Northern Light

by Roy MacGregor

  It was through the Arts & Letters Club that MacDonald became friends with Lawren Harris, who would several years later join MacDonald in forming the Group of Seven. Harris, the scion of one of the country’s wealthiest families (owners of the Massey-Harris farm machinery concern), was himself determined to be a painter of standing. He was also a philosopher, passionate about his view that Canada should foster its own remarkable identity—apart from mother Britain or neighbour America. And he was convinced that this distinctive identity was to be found in the North Country, far away from the buildings and roads and farms of settled Canada. Thomson, who was not given to philosophizing himself, would have heartily agreed.

  Harris paved the way for MacDonald and others to meet Dr. James MacCallum, a Toronto ophthalmologist who would eventually become a great champion and patron of MacDonald, Lismer, Thomson and others. In a booklet prepared by the National Gallery in 1990, concerning murals once owned by MacCallum that the gallery had acquired, MacCallum is described as rather eccentric, a caustic nonconformist who loved sailing and canoes, as well as Chinese theatre and the opera. A 1917 portrait of the man by A. Curtis Williamson shows an arrogant-looking dandy wearing a fedora to cover his balding pate. MacCallum sports a waxed, Simon Legree moustache that gives him a rather diabolical look. The title is Portrait of Dr. J.M. MacCallum (“A Cynic”). MacCallum, however, was vitally important to Thomson during his life—and, it may well be argued, played an even more significant part in Thomson’s afterlife, carefully nurturing the painter’s legacy.

  Born in Richmond Hill, just north of Toronto, in 1860, James MacCallum was seventeen years older than Thomson. His father had been a Methodist minister posted to the Georgian Bay area in the late nineteenth century—in the same general region as the Thomson family farm. And young James, like young Tom, had become infatuated with the rugged landscapes and vast choice of outdoor activities in the area. He was a brilliant student, pursuing his higher education in London, England, and after he’d acquired his medical degree, he lectured in pharmacology and held the chair in ophthalmology at the University of Toronto for twenty years.

  MacCallum was an early nationalist in a colony that flew the Union Jack, sang “God Save the Queen” (then “King” after 1901, when Victoria died) and, only a decade earlier, had re-elected Sir John A. Macdonald largely on the basis of a campaign speech in which he’d declared: “A British subject I was born and a British subject I will die.” Five years after Macdonald’s final campaign, and his death later that same year, a group of University of Toronto professors, all budding Canadian nationalists, founded the Madawaska Club at the mouth of Go Home River, where it empties into Georgian Bay. Their goal was to have a “wilderness” place with easy access—train to Penetanguishene, steamer to the camp—that would allow their various families to bring up “young men inspired with the Canadian affection for pioneering and the Canadian love of forest and stream.” MacCallum joined two summers later, the year they built their clubhouse, and so liked the area that in 1905 he purchased Island 158 out in Go Home Bay, a mass of rock and pine that he would later rename West Wind Island.

  Harris often visited MacCallum at his island retreat, and it was Harris who invited MacCallum, in the late fall of 1911, to attend the exhibition of sketches MacDonald was showing at the Arts & Letters Club in Toronto. To that point, the prosperous eye doctor had shown little interest in art, but it may be that something in those country landscapes appealed to his patriotism. Or perhaps his interest was piqued a month later when another club member, C.W. Jefferys, published a commentary on MacDonald’s work in which he said: “In these sketches there is a refreshing absence of Europe, or anything else, save Canada.”

  Suddenly keen on Canadian art, MacCallum invited MacDonald and his family to Go Home Bay during the summer of 1912, along with Lawren Harris. During those summer days, MacCallum and Harris pressed MacDonald to take up painting full time and leave behind his paid job as an illustrator. MacDonald, English-born, highly conservative and dedicated to his family duties, demurred, but the two continued to press him, and, with MacCallum offering to purchase his paintings and to grant him interest-free loans, MacDonald finally agreed. It was the beginning of James MacCallum’s remarkable career as an art patron—the man who, as much as anyone else, created the Group of Seven, even though he was neither artist nor member.

