Northern Light

by Roy MacGregor

  The Trainor family must have been oblivious to any such reputation. While Ralph Bice and my grandfather’s brother, Tom McCormick, both teetotalers, dismissed Tom as a “drunk,” that seems a harsh judgment of someone who merely enjoyed a drink, as Hugh Trainor was also known to do. The Trainors would not, of course, have approved of Thomson’s reputation, as Bice put it, as a “philanderer,” but such a reputation was surely exaggerated—women all over the place thinking they were engaged to him. Around the Trainors, Thomson was always well behaved. Otherwise, he would never have had an open invitation to dinner whenever he was in town or at the lake, and they would not have given him open access to their cabin when they were not there. They saw him first as a suitor to Winnie, then as a potential son-in-law, of whom they obviously approved. To them, he was a good man, a fine painter and, like Hugh Trainor himself, comfortable and skilled in the wild.

  The records show that Thomson did, in fact, once hold a guiding licence. He paid one dollar for it in 1917. In previous years, including that first long stretch at Canoe Lake in 1913, he might well have done some under-the-table work as a guide, but likely very little. When Thomson fished, it was usually for himself and by himself, except when a new friend such as Ranger Mark Robinson might join him.

  Mark Robinson was the first person Thomson met, at the train station, when he arrived at Canoe Lake. Robinson manned the Joe Lake ranger station, which was only a short walk down the tracks from the Canoe Lake station. The ramrod-straight, moustached Robinson—who despite his military background rarely wore his formal ranger uniform—was a popular and much-admired figure in Algonquin. Though Robinson missed much of Thomson’s time in the park—he enlisted to fight in the First World War at age forty-nine and went overseas, where he was wounded—he was at the park when Tom first arrived and led the search when Tom vanished. They were good friends, and Robinson’s daily journals and later taped remembrances—the latter often contradicting the former—would become the main source for all future studies of Thomson.

  Robinson recalled meeting a “tall fine-looking man” carrying a packsack at the Canoe Lake station. They introduced themselves to each other, and Mark recommended that Tom take a room at Mowat Lodge. Robinson even introduced Thomson to Shannon, who also happened to be at the station with his horse cart. Shannon said he “might” be able to find a room for Thomson, but when Robinson piped up that the lodge had only two guests, off the two men went in Fraser’s cart. Robinson said his initial encounter took place in 1912, but it would actually have been 1913, when Thomson returned to Canoe Lake alone after having first visited in the spring of 1912 with his friend Ben Jackson. Also, Mowat Lodge came into existence in 1913.

  Robinson recalled that he was approached by the railroad section foreman two days after Thomson’s arrival. “Look, Mark,” the man said, “if I was you I’d keep my eye on that chap that came in the other night.”

  “Why, is there anything strange about him?”

  “Well, he had three sticks stuck up, and a bit of a board on it and he was dabbing bits of paint on. I don’t know what he was doing, but he’s worth watching anyway.”

  “Well,” Robinson asked, “is he an artist?”

  “A what?”

  “An artist.”

  “What kind of a thing is that?”

  Apocryphal or not, it’s a good yarn, and Robinson, who would go on to become chief ranger and superintendent of the park and then retire to many summers of telling and retelling Tom Thomson stories around the Taylor Statten campfires, told such tales well.

  The story does illustrate how unusual it was to be an artist in those days in that setting. It also shows that Thomson was instantly noticed. The local men found him suspicious, while the women found him romantic. While other men worked, Thomson would sometimes be seen sitting by the water skipping stones or staring long and hard at a particular tree that almost anyone else would have dismissed as too ugly and scrawny even to bother cutting down. He liked his own company and sometimes could be so lost in thought that he would not respond when spoken to or waved at. Little wonder that some took an instant dislike to him, while others, like Mark Robinson, found him polite, if shy, and interesting in what he did with his time in the park.

