A Brief History of South Dakota/Chapter 11
CHAPTER XI
AN ENGLISH CAPTAIN FROM SOUTH DAKOTA
When the second war with England began in 1812, British interests in the Northwest were placed under the general control of Major Robert Dickson, a bluff old Scotch fur trader, who was married to a Flathead Sioux woman whose home was on Elm River in what is now Brown County, South Dakota. It was the British purpose to enlist the Sioux and other western tribes in their behalf to make war on the Americans. Dickson's wife was the sister of Red Thunder, chief of the Flatheads, and this chief and his seventeen-year-old son, together with twenty-two Sissetons from South Dakota, at once entered the British service. In the early spring of 1813 they went down, with many other Indians, to Mackinaw, which was the headquarters of the British in the West, and thence proceeded against the American post, Fort Meigs, on the Maumee River in northern Ohio.
The siege of Fort Meigs was maintained for some time, when a party of volunteer Americans from Kentucky appeared on the ground and the British were compelled to give up their intentions upon the post. Dickson held a council with the Indians and proposed that they should proceed at once against Fort Stephenson, an American post on the Sandusky River. This was agreed to and they embarked in their canoes down the Maumee, but when they arrived at the mouth of the river, Itasapa, the head chief of all of the Sioux Indian expedition, turned the prow of his canoe up the lake toward Detroit, instead of turning south toward the Sandusky.
Dickson and other officers hurried to the front and demanded to know the chief's intentions. Itasapa said he was going to take his warriors back to the Mississippi, and nothing that Dickson or the English could do could persuade him to change his mind. He resolutely kept on toward Detroit, and the other tribes, seeing the Sioux deserting, followed their example; only Red Thunder, his young son, and sixteen of the Sissetons remained to support the English in their attempt on Fort Stephenson.
It seemed as if these warriors who remained loyal to the English attempted, at Fort Stephenson, to make up for the desertion of their countrymen; they fought with extraordinary bravery, but no one of them so distinguished himself as did Dickson's nephew, the Flathead young boy from South Dakota. He fought like a tiger, and, forgetting the Indian cunning and custom of concealing one's self from the enemy, he charged again and again in the open, and his relatives at once named him Waneta, which means "the charger." It does not seem that up to this time he had any name, but his new name he held during the rest of his long life. At the charge upon Fort Stephenson Waneta received nine gunshot wounds, but survived them all and as long as he lived he wore in his hair nine small sticks painted red, as tokens of the wounds he had received. Waneta continued to serve the English interests until the close of the war, when he was called to the English headquarters, which had been transferred to Drummond Island in Lake Huron, and given a captain's commission and
Waneta
a fine uniform. There is a tradition among the Sissetons and Flatheads that he was taken to England and presented to the king, but this is probably not true. At any rate he came back to his home in Dakota, where he remained for many years entirely loyal to the British government. Most of the other Indians had very promptly turned over to the American side.
When in 1819 the government began the military settlement at the head of navigation on the Mississippi, which resulted in the founding of Fort Snelling, Waneta, as a good British subject, went down to see what was going on and protest against the enterprise. He remained about the post for several weeks, and became acquainted with the officers and men and all of the cabins and arrangements within and without the post. He then entered into a conspiracy to surprise the post and destroy the garrison, but as he was about to carry it into execution, Colonel Snelling, then in command, got information of it. Snelling promptly arrested Waneta, took him into the post, and put him through a sweating process which thoroughly naturalized him. Colonel Snelling took his British medals and flags away from him, destroyed them before his eyes, and compelled him to swear allegiance to the American flag. Waneta came out from the fort thoroughly reformed in his views, and for the rest of his life was as proud of his Americanism as he formerly had been of his English allegiance.
When Major Long, in 1823, was sent out by the government to establish the boundary line between the United States and Canada where the Red River crosses the line, Waneta met him at Big Stone Lake, where he had prepared a great ovation for the military. He was dressed for the occasion in a magnificent array of finery in which he had combined the most striking features of civilized and savage clothing. In 1825 he signed the trade and intercourse treaty at Fort Pierre, and a few weeks later, signed the boundary treaty at Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. In 1832 Catlin found him at Fort Pierre, where he painted a fine likeness of him.
Waneta was easily the most able, and the most distinguished chief of all the Sioux nation of his period. He was shrewd, crafty, and diplomatic. After the conquest of the Rees in 1823, Waneta removed his home from the Elm River, in northern South Dakota, to the mouth of the Warreconne River (Beaver Creek) on the Missouri, in southern North Dakota, where he set up a protectorate over the Rees. He compelled them to pay him tribute in corn and horses and furs, which enabled him to live in great ease and splendor, and in consideration of this he protected the Rees from the Sioux tribes. He died in 1848 and was buried on the east bank of the Missouri River opposite Fort Rice in North Dakota.