  MacCallum first met Tom Thomson when he was visiting MacDonald at his Toronto studio. He found the “tall and slim, clean cut, dark young chap” to be a man of few words, yet determined and independent, and he asked MacDonald to get him some of Thomson’s sketches so he might see what sort of artist he was. MacCallum was entranced with the small paintings: “They made me feel that the North had gripped Thomson as it had gripped me when as a boy of eleven, I first sailed and paddled through its silent places.”

  MacCallum’s importance to this fledgling group of Ontario artists cannot be underestimated—corroborating even MacCallum’s own vain, self-serving claims. He was generous with his money, often staking struggling artists for months while they painted. His retreat at Go Home Bay was always open as a refuge for the artists, and often their families, who stayed there as his invited guests. A.Y. Jackson claimed it was MacCallum who kept the group together and in Canada, and that claim is reinforced by Jackson’s account of a conversation MacCallum had with him about his own intention to head south to pursue a painting career.

  “If all you young fellows go off to the States, art in Canada is never going to get anywhere,” MacCallum protested.

  Instead, MacCallum said, Jackson could have a place in a studio MacCallum and Harris were going to build in Toronto near the Rosedale Ravine. MacCallum not only promised that, but also guaranteed to cover Jackson’s expenses for a year of painting. Jackson accepted—and stayed in Canada.

  MacCallum also told Thomson he would stake him. Though the young artist was grateful for MacCallum’s patronage, he wanted it to come in the form of helping him sell his work. Thomson remained fiercely independent, and some of his fellow painters felt that while he often benefited from his association with MacCallum, the relationship was sometimes strained. Thomson was never entirely comfortable visiting the MacCallums at Go Home Bay, as he felt more “owned” than welcomed there. He once wrote a friend to say that MacCallum’s retreat was “getting too much like north Rosedale to suit me—all birthday cakes and water ice etc.”

  The money he earned from the sale of Northern Lake was his own, and the cash—once he’d gathered up the 250 one-dollar bills from the floor—gave him the courage to ask for a leave of absence from his seventy-five-cents-an-hour job at Rous and Mann. The leave was granted. He was now a painter. And he was headed once again for Algonquin Park.

  That year, 1913, marked the twentieth anniversary of Algonquin Park, which had been founded in 1893 as the largest “national” wilderness reserve in Canada. “National” jurisdiction was soon after changed to “provincial.” “Wilderness reserve” was a bit of a stretch—at least in those parts of the park reachable by train and increasingly populated by campers, cottagers and lodge visitors. Timber rights were also being granted throughout the reserve, so dozens of mills were being built from the Madawaska Valley to the Muskoka Lakes, with several appearing inside the park boundaries.

  The two key players in the establishment of the park—James Dickson of the Ontario Land Surveyors and Alexander Kirkwood, chief clerk in the land sales division of the Department of Crown Lands—prided themselves on being “practical” men. Dickson saw no need to curtail the logging that had been going on for decades, and Kirkwood even envisioned a day in which the broader area of the park and surrounding communities might sustain a population of “a million or more people” engaged in everything from farming to forestry. Today, there are not even that many summer visitors, and far fewer live in Algonquin Park proper than during the years Tom Thomson spent at Canoe Lake.

  In the early days government officials were so unsure of what the park should be t
hat they sent one James Wilson north to make suggestions. He was head of Niagara Falls’ very tame Queen Victoria Park and, perhaps in keeping with his station, quickly recommended the eradication of the common loon—now a commonly recognized symbol of the Canadian wilderness—on the grounds that the bird was consuming the fish that would attract American sportsmen. The park’s first superintendent made a similar recommendation—that all bears and fox “be destroyed without mercy” so that people would have no fear of coming to the park. George Bartlett, the walrus-moustached bureaucrat who became superintendent in 1899, felt the same way about wolves and encouraged early rangers to shoot them on sight and leave poison out for them. (Today, the “wolf howl” is the most popular tourist attraction the park has to offer.)

