160 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



VI. 



Louis Riel — The Elder, 



Perhaps no name connected with "The Selkirk Settlement" is 

 better known than that of Louis Riel. The name, however, applies 

 to two men — father and son — senior and junior. They were both 

 men of distinct mark. Louis Riel senior figured largely in the strike 

 for freedom led by Sinclair, Isbister and others. Riel the Elder was 

 proverbially known as "The Miller of the Seine." The Seine is a 

 small tributary of Red River that flows in opposite to what is known 

 as Point Douglas— (Douglas so called from Lord Selkirk's family 

 name). The Seine empties within the limits of St. Boniface — the 

 eastern suburb of the City of Winnipeg. Riel the Elder was always 

 said to have been of Sioux, Irish and French descent. He was noted 

 for his fiery temper, his dashing bravery, and his fearless opposition 

 to "The Company." His water-mill ran during the spring and early 

 summer, when the water was at high mark. His triangular descent 

 left no doubt as to his fierceness of temper or manner. In the great 

 Sayer affair which disturbed all Assiniboia to the very heart, it was 

 the senior Riel who gathered his French compatriots in St. Boniface 

 Cathedral on Ascension Day, 1847, made a fiery oration at the doors 

 of the Church, dashed across the river at Point Douglas, and took 

 five hundred men across on Sinclair's ferry boats who fired volleys 

 from their guns, rushed to the Court House, and liberated Sayer — 

 shouting "Le Commerce est libre! Vive la liberté!" Violent although 

 the eruption was, it settled for all time the fact that to the Autochthons 

 of Red River Settlement, there was freedom of trade as far as hunting 

 and using and exporting natural products of the soil and river, both 

 as regarding use or trade. 



VIL 



Louis Riel — The Younger. 



The fiery leader of the Metis revolt in 1869-70 was Louis Riel, 

 Junior, who though sprung on the mother's side from a respectable 

 Metis family, carried a more violent disposition even than his father, 

 and having a good education — a part in St. Boniface College and a 

 further training in Montreal — added to his inherited disposition a 

 megalomania unknown to the "miller of the Seine." It is not the 

 purpose of the writer to discuss the rights and wrongs, the blunders 

 and mistakes, the rashness and the stupidity, the cruelty and the 

 cowardice on the part of both parties, who opposed each other in the 

 Red River Rebellion of 1869-70. It was a melange of grossly despic- 



