Reviewer Dennis Duffy commended Brown's research, but stated Brown "often cheats" in assigning forethought to Macdonald's action unattested in historical documents. Critic Rich Kreiner found that Brown's disengaged approach to "Louis Riel" invited a reader-response approach to reading it. As an example, it was the impetus for an in-depth, three-part interview conducted by Dave Sim in the pages of his comic book "Cerebus", which Sim uses as an opportunity to apply his own idiosyncratic views to an interpretation of events in Brown's book.