The Street Names of Toronto

I was simultaneously fascinated and flabbergasted by Bruce K. Ward’s review of Jean Meyer’s Louis Riel: Prophète du Nouveau Monde. Ward provides a compelling appraisal of the nineteenth-century Métis leader as a mystic, especially in a transnational context. However, he is not nearly as successful when it comes to recounting Canadian history.

Ward foregrounds the significance of Riel’s death in what is now Saskatchewan in 1885. Yet he elides the fact it did not happen in a void but was preceded by another political execution, that of Thomas Scott at Red River in 1870. Actually, Ward manages to write a comprehensive assessment of Riel’s legacy without mentioning Scott at all. This is a curious omission, to say the least, considering that Riel not only had the Ontario Orangeman executed largely for impudence but then refused to hand over his body for burial.

An acknowledgment of Riel’s role in the death (and non-burial) of Scott would certainly help to contextualize the purported exultation of his Orange hangman. It would also explain why the federal authorities in Regina initially decided to bury Riel in a local church. As Joseph Adolphe Chapleau, then the secretary of state, related to John A. Macdonald, the decision was “specially made to prevent the avengers of Scott’s death from doing with Riel’s body what was done with Scott’s remains, stealing it and concealing it in some secret spot.”

Thomas Scott would seem to complicate today’s dominant narrative about the “visionary” Riel, who was reputedly killed solely for his ideas. Thus scholars, like politicians, prefer to pretend that he did not exist.