At this time the Thomson family was aware only that Tom had been found. A badly worded telegram from Fraser left confusion at first as to whether he had been discovered dead or alive. A second telegram made it clear and asked Tom Harkness for directions to be telegraphed back as to what the family wished done with the body. They, of course, wanted their son returned home for burial and Harkness sent a telegraph to the attention of Shannon Fraser at Mowat Lodge requesting this. For whatever reasons, that telegram of instructions never reached Canoe Lake—or, if it did, was ignored.
Had telephone service been available, the confusion might have been avoided, but the only existing phone lines ran along the railway track, connecting several ranger cabins to park headquarters. It was impossible to phone outside the park or to call in. The only way to send messages was by telegraph or by letter.
Mark Robinson said later that the quick burial was his suggestion. “He was my friend,” he said, “and that was getting under the skin pretty badly, and I called the Superintendent in the morning and I said, ‘Look Mr. Bartlett, Thomson was my friend and I hate to think of him lying there.’ I said, ‘It’s not right.’ He said ‘I agree with you.’ ”
Bartlett had already requested, by telegraph, the presence of the coroner from North Bay, Dr. Arthur E. Ranney, but Ranney had yet to arrive. As Bartlett considered himself to be the near-total authority in the park, he decided to act as ex officio coroner, signing the required papers for burial and telling Robinson to have the undertakers embalm the decomposing body so that a small funeral and burial might take place in the Canoe Lake cemetery behind the old Gilmour mill property.
R.H. Flavelle, the undertaker who took on that grisly task, claimed that Bartlett, in the capacity of coroner, “sent over a certificate of accidental death by drowning.” The official conclusion, then, was already set in motion before the coroner even arrived from North Bay. Robinson later claimed that Bartlett told him directly, “You’ll have to handle it for the government.”
Robinson telegraphed his cousin, Roy Dixon of Sprucedale, a small village on the Grand Trunk line as it passed Scotia Junction and continued west toward Georgian Bay. Dixon was trained as an embalmer, and he, in turn, contacted Flavelle of Kearney, a furniture dealer who also sold caskets and acted as the village undertaker. The two men headed for Canoe Lake, Dixon staying with his cousin at the Joe Lake ranger quarters, while Flavelle stayed at Mowat Lodge. The two guides who had found Thomson’s remains, Rowe and Dickson, had apparently stayed up all night, keeping guard over the body that still lay lashed to the roots and covered with a blanket. It would have been stomach-churning to watch, with the waves lightly lapping and the steady sound of their friend’s body rubbing against the roots and the rocky shore.
Robinson arranged for the body to be taken to the nearby point on Wapomeo Island and laid out on planks so that Dixon and Flavelle could do their work. The ranger and Dr. Howland oversaw matters, Robinson noting that the body had a bruise over the left eye and fishing line wrapped multiple times around the left ankle. This struck him as curious because Thomson’s fishing rod and line had not been found in his canoe, though other provisions had been stashed safely and survived. Dixon asked whether Robinson had a knife he could use to cut off the line. The ranger cut the line himself, counting as he unravelled the coils. The fishing line had been wrapped—carefully, Robinson thought—sixteen or seventeen times around the ankle. It was not, in his opinion, Tom’s regular fishing line.
Robinson’s journal suggests that, right from the beginning, there was suspicion and disagreement among the locals as to what had happened to Thomson. By Wednesday, two days after the artist’s body had been found, Robinson wrote in his journal: “There is Considerable Adverse Comment regarding the taking of the Evidence among the Residents.”
Robinson kept his own strong suspicions to himself, not noting them in his journal. But he did have his doubts. In an interview with Rory MacKay for the Algonquin Park archives, Robinson’s younger son, Mark Robinson, Jr., said, “I don’t think that he ever felt that it was an accident. My [older] brother [Jack] was there with him and he was old enough then to remember, and the way the twine was around the legs, I don’t think there could be any doubt that he was done in for one reason or another.”
