Northern Light

by Roy MacGregor

  A younger Mark Robinson would have been among the doubters himself. Before he retired as a ranger, he had once been told by headquarters to ensure that a British travel writer found good fishing. It being late July, Robinson noted, he figured “the water was too warm for trout in most places.” Longtime park naturalists Ron Tozer and Rick Stronks agreed in 2009 that it would be “extremely unlikely” that a lake trout would be found in such a location on July 8th in any year. “Lake trout,” said Tozer, “would almost certainly be in deeper water at that time.”

  “I don’t believe that Mark Robinson saw him,” Daphne Crombie told me. Of course, Daphne wasn’t there at the time, so that is only her opinion. Yet Robinson’s own daughter, Ottelyn Addison, who revered her father as did so many others in the park, doubted the story was anything but an old man’s faulty remembrance or perhaps evidence of his eagerness to keep the attention of an interested interviewer.

  And yet, a far more important reported sighting that July 8th was still to come.

  At precisely 12:50 p.m. early that Sunday afternoon, Thomson apparently set out from the Mowat Lodge dock in his dove-grey Chestnut canoe for a day of fishing. Shannon Fraser said he’d seen him off and took careful note of the time, checking his own pocket watch as the painter paddled away.

  It has always been said that this was the last time anyone saw Tom Thomson alive. But was it? Or did someone see him later that evening?

  Or, even more curiously, was Thomson already dead by the time Fraser said he carefully checked his timepiece—dead and disposed of the night before under cover of dark?

  Which would make the “big trout” more of a “red herring” than evidence that Tom Thomson was still alive when Fraser claimed he watched him paddle away.

  The Jack Pine, 1916.

  Portrait of Dr. J. M. MacCallum, patron of Tom Thomson and several other artists who went on to form the Group of Seven. This 1917 work by A. Curtis Williamson is titled A Cynic.

  Canoe Lake guide George Rowe (far right) was one of the guides who discovered Tom Thomson’s body floating in Canoe Lake on July 16, 1917.

  Tom Thomson posing with trout catch.

  The Trainor family purchased an old ranger’s cabin at Canoe Lake in 1912 and changed it into a summer cottage that has changed little over the years.

  Tom Thomson shaving in the bush.

  Tom Thomson in canoe, smoking pipe.

  Tom Thomson fly-fishing.

  Tom Thomson and Arthur Lismer, Smoke Lake, Algonquin Park, 1914.

  SEVEN THE SEARCH

  Tuesday, July 10, 1917, began with the sort of weather that keeps the loons calling late and makes the water feel warmer than the air. It had rained during the night, and Canoe Lake was still covered in shifting mist when, around 9:15 a.m., Shannon Fraser made his way to the Joe Lake ranger station and, as Robinson recorded in his journal for that day, “reported that Martin Bleacher had found Tom Thompsons Canoe floating upside down in Canoe Lake and wanted us to drag for Mr. Thompson’s body.”

  Robinson was certain that whatever had put Tom Thomson’s canoe in the water would soon be explained. Perhaps Monday’s wind had blown it free from a shore where Thomson might have lodged it—though Thomson was familiar enough with canoes that, surely, he would have hauled it completely out of the water and turned it over, particularly as there had been signs it would rain. Perhaps, thinking he would be only a short while, he had left it sitting partly in and partly out of the water at one of the portages, the bow pulled up on the shore but not tied or not tied securely. The waves could then have slowly rocked the canoe, sucking it back off the roots and muck and out into the deeper water. It happened sometimes, even to those who should know better. Maybe Tom was stranded somewhere, embarrassed, as he should be. But drag for a body? Hardly—it simply made no sense.

  Fraser said he’d last seen Thomson paddling away from the Mowat Lodge dock shortly before one o’clock on Sunday afternoon. He later added that he’d given Thomson some food from the lodge: a fresh loaf of bread, two pounds of bacon, a dozen potatoes, one pound of rice, one pound of sugar … which seems a considerable amount for an afternoon fishing trip. Perhaps Thomson was taking some necessary supplies to the Trainor cabin before setting off. The amount, however, would have suggested to someone like Mark Robinson—already skeptical that anything might have gone wrong—that Tom had intended to be gone a number of days, as was often the case with the painter.

