A  group in southern Ontario is raising money to build an eight-acre outdoor museum to celebrate Chief Tecumseh , a First Nations hero of the War of 1812.

The Friends of the Tecumseh Monument have plans for a $4 million interpretive centre at the site of the Battle of the Thames,  about 30 kilometres northeast of Chatham, Ont., where Tecumseh fell Oct. 5, 1813,

After the Battle of Lake Erie  in September, Brigadier General Henry Procter, the British commander at Detroit, began a retreat across the Ontario peninsula, pursued by about 3,500 U.S. troops under Brigadier General (later President) William Henry Harrison.  The forces met near Moraviantown on the Thames River. The British, with 600 regulars and about 1,000 native allies under Shawnee chief Tecumseh, were outnumbered and defeated.  Tecumseh was killed, the beginning of the end of the natives’ alliance with Britain.

Meanwhile, an hour and a half down the highway south, Windsor’s Community Museum in Windsor, Ont., is displaying the flag reputed to have covered Tecumseh’s body after the battle. The flag is part of  the exhibit Living in 1812: Life on the Sandwich Frontier, running to January, 2013.

The flag, handed down through many generations of a U.S. First Nations family, has not been corroborated as that which covered Tecumseh, though the museum’s curator says the colours, fabric and stitching are correct for the time period.  It was donated to the museum because the U.S. family thought it belonged in Canada as it is a piece of Canadian history.