This week, the University of Saskatchewan unveiled a poem written by Métis leader Louis Riel in the weeks before his execution for High Treason in 1885.

Riel addressed the poem to Robert Gordon, a jailer in the Regina jail where Riel was being held. The two appear to have struck up a friendship, and Gordon is reported to have mercifully given Riel and his wife some measure of privacy when she came to visit.

The poem had been in the possession of the daughter of a former editor of The Hamilton Spectator, who bequeathed it to the university. The editor was not a descendant of Gordon’s, and it is not known how he came to possess the poem.

Other poems by Riel are known, but this seems to be the first discovered that was written in English. In it, Riel praises those who act upon the virtuous urgings of their consciences:

Our merits, before God, be facts.
How many who, with good desires,
Have died and lost their souls to fires?
Good desires kept unpractic’d
Stand, before God, unnotic’d.
O Robert, let us be fond
Of virtue! Virtues abound
In every sort of good,
Let virtue be our soul’s food.

It’s a shame such eloquence could not move the court to justice, or at least mercy.

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