Red River Rebellion - Creation of Manitoba

Creation of Manitoba

Upon receiving news of the unrest, Bishop Taché was recalled from Rome. He arrived back in the colony on March 8, whereupon he conveyed to Riel his mistaken impression that the December amnesty would apply to both Riel and Lépine. On March 15 he read to the elected assembly a telegram from Joseph Howe indicating that the government found the demands in the list of rights to be "in the main satisfactory". Following the preparation of a final list of rights that included new demands such as a general amnesty for all members of the provisional government and provisions for separate francophone schools, delegates Abbé Joseph-Noël Ritchot, Judge John Black and Alfred Henry Scott departed for Ottawa on March 23 and 24.

Shortly after this, Mair and Schultz arrived in Toronto, Ontario, and with the assistance of George Taylor Denison III immediately set about inflaming anti-Métis and anti-Catholic sentiment over the execution of Scott in the editorial pages of the Ontario press. Nevertheless, Macdonald had decided before the provisional government was established that Canada must negotiate with the Métis. Although the delegates were arrested following their arrival in Ottawa on April 11 on charges of abetting murder, they were quickly released. They soon entered into direct talks with Macdonald and Cartier, wherein Ritchot emerged as an effective negotiator; an agreement enshrining many of the demands in the list of rights was soon reached. This formed the basis for the Manitoba Act of May 12, 1870, which admitted Manitoba into the Canadian confederation on July 15. Significantly however, Ritchot could not secure a clarification of the Governor General's amnesty — anger over Scott's execution was growing rapidly in Ontario, and any such guarantee was not politically expedient. The delegates returned to Manitoba with only a promise of a forthcoming amnesty.

Read more about this topic:  Red River Rebellion

Famous quotes containing the words creation of and/or creation:

    One of the necessary qualifications of an efficient business man in these days of industrial literature seems to be the ability to write, in clear and idiomatic English, a 1,000-word story on how efficient he is and how he got that way.... It seems that the entire business world were devoting its working hours to the creation of a school of introspective literature.
    Robert Benchley (1889–1945)

    There have been heroes for whom this world seemed expressly prepared, as if creation had at last succeeded; whose daily life was the stuff of which our dreams are made, and whose presence enhanced the beauty and ampleness of Nature herself.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)