Northern Light

by Roy MacGregor

Sixty years after Tom Thomson was buried, notes on the events of 1917 compiled by Charles Plewman, the young Mowat Lodge guest who had served as a pallbearer, appeared in the Gull Rock Gazette, published by the alumni association of a summer camp Plewman had founded in the Haliburton Highlands in the early 1930s. Plewman was now dead, but his remembrances confirmed that Winnie had acted on behalf of the absent Thomson family. He believed, accurately, that the Thomsons had learned of Thomson’s Canoe Lake burial only when Winnie called them from Huntsville. He believed the family then asked her to make the arrangements for the exhumation of the body and its return to Owen Sound.

  “Apparently,” Plewman wrote, “because Winnie was familiar with what had happened, the family agreed that she should represent them by making arrangements to have the body removed. She phoned the original undertaker at Kearney and tried to persuade him to act. He refused. She contacted Mr. Churchill the undertaker in Huntsville pleading with him to act. He could come down on the evening train, get the job done that night, and return the next morning. She offered the help of several men who were staying at the Lodge.”

  We know that Winnie had taken the evening train out on July 17, immediately after Tom Thomson had been buried, so she was no longer at Canoe Lake when the coroner, Dr. Arthur E. Ranney, finally arrived from North Bay later that same evening. After Ranney’s train pulled in at about 10:30 p.m., he had a quick meeting, over tea, with Mark Robinson while the ranger filled him in on the essentials. Robinson then took the coroner to the Trainor cottage, where they were met by Martin Blecher, Sr., who invited them to repair to his larger cottage nearby for dinner. Dr. Ranney, who had not eaten since boarding his train, accepted enthusiastically. The various witnesses and interested persons assembled there were Dr. Goldwin Howland, Martin Blecher, Sr., Martin Blecher, Jr., Shannon Fraser, Mark Robinson, J. Ed Colson (who owned the Algonquin Hotel), guide George Rowe and one person identified as “Tourist” (who was likely Charlie Scrim, the Ottawa florist who hung around with the guides). After a hearty meal was served by the Blecher women and eaten by the men, the gathering then turned to holding an official inquest, Dr. Ranney presiding.

  Dr. Howland told the coroner that the body had been in an “advanced state of decomposition” when it was discovered, that there had been bleeding from the right ear and a bad bruise on the temple. Though Ranney never viewed the body himself, he wrote in a 1931 letter to Thomson’s biographer Blodwen Davies that there was a “… bruise on the right side of head, temple region, about four inches long, this no doubt caused by striking some object, like a stone when the body was drowned.” He was merely repeating Howland’s observations.

  In Robinson’s journal entry for July 17th, the ranger noted that he and Howland had examined the body. “We found a bruise on left temple about four inches long,” he wrote. “Evidently caused by falling on a Rock.…”

  The coroner, apparently, did not question whether the bruise was in fact on the right or left temple but quickly accepted that the injury was most likely caused by Thomson striking his head on a rock, either before or after he slipped into the deep waters off Little Wapomeo Island. Not long after midnight, Ranney called an end to the inquiry, endorsing the original assessment made by Superintendent Bartlett: death by drowning. Bartlett hadn’t seen the body either. Nor had he made the effort to attend the inquest.

  Mark Robinson was troubled both by the verdict and by how superficial the inquiry was. As he remembered in 1953, “almost before we had time, Dr. Ranney said, ‘Clearly a case of accidental drowning. Accidental drowning is the verdict.’ ” Robinson claimed one of the “old guides”—he did not name him, but we can assume it was George Rowe because Lawrie Dickson was not present—attempted a weak protest but got nowhere. Robinson, too, held his tongue. In the letter, he wrote: “Dr. Ranney of North Bay conducted what inquest was held. Tom was said to have been drowned. It may be quite true but the mystery remains.”

  At about one in the morning, Martin Blecher, Jr., ferried Dr. Ranney and Mark Robinson to Joe Creek in the Blechers’ boat. They walked from the landing to the ranger’s shelter house. Robinson noted in his journal of Wednesday, July 18th, that they arrived back at around 2:30 a.m. and that Ranney slept briefly before catching the 6 a.m. train to Scotia Junction, where he boarded the train back to North Bay.

