Defiant Spirits

by Ross King

  When the Bletchers returned a short while later, intending to tow it back to the hotel, the canoe had disappeared. No one realized Thomson was missing until the next morning when the Bletchers finally reported their sighting to Shannon Fraser. Mark Robinson and the park superintendent, G.W. Bartlett, were immediately alerted, and the search began on both water and land. Robinson assumed that Thomson, while portaging, “must have broken a limb . . . or fallen someplace and injured himself.” 37 Gunshots were fired and whistles blown. On Tuesday, two days after Thomson disappeared, the capsized canoe was spotted by Charlie Scrim and brought ashore. The portage paddles were lashed into place and a few provisions stashed in the bow, but Thomson’s handmade black-cherry paddle, axe, fishing rod and dunnage bag all were missing. A telegram reporting the discovery was sent to Thomson’s parents in Owen Sound. The Owen Sound Sun reported that the state of the canoe meant it could have drifted from its moorings, leaving Thomson marooned, but alive and well, on one of the islands.38

  On Thursday, July 12, Robinson wrote Dr. MacCallum to inform him that Thomson was missing but that “everything is being done that can be done.” 39 That same morning Thomson’s older brother George arrived at Canoe Lake from where he had been holidaying in Owen Sound. He remained in Mowat for two days before returning to comfort his elderly parents. By then the Toronto Globe was reporting that “one of the most talented of the younger landscapists” was thought to have been drowned or “the victim of foul play.” The suggestion of foul play may have surprised the paper’s readers given the drownings that routinely occurred in the region every summer. In the same week Thomson went missing the papers were reporting the drowning of a seventeen-year-old boy after a canoeing mishap on a lake near Bobcaygeon and the death of two men after a capsize on Drag Lake in the Haliburton Highlands. Foul play was not mentioned in connection with either case.40 The Globe ended its story on a gloomy note: “There is still a chance that Mr. Thomson may be alive, but this is considered doubtful as four days’ search has failed to find a trace of him.” 41

  Thomson’s body was finally found on Monday, July 16, more than a week after he went missing. It was spotted at ten o’clock in the morning by a vacationing Toronto neurologist named Goldwin Howland. Dr. Howland had impressive medical credentials, not to mention an alluring Canadian pedigree. His grandfather had been one of the Fathers of Confederation, and his father, William Holmes Howland, was the reforming mayor of Toronto whose zeal for shutting down bars and brothels in the late 1880s had earned the city its nickname Toronto the Good. Dr. Howland was himself a distinguished figure, the country’s first consulting neurologist and a pioneer in the treatment and rehabilitation of wounded soldiers.

  In the summer of 1917 Dr. Howland was renting Little Wapomeo Island and its cottage from Taylor Statten, future founder of Camp Ahmek. He was sitting on the veranda (or, other sources claim, fishing with his daughter in a boat) when he saw a body floating on the lake. He immediately summoned Larry Dickson and George Rowe, who recognized Thomson from his clothing. Securing it with, presumably, a fishing line, the two rangers towed the body several hundred yards through the lake to Big Wapomeo Island. Here they tethered the dead artist to, poignantly, the roots of a pine tree.

  TOM THOMSON WAS buried twice: first in Canoe Lake, and then again, in a metaphor for how he would never truly be laid to rest, four days later, after exhumation, in his hometown of Leith.

  The Canoe Lake ceremony, performed on July 17, was a forlorn and improvised affair. “The sky was overcast and the rain was falling,” recalled a visitor from Toronto enlisted as a pallbearer even though he was utterly oblivious to Thomson’s identity and reputation. “It had all the earmarks of a backwoods funeral.” 42

  The funeral was held, on the advice of Dr. Howland and with the permission of G.W. Bartlett, because of the deterioration of the body. The coroner had not yet arrived, nor were any of Thomson’s family or friends from Toronto present. The brief telegram sent by Shannon Fraser to the Thomson family—“Found Tom this morning”—had failed to indicate whether he was alive or dead, painfully prolonging their suspense. An ensuing telephone message, received, according to the local newspaper, “in a roundabout way,” did little to clarify.43 The family would not learn positively of his death until the day after his funeral.

