GREAT GUNS!
Subordinates may have regarded portly British Maj. Gen. Frederick Middleton as pompous and plodding. But the 59-year-old commander of the Canadian Militia—who had been recommended for the Victoria Cross during the 1857 Indian Rebellion and honorably mentioned in dispatches in New Zealand—was no fool. As he surveyed the western Canadian village of Batoche through his binoculars on May 9, 1885, the old soldier knew he was in trouble.
In late March, when the Métis people (of mixed-blood European and North American Indian ancestry) allied with disaffected Crees and Assiniboines of the First Nations to overthrow the government of the District of Saskatchewan, Middleton had hastily raised a force of some 900 Canadian militiamen to put down the uprising. Although the Métis were undisciplined fighters, they were skilled at irregular warfare and expert marksmen armed with Winchester repeating rifles.
Other than a few squads of scouts and constables of the North-West Mounted Police, Middleton’s force largely comprised citizen soldier units from cities and towns back East. Armed mostly with old breechloading, single-shot Snider-Enfield rifles, the militia was better suited to the parade ground than warfare against a resourceful, mobile enemy fighting on his own turf. “I went down the ranks,” the general himself recalled of one training drill, “and found that many of [the men] had never fired a rifle; some even had never fired any weapon at all.”
On April 24, en route to the Métis stronghold at Batoche, Middleton’s force had stumbled into an expertly laid ambush at Fish Creek. During the sporadic firefight the Canadians had lost 10 killed and 40 wounded, and Middleton took a bullet through his fur service cap. A week later the general had received word that First Nations warriors at nearby