  More information kept arriving. Martin Blecher, Jr., and his sister Bessie said that, shortly after 3 p.m. on Sunday, they’d set out on a motorboat excursion down Canoe Lake to Tea Lake and had seen an overturned canoe about five minutes after leaving their dock near the Trainor cottage and the lodge.

  As three o’clock was about two hours after Tom had supposedly paddled away from Shannon at the Mowat Lodge dock, it’s always been assumed that the overturned canoe was Tom’s. (Within those two hours, he would have had time to stop off at the Trainor cabin for his fishing equipment and perhaps also his paints.) And this assumption has led to the supposition that Tom met with ill circumstances that afternoon, sometime before three o’clock.

  But the overturned canoe, like the big fish, poses problems. If it is true that the Blechers came across a canoe and, as Robinson recorded in his journal, “They investigated no further,” this would go against the “code” of the waters of Algonquin Park—or any other body of water, for that matter. If you see an overturned canoe, you check, and you check very carefully. But Martin Blecher, Jr., later suggested that he and his sister assumed the canoe was not a sign of distress but one recently reported missing by the Colsons, who owned the Algonquin Hotel on Joe Lake. He said he thought he and Bessie would tow it back on their return, only to find, on their return, that it had vanished.

  It is baffling that this canoe has so often been taken to have been Tom’s. Fleets of canoes belonging to camps and lodges tended to be painted one colour—either red or green or sometimes yellow—for convenient identification. But Tom had deliberately painted his beloved Chestnut canoe a dove colour (actually a pale bluish white) precisely so it would be seen as unique. The canoe was known by everyone on Canoe Lake, and it would have been especially recognizable to the Blechers, since they would have seen him paddling it daily as he came and went from Mowat Lodge and the Trainors’ cottage. If indeed it was overturned, the distinctive colouring would have been most prominent. So too would have been the metal strip on the keel side that Thomson had installed to save wear and tear when he pulled the craft up on shore. Most on the lake also knew about the metal strip and how fussy Thomson was about the care of his familiar canoe.

  The Blechers had mentioned the Sunday afternoon canoe sighting to Shannon Fraser on Monday morning, yet Fraser said nothing to the nearest authority, Mark Robinson, for a full day. And as Robinson’s journal entry is ambiguous—Fraser telling him that the Blechers had found the canoe “and wanted us to drag for Mr. Thompson’s body”—it is impossible to say which of them had suggested the dragging: Martin Blecher, Jr., or Fraser?

  How could the Blechers ignore an overturned canoe, assume it belonged to the hotel up on Joe Lake, not recognize it as the distinctive canoe that most everyone knew well and then later decide that Tom must have drowned and was now at the bottom of the lake? It makes no sense.

  The canoe they saw was far more likely the one missing from the Algonquin Hotel. On Friday the 13th, five days after the canoe sighting, Robinson recorded in his journal that he and his son Jack had found “Mr. Colsons Canoe or Canvas Boat” abandoned on the Gill Lake portage. But there is no mention as to whether Robinson thought that this was the canoe that the Blechers had ignored on Sunday the 8th. It could have drifted there or been hauled up by someone who’d found it floating in Canoe Lake.

  No matter what canoe the Blechers saw that Sunday afternoon, there is no doubt that on the morning of Monday, July 9th, Tom’s dove-coloured canoe was found. There are conflicting tales as to whether the canoe was found floating upside
down or right side up, but no disputing that it was his and that Tom was really missing. Ottawa florist and park visitor Charlie Scrim and Mark Robinson noted that Tom’s “working” paddle—the one he preferred to paddle with, using other paddles tethered to the seats and thwart to form a shoulder support for portaging—was missing. If Tom had flipped, the paddle should have been easy enough to find floating, but it never was discovered despite searches that went on for years afterwards. This was, in fact, the first evidence that cast real suspicion: if Tom had not been paddling, how did his canoe end up floating on the lake, upside down or right side up, and he at the bottom?