  “Later in the day,” Robinson recounted, “S Fraser received telegram that a steel casket was being sent in and Thom Thompsons body was to be exhumed and taken out By whose Orders I am not at Present aware.”

  They were confusing times. The telegram to Fraser concerning the exhumation could have come from Churchill, the undertaker who had been assigned by Winnie Trainor to exhume the body; from Winnie herself; or from the Thomson family in Owen Sound. No matter, Robinson clearly felt that he should have been informed, as he remained the official voice of authority for Canoe Lake.

  Dr. Ranney supposedly filed his report back in North Bay, but research by William Little for his 1970 book could not find it; nor has it turned up since if, in fact, it ever existed. All that survives of Ranney’s work during his quick visit to Canoe Lake is a “Warrant to Bury After A View” document, granting lawful permission to bury the body to “the person in charge or control of burying grounds” at Canoe Lake, and a “Coroner’s Warrant to Take Possession of Body.” The latter was issued to “the Chief Constable” of Canoe Lake, Mark Robinson, giving the okay to “forthwith take in charge the body of Thomas Thompson deceased now lying dead at Canoe Lake Ont.” Both documents are signed and sealed “this 17th day of July 1917”—the day Thomson was buried. Ranney, therefore, was granting official approval for acts that had been carried out before he had arrived.

  Anyone who has grown up in a relatively remote, “wilderness” area that is also a tourist destination knows that a “colonial” psychology runs strong among those who live and work there. Algonquin Park was no exception to this custom. Enormous emphasis is placed on “serving” others—rich tourists, city visitors, the politically connected—who come and go. Even when I was growing up in the area in the 1950s and 1960s, the many grandchildren of Chief Ranger Tom McCormick had the sense that the Junior Ranger Program, where youngsters aged seventeen were taken on for summer employment, was not for them but for privileged kids from the city. These youngsters usually came from families with some connections, even if only minor. Dr. James MacCallum was well connected because of his work, his wealth, his prestige and his many friendships through the elite Arts & Letters Club of Toronto. The Thomson family was well connected through George Thomson and also through Tom’s brother-in-law Tom Harkness. However, it is unlikely that the Thomsons ever sought to exert such influence in trying to have a fuller examination of the matter than had already been attempted through Ranney’s quick inquiry. It’s far more likely that others in positions of power chose to act on their behalf, believing they were protecting a highly respected and important family.

  As an administrator, Bartlett, the park superintendent, tended to take the line of least resistance or least complication. When he had been named to the post in 1898, he recorded that “[t]he job included the position of Postmaster, Commissioner in the High Court of Justice, Police Magistrate, and Chief Coroner in the District of Nipissing. The Premier of the Province told me that the Park had been a blot on the Government and asked me to make it a credit.”

  Bartlett was determined to make his bush fiefdom “a credit” and to stay clear of any complaints from Toronto. It was Bartlett who, considering himself to be ex officio coroner, immediately declared that Tom had died by drowning without so much as seeing his body. It was Bartlett who approved the quick burial. And it was likely Bartlett who handcuffed the real coroner, Dr. A.E. Ranney, who arrived to find the body embalmed and already buried. Ranney might also have been asked to sign documents that predated his arrival.

  Ranney might even have been outraged by what Bartlett had done to him, which could explain his hasty, sloppy and disinterested official inquiry at the Blechers’
cottage and the speed with which he got away from Canoe Lake in the morning. It may even explain the lack of a coroner’s report. That report was always said to have been lost, but perhaps Ranney never bothered to file one, since the conclusions had been reached before he even started his inquiry.

  Once Ranney arrived, courtesy alone should have required Bartlett to travel the short distance from his Cache Lake headquarters to attend. Perhaps Bartlett regretted bringing in Ranney in the first place, having sent the telegram to North Bay before he realized that this whole unfortunate affair would be best concluded as quickly as possible.

  There were legitimate questions about the legalities and ethics of the shabby inquest—and also about the legalities concerning the paintings Tom Thomson left behind.

