Page:A Brief History of South Dakota.djvu/73

 CHAPTER XI

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 67