  Always, the push was on to attract visitors. The royal commission that had led to the establishment of the park had specifically tagged Algonquin as “A Place of Health Resort.” It was believed the park could serve as a natural “sanitarium,” and it was hoped that the well-off who were being advised by their doctors to take leave would find the northern Ontario air “more pure and more invigorating than in either Europe or the States.” The Ontario Board of Health sent a staff doctor to check out possible sanitarium sites at Canoe and Cache lakes, and he reported that he had found proof of an Algonquin cure for consumption in a railway engineer whose lungs were so affected that doctors had declared his case hopeless. “Now,” the doctor reported, “he is hale and hearty and can travel by canoe all day, with his clothes wet half the time, without feeling any ill effects.”

  It was an era of “muscular Christianity,” when “roughing it” was widely considered one of the great “manly virtues.” The Owen Sound newspaper report of Thomson’s 1912 trek to the Temagami region reflected this popular sentiment. Ernest Thompson Seton—the young naturalist who had been with Tom Thomson’s cousin Willie Brodie when he drowned on the Assiniboine River—had become a hugely popular writer with the 1898 publication of Wild Animals I Have Known, and Seton often visited Algonquin. In later years he even had his own cabin at Taylor Statten Camps. Seton, whose unruly hair and sagging moustache gave him the look of a young Einstein, was a most peculiar person, who had reacted badly to criticism that his books were overly sentimental and naïve. His readers did not know that he was a tortured soul who slept on boards and splashed his private parts with ice-cold water to prevent nocturnal emissions—or that he turned cross-eyed from stress when he actually found himself in the deep bush. They knew only what he preached: that living in the wild was the secret to mental and spiritual happiness. It was Seton’s Woodcraft Indians movement that inspired Lord Baden-Powell to found the scouting movement, and the two of them, Seton and Baden-Powell, turned camping (which had been done largely by necessity) into a popular wilderness phenomenon. Algonquin Park could not have come along at a more fortuitous time.

  Tourists came in by rail and stayed in lodges such as the Highland Inn on Cache Lake and the Algonquin Hotel on Joe Lake. Grand Trunk brochures of the time called the line through the park “The Highway to Health and Happiness.” And though postcards sent home from the area often spoke of “roughing it,” most visitors arrived and left quite comfortably by rail. Guests of the more luxurious lodges went on catered picnics and leisurely cruises on boats with outboard engines. They “dressed” for dinner.

  But there were many, and Tom Thomson was one of them, who truly wished to “rough it,” setting out with nothing but tent, pack, cooking utensils, an axe, a canoe, paddles and fishing gear. Tom clearly preferred the sanctuary of his bush life to any bustle around a busy lodge.

  As soon as travel was possible in the spring, Tom would head for Canoe Lake, planning to arrive early enough to hear the rumblings and moanings of the dying ice. Like everyone else, he marvelled at how quickly it broke up when the moment arrived. It was almost as if the ice sank.

  On his way to and from Algonquin Park, Tom got into the habit of stopping off in Huntsville to visit his old friend Dr. John McRuer and, from 1913 on, his new friend Winnifred Trainor. That year McRuer had been diagnosed with an advanced case of tuberculosis, and he and Edythe left for Denver where he hoped to establish a new practice and perhaps find a cure in the mountain air. Tom continued to drop in regularly on the Trainors.

  By 1913 the Trainors had fixed up the Manse to suit their own tastes. As the cottage was barely a stone’s throw from Mowat Lodge, where Tom stayed, they most likely first met the artist at the lake that spring. While others around the area might have resented Tom for his seemingly idle ways, the Trainors obviously embraced him, as he was soon offered use of their cabin whenever they were not there. It gave him a good place, away from the lodge, to store and dry his art. Perhaps Hugh and Margaret Trainor were hoping for something to come of putting Winnie and Tom together. Their elder daughter, after all, was nearly thirty—well past the normal age for marriage.

  There were cards and dances and music at Canoe Lake. The owners of Mowat Lodge, Shannon and Annie Fraser, were happy to have entertainment in their small “lobby,” and the larger Algonquin Hotel on Joe Lake was busy and welcoming to visitors from around the lakes, as well as its own guests. Winnie and Marie were often out and about, and they were popular. Tom frequently canoed from his favourite campsite near Hayhurst Point across the lake to the Trainor cabin, where he hoped to arrive in time for a meal and was said to happily help with the dishes.