  Mark Robinson might well have been frustrated with his superior, Bartlett, but he had been trained throughout his adult life—militia, park ranger, service in the war—to follow orders no matter what he might feel about the orders themselves. Later in life Robinson carefully said that, while the search had still been on for Thomson, he had been “instructed” (obviously by Bartlett) to go to “the little house” (the Trainor cabin) and see what was there that belonged to Thomson. He said he and Hugh Trainor found about forty of the spring series of sketches “laying around there” (though he maintained that the original number had been sixty-two). Robinson said he gathered the sketches up, as instructed, for the Thomson family.

  This version of events is at odds with park historian Audrey Saunders’s account, in which George Thomson was said to have entered the Trainor cabin during the days before Tom’s body was found and to have taken some thirty-five paintings without asking permission of either the Trainor family or the park authorities. As the responsible older brother, he would have felt well within his rights to do so, even if those rights might be open to question, especially given that the fate of his younger brother was still unknown. While Saunders’s book is often said to be the “official” history of the park and was paid for by government funds, it suffered from tampering and is not considered definitive in all aspects. If Robinson’s count is accurate (and if Thomson worked at a pace of a sketch a day that spring), he would have arrived at Canoe Lake around the last week of March. At the same speed of production, if Saunders is correct, he would have arrived nearly a month later. The first mention of his presence that spring in Mark Robinson’s journal is May 3: “Tom Thomson called this afternoon.” I believe he arrived in early April and painted until the blackflies became impossible around the end of May. It is also believed that he gave a number of the sketches away, so an exact total is impossible to calculate. Whatever the actual count, a significant number of the sketches ended up with the Thomson family and formed part of the Tom Thomson art estate, which was carefully overseen in subsequent years by Dr. MacCallum.

  Before his 1953 interview, Robinson had never made mention of the visit to the cottage with Hugh Trainor to clear out the sketches—and his 1953 interview, completed when he was eighty-six, does suffer from inconsistencies with his own 1917 daily journal. It seems equally possible that Saunders got it right when she claimed that George Thomson had simply gone to the Trainor cabin alone and relieved it of thirty-five or so paintings. Before Thomson’s death, those paintings were his to do with as he wished. But if they were taken from the Trainor cabin by George Thomson before his brother’s body was even found, or simply handed over to him without question, what does that say of ownership? What if the paintings—even some of them—were intended to be a gift to Winnie? Or was the painter merely storing them at the Trainors’ cottage, planning to ship them south himself, to be used as inspiration for his larger canvases during the winter? We cannot know.

  Winnie Trainor would raise her own questions about the paintings later, but at the time of the hasty inquest, which she did not attend and was not asked to attend, she was busy arranging, on behalf of the Thomson family, the exhumation of Tom Thomson’s body by Churchill, the reluctant undertaker from Huntsville.

  In the notes pallbearer George Plewman left behind, he claimed that when Churchill arrived at Canoe Lake, Shannon Fraser had transported the undertaker and his casket to the cemetery and had offered further assistance, but Churchill turned him down. Plewman claimed that Fraser was highly dubious of Churchill, who worked alone, under lamplight, and completed the task in about three hours. How, Fraser wondered, would it be possible, in that timeframe, for one man to dig up a coffin from a six-foot-deep grave, remove the body from the casket, place it in the metal casket, seal the casket and be ready for transport back to the train station? Fraser, Plewman wrote, openly doubted that the coffin that left on the train the following morning was heavy enough to contain a body. So, too, did the men who transferred the metal casket to the train heading south from Scotia Junction and on to Owen Sound.

  Mark Robinson was also mystified by Churchill’s behaviour. He had originally puzzled over whose “orders” Churchill was following, but it seems that, by the following day, he was satisfied that it was indeed the Thomson family who had requested the exhumation. “Mr. Churchill undertaker of Huntsville, Ont., arrived last night,” Robinson noted in his journal of July 19th, “and took up the body of Thomas Thompson under direction of Mr. Geo Thompson of Conn. U.S.A.”

