Lake trading post 6 miles from Batoche in order to protect itself against Fort Carlton of the NWMP in the same direction, whose commander LNF Crozier with about 100 men to capture Riels and Dumonts had advanced and refused to surrender the fort. Crozier sent his men against the advancing Métis and was hopelessly defeated, but Riel, who was also present, prevented a massacre by prohibiting a pursuit of the fleeing NWMP. Among the few dead among their own men, however, were Dumont's brother Isidore and two other relatives. Crozier withdrew to Prince Albert and the Métis burned Fort Carlton, but then withdrew to Batoche.

At the end of April, under General Frederick Middleton, around 3,000 men arrived in Saskatchewan to suppress the rebellion. Shortly before Batoche at Fish Creek, Dumont was able to deliver a heavy blow to Middleton's troops, but due to losses of horses and running out of ammunition, the Métis were practically unable to defend. When the uncertain Middleton finally decided to attack two weeks later on May 9th in the unfamiliar terrain, the outcome of the conflict known as the Battle of Batoche was clear from the outset, despite fierce resistance from the Métis. Batoche was captured on May 12, and when Dumont heard of Riel's surrender on May 15, at the urging of his family, he fled south across the border with the US state of Montana .

After the Northwest Rebellion

In the USA he was first arrested by the Army , but released after two days, and received political asylum. He initially stayed with relatives in Fort Benton , where his wife Madeleine followed him in the autumn. An attempt to raise funds for the release of Riel from his imprisonment in Regina was unsuccessful.

The following year Madeleine died, presumably of tuberculosis, and despite an amnesty from Canada, he stayed in the United States and, when offered by William Frederick Cody , joined his Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show as an art shooter and lived at Staten Island , NY, where he began To give lectures on the rebellion in front of the local French-Canadians community, through which he came into contact with French-Canadians from Québec . At the invitation of Laurent-Olivier David, he began a lecture tour in Montréal in 1888 , but this was broken off again after the first speech because he did not have the rhetorical talent of Riel and disappointed the audience. Dumont traveled back to the Red River, but returned east to Montreal in the same year, where he wrote down a report on the Northwest Rebellion in the winter of 88/89.

He then left the city and little is known about the following years. In 1893 he tried in Winnipeg for his farmland on the Red River, which he was then able to purchase via a right of first refusal. He leased the farm to (a) relative and lived in a secluded hut with his nephew Alexis Dumont, where he died on May 19, 1906, largely unnoticed by the public.

literature

Web links

Footnotes

  1. ↑ see e.g. B. The University of Alberta Press: Reminiscence of a Bungle, By One of the Bunglers, and Two Other Northwest Rebellion Diaries. Introduction pp. Xx-xxii to the politics of Lawrence Vankoughnet ISBN 0-88864-077-3 .
personal data
SURNAME Dumont, Gabriel
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Leader of the Métis in Canada
DATE OF BIRTH December 1837
PLACE OF BIRTH Red River Colony
DATE OF DEATH May 19, 1906
Place of death St-Isidore-de-Bellevue , Saskatchewan