  Shannon Fraser sent telegrams to the Thomson family in Owen Sound and to Dr. James MacCallum in Toronto, informing them that Tom’s canoe had been found and that Tom had not been seen since Sunday at about noon. Robinson reported the situation to Algonquin Park superintendent George Bartlett at the Cache Lake headquarters, and Bartlett instructed his ranger to begin a search of the nearby woods. Robinson and his young son hiked trails to the south and west and walked in to Gill Lake but could find nothing, not even fresh tracks after the rain. Robinson tramped through the portages and along the paths every day that week but found no trace of Thomson.

  On Thursday the 12th, Fraser wrote to MacCallum: “Dear Sir. Tom left here on sunday about one o’clock for a fishing trip down the lake and at three oclock his Canoe was found floating a short distance from my place with both paddles tied tight in the canoe also his provision were found packed in the canoe. The Canoe was up side down We can find no trace of where he landed or what happened to him Everything is being done that can be done his brother arrived this morning Will let you know at once if we find him.”

  George Thomson, who was on vacation in Leith, visiting his parents and his wife’s parents, was dispatched by the family to look into matters at Canoe Lake. George arrived on Thursday morning, and Mark Robinson took him around the lake in wet weather, introducing him to various people and going over, again, what little was known about the situation. Robinson also used the crude rangers’ telephone line to ring up Ranger Albert Patterson and have him go into Huntsville “to search into matters there.”

  What “matters”? Patterson was stationed at Moose Lake, now called McCraney Lake, near the western boundary of the park, so he was in the handiest location for making such checks, whatever they entailed. Perhaps Robinson merely wanted to find out whether anyone in Huntsville had seen Thomson or whether he had been seen at the station at Scotia Junction, catching a train north, for Robinson still believed that Tom would show up and all, eventually, would be explained. The ranger’s journal entry also raises questions. He usually wrote in brief, straightforward terms, so why would he not say the ranger had gone to Huntsville to find out whether Tom’s friends the Trainors knew anything? “To search into matters there” seems to suggest an avoidance of mentioning what those matters might be. Could it be that there was gossip around the lake about a marriage the artist might be trying to avoid? Was there some sense that perhaps Thomson—having stocked up on supplies from Mowat Lodge—was not off for an afternoon fish but on the lam from responsibilities he was not in any financial position to face?

  In letters and in conversations, Thomson had suggested that he might head west at some point in 1917 to do some painting. In April he had written that letter to his brother-in-law Tom Harkness, saying, “I may possibly go out on the Canadian Northern this summer to paint the Rockies but have not made all the arrangements yet. If I go it will be in July and August.” It was now early July.

  George stayed at Canoe Lake only two days—a remarkably short time, considering that his younger brother was missing and the discovery of his dove-grey canoe suggested that something terrible might have happened to him. Surely George must have been deeply concerned—to think otherwise is simply impossible. But he might also have been a bit miffed over being forced to take on an onerous family responsibility that so often falls to the eldest son. As George was also a painter, and a good one, he may well have been envious of his younger brother’s growing success. It can be fairly assumed that he profoundly disagreed with Tom’s irresponsible lifestyle. George Thomson—who looked more like a banker than an artist with his close-cropped, thinning hair and carefully trimmed moustache—frowned on drinking and believed a man should support a family with a real job, even if that person believed himself to be an artist—as he did himself.

  So after two nights at the lodge, George apparently gathered up his younger brother’s sketches, that remarkable day-by-day record of the spring of 1917, and caught the next train west out of the park. His actions seemed most curious.

  “I have never understood or read any plausible explanation why George Thomson visited Canoe Lake immediately after Thomson’s disappearance,” art expert David Silcox wrote in Tom Thomson: The Silence and the Storm, “and then not only left while everyone else continued the search for his brother, but took most of Thomson’s sketches away with him. If he presumed him dead, why did he not take all of Thomson’s belongings? And if he thought he might still be alive, why would he not have helped with the search, and why did he take away work that Thomson might have wanted? His behavior was odd, to say the least.”