  Robinson, who had joined the Algonquin Park staff in 1907 on the advice of his doctor following a serious illness, clearly had an appreciation of Thomson’s art. In a taped 1953 interview with J. Alex Edmison, an early camper and later lifelong recruiter for the Taylor Statten Camps, the then-elderly Robinson—he died in 1955 at age eighty-eight—talked at length about Thomson’s mysterious death and his recollections of what had happened thirty-six years earlier. But he also spoke eloquently of Thomson’s paintings. In one encounter that Robinson said he witnessed in 1912 (though it is far more likely to have happened in 1913), he told about Thomson’s exchange with the daughter of Charlie Ruttan, the sectionman at Canoe Lake. The girl was only sixteen, with little formal education, but was considered to be quite bright. Thomson was showing some sketches, and the young girl was particularly taken with one. She looked closely and squealed, saying it was “just like the alders were a week ago.” Thomson’s face, said Mark, lit up. Thomson said it was the finest compliment he’d ever received, that the girl had seen exactly what he’d hoped to capture.

  “She saw it all there,” Tom told Mark. “I knew I was going places.”

  His art was certainly going places. Tom Thomson, on the other hand, was now exactly where he felt he had to be.

  FOUR CANOE LAKE

  Thomson stayed at Mowat Lodge, for the most part, and took his meals in the back kitchen, usually served by Shannon Fraser’s mother and sometimes by his wife, Annie, or even by their daughter, Mildred. Tom was considered well mannered and polite, putting down knife and fork while old Mrs. Fraser said a short prayer before starting into her own plate.

  The Frasers had been at Canoe Lake for six years by then. They also ran the post office and telegraph, and had a team of two horses they hitched to an old funeral cart, which was widely used about the lake to carry people and supplies along the torn-up spur lines that had once served the Gilmour mill. They kept cows and chickens in order to have fresh milk and eggs for guests, and Annie had a growing reputation as a cook. If Mowat Lodge was rustic compared to, say, the Highland Inn, the rates and Annie’s home-cooked meals made the place a welcome alternative and an immediate financial success.

  While Shannon could be good company—like Mark Robinson, he loved to tell a story—many viewed his long-winded tales as his way of avoiding work. The locals considered him lazy, and they feared his snap temper. According to Audrey Saunders in Algonquin Story, an official history of the park published in the 1940s, Fraser often had trouble keeping staff and would sometimes ask guests to take on duties in return for reduced charges. Thomson was known to patch the roof and put in the garden at the lodge, and if he did any guiding for money, it was likely through Fraser.

  According to Saunders, Fraser’s staff problems usually involved two local guides, George Rowe and Lawrence Dickson (better known as “Lawrie” but sometimes called “Larry”). They lived in little shacks on the mill property and took lodge guests out fishing. (Thomson painted one of the shacks, and that work, called Larry Dickson’s Shack, now hangs in the National Gallery in Ottawa.) The two guides had notorious reputations for getting drunk at inopportune times, often when scheduled to take out a fishing party. Fraser regularly blew up at them, firing them and hiring them back, then firing and hiring them again through much of the season.

  Thomson became a bit of a financial windfall for Mowat Lodge, as he continually persuaded fellow artists to come to Canoe Lake to paint. He and his cohorts were even becoming known, ever so slightly, as “The Algonquin Park School.” A.Y. Jackson, whom James MacCallum had introduced to Thomson in Toronto, became part of the informal movement merely by showing up in the park to paint. Arthur Lismer came with Thomson mostly out of curiosity, wanting to see what was so special about a landsc
ape dominated by grey rock, blue-to-black water, rusty pine needles, soft tamarack and forests filled with everything from lowly poplar to the majestic white pine. Lismer, like others, found the landscape compelling but the creative conditions difficult, as artists often had to sketch with one hand while using the other to swat away blackflies and mosquitoes. The arms determined to carry it through, the legs eager to bolt for cover.

  Thomson’s artist friends would often combine the trip to Canoe Lake with a stay at MacCallum’s cottage on Go Home Bay. But Canoe Lake was far more to Thomson’s liking, even if not always so endearing to the friends he hauled up north with him. In one letter Jackson wrote from Thomson’s beloved retreat in early 1914, he half-joked that the next news family and friends might hear of him would be “Artist devoured by wolves.” He had not encountered wolves up close but had heard their howls in the distance when sketching outside one winter morning.

