The expedition to Red River was a considerable feat
for Canada's young militia. The expedition required
more than a thousand boats and several hundred voyageurs
to transport the 1,200 troops and their supplies over
the unfinished Dawson Road to Red River. As hinted at
in Hopkins' view of the militia's portage at Kakabeka
Falls, the logistics of moving such a large contingent
through the wilderness were considerable. When it finally
arrived in Red River after four months en route, Louis
Riel and other Métis leaders had already fled
to the United States.
Hopkins was an accomplished artist noted for her
paintings of canoe travels. She married Edward Hopkins,
the private secretary to Sir George Simpson, governor
of the Hudson's Bay Company, and often travelled with
the two men on inspection tours of the Northwest.
This painting was completed a few years after the
Red River Expedition and was influenced, in part,
by an engraving that William Armstrong had published
in the Canadian Illustrated News in 1871. It
romanticizes the expedition's endeavours to overcome
the adversities placed before it by mother nature.
In many respects, it celebrates the expedition's role
as the vanguard of the new society that was soon to
make its way west.
It is interesting that Hopkins chose this theme for
her only work that portrayed the Red River Expedition.
It conveniently ignores the harassment and intense
ill-feeling that the Métis endured once the
contingent arrived in Red River (at least one Métis
death was attributed to the presence of the Canadian
militia). Soon after, many Métis left their
Red River homes to escape the flood of new arrivals
from Ontario, and moved further west, into the Prairies.
Hopkins presented this work to Colonel G.J. Wolseley,
the senior officer in command of the Red River Expedition.
Wolseley's wife, the Dowager Viscountess Wolseley,
presented it to the Government of Canada in 1917.
