Red Haired Man had pivotal role in war
Robert Dickson’s native warriors helped thwart U.S.
On June 18, 1812, at a portage between two rivers in the wilderness west of Lake Michigan, a courier who’d trekked thousands of kilometres with a secret letter from Upper Canada’s military commander, Maj.-Gen. Isaac Brock, finally reached the intended recipient: Robert Dickson, a 46-year-old, Scottishborn fur trader from Niagara who was known as “Red-Haired Man” among his many aboriginal friends.
On the same day in Washington, U.S. president James Madison signed a declaration of war, sending the young American republic — just 29 years after winning its fight for independence — into a new battle with Britain, this time with plans to conquer its Canadian colonies and secure unfettered access to the vast Northwest beyond the Great Lakes.
Brock, who would be famously martyred in the defence of Canada before the year was out, earned a good measure of that posthumous glory with his prescient but largely unheralded plea to Dickson, penned three months before the conflict had even begun: “As it is probable that war may result from the present state of affairs,” he had written on Feb. 27, “it is very desirable to ascertain the degree of co-operation that you and your friends might be able to furnish.”
When Brock’s “confidential communication” was delivered to Dickson on June 18 near presentday Portage, Wis. — in the company of the Sioux chief Wabasha and other aboriginal leaders, and at the very moment when the U.S. was officially launching its war against Canada — an alliance was cemented that would prove crucial to thwarting the imminent American invasion.
Two centuries later, on the eve of the War of 1812 bicentennial commemorations to be marked Monday across North America, Brock’s brilliant bit of covert diplomacy — which changed the course of the conflict on the day it started — is little appreciated in today’s heritage hot zone of southern Ontario, where the hero of Queenston Heights would fall to a sniper’s bullet that October
MAJ.-GEN. ISAAC BROCK
and most of the fighting over the following 2 1/2 years would take place within a cannon’s shot of today’s U.s. - canada border.
But in a distant native community south of Saskatoon — the home of Saskatchewan’s Whitecap Dakota First Nation — a few hundred kinfolk of the Sioux warriors who joined Dickson, Brock, Wabasha and fellow aboriginal ally Tecumseh in confronting U.S. forces 200 years ago are proudly remembering their special connection to the War of 1812 battles that helped create Canada.
To this day, the war is known among the Dakota Sioux as Pahin-shashawacikiya: “When The Red Head Begged For Our Help.”
“In Western Canada, there’s not really a lot of awareness of the War of 1812,” says Chief Darcy Bear, leader of Whitecap’s 600-member community. “But it’s basically the humble beginnings of our nation. Canada didn’t just happen in 1867 — turn on a switch and Canada was there. There were actually relationships prior to that, and the British really relied on their First Nations allies.”
Dickson, the largely forgotten figure central to forging those ties at the pivotal juncture of 1812, had won the trust of various native tribes through years of honest dealing in the fur trade, by delivering life-saving supplies in times of hunger among his aboriginal friends and — above all — by marrying To-to-win, the sister of a respected Sioux chief.
On the eve of war with the U.S. two centuries ago, Brock knew that Dickson could play a major role in bolstering British interests on the western frontier.
After Brock’s courier arrived with the general’s clandestine inquiry, Dickson responded immediately — in a letter dated June 18, 1812, a copy of which is held today at Library and Archives Canada — with a pledge to rally “250 or 300” aboriginal fighters “of all sorts of different languages” to the British cause.
“All ready to march when required,” Dickson added, enclosing transcribed statements from Chief Wabasha and two other Sioux leaders attesting to their nation’s determination to fight the Americans.
“We live by our English Traders who have always assisted us, and never more so than this last year, at the risk of their lives,” Wabasha’s message read.
Within a month, on July 17, a contingent of aboriginal warriors led by Dickson had joined with a motley crew of British soldiers, English-Canadian volunteers and French-Canadian voyageurs in securing the first victory of the war: the capture of the American fort on Mackinac Island at the western end of Lake Huron — a strategically important prize guarding the entrance to Lake Michigan.
The Americans assigned to the military outpost — unaware that the war had even been declared and fearful of any engagement with First Nations — surrendered the gateway to the Northwest without firing a shot.
Another key victory followed a month later, on Aug. 16, with the capture of Fort Detroit. Brock personally led the siege and again benefited from the participation of hundreds of allied aboriginal soldiers — including the renowned Shawnee chief Tecumseh and Dickson’s ragtag native corps — whose menacing presence prompted a premature and probably unwarranted American surrender to outnumbered British-Canadian forces.
William Hull, the U.S. general at Detroit and also the first governor of Michigan, had scuttled a planned invasion of Canada in July amid fears of facing aboriginal fighters and after receiving word of the hasty American surrender at Mackinac.
IT IS FAR FROM MY INTENTION TO JOIN IN A WAR OF EXTERMINATION, BUT YOU MUST BE AWARE THAT THE NUMEROUS BODY OF INDIANS WHO HAVE ATTACHED THEMSELVES TO MY TROOPS WILL BE BEYOND MY CONTROL THE MOMENT THE CONTEST COMMENCES.
He then gave up Detroit after the U.S. garrison suffered just a handful of casualties, primarily because Hull believed Brock’s carefully calculated warning — delivered by a courier across the battle line — that a massacre of American soldiers and civilians by First Nations warriors might not be preventable.
“It is far from my intention to join in a war of extermination,” Brock had slyly written, “but you must be aware that the numerous body of Indians who have attached themselves to my troops will be beyond my control the moment the contest commences.”
Momentum in the War of 1812 would shift several times before a peace treaty was signed in Belgium in December 1814 that essentially declared a stalemate and restored all prewar boundaries. The momentum shifted, in fact, several times even after the Treaty of Ghent was struck and before news of the war’s end finally reached North America in February 1815.
But by all accounts, the British-Canadian alliance with Tecumseh, Wabasha and other aboriginal leaders proved essential in preventing the American takeover of the colonies that would be joined in Confederation a half-century later — as well as the western territories that would gradually become part of the new, independent nation north of the United States.