  However hasty and irregular these proceedings may seem to posterity, swift burials were the norm in Ontario at this time. The deceased was almost always buried within a day or two of death. When Professor George Blewett drowned under similarly inexplicable circumstances at Go Home Bay on August 15, 1912, his body was returned to Toronto on the Muskoka Express on the sixteenth and then buried at the Necropolis on the seventeenth, a Saturday.44

  A horse-driven cart carried Thomson’s wooden coffin along a logging road to the tiny cemetery, encircled by a picket fence, that stood on a knoll behind Mowat. The location was eerily similar to the “secret ferny tomb” near Mattagami Lake where Neil McKechnie had been laid to rest almost exactly thirteen years earlier. Thomson knew the Mowat cemetery well. He had photographed one of the two graves, that of James Watson, a twenty-one-year-old Gilmour employee killed by a falling tree in 1897. Watson was, according to his grave marker, “the first white person to be buried at Canoe Lake.” His gravestone included a pair of couplets legible in Thomson’s photograph:

  Remember, comrade, when passing by

  As you are now so once was I,

  As I am now so you will be;

  Prepare thyself to follow me.

  Thomson was interred some twenty-five feet from Watson’s grave, with Martin Bletcher Sr. reading the service. Several hours later a coroner named Arthur Ranney, summoned from North Bay but delayed by medical emergencies, opened the inquest. The body had been examined by Dr. Howland, who observed a bruise on the right temple—what the coroner concluded was consistent with “striking some obstacle, like a stone” 45—and some bleeding from the right ear. Dr. Howland believed from his observations that Thomson died by drowning. The verdict was accepted by the coroner, a less distinguished medical practitioner than Dr. Howland. He concluded the inquest at 1:30 am on the eighteenth and then, later that morning, caught the train back to North Bay.

  Thomson remained in the Canoe Lake cemetery for less than two days. At eight o’clock on the evening of the eighteenth, an undertaker, a bowler-hatted man named Churchill, arrived from Huntsville with a metal casket and instructions to exhume the body and return with it to Owen Sound. He worked late into the night, literally prosecuting the resurrection that would be performed, figuratively, many times thereafter. On the following evening the casket was placed on a train that carried Thomson for the last time from his beloved Algonquin Provincial Park.

  The second funeral service was performed on Saturday, July 21, at the Presbyterian church in Owen Sound. Interment followed in the family plot at the church in Leith. In the Burial Register of Owen Sound church, the Reverend P.T. Pilkey inscribed a strange clerihew: “Talented and with many friends, and no enemies, a mystery.” 46

  tom thomson, despite painting in vibrant hues, once told Mark Robinson that “grey is one of the hardest colours I have to manage.” 47 It is cruelly appropriate that his life should have ended in shades of grey, the answers to what exactly happened on the afternoon of July 8, 1917, as elusive as the yellow-jerkinned phantom who local legend claims paddles through the veils of Canoe Lake mist: an insistent rejoinder to the poet Earle Birney’s famous quip that Canada is haunted by a lack of ghosts.

  The Reverend Pilkey was far from alone in his bafflement over Thomson’s death. The mysterious disappearance, the rushed inquest, the simple verdict from a coroner who failed to view the body; such proceedings caused disquiet. By 1917 Thomson was an experienced canoeist who had shot the rapids of the Mississagi, paddled the gorges of the Petawawa, conquered the strenuous portages of the Mattawa. How could he possibly have drowned, not in one of these eerie wildernesses, but on a cal
m lake, in broad daylight, only a short distance from his lodgings and where the neat cottages of wealthy Torontonians sat perched on private islands?

  As Arthur Lismer observed from Halifax, the circumstances were “strange enough for any amount of speculation.” 48 No sooner had the coroner departed on the eighteenth than Mark Robinson wrote in his diary, “There is considerable adverse comment regarding the way evidence had been taken at the meeting among the residents on the Lake.” 49 To a number of Mowat residents, Thomson’s death seemed not to have received a proper investigation. Charles Plewman, the pallbearer, noted how there was “considerable speculation” as to how a man with Thomson’s skill in handling a canoe could have drowned.50 Most distressed and suspicious was Winnie Trainor, who, after the body was found, “appeared on the scene,” according to Plewman, “and demanded the right to see the remains, saying that there must have been foul play as she was certain that Tom didn’t drown by accident in a small lake like Canoe Lake.” 51

