Honore Jaxon, Professional Rebel

I
n December 1951, a ninety-year-old man was evicted from 157 East 34th Street. The building’s former live-in janitor and furnace tender, his old age and ill-health had precluded satisfactory performance and the landlord had fired him. Out on the sidewalk, his books and papers, neatly tied and wrapped in brown paper, were piled six feet high, eleven feet across, and forty feet long.

Major Honoré Joseph Jaxon told reporters that he was a Canadian half-breed, born of a Metis Indian maiden and a Virginian adventurer. The rest of his story was a vague farrago of treason, rebellion, and Indian wars in the Canadian West, and apparently no one put much stock in it. His photograph in the Daily News showed a bearded, decrepit old man with a thousand-yard stare.

Jaxon moved to the offices of the Bowery News, Harry Baronian’s legendary paper of “the basement of society.” After Jaxon sold two tons of newspapers and magazines for scrap, the rest of his collection—mostly books and papers on Indian history, life, and customs—were carried to his new residence, according to The New York Times,  by “gentlemen of the Bowery, led by one called Bozo.” Less than a month later, Jaxon died at Bellevue Hospital. His papers went to a city landfill.

Some of his story was fudge. He was not half Indian, nor had his father been a Virginian. But nearly seven decades before he had fought in Louis Riel’s North West Rebellion, serving as Riel’s personal secretary. He had also been tried for treason. He had generally spent his life serving revolutionary causes, and the lost mountain of his books and papers had documented the colorful, tragic history of the old Canadian West. It may, as the Ottawa Citizen wrote a few years ago, “have contained some of the secrets of one of the blackest periods in the history of Canada.”

Most Americans have never heard of Louis Riel. Few Canadians have not. He was born in 1844 in Manitoba of French, Irish, and Indian heritage. Louis was educated for the priesthood and then the bar. Neither took, and so he returned home.

Manitoba then was part of Rupert’s Land, the vast territories of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Its people were Metis, descendants of French fur traders and native American women, whose distinct culture blended both traditions. In 1869, the Bay Company sold its lands to Canada. When the Dominion government sent in surveyors, the Metis believed their arrival signaled the loss of their farms and stopped them at gunpoint.

In a land of illiterates, a little education and a gift for mob oratory go a long way. Riel’s rise in late 1869 was meteoric. In October he became secretary of the Metis National Committee and by November had become such an irritant that Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s prime minister, discussed the possibility of bribing him into silence. By December Riel was president of Manitoba’s provisional government. He seized Fort Garry (now Winnipeg), where he established his capital. His troops closed the border. Riel then negotiated Manitoba’s admission to the Confederation as a self-governing province rather than a mere territory.

Things fell apart when Riel’s government executed Thomas Scott, a militant anti-Catholic, for inciting an armed uprising against Riel. Macdonald sent in the militia. Riel’s guerrillas drove them out. At Macdonald’s request, the Imperial government in London sent out Colonel Garnet Wolseley with British regulars. The model for General Stanley, W.S. Gilbert’s modern major-general in The Pirates of Penzance, Wolseley was idiosyncratic but effective: his dawn assault on Fort Garry in August 1870 found it abandoned and Riel riding for the border.

Though in exile and under indictment, Riel was elected to Canada’s House of Commons in October 1873. Parliament immediately expelled him. He was re-elected in January 1874, expelled again that April, and re-elected yet again the following September. This was becoming absurd. On October 15, 1874, Her Majesty’s government outlawed Riel for five years. It was merely the first-act closer.

Honoré Joseph Jaxon, who would be among Riel’s most fervent supporters, was born William Henry Jackson in Toronto on May 13, 1861. His parents were well-educated English-speaking Canadians. Jackson began his university studies at sixteen. When his father lost his business in a fire, the family took a homestead in the Northwest Territories near the proposed right of way of Canada’s first transcontinental railroad, the Canadian Pacific. Jackson joined them, helping his father sell farm machinery. He had a sentimental affection for Indians: he was moved by the thought of once-proud natives subsisting on mice and gophers, dependent on handouts from the very people who had destroyed their way of life. Yet his daily dealings with the white settlers made him aware of their grievances, too.

