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
