by Ross King
R.B. Bennett, a Conservative mp for Calgary and future prime minister, warned that compulsion could not be introduced in French Canada without “riot and bloodshed.” 19 A foreign correspondent, in an article headlined “Canada at the Cross-ways,” observed this bleak political landscape and sorrowfully observed, “The clouds are still low over the political horizon of Canada, and the prospect of their breaking to a clearing sky seems remote.” 20
In the midst of this furor there appeared in the Toronto Daily Star, on Wednesday, July 18, beneath a long list of Canadian soldiers killed in action, a report that the body of a “landscape artist of rare charm and promise” had been recovered from Canoe Lake.
6 SHADES OF GREY
WHEN TOM THOMSON arrived at Mowat Lodge early in April 1917, snow still covered the ground. For the first few weeks he spent his time painting and ice fishing. In the middle of the month, he wrote to his father that, with three feet of snow in the bush, he was anticipating “a lot more winter sketches.” 1 But he was unsure of his plans for the coming months and not certain if he would remain in Algonquin for the whole summer. He had already decided against working as a fire ranger because, as he wrote to his brother-in-law, “it interferes with sketching to the point of stopping it altogether, so in my case it does not pay.” The job might have earned him a certificate of exemption from conscription, had he wanted one, on the grounds that it could be deemed (in the words of the Military Service Act) “expedient in the national interest.” But as he told his brother-in-law, “I can have a much better time sketching and fishing and be farther ahead in the end.” 2
There was apparently another reason why Thomson decided to remain at Canoe Lake rather than work as a fire ranger. Mark Robinson believed Thomson wished to stay close to one of the summer cottagers, Charlie Scrim, a twenty-nine-year-old florist from Ottawa. Scrim had been an active member of the Rideau Canoe Club, but by 1917 he was suffering from a physical infirmity, probably tuberculosis, the disease that in a few months would claim Thomson’s friend
Dr. John McRuer. Thomson believed the ailing Scrim was “not long to be with us,” so he resolved “to stay down here on Charlie’s account” and make what was left of his life “as happy as can be.” 3
This devotion to Scrim reveals the strong bonds of attachment Thomson felt to the small community on Canoe Lake, and to some extent it belies his reputation as a taciturn solitary. In the early spring and late autumn, when the snow prevented him from pitching his tent, he lived, according to one Canoe Lake resident, “with the Frasers as one of the family.” 4 He was likewise friends with the rangers, not only Mark Robinson but also Larry Dickson and George Rowe. Dickson, a former shantyman, and Rowe, a one-time typesetter and mill worker, shared a small log cabin (painted several times by Thomson) on the north end of Canoe Lake, near the Algonquin Hotel. He also became close to the less robust residents, such as Scrim. Many of those who visited Canoe Lake were semi-invalids who came for the sake of their health. Thomson took an interest in their welfare, rowing “many a sick friend” around the lake until they were “growing strong and back to health again.” 5
A visitor to Canoe Lake with whom he formed a much-debated romantic attachment was Winnie Trainor. A Mowat Lodge resident in 1917 later claimed that Thomson was “with her all the time.” 6 According to the testimony of another regular visitor, an American named Robert Little, Thomson and Winnie were “frequently seen together.” 7 Described by Little as “comely,” the tall and slim Winnie was known at Canoe Lake as a “Belle of the Ball.” 8 What must have appealed most to Thomson was her love of the outdoors and her interest in his paintings. Mark Robinson’s daughter wrote that Winnie took “a great interest in Thomson and his work. Tom visited her in Huntsville and gave her some of his sketches.” 9 Altogether he gave her about a dozen of his works—though none painted after 191410—and also decorated a set of her crockery with northern scenes. Frequent letters passed between them when she was in Huntsville.
At some point, using the camera he always packed for his canoeing expeditions, Thomson took two photographs of a woman generally presumed to be Winnie. Both show her standing in the bush on a sunny summer’s day, a bamboo fly-fishing rod in one hand and her catch of bass in the other. She wears an ankle-length flannel dress with a high collar and down-to-business, rolled-back sleeves. She is smiling but her eyes are shyly downcast, or else Thomson caught her at the moment she blinked or squinted in the sunlight. She looks to be a young woman at home in the bush, an updated version of that uniquely Canadian female character type, the industrious and prudent pioneer woman of the sort described by Catharine Parr Traill in The Backwoods of Canada and The Canadian Settler’s Guide. The photographs suggest that Thomson was able to share his passion for fishing and the outdoors with a woman as well as with men like Mark Robinson or Ned Godin.
