The Consolidation Of The West
Having apparently settled the question of a constitution, the Dominion turned its attention to the west. In 1869, the territory of the Hudson's Bay Company was bought for GBP300,000 and the Northwest Territories , as the area then became known, reverted to the Crown until Canada was ready to administer them. Predictably, the wishes of its population - primarily Plains Indians and 5000 Metis - were given no heed. The Metis, whose main settlement was near the site of modern-day Winnipeg, were already alarmed by the arrival of Ontario expansionists and were even more alarmed when government land surveyors arrived to divide the land into lots that cut right across their holdings. Fearful of their land rights, the Metis formed a provisional government under the leadership of Louis Riel and prepared to resist the federal authorities . In the course of the rebellion, Riel executed a troublesome Ontario Orangeman by the name of Thomas Scott, an action which created uproar in Ontario. Despite this, the federal government negotiated with a Metis delegation and appeared to meet all their demands, although Riel was obliged to go into exile in the States. As a result of the negotiations, Ottawa created the new province of Manitoba to the west of Ontario in 1870, and set aside 140 acres per person for the Metis - though land speculators and lawyers ensured that fewer than twenty percent of those eligible actually got their land. Dispossession was also the fate of the Plains Indians . From 1871 onwards a series of treaties were negotiated, offering native families 160-acre plots and a whole range of goods and services if they signed. By 1877 seven treaties had been agreed (eventually there were eleven), handing over to the government all of the southern prairies. However, the promised aid did not materialize and the native peoples found themselves confined to small, infertile reservations. The federal government's increased interest in the area - spurred by the Cypress Hills Massacre of Assiniboine natives in 1873 - was underlined by the arrival in 1874 of the first 275 members of the newly formed Northwest Mounted Police, the Mounties . One of their first actions was to expel the American whiskey traders who had earned the region the nickname Whoop-up Country. Once the police had assumed command, Ottawa passed the Second Indian Act of 1880, making a Minister of Indian Affairs responsible for the native peoples. The minister and his superintendents exercised a near dictatorial control, so that almost any action that a native person might wish to take, from building a house to making a visit off the reservation, had to be approved by the local official, and often the ministry in Ottawa too. The Act laid down that every aboriginal applicant for "enfranchisement" as an ordinary Canadian citizen had to pass through a three-year probation period and was to be examined to see if he or she had attained a sufficient level of "civilization". If "enfranchised," such people became so-called "non-status Indians", as opposed to the "status Indians" of the reservations. Meanwhile, during the 1870s, most of the Metis had moved west into the territory that would become the province of Saskatchewan in 1905. Here they congregated along the Saskatchewan River in the vicinity of Batoche, but once again federal surveyors caught up with them and, in the 1880s, began to divide the land into the familiar gridiron pattern. In 1885, the Metis again rose in revolt and, after the return of Riel, formed a provisional government. In March they successfully beat off a detachment of Mounted Police, encouraging the neighbouring Cree people to raid a Hudson's Bay Company Store. It seemed that a general native insurrection might follow, born of the desperation that accompanied the treaty system, the starvation which went with the disappearance of the buffalo, and the ravages of smallpox. The government dispatched a force of 7000 with Gatling guns and an armed steamer, and after two preliminary skirmishes the Metis and the Cree were crushed. Riel, despite his obvious insanity, was found guilty of treason and hanged in November 1885. The defeat of the Metis opened a new phase in the development of the west. In 1886 the first train ran from Montreal to Vancouver and settlers swarmed onto the prairies, pushing the population up from 250,000 in 1890 to 1,300,000 in 1911. Clifford Sifton, Minister of the Interior, encouraged the large-scale immigration from Eastern Europe of what he called "stalwart peasants in sheepskin coats". These Ukrainians, Poles, Czechs and Hungarians ploughed up the grasslands and turned central Canada into a vast granary, leading the Dominion into the "wheat boom" of the early twentieth century.
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