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becomes a popular image of the brutality and cowardice of these Métis, despite the fact that the illustration’s depiction is so far from the reality.
    The influence and political power of Orangemen across Canada, and especially in the halls of Ottawa’s Parliament Hill, becomes evident when, despite successful negotiations between the Métis and the federal government, no guarantee for the amnesty of the leaders of the Red River resistance is attained. Riel is forced to view himself as a wanted man, despite his massive popularity in the newly formed province.
    In what the Canadian government terms an “errand of peace,” a Canadian military expedition led by Colonel Garnet Wolseley is dispatched to Red River in the summer of 1870 for the declared purpose of quelling talk of American expansionism. Ontarians cheer Wolseley’s expedition as the suppression of a Métis rebellion. When word reaches Riel that Wolseley approaches in waning August, Riel understands the reality. He faces arrest, imprisonment, and worse. For the second time in his young life, he is made to wander the wilderness, once again returning to Minnesota. Five years later, in 1875, Riel is formally exiled from Canada for five more years. And in the fourteen years between the day he is first forced to flee his homeland and the day Dumont appears in Montana to ask him to return, Riel goes through a transformation that is nothing short of startling.

CHAPTER THREE
    Promise
    Gabriel has long dreamed of an alliance between Métis and Indians of all nations. What could be more perfect? Now that the buffalo are all but gone, the people are hungry and discontent growls in their bellies. The Cree, Blackfoot, and others have been forced onto the reserves, and many are close to starvation. The Métis’ crops this summer of 1874 are poor, and unhappiness settles across the land like a drought.
    But Riel’s arrival has sparked something, and the news travels fast as a prairie fire that the Father of Manitoba has come here to try to help, to try to make things right. Riel’s welcomed as a hero, and large crowds flock to meet him. Gabriel watches as Louis speaks magnanimously at the home of his new host, his cousin Charles Nolin, easily winning over the trust of the Métis, and Gabriel witnesses Louis again a few days later, speaking wisely at a schoolhouse to a group made up largely of English settlers. Gabriel must feel that much more secure in the decision to bring Riel here to help when even the stiff and cautious English, many of whom were Riel’s dissenters back in Manitoba, are won over by Louis’s words. And if Louis loses some of that English support when he begins to win over the malcontent Indians, then so be it. But in these months of July and August, thanks to Louis’s speeches, speeches filled with words of harmony and a future and leadership and abundance and ownership, it seems that some of the ache of hunger, some of the anger at a federal government that won’t answer Métis petitions once again, are dulled by this great man’s words. Even the Catholic priests nod their heads when they hear Riel speak.
    John A. Macdonald, who had been forced to resign due to a railroad scandal, has found himself back in power again, now pushing as hard as ever for a railway that links the east with the west. And his policy of ignoring that which he finds distasteful continues. His deputies have bungled or “misplaced” both Métis petitions and government responses to those petitions, which basically demand once more that the Métis be recognized in the North-West. The bad taste of 1860s Manitoba has returned to the mouths of the Métis, in large part because of a new influx of surveyors and European settlers pouring into the country around Batoche and Saint-Laurent. It seems that the farther west the Métis push in pursuit of their staple food supply—the buffalo—and a life of solitary freedom, it isn’t long before these others follow and begin to