The most tantalizing thing about Thomson’s photographs is that Winnie (if she is indeed the woman in the pictures) wears three rings on the third finger of her left hand.11 Whether or not Thomson and Winnie were engaged—and, if so, whether their engagement was the result of a pregnancy—has been the subject of much inconclusive debate. Annie Fraser, Shannon Fraser’s wife, later claimed the pair was to be married. She based her evidence, according to Robinson’s daughter, on a letter “carelessly lying on a dresser” in Thomson’s room at Mowat Lodge. This letter supposedly urged Thomson to “get a new suit, because we’ll have to be married” 12—the hasty trip down the aisle necessitated (so the inference goes) by Winnie’s pregnancy. Yet Thomson would hardly have left a letter of such import lying “carelessly” on a dresser: he was suspicious of the Frasers’ interest in his affairs, warning Winnie never to put anything personal in her letters because the Frasers “always seemed to know his business.” He suspected the Frasers of steaming his letters open in the post office or else removing them from his overcoat pocket.13 Even if Winnie committed such sensitive information to print, Thomson would not have been so indiscreet as to leave the letter vulnerable to the snooping eyes of his landlady.
Not everyone believed the relationship between Thomson and Winnie was destined to end in marriage. Mark Robinson learned from an unnamed friend that Winnie claimed she was engaged to Thomson. The ranger had his doubts: “Perhaps so, but I did not see anything to indicate more than ordinary friendship.” 14 He too read the correspondence between Thomson and Winnie (there were few secrets at Canoe Lake) but dismissed it as “just ordinary boy and girl letters, there was nothing extraordinary about them.” 15 An adolescent acquaintance of Winnie later remarked that she knew nothing of the engagement and that the relationship between the two supposed lovers was “all a mystery.” 16
Even so, the rings in the photograph and the testimony of Robert Little indicate something more than ordinary friendship. After more than three years, Thomson’s relationship with Winnie appears to have reached a critical stage—though not necessarily as a result of a pregnancy. Thomson certainly hoped to find domestic happiness: that much he indicated in his letter to Frank Carmichael deploring those who believed that bachelordom and celibacy were ideal for an artist. He undoubtedly agreed with his friend Will Broadhead that the life of a bachelor was “unnatural and disappointing.” 17 But marriage would have brought its own problems. Thomson wrote to his father in the spring of 1917 that he hoped to live exclusively by his art “for another year at least . . . I will stick to painting as long as I can.” 18 Marriage would inevitably threaten his artistic independence. Would he be able to support Winnie and a family? Or would he be forced to work as a fire ranger or—provided he could find a job—a commercial designer?
The decision did not, to all outward appearances, weigh heavily on Thomson. A fellow resident of Mowat Lodge that spring found him “a rather moody, quiet chap, and rather withdrawn,” but Little believed him to be “in excellent spirits.” 19 He was also productive with his brush. Each day through April and May he painted, according to Robinson, at least one sketch (or
“board,” as Thomson called them), creating “a record of the weather for sixty-two days, rain or shine or snow, dark or bright.” 20 Once again Mowat Lodge turned into an exhibition gallery as dozens of Thomson’s sketches were spread around the dining room. One was given by Thomson as a wedding present to Robert and Daphne Crombie, a couple honeymooning at Canoe Lake.