  The wording “under direction of” is somewhat vague, suggesting that George had returned to Canoe Lake, and a letter signed by him and sent to Dr. MacCallum was postmarked from Mowat the same day that the body was supposedly exhumed. Yet, much later in life, George claimed he had not been there a second time. The Owen Sound paper did report that he had accompanied the body home, and it may be that he joined the train at some point, possibly even arriving at Canoe Lake, where he would have met Churchill and the sealed casket, posted the letter he had written on the train and then immediately caught the next train leaving. In a July 22nd letter to her sister Minnie, Tom’s sister Margaret wrote that “George went the next afternoon to Canoe Lake and brought Tom’s body on the Friday night train to Owen Sound.” We know from Robinson’s journal entry that Churchill arrived the night of the 18th, Wednesday, and was ready to catch the morning train on the 19th, Thursday, which raises questions about the “Friday night train.” Did she make a mistake, that the body had arrived on the Thursday night train? Or was there a day’s delay, which might explain why George Thomson said he was never at Canoe Lake a second time and had joined up with the body at one of the transfer points? No one had seen him either arrive or leave and he himself denied ever returning; but the posted letter and Margaret’s letter both suggest that he must have been there, even if briefly.

  On July 21st, Tom Harkness, who was handling the estate, paid out certain expenses to George Thomson, including $37.75 in rail fare, another $8.15 fare for the casket, $1.80 to purchase “Cigars for Rangers,” $1.50 to ship the sketches, 60 cents for a telephone call to Toronto (likely to Dr. James MacCallum, whom the family had asked to handle Tom’s art inventory) and $4.40 in “Expenses to Churchill Undertaker.” Given that this suggests that George Thomson had already paid the undertaker, who had returned to Huntsville, it seems probable that George did accompany the body home.

  Mark Robinson did not see George Thomson at Canoe Lake after Tom was buried. In his long 1953 interview, Robinson said he had known nothing of the exhumation having taken place until he went to the train station early Thursday morning and found a man standing beside a steel coffin that had been soldered about the edges. Robinson went on to describe his conversation with the undertaker:

  I looked at it. I said, ‘What’s the idea?’

  The gentleman standing there said, ‘What’s so and so to you?’ I showed him my badge.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I have Thomson’s body in there. It’s being taken to Owen Sound for burial.’

  I asked him, I said, ‘Should you not have reported to the authorities before you touched a grave?’ I said, ‘That’s an official cemetery over there.’

  ‘No,’ he says, ‘it’
s not necessary; when I get instructions to remove a body, I do so.’

  Robinson said he went to the ranger’s crude telephone and immediately reported this transgression to Superintendent Bartlett, who told him: “ ‘Now, Mark we’ve had enough trouble over that thing. I hope that you’ll let it settle. Say nothing about it—if they want to take the body, let them take it.’ ”

  Robinson, of course, obeyed. Once the train had left with Churchill and the metal casket, Robinson says he was called by Bartlett, who wished him to go to the cemetery and make sure everything was filled in. “Close it up,” he instructed the ranger.

  Robinson said that when he got there, he was surprised by how little there was for him to do. He found a hole no bigger than what “any ground hog would make”—a scooped-out hole about twenty inches deep.

  “God forgive me if I’m wrong about it,” Robinson said, “but I still think Thomson’s body is over there. And I may state right here … I think Thomson was struck on the head with a paddle by some person that afternoon (referring, of course, to the afternoon of Sunday, July 8th, which was taken to be the last time anyone had seen Tom thanks to Shannon Fraser’s testimony).

  “I don’t think Thomson died a natural death from drowning.”

  NINE THE SEALED CASKET

  Nearly forty years after this remarkable week at Canoe Lake, undertaker F.W. Churchill was indignant to think that anyone could question his ethics. But this is exactly what happened in 1956 in the days following the discovery of human bones in the spot where he had supposedly exhumed Tom Thomson’s body. He was then living in Kirkland Lake, Ontario, and had been contacted by the Canadian Press for comment following the news report of a skeleton being uncovered at Canoe Lake. The retired undertaker was adamant that he had, indeed, exhumed and shipped the body to the Thomson family in Owen Sound. He claimed that four men had been assigned by Ranger Mark Robinson to help him. Robinson could neither verify nor deny this claim, as he had died the previous Christmas, and Churchill was adamant that the job had been done properly. No matter that Robinson had never noted this in his careful journals—or in subsequent letters or interviews—and had, in fact, expressed great surprise when he first encountered Churchill and his casket on the Canoe Lake platform, preparing to leave the park.