In December 1951, the bearded, decrepit Major Honore Jaxon was evicted from 157 E. 34th Street. Several “gentlemen of the Bowery, led by one called Bozo” moved him into the offices of Harry Baronian’s legendary Bowery News, the self-proclaimed voice of society’s basement. The 90-year-old died within a month. He had claimed to be a Canadian half-breed revolutionary. The story was only part fudge. He wasn’t half-American Indian. But nearly 70 years before, he had fought in Riel’s Rebellion.

Few Americans have heard of Louis Riel. Few Canadians have not. Riel was born in 1844 of French, Irish, and Indian descent. His native Manitoba, then owned by the Hudson’s Bay Company, was largely inhabited by Metis, descendants of French trappers and native women, whose distinct culture blended both traditions. Canada purchased the company’s lands in 1869 and sent in surveyors. The Metis, believing the Canadians meant to take their farms, took up arms.

In October 1869 Riel became secretary of the Metis National Committee. By November Canadian Prime Minister John A. Macdonald was discussing whether bribery might silence him. By December Riel was president of Manitoba’s provisional government. His horsemen took Fort Garry (now Winnipeg). Riel then negotiated Manitoba’s admission to the Confederation as a self-governing province. But when Riel’s government executed anti-Catholic fanatic Thomas Scott for rebellion, Macdonald sent in the militia.

Riel’s forces expelled them. Macdonald then sought help from London, which sent Colonel Garnet Wolseley (later Gilbert and Sullivan’s “very model of a modern major general”) and the 60th Foot. When Wolseley’s redcoats assaulted Fort Garry in August 1870, the rebellion collapsed and Riel escaped to Montana. Though an indicted exile, he was elected to Parliament in October 1873. Parliament expelled him. He was re-elected in January 1874; expelled in April, and re-elected in September. To avoid further embarrassment, the government outlawed him in October.

His life had not yet crossed that of Honore Jaxon. Born William Henry Jackson in Toronto on May 13, 1861, Jaxon’s parents were well-educated English-speaking Canadians. When his family homesteaded in western Canada along the proposed route of the Canadian Pacific Railway, Jackson left university to join them. But in 1882 Parliament permitted the CPR to change its right of way, which would leave the Jacksons and their neighbors 250 miles from the tracks. Enraged, Jackson became a militant anti-government agitator.

Meanwhile, the Metis had been neither granted their own land nor recognized as a distinct people as promised, and eastern speculators had been granted lands that Metis had farmed for generations. In July 1884 Riel returned to renew the rebellion. He met Jackson, who became Riel’s secretary and was commissioned a cavalry major. He identified so with the cause that he changed his name and adopted the persona of a French half-breed.

Although 50 Metis riflemen stood off 3,000 Canadian troops at Fish Creek on April 24, 1885, the invaders took Riel’s capital at Batoche, Saskatchewan, on May 12 after a three-day siege. At his treason trial, Riel defended himself, arguing the rebellions were justified by political and corporate abuses. Upon his conviction, Riel was hung on November 6, 1885.

Meanwhile, Jaxon proved an uncooperative prisoner, even escaping after bathing, racing naked across the prairie pursued by Canadian cavalry. After a half-hour trial, Jaxon was found not guilty of treason by reason of insanity. Within weeks, he escaped from an insane asylum, reappearing in Chicago, where he “narrowly escaped being arrested as a principal conspirator” in the 1886 Haymarket Riot, where a bomb killed eight police officers. In June 1894 Jaxon marched on Washington with Jacob Coxey’s army of the unemployed. The New York Times claimed Jaxon was involved in an “Anarchistic plot” to blow up the Capitol and “in mysterious conspiracies against the English government.”

Strangely, throughout this wild career, Jaxon was a politically connected Chicago general contractor, prosperously paving streets and sidewalks. After King Edward VII pardoned him in 1907, he toured the Canadian West, documenting the history of Riel’s rebellions. He retired, drifting east to edit a New Jersey left-wing newspaper. After 1922 he lived in the Bronx, on a granite outcropping overlooking the Bronx River, where he built a “palace” of scrap wood and corrugated tin.

In February 1942, health inspectors alleged that Jaxon’s home was a rat-infested firetrap without running water. The Times reported that Jaxon, supposedly a “soldier of fortune” with service in three wars, told the magistrate his palace was really a fort “to protect the Bronx against enemy submarines that might travel up the Bronx River.” After the city forced him out, he went to East 34th Street.

Jaxon’s obituaries claimed he was a Montana-born French-Indian half-breed, whose wealthy fur-trading father had sent him to university, which he had left to fight with the Metis. His swashbuckling persona was more persuasive than truth, even in death.