Some two weeks later, Robinson wrote down a rough inventory of the known facts concerning Thomson’s disappearance. Tom Thomson’s canoe—whether found floating upright or upside down—contained a stash that included a rubber sheet, a one-gallon can of maple syrup and a large tin of jam. At the Mowat Lodge dock, from which Thomson apparently set out on July 8th, three old tin pails were found, along with a pair of buckskin moccasins (Thomson had more than one pair), three trolling spoons, some fishing line and an axe. According to Charlie Scrim, Thomson left carrying three small pails containing a small quantity of rice, sugar and flour, a half-dozen potatoes, a small frying pan, a rod, a reel and a landing net (a different tally from what Fraser had listed). He was wearing khaki trousers, white canvas shoes, a lumberman’s grey woollen shirt and no hat.
It is difficult to say what, if anything, this list means. It does not include the supplies that Shannon Fraser said he fetched for Thomson just before the painter paddled away from the dock at precisely 12:50—according to Fraser, who claimed to have carefully checked his timepiece. It suggests that Thomson did not take his axe, which would be most peculiar, given that he clearly planned to make a meal or meals in the bush, which would require kindling and wood for a campfire. In such a setting, an axe would be considered almost as important as the canoe and paddle. The working paddle, Robinson noted elsewhere, was not found. On the other hand, if the canoe was found floating upside down, as some claimed it had, the axe would have been the first thing to sink had it been loose. Thomson’s familiar paddle, however, would have floated and, almost certainly, been found.
Whatever had happened—accidental drowning? murder? suicide?—the one undeniable fact was that Thomson was dead.
On Tuesday, July 17th, very early in the morning, a distraught Winnie Trainor arrived alone by train. Ten-year-old Rose Thomas, whose parents ran the Canoe Lake station, saw her step down from the coach. Decades later, Rose claimed to recall exactly what Winnie looked like when the train pulled in: she was wearing a beige coat with matching beige hat, and her black hair was smartly braided. “I asked her in but she said she’d rather not,” Rose told park historian Rory MacKay in 1976. “So she went and stood on the bridge … I can always remember her standing on the bridge and looking down into the water.”
After a few minutes staring into the calm, tea-coloured waters of Potter Creek, she turned and headed down the pathway toward Mowat Lodge and her family’s cottage, and from there she went by boat to the island where Tom lay. She insisted on being allowed to view the body. She wanted to know on whose authority Tom was to be buried at Canoe Lake. She wanted to know whether the family had been informed and whether they had made their wishes clear. She wanted to know why they were not going to wait for the coroner’s arrival from North Bay. She was very upset and later told the Thomson family that she had “suggested things but was refused.”
She was given no answers. Mark Robinson was the only authority present, and park superintendent Bartlett, who had already approved the burial, was acting on behalf of the coroner. Undoubtedly, Robinson and the other men present, Winnie’s father included, thought they were protecting a distraught woman by keeping what they felt were her sensitive feminine sensibilities from an image she would never forget: the swollen and decomposing cadaver of her special friend. Young Jack Robinson had seen the body and, years later, said he could never get the memory of that shocking moment out of his mind. But the refusal angered Winnie Trainor even more—she would never forgive Mark Robinson for this—and she became very agitated, but the ranger would not change his mind, and the men proceeded with the plan to bury the body as quickly as possible.
Shannon Fraser had said nothing about receiving a telegram from the
Thomson family, though he had himself requested one and Tom Harkness had sent instructions.
Winnie had her reasons for demanding to see the body. There were certainly physical matters to puzzle over, and the small Canoe Lake community would already have been buzzing with talk about the bruised temple—Dr. Howland saying the bruise was on the right side, Robinson noting in his journal that it was on the left side—and the fishing line wrapped around the left ankle. Robinson said the line was a cord that was easily cut with a sharp knife. The preferred method of fishing for summer lake trout in the early years of Algonquin was to weigh down such line with sinkers or lures to get down deep enough, to where the trout would have moved by July. Those who fished alone in canoes would sometimes wrap their line around a notched board that could be worked by hand and foot, sometimes a bare foot. But Robinson noted that the line appeared to have been wrapped carefully and deliberately, which meant it would not have been the result of Thomson going into the water and having the line spin around his ankle as he rolled toward the bottom or in the light currents of the lake. Robinson did not believe the line he cut belonged to Thomson. He concluded that it had been wrapped so neatly and tightly that it could not possibly have happened accidentally.