One sketch Thomson completed was a small but ambitious nocturnal scene, Northern Lights. The possibility of painting nocturnal landscapes fascinated and frustrated painters. “It often seems to me,” wrote Van Gogh in September 1888, “that the night is more alive and more richly coloured than the day.” 21 But how did one use colour to depict darkness? The Starry Night, with its superabundant variegation of swirling blues and yellows, was Van Gogh’s triumphant experiment. Thomson was equally daring. He attempted to depict the aurora borealis, something so fleeting that most artists considered it impossible to paint. Late one “intensely cold” evening Thomson had been watching the northern lights outside Mark Robinson’s house when he declared, “I believe I can put that on canvas.” Robinson’s property near the Algonquin Hotel failed to provide a striking background to the lights, so he went to Larry Dickson’s cabin and lit a fire. He then spent the entire night dashing in and out of the cabin, studying the lights for a few minutes before returning inside to warm his hands beside the fire and paint by lamplight.22 Only twenty-two centimetres high by twenty-seven wide, the sketch showed the newly self-confident painter in full artistic flight. Yet Thomson was still assailed by self-doubts. Evidence of his ongoing frustrations was a pile of smashed-up boards along Potter Creek.23
Thomson became less prolific as summer arrived. On July 7 he wrote to Dr. MacCallum that he had not been able to work “since the flies started. The weather has been wet and cold all spring and the flies and mosquitoes much worse than I have seen them any year and fly dope doesn’t have any effect on them.” He kept busy nonetheless, taking temporary work as a fishing guide and planting vegetable plots at both Mowat Lodge and the cottage known as The Manse. But with the weather finally warming in the first week of July he was optimistic about producing more work. “Will send my winter sketches down in a day or two,” he wrote to Dr. MacCallum, “and have every intention of making some more.” 24 That evening found him drinking with a group of men in Larry Dickson’s cabin.
LIKE MANY MEN who lived in the bush, Larry Dickson and George Rowe were hard drinkers. Dickson resorted to doses of horse liniment to treat his frequent hangovers. Their fondness for liquor meant they were regularly fired (and then long-sufferingly rehired) by Shannon Fraser, who used them, like Tom Thomson, to carry the mail and perform odd jobs around Mowat Lodge. Thomson, at least as a young man, also enjoyed a drink. “I have been with him on several occasions when I am now sorry to say that neither of us was very sober,” reported a friend from Owen Sound.25 Getting drunk in Ontario in 1917 was not the easiest proposition. Prohibition arrived in September 1916, when the Ontario Temperance Act closed all bars and liquor stores in a supposed effort to make the province more economically productive. The only legal place to consume alcohol was a private house, provided it could be obtained in the first place from either a reliable bootlegger or a sympathetic physician.
Alcoholic beverages were served, however, in the tiny cabin that Rowe, a man in his sixties, shared with Dickson. Besides Thomson and Rowe, those present that Saturday evening, July 7, were Shannon Fraser and a married American named Martin Bletcher Jr., a private detective from Buffalo whose family owned a cottage close to The Manse. Heavy drinking ensued. “They were all pretty good drinkers,” Daphne Crombie later reported. “Tom as well . . . They were all tight.” 26
Daphne Crombie and her husband were not actually present at Canoe Lake in July 1917, and reports of what happened over the next twelve hours would vary widely. Thomson and Bletcher soon began to argue. Certain investigators, following the usually reliable maxim cherchez la femme, have been anxious to draw Winnie Trainor into their dispute.27 More likely the cause of the argument (if in fact a drunken argument requires a rational casus belli) was the war. The United States had finally entered the Great War in April 1917, with Congress approving conscription on May 18 and requiring all American men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty (Bletcher was a few days shy of his twenty-sixth birthday) to register for the draft. Later it was claimed that Thomson accused Bletcher of evading the draft.28 It seems unlikely, though, that Thomson, with his hatred of war and probable humiliation by the Order of the White Feather, would have berated the young man as a slacker.
Americans were extremely unpopular in Canada during the war years. They were regarded as having sat on the sideline for more than two years, profiteering on war orders and bank loans as Canadians died in their thousands on the Western Front. Their belated entry was marked with a typical bravado and much insensitive flag-waving. Propaganda movies and war songs playing up America’s (hitherto non-existent) role in the war flowed across the border with no regard for Canadian sensibilities or sacrifices. Harold Innis spoke for many Canadians when he wrote to his mother in July 1917: “The Americans never get tired of talking about the things they do or the things they are going to do . . . I never heard such a line of bragging and boasting in my life. It was really disgusting, at least to Canadians.” 29 When an American musical, The Passing Show of 1917, was performed at Toronto’s Gaiety Theatre, entire audiences booed or stormed out as the Stars and Stripes was waved onstage.30
Canadians also resented the hysterically anti-British tone of
German-American propaganda. Bletcher, a German-American who spoke with a slight accent, was therefore almost guaranteed to raise hackles at Canoe Lake. He had already attracted suspicion and hostility. Feelings against Germany and German immigrants ran so high in Canada that the teaching of German literature was banned in schools, orchestras refused to play German music, and soldiers of the 118th Infantry Battalion, based in Waterloo, vandalized German-owned local businesses. Thousands of “enemy aliens” were interned in camps across the country, including (until the spring of 1916) at nearby Camp Petawawa.
