Tomahawks and Battle of the Thames Artifacts

Sly Old Fox

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The two hatchets are an antique Walters that I found in the bush while the other is a crate opener.

As for the rest, they are artifacts from the Battle of the Thames (east of Chatham, On) from the War of 1812. At this battle, the great Tecumseh was killed.

On the board are two forged tomahawk heads aas well as stone tomahawks and two cast iron balls from a canon's canister.


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Thanks for posting pics. Did you find everything field walking? or do you swing a detector as well? Is the battle area near the park on hwy 2. Nice looking collection. Cookie
 
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Very intresting.

I have a Big stone Axe head i found in and extinct volcano crater in Queensland Australia.
Its very Heavy and if you got schwact with it you would be in Troble.
The Edge is so nice a Curve i was very impressed when i found it.
 
Very intresting.

I have a Big stone Axe head i found in and extinct volcano crater in Queensland Australia.
Its very Heavy and if you got schwact with it you would be in Troble.
The Edge is so nice a Curve i was very impressed when i found it.

The pinkish coloured arrowhead (top left, bottom picture) looks to be made from Flint Ridge, Ohio material, the others are made from local Onandaga chert.


Thanks for the comments. :canadaFlag:

I lived in Bothwell during the years of WW11 and never walked the fields on the north side of the Thames - but I had relatives, by marriage to my mother who farmed in that immediate area and these items were picked up by the farmers working the land. I inherited the lot in a box, and put them on a display board for our daughter for show and tell. As for the last quote, yes, the followers of Tecumseh came from south of the Great Lakes, there Tecumseh and his brother, the Prophet, led their people north to fight against the Yanks because of the incursion into their ancestoral territory by the Yankee push west. Proctor, the British General was not a great soldier and from my readings, was no hero. The only hero in this battle was Tecumseh, little known in Canada. He should be recognized better than the town of Tecumseh and a few streets named after him. His body was not left on the battlefield but spirited away by his friends, to an un known burial site.

I've a first cousin who taught school in Chatham who tells me that he taught a mixed race lad who claimed that Tecumseh was burried on the bank of the Sydenham River to the north. :confused:

The Yankee army had a number of wild Kentuckian cavalry and it is said that it was them who over ran the Indian allies, while the Red Coats turned tail and ran.:eek:

This is part of our Candian heritage which should be celebrated, not that I don't love my American cousins.:)

If you agree with the sentiments in the last part of my signature lines, feel free to use, the more the merrier.
 
Nice collection. I've got several stone hammerheads found on our farm in Manitoba. That hatchet head looks like it would be awful hard to pull out of someone's skull in a hurry. I'm not sure I'd like mine quite that long for that reason.
 
As for the last quote, yes, the followers of Tecumseh came from south of the Great Lakes

I have no doubt that the stone points came from or near the battle sight, but they appear to be far older than that. Several look to be Adena points, which would make them several thousand years old, and none of them are actually arrowheads, but rather dart points or hafted knife blades. True arrowheads are much smaller.
Flint was widely traded, going back thousands of years. Here in Sudbury, I have seen at the University a catch of blades made of Hudsons Bay Lowland flint, the scource of which is about 400 miles north of here. They were found locally. A dig in North Bay a few years ago turned up a few flakes of obsidian from Wyoming and a bit of Knife River flint from west central North Dakota. Thats a long way from North Bay!
 
The tomahawk is really fantastic and still in good shape considering, I bet it has a story to tell!!

The F&I war was fought all over the northern U.S and southern Ontario....

A head like that would be a prized posession or battle trophy to a warrior at the time.....
Its very possible there could be human remains at the site where you found it.

Very cool!!!

I wish I had a metal detector, I know of a few sites I would indeed like to examine!!

Cheers!
 
How the heck did it find it's way up to our neck of the woods? :confused:

By trade.
Another good example of how far this stuff moves is the Speigle Site in Killarney, just south of us. When it was excavated some years back, some very large cerimonial Adena culture blades were found in a burial mound. The originals are at Michigan State University, but Laurentian has copies made from moulds of the originals. I have seen these, and they are absolutly beautiful, very large and thin, increadible workmanship. They are made of the same flint ridge Ohio material I mentioned in my above post.
 
How the heck did it find it's way up to our neck of the woods? :confused:

I presume that you mean the arrowhead mentioned above which is said to have come from Ohio.

If you read up on the war of 1812, you will learn that the indian confederacy below the Great Lakes, going much further south than what is now Ohio, took up arms against the USA and were allies of the British.
 
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