  Some speculation involved suicide. Thomson certainly seems to have suffered from bouts of depression—what Carmichael called his “blue streaks.” But might he have killed himself? Shannon Fraser wrote to Dr. MacCallum on July 24, in garbled English, that Thomson “must of taking a cramp or got out on shore and slip of a log or something.” 52 But to Plewman he told a different story, suggesting the “shy and sensitive” Thomson, facing a “showdown” with Winnie regarding their impending marriage, decided “that a settled, married life was not for him, but that he just could not say so to Miss Trainor.” 53 When his theory reached the ears of the Thomson family, Fraser emphatically retracted: “No one ever mentioned such a thing as suicide at the inquest,” he assured George Thomson. “The verdict was death due to drowning. I am feeling very badly about this terrible thing as I thought so much of Tom & would be the very last to even mention such a thing.” 54

  One of the people who knew Thomson best, Frank Carmichael, found the suicide theory unconvincing. Two days after the Canoe Lake funeral he wrote to Lismer, “The idea of Tom himself being responsible for it (which seems to have entered into some of the discussions) hardly strikes me as being probable. It is hardly fair to presume on his eccentricities to that extent.” 55

  Suspicions lingered of foul play, some implicating Fraser, possibly because of his swiftness in promoting the suicide theory. Fraser’s true crime seems to have been his petty and unseemly greed. Winnie Trainor regarded him as “money grabbing,” 56 and his conduct in the weeks following Thomson’s death led to a falling-out with the Thomson family. Fraser seems to have been guilty of sharp practice. He tried to sell Thomson’s shoes after his death, he undervalued Thomson’s two canoes by claiming they were “full of holes” and therefore worth only $10 each, and he charged both the Thomsons and Dr. MacCallum for the services of the rangers. “I tell you frankly, Mr. Fraser,” Thomson’s brother-in-law wrote in a stern letter, “I am suspicious that you are not dealing square and I hope you will be able to give a satisfactory explanation of everything.” The family was understandably concerned about the $250 loan from Thomson to Fraser in 1915, though Winnie assured them it had been repaid in full. Even so, Thomson’s sister Margaret began to wonder if Fraser was guilty of more than minor irregularities in dealing with Thomson’s estate: “Sometimes I wonder if the man did do anything to harm Tom,” she wrote to Dr. MacCallum. “I suppose it is wicked to think such a thing, but if anyone did harm him, it was for the little money they could pocket.” 57

  It hardly seems convincing that Fraser, however avaricious, should have ambushed and murdered, in broad daylight, for the price of two canoes and a pair of shoes, the man who was such an asset to Canoe Lake and Mowat Lodge. Nor would Fraser have done away with his friend to get his hands on his paintings: Thomson was only too happy to give away his sketches. Little claimed he “often gave away his panels for the asking or to pay for some minor obligation,” and Plewman believed that in the summer of 1917 he, if he so wished, “could have had them for about a dime a dozen.” 58

  Sixty years later, Fraser was blamed for Thomson’s death by Daphne Crombie, the newlywed who came to Canoe Lake with her tubercular husband. In 1977 she gave two interviews incriminating Fraser, one for the Algonquin Park Museum Archives, the other to the journalist Roy MacGregor, a distant relation by marriage of Winnie Trainor and the author of the 1980 novel Shorelines (later retitled Canoe Lake).

  Although not at Canoe Lake in July 1917, Crombie claimed that when she returned four months later Annie Fraser told her that Thomson’s drunken altercation on the night of July 7 was not with Martin Bletcher but with Shannon Fraser. Fraser and Thomson, both the worse for drink, had argued over money. Thomson needed Fraser to repay him because Winnie was pregnant and he needed a new suit for their forthcoming wedding. After an exchange of blows, Thomson fell to the floor and struck his head on a fire grate. He either died outright or—as Crombie believed more likely—was knocked senseless. The panicked Fraser roused his wife, and the pair disposed of the body in the lake. “My conception,” claimed Crombie, “is that he took Tom’s body and put it into a canoe and dropped it in the lake. That’s how he died.” 59

