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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. Sir Isaac Brock, finally reached the intended recipient: Robert Dickson, a 46-year-old, Scottish-born 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.

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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 cooperation that you and your friends might be able to furnish.”When Brock’s “confidential communication” was delivered to Dickson on June 18 near present-day Portage, Wisconsin — 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.