  “You will notice my present address,” Jackson had gone on in his letter, “far from the dust and din of commercialism. Mowat is a quiet unpretentious place. It doesn’t bust itself to double its population every two years. Nor go crazy over selling building lots. No fortunes are made or lost and yet everyone is happy. The population is eight including me. Perhaps if I stayed on I could get a job as health officer. Or chief of the fire brigade. Our only means of locomotion are snow shoes. There is only one road to the station a mile away and it stops there. However the snow shoeing is good there are lots of lakes and all frozen. So you can walk for miles on the level. As soon as you get off the lakes you are in the bush which is very rough a very tangle of birch and spruce but very interesting wild animals abound. Tracks everywhere deer, foxes, rabbits and wolves mostly. Hunting is forbidden so they all congregate here. I expect to be here until the middle of April, getting some winter sketches.”

  A month later, Jackson wrote to MacCallum, saying, “The country up here is glorious. Heaps of stuff to paint. If the conditions would let you work. The first two weeks there was plenty of sunlight, but cold. 20 below zero was a nice mild day. And since March roared in the sun has never been more than a dim blur in the sky.”

  It was a new world for these Toronto-based artists, and though none embraced it with quite the enthusiasm of Thomson—who became almost fanatical about “The North”—the others took to it in varying degrees. Jackson could be described as lukewarm at best. Fred Varley (then signing his name as “F. Horsman Varley”) wrote MacCallum from Mowat to let him know “what a great time we are having up here—The country is a revelation to me—and completely bowled me over at first—We have been busy ‘slopping’ paint about and Tom is rapidly developing into a new cubist, but say, he has some great things up here. I’d like to tell you that you have given me the opportunity to wake up—I had given painting the go-by—but I’m going full tilt into it now.”

  MacCallum’s generosity saved the British-born Varley from probable oblivion. Then happily married to Maud—whom he would eventually leave for a studio model—and with a growing young family to support, as well as being notoriously bad with his money, Varley had been thinking of giving up the painting dream for the more lucrative and steady employ of illustration and design. He felt if he had steady work, he could also take on portrait commissions to help pay the mounting bills that were a constant issue between him and his wife. MacCallum’s offer of assistance was critical in persuading Varley to stick to his painting. He couldn’t help but notice the dramatic effect MacCallum’s small financial aid had had on Jackson and Thomson. With freedom to paint, Thomson had seemed to be transformed, almost overnight, from a part-time painter of little notice to a full-time artist of promise.

  In the summer of 1914, Thomson set out on a remarkable canoe journey that, alone, should dispel any doubts about his increasing prowess with a paddle. After spending some time sketching around Go Home Bay, he made his way up through the French River to Lake Nipissing, then—likely by train—to South River, where he visited with a new friend, Algonquin Park ranger Tom Wattie. Thomson and Wattie had first met the summer before, when Thomson had passed through the South River and Trout Creek area on his way to paddle two of Algonquin’s larger and more spectacular lakes, North Tea and Manitou. In the coming years, Thomson would visit Wattie and his family several times—in the village and at their island camp on Round Lake (now called Kawawaymog Lake). He also spent time at Wattie’s ranger quarters on North Tea Lake, just inside the park’s northwestern boundary. Wattie said he liked Thomson’s partridge stew and dumplings. And Thomson liked Wattie’s friendly company and bush knowledge. Thomson also thought the sketching panels produced by the Standard Chemical–owned sawmill in South River were the best he’d ever found.

  Thomson returned to Canoe Lake via North Tea and the string of lakes and rivers and at times difficult portages through the heart of the park, travelling, camping and painting for more than ten weeks. When Great Britain—and, by extension, Canada—declared war on Germany on August 4, 1914, Thomson was likely far back in the bush, oblivious to the harsh realities of the outside world.

  That fall Thomson claimed—and Ranger Mark Robinson agreed—that the colours were the most spectacular ever seen in Algonquin. For a few weeks Canoe Lake seemed overrun with artists seeking to capture the rich reds of sugar maple and sumac, the golden stands of birch and the almost feathery yellow of the swamp tamaracks. Early park historian Audrey Saunders wrote that, as the paintings had to dry before being packed away for shipping, “Mowat Lodge would overflow with all these latest sketches. Guests and artists alike would share in friendly criticisms and unstinting praise of the most recent experiments.”

