Des canadiens errants: French Canadian troops in the North-West campaign of 1885

System: Origins of Political Legitimacy (New York: McGrawHill , 1969), esp. p. 406. 47. Lucien Pye, Aspects of Political Development (Boston, Litt:e, Brown, 1966), pp. 63ff. 48. John K. Fairbank, "Assignment of the 70's," American Historical Review, 74-(3), Feb. 1969, p. 867. 49. James Laxer, "The Student Movement and Canadian Independence ," Canadian Dimension, pp. 27ff. See also "The American Issue" by Charles Tay!or, Canadian Dimension, 6(6), pp. 6-7. 50. Dawson and Prewitt, op. cit., p. 124. 51. Leonard Doob, Patriotism and Nationalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), p. 37. 52. Ibid., p. 42. 53. Beatie, op. cit. Des canadiens errants: French Canadian troops in the North- West campaign of 1885 DESMOND MORTON La neige tombait en gros flocons ... le c1el semblait vouloir couvrir d'un epais cerceuil bien des douleurs et bien des larmes. 1 Such was the gloomy mood in which Charles Daoust's battalion left Montreal for the North-West in 1885. The scene of tears and anguish at the C.P.R. station was repeated in many other Canadian towns that winter, as the volunteers set off for the unknown perils of war with Indians and Metis. In Toronto, a reporter for the Globe noted "many a tearful- eye and many a blanched face among the women and girls who struggled through the crowd..." 2 For the young Dominion, the outbreak of rebellion in the North-West was a serious matter. The country met the first news of the challenge to its collective authority with an impressive display of solidarity. The excitement which packed the streets of Toronto on the last days of March, 1885, might have been expected in the heartland of English Canada but in Montreal, there were ten thousand people to throng the route of the 65th Carabiniers Mont-Royallfon its way to the station. In Quebec, torchbearing snow-shoers and a huge crowd escorted the men of the 9th Voltigeurst on their departure.3 Fifteen years before, few • Now the Fusiliers Mont-Royal. (Officially, they were the 65th Battalion, Mount Royal Rifles). t Now the Voltigeurs de Quebec. 28 54. Horowitz, "Tories, Socialists, and the Demise of Canada," Canadian Dimension 2(4) May/June 1965, p. 12. 55. Kohn, H., American Nationalism (New York: Collier, 1961), especially Chapter 2. 56. Marcus Lee Hansen, The Immigrant in American History, ed. by Arthur M. Schlesinger (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1940), quoted In Kohn, op. cit., p. 91. 57. Oration delivered October 18, 1823, before the American Philosophical Society at the University of Philadelphia, quoted in Kohn, op. cit., p. 63. 58. Francis Parkman in the North American Review, 82(171), pp. 319-348, quoted In Kohn, op. cit., p. 90. 59. Quoted in C. H. Van Tyne, The War of Independence (Boston: Houghton, MiffHn, 1929). p. 72. French Canadians had been willing to join the Red River expedition: only 77 of the 350 men in the ranks of the Quebec Battalion had been French-speaking.4 This time, it was different. At the behest of the Minister of Militia, Adolphe Caron, a special effort was made to ensure that French Canadians would play their full part in the Dominion force.5 There were grumbles and muffled criticisms in French Canada but Quebec, as a whole, responded to the crisis. "Le fait majeur a souligner," concludes Robert Rumilly, the strongly nationalist historian of the period, "est que nu I ne refusait la quotepart de sa province, nul ne prenait d'emblee le parti de Riel."6 Of course, for militia enthusiasts in both French and English Canada, active service in almost any cause would have been incentive enough to enlist. Oscar Pelletier, a young subaltern from Quebec who was taking a course at the military school at Kingston, watched with growing despair as his comrades obtained permission to accompany the troops. The son of a Liberal senator, Pelletier had no illusions about how decisions were made in the Militia Department : "j'etais en bien mauvais posture pour obtenir des faveurs dans une galere ou la politique jouait les premiers violons." With creditable initiative, he remembered an uncle who, though a Liberal M.P., was on excellent terms with Caron. With...