On the morning of August 15, 1812, the garrison at Forth Dearborn, the site of Chicago, was ready to leave. Orders had been received from General William Hull to make a forced march to Detroit. Scouts had reported drums thumping in the villages and some tribes were painted for war.

Shortly after sunup, Captain Nathan Heald, the post commander, led his men out of the tiny stockade. The ragged column of fifty regulars, flanking the women and children of the few families who had settled near the stockade, started out across the prairie.

From his hiding place, Metea gave the signal. His painted, howling warriors, outnumbering the troops, fell on the train and butchered most of the regulars and settlers. A few months later Metea attempted to stop the advance of General William Henry Harrison's troops marching to lift the siege of Fort Wayne, but he was wounded and forced to flee. When a friend of Colonel McKenney asked Metea why he hadn't thrown away hus rifle during the Indian retreat, Metea replied:
"I would rather have lost my life...."

Metea was one of the principal chiefs and orators at the treaty council held in Washington in the summer of 1821, between the United States commissioners and the Ottawa, Chippewa, and Potawatomi nations. His importance as a chief is underscored by the position of his signature; among his nations fifty-five chiefs signing the trearty, he was second.

Major Stephen H. Long in his journals described Metea: "His stature is about six feet; he has a forbidding aspect, by no means deficient in dignity. His features are strongly marked, and expressive of a haughty and tyrannical disposition; his complexion is dark.... His hair is black, and indicates a slight tendency to curl.... There is something unpleasant in his looks, owing... to a scar which he has upon the wing of his nostril.... We behold in him all the characteristics of the Indian warrior to perfection." The chief's dress, Long observed, while old has "been arranged upon his person with no small degree of care."

It consisted of leather leggings buttoned on the outside, a breechcloth of blue breadcloth, and a short checkered shirt over it. "The whole was covered with a blanket, which was secured... by a belt, and hung not ungracefully from his shoulders, generally concealing his right arm which is... withered from a wound received during the late war.... His face was carefully painted with vermilion round his left eye. Four feathers, coloured without taste, hung behind, secured to a string which was tied to a lock of his hair."

Metea, as he grew older, became a strong believer of education for his people. In 1827, he delivered a number of Potawatomi boys to the Indian agent at Fort Wayne with instructions that they be sent to the white man's school. The boys were placed in the two-year-old Choctaw Academy, then located near Georgetown, Kentucky.

Metea was painted by Samuel Seymour who accompanied the Long expedition as "landscape painter and designer."

During the big Indian council held in the fall of 1827 at St. Joseph, Michigan, Metea drank a bottle of poison, believing it was whiskey, and died.