Heretical or Heroic?

Nicholas Flood Davin, who covered the execution of Louis Riel in November 1885 for the Regina Leader, observed, “Nothing in his life so became him as the leaving of it.” Davin, otherwise unsympathetic to Riel and his cause, was apparently so impressed by the courage with which the condemned man met his early death, at the age of forty-one, that only lines from a Shakespearean tragedy (Macbeth) could do justice to the moment. Death was itself Riel’s last great expressive act, compelling the admiration even of his enemies. For his supporters, it was the heroic death of a martyr, even a saint. For the legion of scholars who have written about him since, it has served, conveniently, as the dramatic end point of an otherwise uncertain narrative full of twists and turns. In a strange way, it clarifies. Throughout the century and a half since his execution, there might be little consensus about what to call Louis Riel — traitor to Canada, victim of British or...