  Tom and Winnie were soon considered a couple in town, as well as at the lake. The Sylvesters, who owned the photo studio in Huntsville and lived across the street from the Trainor place there, had vivid memories of Tom visiting the Trainors. So did their daughter Addie, who would join the Bell Telephone Company in 1922 and serve as the town’s night operator from 1939 to 1960, when dial telephones were introduced.

  “I met him when I was about ten,” Addie told me in 1973. “Mrs. Trainor introduced me and made me shake hands with him, treated me like I was somebody. He was very handsome. Isn’t it funny how I can remember him but couldn’t tell you about other men I met at the time?”

  Winnie was sort of an “older sister” to little Addie. She would sometimes take her young neighbour along to her work at Tudhope’s store and let Addie draw while Winnie did the bookkeeping and ordering. As the grocer had one of the mere handful of telephones in town at the time, Winnie would sometimes ring up Wardell’s, a fabric and general store farther down the same side of Main Street nearer the river, and let Addie speak to her older brother, who was clerking there.

  “She was very clever,” Addie said. “She was well educated. She could have really made something of herself if she had wanted to. She was a whiz with numbers.”

  For Addie Sylvester, there was never any question about Tom and Winnie being in love. “People around here generally did understand that they were to be married,” she recalled. “I was a bit young at the time, but I knew he was her boyfriend. He must have felt something for her—he came there enough.”

  But her most vivid Thomson memory is of a painting he did of the Sylvester home: ““It wasn’t much to look at. Just an old brown-coloured building, nothing that you’d think was nice for a painting. He must have been just sitting at the [Trainors’ dining room] window, and I think it was toward late afternoon when the sun shines here. And it was shining off the icicles and you could see it shining off the ‘mountain’ back behind the house. He was just sitting there and I suppose he had nothing to do, so he just painted the house.

  “But, you know, you could look at that picture in the middle of summer and it would make you shiver.”

  That painting, if it still exists, has never been displayed. But it evoked the season when Tom would increasingly first head north, when temperatures were still freezing. In the spring of 1913, he saw the ice go out at Canoe Lake, sketched for a few weeks and then headed farther north, to the Timmins area, where he worked a stint as a fire ranger. By midsummer, however, he was back at Canoe Lake and determined to paint through the autumn, capturing the
spectacular fall colours of the park. He took a room in the two-storey clapboard building the Frasers had renovated to create their lodge.

  Thomson found he didn’t need much money. His painting was bringing in some, but he no longer hung onto his regular work as a commercial artist. Temporary jobs, such as the fire ranger work, helped and, of course, he had MacCallum’s constant offer of financial aid. His expenses included taking a room while he wintered and painted in Toronto, his travel back and forth from the North Country and whatever it cost him to live around Canoe Lake. That was relatively cheap—eggs were 25 cents a dozen, beef 14 cents a pound and a steel fishing rod cost $1.25—and there was always the prospect of picking up a few extra dollars guiding guests from the lodges.

  Ralph Bice, a lifelong trapper who lived at Kearney on the rail line heading west of Algonquin, came to work in the park in 1914, when he was fourteen. He became a legendary park guide and always claimed that Thomson’s vaunted reputation as a guide was a pure invention of the painter’s Toronto friends. Bice once told park historian Don Beauprie that Thomson “was not very proficient in a canoe, was not a licensed guide and liked the bottle too much.” Bice, who with his wife, Edna, had been good friends of Winnie Trainor during the years after Thomson’s death, also said that it was common knowledge that Tom had another girlfriend, in the Kearney area. But Bice, a churchgoing man known for his high moral values, would not name the woman for fear of damaging her family name. “The reason that he didn’t marry,” Bice revealed, “was that the lady in question wouldn’t marry him unless he gave up drinking.” But that is all the upright guide would say about that connection. He maintained, though, that the painter had several young women around the park convinced that he was going to marry them.