While Robinson cut the line free, Dr. Howland examined the body. The undertakers drained what fluids they could, to reduce the swelling, and washed the body clean. Though Robinson was intrigued by the gash on Thomson’s temple—saying later it looked as if he had been struck by a paddle—he kept his suspicions to himself. Howland, for his part, never even considered the possibility of foul play. He signed a Province of Ontario Medical Certificate of Death and recorded the date of death as July 8, 1917, and entered the “Disease causing death” as “drowning.” There seemed no doubt in Howland’s mind.
On the 17th, Dixon and Flavelle embalmed the body right there at the shore of Wapomeo Island. Robinson said they used double the amount of embalming fluid that would normally be required, and the Thomson family was presented with bills that claimed the same. The body was placed in the wooden casket that the undertakers had brought in on the train. They then hauled the coffin up to the little cemetery, where guides Rowe and Dickson had already dug a deep grave just to the north of where the Hayhurst boy and Watson, the mill worker, had been buried years earlier. The guides had already placed the wooden shell for the coffin in the grave.
“We placed the casket in it,” Robinson recalled later, “there was a funeral service read, I had taken my little Anglican Prayer Book that was given when I was a boy—I generally carried it with me—and he, Mr. Blecher Senior, read the service from it, and a very nice funeral was held. There was several from the hotel in attendance and around about.”
One of those was Charles Plewman, a young man who was a guest at Mowat Lodge and who was pressed into duty as a pallbearer, even though he had never met the painter. He helped those who actually knew Thomson lift the coffin and place it on the back of Shannon Fraser’s horse-drawn cart—ironically, it had originally been a funeral wagon and was known about the lake as Fraser’s “hearse”—for the trek across the flats of the former mill site and up through the pines and aspen to the cemetery.
“Tom Thomson’s burial was a sad and forlorn affair,” Plewman wrote many years later. “The sky was overcast and the rain was falling. It had all the earmarks of a backwoods funeral.”
Apart from the two undertakers, just eighteen people attended. The Blechers all came: father, mother, sister and brother. Robinson, Dickson, Rowe, Scrim, the Frasers, the Trainors (mother, father and Winnifred), the Colsons (three, as Colson’s sister ran the store) from the Algonquin Hotel and Mr. and Mrs. Edwin Thomas from the Canoe Lake train station. None of Thomson’s painter friends were present. Jackson, Harris and Varley were off at war. Lismer was living in Nova Scotia. As for the others who were closer at hand—MacDonald, Beatty and MacCallum—none of them had come. And there was no one at the graveside to represent the Thomson family.
Winnie was the closest person there to a family representative, as subsequent details would prove. In some strange and very sad way, she had become a widow before she even married.
EIGHT THE HAND OF WINNIE TRAINOR
The instructions that Shannon Fraser had requested from the Thomson family were sent but either never arrived or were deliberately ignored. It was not until the next day, July 18th, that Fraser decided to write a letter—not send a telegram, which would have been much faster—to Tom Thomson’s father informing him that “We found your son floating in Canoe Lake on Monday morning about nine o clock in a most dreadful condition the flesh was coming off his hands. I sent for the undertaker and they found him in such a condition … he had to be buried at once he is buried in a little grave yard over looking Canoe Lake a beautiful spot. The Dr found a bruise over his eye and thinks he fell and was hurt and this is how the accident happened.”