In 1882, in what seems to have been the kind of saturnalia of corruption more common in the New York State legislature than a British colonial assembly, the Canadian Pacific persuaded the federal Parliament to change its proposed route across the West. Suddenly, the Jacksons and other settlers who had purchased land along the proposed line found themselves 250 miles from the new route, leaving them unable to ship their products or import machinery and tools. Jackson started an anti-government newspaper, the Voice of the People. His firebrand editorials made his reputation: within weeks, he was acclaimed secretary of the militant Farmer’s Union. On July 28, 1884, Jackson issued his manifesto detailing the settlers’ grievances: unjust taxation, improper regulations and laws, government-subsidized monopolies, and high prices on imported goods.

Then, after fourteen years’ exile, Riel returned. He had been teaching at a mission school in Montana when a Metis delegation arrived. The provincial government had not kept Manitoba intact for the Metis, now outnumbered by white immigrants. The government’s procrastination over granting land to the Metis and its refusal to recognize them as a distinct people had revived discontent. Worse, Eastern speculators had been granted Metis-held lands and authorized to evict them.

In July 1884, Riel arrived at Batoche, Saskatchewan. He met Jackson, who fell under his sway. Jackson so identified with the Metis that he even converted to Catholicism. At Baptism, the English Canadian took the names Honoré Joseph Jaxon, thus reinventing himself as a French half-breed.

Riel began a speaking tour of the Metis settlements with Jaxon as his personal secretary. In December, Riel sent a petition to Ottawa. Even then, Macdonald still thought Riel could be bought off. But in March 1885, Riel was again elected president of a provisional government.  As the president’s personal secretary, Jaxon was the provisional government’s bureaucracy, generating exhaustive political, military, and government correspondence.

Riel’s troops cut the telegraph wires, stopped the mails, and seized government stores and ammunition. Then, on March 26, 1885 Metis soldiers, commanded by Gabriel Dumont, defeated the Royal Canadian Mounted Police at Duck Lake.  Dumont, a forty-eight-year-old trapper and guide, was a born general.  He could neither read nor write, but spoke six languages and had been a warrior, horseman, and crack shot from the age of fourteen.

On the day after the defeat at Duck Lake, Major-General Frederick Middleton, CB, the head of the Canadian land forces, arrived at Winnepeg, having been sent West on the news of Riel’s return.  Middleton was stout, short, red-faced, and white-mustached; he had been a professional soldier for over forty years and had not expected active duty when he had taken command in 1882.  But behind the facade of a good-natured Colonel Blimp (he loved ice-skating) was a daring and imaginative officer who had been repeatedly cited for valor and recommended for the Victoria Cross during the Indian Mutiny of 1857.

Middleton realized that the North West Rebellion was no petty native uprising. He immediately ordered three thousand troops sent west and as they arrived began advancing on Batoche. Dumont fought him to a standstill with fifty mounted riflemen at the Battle of Fish Creek on April 24, 1885. Middleton’s troops, being at best half-trained militia, were shaky and he had to lead from the front, repeatedly exposing himself to enemy fire. At the end of the day, Middleton withdrew. It was the last and greatest victory of the Metis in their struggle against modern civilization.

Middleton calmly regrouped while awaiting reinforcements and supplies. Then he attacked Riel and Dumont at Batoche on May 9, 1885. As this made Jaxon’s paperwork irrelevant to the provisional government’s immediate survival, Jaxon went on active duty. He would later claim a cavalry major’s commission.