  Crombie’s story, with its sketchy, second-hand details related long after the fact, has the obvious flaw that Thomson was still alive—and seen by witnesses like Mark Robinson and Molly Colson—on the morning after his supposed death. MacGregor suggests the fight might have taken place not on the evening of the seventh but on the eighth. Thomson’s overturned canoe, however, was spotted by the Bletchers on the afternoon of the eighth, whereas Crombie’s description of a drunken Fraser rousing his wife implies a late-night drinking session: hence her insistence on the seventh. The cause of the fight—the money owed by Fraser—was contradicted by Winnie, who claimed the debt had been discharged. Other puzzles abound in this version of events. Why would the Frasers dump a still-breathing Thomson into the lake? Why did Annie Fraser confess these details to Crombie? And why did Crombie, once in possession of them, not inform the police?

  The case against Martin Bletcher Jr., the other prime suspect, is even less persuasive. Much later it would be reported that a gunshot was heard on Canoe Lake around the time Thomson was last seen.60 This melodramatic addition to the story, together with Bletcher’s B-movie threat against Thomson and his supposed role as a Boche agent lurking in the Canadian backwoods, consigns the tragedy of Thomson’s death to the realms of John Buchan’s spy fiction.

  ONE REASON FOR continued suspicions of foul play is a piece of evidence that came to light almost forty years after Thomson’s death. Mark Robinson mentioned in 1956 a fact that appeared nowhere in contemporary accounts of Thomson’s death, least of all in either

  Dr. Howland’s affidavit or the coroner’s report: around Thomson’s left ankle, claimed Robinson, “there was a fishing line wrapped sixteen or seventeen times.” 61 The fishing line has been offered as proof that Thomson’s assailant, after striking the lethal blow, tethered his body to a rock or other weight so he would, in mafia-victim style, sleep with the fishes. It also supposedly explains why Thomson’s body took so long to find: it was anchored to the bottom of the lake for perhaps as long as a week.

  Yet there is a more plausible and innocent explanation for the coiled fishing line. Robinson spotted the suspicious tether when Thomson’s body was still on Big Wapomeo Island, resting on boards and undergoing an examination by Dr. Howland. Larry Dickson, present for the makeshift autopsy, asked Robinson if he had a sharp knife to cut through the fishing line. According to Robinson, “I said I had . . . and I did, and I counted them, that’s why I know there were sixteen or seventeen.” 62 Why Dickson should have requested Robinson to remove this incriminating and surely significant piece of evidence in the middle of an autopsy, in the presence of a distinguished medical professional, is a mystery unless one considers that Dickson wound it around Thomson’s ankle in the first place: he and George Rowe were the ones who towed the body through the wat
er to Big Wapomeo Island and tethered it to the tree.

  Thomson’s body would have required no anchor to remain beneath the surface of the lake for a full eight days. Dr. Howland probably entertained no suspicions of foul play because the medical literature of the period taught that a drowned corpse always remained underwater for eight to ten days before floating. That, at any rate, was the sworn testimony, in a case heard before the Supreme Court of the State of New York, of a coroner who examined some four hundred drowning victims. Two assistant coroners from New York City and a medical doctor corroborated his evidence. Only when the water temperature is 70 degrees Fahrenheit or above—certainly not the case at Canoe Lake in the cool spring and summer of 1917—will a corpse rise in less than a week. Thomson’s body therefore appeared on the surface of Canoe Lake exactly when medical science would have predicted.63

  Another supposed murder clue—the air reportedly in Thomson’s lungs—may also have an innocent explanation. Air in the lungs would mean, so the theory goes, that Thomson was dead before he entered the water, struck on the head by a paddle-wielding assailant who then, in the words of one melodramatic reconstruction, “watched him crumple up and topple over the side of the canoe and sink slowly out of sight without a struggle.” 64 As many as 10 to 15 per cent of drowning victims, however, are found to have air in their lungs. This condition, known as “dry drowning,” results from a laryngospasm, an involuntary muscular contraction of the vocal chords caused by a small amount of water entering the airways. This reflex shuts the windpipe, creating a seal that prevents more water from entering the lungs but in the process stops the victim’s breathing. The result is that he or she “drowns” with only a small amount of water aspirated and air still in the lungs.65