Fraser appears to be justifying the quick burial, which would suggest he had, in fact, received the telegram of instructions from Tom Harkness, the painter’s brother-in-law, but chose instead to let the burial go ahead and inform the family of what had happened by letter. However, by the time Fraser had mailed his letter, they’d already received a late-night telephone call from Winnifred Trainor, letting them know that Tom had been buried. Somehow, perhaps at the Canoe Lake station, she’d found out about the family’s wishes that the body be buried in the family plot at Leith. In a letter she sent on August 11th to Harkness she made reference to a “telegram of instructions” that she saw while catching the evening train. “I had quite a hard struggle even to see it,” she wrote to Harkness. She offered no other insight, so he must have known to what she was referring.
In retrospect, she wrote, “I’m sorry I did not go up the day before.” She said she had suggested things at Canoe Lake—surely referring to her confrontation with the men over her right to see the body for herself—“but was refused.” She wrote that once she got to the lake and realized plans were in the works to bury Tom, with an embalmer and undertaker already there, “I did everything in my power to get things righted. I was told there it could not be done, but I thought I’d have a try and that time was precious.”
She said she got off the train at Scotia Junction to make the connection to Huntsville, but instead of taking the next train she stayed on to contact the Thomson family and, it would appear, another undertaker in Huntsville. The wires were down, she said, but she was able to find the agent and managed to send out some messages “all free of charge, & perfectly lovely about it all.” She said she worked until around 3 a.m. on July 18th. She would have contacted the Thomson family around midnight. A letter that Tom’s sister Margaret wrote to another sister, Minnie, five days after the burial said that “Miss Traynor, a friend of Tom’s” informed them at twelve o’clock by telephone—she says by telephone, while Winnie’s letter suggests by wire—that “the body had been buried and wanted to know if we would like anything done. We told her we wanted him home, so she did everything in her power and stayed up all night to help us. She called George at three o’clock that night again and in the meantime she was doing everything she could to help make arrangements.”
Winnie was quickly suspicious of Shannon Fraser’s role in Tom’s swift burial. When she happened to meet Tom’s sister Margaret a few weeks later at a small Toronto memorial exhibition of his works, she told Margaret that Fraser had indeed received Tom Harkness’s telegram of instructions but “didn’t let on to anyone.” Winnie said she could not understand why anyone “would want to keep that to himself.”
Once Winnie made it home to Huntsville early on July 18, she went to the telephone exchange there and made six calls at a total cost of five dollars. We know this precise figure because the Thomson family ended up with the bill, which suggests she was not only working on their behalf, but was also reimbursed for her expenses. The bill was paid by Miss W. Trainor on July 25, 1917. The six calls are all dated July 18, the day after Thomson was buried at Canoe Lake
.
She made two calls to “Mr. Thompson, Owen Sound,” one that cost $1.10, and another, longer one, for which she was charged $2.50. The remaining four calls were all to “Mr. Flavelle, Kearney,” the furniture-dealer-cum-undertaker, who had been present at the embalming of Thomson’s body. The four calls to Flavelle—one long discussion at 70 cents, one at 35 cents and two brief, perhaps abrupt, calls at 20 cents and 15 cents—were likely followed by her second call to the Thomson family, during which she reported on her failure to convince Flavelle to exhume the body he had just buried and then ship it back to the family in an appropriate, sealed casket. He may not have had such a casket in Kearney. Winnie suggested that the family not bother with Flavelle any longer and turn, instead, to someone she knew who would do the job the family required. The family agreed.
Winnie then got in touch with the Huntsville undertaker, F.W. Churchill. The only account of events we have from Churchill came in an interview he gave nearly forty years after Thomson’s body was buried. He was seventy-three years old at the time and suffering from a faulty memory. He told the reporter who contacted him: “Mr. Thomson’s relatives and friends were not happy with the burial spot. Miss Blodwen Davies, a friend, wanted him buried at Leith. She phoned the undertaker in Kearney, who had been in charge of the funeral near Canoe Lake, but he refused to exhume the body. Then she phoned me in Huntsville. I was not anxious to do the job, but she begged me and finally I said yes.” He said that the woman would not take “no” for an answer and was determined to “get things righted.” Of course, Churchill is confusing Thomson’s first biographer, Blodwen Davies, with Winnie Trainor.
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