Despite overwhelming odds, the rebels held out for three days. After his surrender, Riel stood trial for treason as the sole cause and instigator of the rebellion. (Government policy clearly played no role in the Metis’s discontents.) Riel openly rejected his counsel’s argument that he was not guilty by reason of insanity. With fiery eloquence, he characterized the revolts as the acts of a people made desperate by political and corporate power: the Metis as a society were small but even so had rights; Canada, though far greater, “had no greater rights than them, because the right is the same for all.”

Riel was convicted. On November 6, 1885, he was executed at the Northwest Mounted Police barracks at Regina, Saskatchewan. The man hanged for a traitor is today honored as a freedom fighter, the Father of Manitoba, the People’s Hero. His life has inspired biographies, histories, novels, plays, and an opera.

Gabriel Dumont fled south across the border, where he was welcomed as a political refugee and—being between gigs—rode for a while with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. After he received the Queen’s pardon in 1888, he returned to Canada and resumed his life as a farmer and trapper. Major-General Middleton was knighted, received a purse of $20,000, and retired a lieutenant-general in 1892 to become Keeper of the Crown Jewels. He died in his headquarters in the Tower of London in 1898.

After the surrender at Batoche, Jaxon was detained incommunicado. At least one Canadian historian, Howard Adams, has argued that Jaxon was silenced to suppress the extent of support for the Rebellion among white settlers. Jaxon was an uncooperative prisoner: he almost escaped once after bathing, racing naked across the prairie with Canadian cavalry in hot pursuit. Finally, at a trial that lasted a half-hour, he was adjudged not guilty by reason of insanity. He escaped a Fort Garry insane asylum within weeks and re-emerged in Chicago, where, surprisingly, he spent the next two decades as a successful, politically-connected general contractor, building sidewalks and lobbying for the cement and construction industries at City Hall and the state Capitol. He also lectured before women’s clubs on life among the Indians.

Yet the contemporary press strongly suggests that Jaxon was active in the political fringe, too. According to The New York Times, he “narrowly escaped being arrested as a principal conspirator…” after the 1886 Haymarket Riot. In June 1894, he marched on Washington with Jacob Coxey’s army of the unemployed. Embrey Howson’s Jacob Sechler Coxey sketches Jaxon as a “Canadian half-breed complete with blanket and tomahawk.” The Times, which detested the whole notion of Coxey’s “petition in boots,” fingered Jaxon to be the leader of an “Anarchistic plot” to blow up the Capitol, the White House, and the Treasury, War, and Navy buildings at Washington. The paper went on to allege that since his escape into the United States, Jaxon had been “engaged in mysterious conspiracies against the English government.” As late as 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt blasted Jaxon for supporting the Industrial Workers of the World.

Later that year, Canada pardoned Jaxon. He returned to tour the West, photographing its vanishing ways of life, and began collecting books, documents, and letters on Riel’s rebellions, the Metis, and the Canadian Indian peoples.

Up until 1911, Jaxon was still dabbling in international revolutionary politics, delivering a spellbinding address to the British Trades Union Congress’s annual conference as the representative of a Mexican revolutionary party. At some point around World War I, he retired to New Jersey, where he briefly edited a left-wing newspaper. In 1919, he relocated to Staten Island and in 1922 to The Bronx. By now the old revolutionary was no more than a gadfly. (The Daily News called him  “a thorn in the side of authority.”) He lived at 1383 Eastern Boulevard, a granite outcropping on the Bronx River. There he built a “palace” out of ammunition boxes, orange crates, and scrap wood, fencing it with boards and corrugated tin.

In February 1942, City health officials hauled Jaxon into court on the grounds that his residence was a rat-infested fire trap without running water. Jaxon argued that it was a fort, perfect for defending against “enemy submarines that might travel up the Bronx River.” The old man had lost none of his genius for resistance: it took four years before the city was able to force him to move, whereupon he took the custodian’s job on East 34th Street.

In his obituary, the Times printed the legend: Jaxon had been born in Montana, the son of a French pioneer settler and a Metis Indian girl, father a fur trader sufficiently wealthy to send him to University, and so on. Jaxon’s reinvented self had overcome his reality.