  Arthur Lismer was one of the artists who came north that autumn on Thomson’s recommendation. He wrote MacCallum from Mowat Lodge on October 11, 1914, to say that they’d just had a glorious week of colour before a heavy rain put an end to the sketching. While Lismer was staying at the lodge, Thomson and Jackson were camped during the good weather across the lake at Thomson’s favourite spot, near Hayhurst Point. “Both,” Lismer wrote MacCallum, “are doing fine work & each having a decided influence upon the other.” He thought Thomson’s use of colour had improved from his earlier sketches.

  Jackson found Thomson good company but strangely reserved. He remembered Thomson being reticent to show off his work and was such a perfectionist that, at one point, he tossed his sketchbox into the woods in frustration. Though Jackson was careful not to say so at the time, he must have been less impressed with Canoe Lake than the others were. In his later memoirs, he wrote, “The area around Canoe Lake at the time was a ragged piece of Nature, hacked up many years ago by a lumber company that went broke. It was fire-swept, damned by both man and beaver and o’errun with wolves.”

  All the same, it is rather remarkable how much artistic activity went on in the park during those years. The 1914 journal of longtime Algonquin Park ranger Bud Callighen, who was posted at nearby Smoke Lake, indicates that he and other rangers saw artists as much as wildlife in their daily rounds. Callighen records that he shepherded Jackson around Smoke and Tea lakes for some late-winter sketching, took care of Thomson and Lismer in May when they portaged over to Smoke Lake and ran into Thomson and Jackson several times that fall as they paddled and camped around Smoke and Ragged lakes.

  According to Callighen’s journal (which, like Robinson’s, always showed Tom’s last name with a “p”), the rangers spent a fair bit of time with the artists. But more unusual is that Thomson appears to have been accepted as part of the small Canoe Lake circle, even though he never stayed through the winter. On April 28, 1915, after encountering a fishing party of four, Callighen wrote in his journal that the group included longtime guide George Rowe and “Thompson.” He also noted two Johnston boys, whom he specifically called “(tourists).”

  Thomson was accepted because he was, for the most part, quiet and polite, but also because he was a quick study when it came to survival in the bush. Callighen claimed that “Tom did everything in the bush coun
try well.” By most accounts penned by those who knew him then, Thomson arrived as an excellent swimmer—rare for men of that time—and soon became adept at paddling and tripping through the various routes, usually alone and with little equipment apart from tent, pack and a few cooking utensils. He told friends that if he could catch fish and pick enough of the blueberries and raspberries that grew along the shorelines and the portages, he could get by virtually expense free when deep in the woods.

  Thomson seems to have had little regard for money, even when he often seemed desperately in need of some. There is an anecdote about him pulling his hand from his pocket, spilling what little money he was carrying and not being willing to interrupt his fishing to try to retrieve the lost coins. Other anecdotes suggest that he felt duty-bound to pay his own way, once compensating a doctor who had lanced a boil for him by offering him several sketches, which were accepted with reluctance. Mark Robinson said that if you invited Thomson for a meal, you might see him come back the following day, to pay the debt, with a jar of wild raspberry jam or a fat lake trout. Annie Fraser said that when she lent him her washer so he could clean his blankets, he made sure to clean hers as well, and she also said he’d once washed the kitchen floors for the Frasers after a Mowat Lodge party.

  In Thomson’s four productive years in Algonquin Park, he completed approximately three hundred sketches and managed only two dozen larger paintings, which he finished in Toronto during the winters. In 1913 he returned to the city with thirty-some sketches, one of which, Lake, Shore and Sky, he gave to his increasingly close friend, A.Y. Jackson. Jackson and Thomson were now working in the Studio Building that MacCallum and Lawren Harris had constructed by the Rosedale Ravine. Sheltered from the sounds of the city, particularly under winter snow, it came as close to replicating the park experience as any location Thomson could find in the busy city.