Bletcher fell foul of these anti-German sentiments. Mark Robinson, newly returned from Europe after being wounded while serving with the Peterborough Rangers, believed him to be a German spy.31 The suspicion, however unfounded, was not completely unreasonable. Under Count Johann von Bernstorff, the German ambassador to the United States, members of the German Foreign Office in Washington were recruiting and organizing German-born Americans for missions in Canada as saboteurs. In 1914 British intelligence warned the Canadian government of a German plan to bomb the Welland Canal. Although that attack never took place, soon afterwards a cpr bridge in New Brunswick was destroyed by dynamite on orders from Arthur Zimmermann, undersecretary at the Foreign Office in Washington (and future author of the infamous “Zimmermann Telegram”). Then in June 1915 a German agent from Detroit named Karl Respa, a one-time homesteader in Alberta, planted dynamite at a factory in Walkerville, Ontario, and at an armoury in Windsor. Only the former detonated, but within a few days more dynamite was found on the premises of both a Windsor truck company and a machine works due to be transformed into a munitions factory. Respa was apprehended and, in March 1916, sentenced to life imprisonment in Kingston Penitentiary.32
Whatever the exact nature of their disagreement, cottagers at Canoe Lake had already noticed “some ill feeling” between Thomson and Bletcher, and on the night of July 7 it erupted into open hostility.33 Insults were traded, and the altercation stopped shy of an exchange of physical discourtesies only thanks to the intervention of Fraser and Rowe. One account described the aggrieved Bletcher storming from the cabin with a final drunken threat to Thomson: “Don’t get in my way if you know what’s good for you!” 34
Thomson returned to his room at Mowat Lodge (he was not sleeping in his tent at this point) and the next morning, in heavy rain, went fishing on the north end of Canoe Lake. Later in the morning, at the
Algonquin Hotel, he had a cup of tea, as well as “a piece of cake and pie and so on,” with the owner, Molly Colson.35 Shortly before one o’clock he went to The Manse, not to visit Winnie, who was in Huntsville, but to collect his fishing gear. He was planning a longer fishing expedition, probably to Gill Lake. He asked Shannon Fraser to load his canoe—his distinctive blue-grey Chestnut—with supplies such as bread, bacon, maple syrup and pancake flour. He did not pack his sketching equipment. Fraser wrapped the provisions in a rubber groundsheet and placed them in the bow.
In the summer of 1916 Thomson had positioned himself on Hayhurst Point, a peninsula on the north end of Canoe Lake. Here, occasionally cleaning his brush on the rocks, he painted the waters and islands spread below him. Islands, Canoe Lake shows a stretch of gloriously prismatic water—soothing licks of salmon pink, lavender, ultramarine—beneath a teal-coloured sky. One year later he paddled onto this shimmering lake, navigating into the middle because the passage along the shoreline was blocked by sawlogs. He was wearing a grey lumberjack shirt, khaki trousers and canvas shoes. The last Fraser saw of him, he was already fishing, trolling with his copper fishing line in the middle of the lake. By Fraser’s fob watch it was 12:50 pm. The temperature was in the upper teens, the morning’s heavy rain turning into a light drizzle.
TWO HOURS LATER, a few minutes after three o’clock, Martin Bletcher and his sister Bessie, crossing the lake in their small motor launch, spotted a capsized canoe near one of the islands, Little Wapomeo, in the middle of the lake. Not recognizing it as Thomson’s, despite the unique colour, they assumed it was one that had come loose from its moorings at the Algonquin Hotel. Rogue canoes, like stray logs, were not an uncommon sight: earlier that morning Thomson and Shannon Fraser rescued an abandoned canoe from the north end of the lake.36