  News of the painter’s disappearance had found its way into the papers. The Globe reported that Thomson was “missing.” The Owen Sound Sun suggested he had “likely drowned.” Yet while the newspapers were hinting at the worst, Robinson carried on the search for his friend. He and his son began checking the islands and portages into other lakes. There is no indication in his reports or in any other recollections that they ever dragged for a body. Dr. Robert P. Little, who had been on a canoe trip in the area at the time, later wrote a small essay in which he claimed that “Dynamite was exploded in the lake without result,” but this is difficult to imagine, as Robinson makes no mention of this in his journals, and he would have had to authorize its use. He had stuck to his original belief that Tom was not in the water but was somewhere else. Hurt perhaps, but alive.

  Ranger Patterson returned from Huntsville with no news of Tom’s whereabouts. Robinson and his son kept searching, now moving deeper into the surrounding bush where Robinson would blow his whistle and even fire the odd shot in the air without getting any response. Curious about the missing “working” paddle that should have floated, he went around the Canoe Lake shoreline on Sunday, searching in vain for any sign of it.

  Monday, July 16th, produced a fine and clear morning. Robinson noted in his journal that he baked bread before heading out once again to look for the painter. He was beginning to wonder if they’d ever find out what had happened or where Tom was.

  But in an instant all that changed.

  “Charlie Scrim come walking to the door, tears running down his cheeks,” Robinson later recalled.

  “Mark,” Scrim said, “they’ve found Tom’s body.”

  “What?”

  “They’ve found Tom’s body.”

  “Where?”

  “Dr. Howland,” Scrim sputtered. Dr. Goldwin W. Howland, a neurologist at the University of Toronto, had taken over Taylor Statten’s cabin on Little Wapomeo Island for a couple of weeks while the Stattens spent the month of July at Springfield College in Massachusetts, attending the YMCA Training School. Statten and his wife, Ethel, would not be coming back to their island cabin on Canoe Lake until August.

  Howland had apparently been sitting at the front door of the Stattens’ cabin early that morning when he saw something rise in the water not far off the shore. Lawrie Dickson and George Rowe, the two guides who lived on the old Gilmour mill property, were paddling down the lake, and Howland called to them to shift direction and check on whatever it was that was bobbing in the water. Rowe called back that it was probably a loon, but Howland persisted until they turned slightly and paddled over. It didn’t take long for a shocked Rowe to shout back, “It’s Thomson’s body!”

  Howland later said he believed his young daughter might have loosened the body f
rom whatever had held it down so long when they’d been out fishing the previous evening and the little girl had snagged something solid while trolling through the channel between Wapomeo and Little Wapomeo islands.

  Whatever had caused the body to rise, it was now on the surface, badly bloated, with the flesh tearing in places, yet the guides knew from the hair and clothes and circumstances that it had to be Tom. It could be no one else. Howland suggested that they tow the body over to the shore and tie it to some tree roots that were hanging over the rocks. Being a medical man, he knew better than to haul a bloated body out of the water into the sun. After days of overcast and drizzle, it was finally brightening up, and on land, in the sun, the bloating would worsen and the rotting flesh split and tear. Once they had secured the body, they went to notify the authorities, beginning with Robinson, the local ranger.

  The affidavit signed by Dr. Howland on July 17, 1917, said: “I saw body of man floating in Canoe Lake Monday, July 16th, at about 10 A.M. and notified Mr. George Rowe a resident who removed body to shore. On 17th Tuesday, I examined body and found it to be that of a man aged about 40 years in advanced stage of decomposition, face abdomen and limbs swollen, blisters on limbs, was a bruise on right temple size of 4” long, no other sign of external marks visible on body, air issuing from mouth, some bleeding from right ear, cause of death drowning.”

  The grisly scene of a bobbing body lashed to tree roots was disconcerting to all who saw it. Robinson recorded that Hugh Trainor helped cover the body with a blanket. Hugh and Margaret Trainor were staying at their cabin—he likely helped with the search—and they would have sent word to Winnie, at work in Huntsville and surely dreading bad news, that Tom had been found, dead.