33.8 America: a.d. 1801 to 1900  (Page 3/31)

In the 1850s Tsimshian Indians

Louis Riel the Younger, 1/8 Chippewa, but educated in Montreal on a Catholic scholar- ship, became the Metis leader. He rebuffed the government's attempts to survey and reclaim the land, working out of his headquarters in Fort Garry, which was later to become Winnepeg. Riel was hung as a traitor to the Dominion in 1885, 15 years after Manitoba had become a province. Canadian Mounted Police had been formed and after the Metis were controlled, the great nations of the Sioux had to be tamed and that included Sitting Bull, himself, who had gone to Canada after the famous Custer massacre in the United States. The end result for these displaced Indians, however, was gradual starvation, as civilization came west with the Canadian Pacific Railroad in the 1880s. We shall hear much more about earlier Indian problems in the vicinity of the Great Lakes in later paragraphs. (Ref. 151 , 212 , 32 )

The formation of the Dominion resulted from three forces, the rise of Canadian nationalism, a desire of British liberals to slough off colonial responsibilities and the ambition of some elements in the United States to annex Canada. The constitution granted to the Dominion reserved the powers of government in the Parliament at Ottawa, but it failed to quench provincialism, particularly among the French population, which considered itself a nation apart, and still does.

Like the United States, Canada had a depression in 1873, which lasted at least 20 years and slowed the growth of that country considerably. It recovered only after the completion of the transcontinental Canadian Pacific Railway in 1885, after years of financial and engineering difficulties. The election of 1896 brought Sir Wilfrid, a French-Canadian lawyer, to head the government as premier and his long administration saw a wave of prosperity as the prairie provinces developed with their new railroad transportation system. Still, at the end of the century great expanses of land in Canada were essentially uninhabited. Lands occupied by 1900 included a narrow strip along the St. Lawrence River, Montreal and the eastern Great Lakes, then southern Manitoba, Saskatchewan and southeastern Alberta, with Winnipeg as a wheat center being the only city of over 100,000 west of Toronto. (Ref. 151 , 8 )