Northern Light

by Roy MacGregor

  “We opened the grave and took the coffin and the rough-box out of the grave,” Churchill told the Canadian Press. “The body was badly decomposed but still recognizable as Tom Thomson. I transferred the remains into a metal box which I could seal. The empty coffin and rough box were put back into the grave and the grave was filled again.

  “We placed the metal box with the body in a coffin and shipped it to Owen Sound, as Miss Davies [he meant Miss Trainor] had requested. One of Mr. Thomson’s brothers accompanied the coffin on the train to Owen Sound.

  “There my instructions ended, but I heard that the undertaker from Owen Sound saw to the burial of the coffin in the cemetery at Leith.”

  The question of the sealed casket has long been its own mystery. If, indeed, Churchill had placed the body in a sealed casket for the train journey, he would have had to bring the necessary tools along to solder the casket shut—and this would take considerable time. He might have arrived, and departed, with an already-sealed coffin.

  Proof that Churchill had, in fact, completed his assignment was said to lie in the contention that there had been a “viewing” of the painter’s body once the casket arrived back in Owen Sound. This claim dates mostly from interviews with two elderly sisters, Agnes and Margaret McKeen, for a 1969 story in the Owen Sound Sun Times. They likely stepped forward in reaction to a CBC documentary on Thomson aired at about that time, which had suggested that the body had never been moved from Canoe Lake. The sisters wanted it to be known that their late cousin, John McKeen, had been a neighbour of the Thomsons and had had the difficult task of accompanying the painter’s father, as the casket top was removed at his insistence.

  “Mr. Thomson,” the paper reported the elderly sisters as saying, “expressed relief that he no longer had doubts as to the whereabouts of his son.”

  This all seems rather strange. In the first place, no one back in 1917 had any reason to doubt that the coffin contained anything but the remains of Tom Thomson—so why would there be “relief” regarding “the whereabouts of his son”? No questions had yet been raised about the whereabouts of Tom Thomson’s remains. Decades later, when William Little published The Tom Thomson Mystery, he noted in his acknowledgements a debt to a “Mr. John McKeane (deceased) of Leith, Ontario.” Surely this would be the same John McKeen who supposedly viewed the body. It seems beyond belief that McKeen, while alive, would not have mentioned this critical witnessing of the body to Little, as Little’s book was arguing that the body had remained at Canoe Lake and had never been transported to Leith as the undertaker Churchill had so vehemently claimed.

  But there are other questions concerning the McKeen sisters’ remarks. First would be the state of the body. “The stink!” Mark Robinson’s daughter Ottelyn said in a conversation with me in 1977. “No one would transfer it if they could avoid it.”

  “I can’t imagine anyone un-soldering the metal casket in Owen Sound to see the body,” says Phil Chadwick, a weather scientist who has long studied Thomson’s work. “It would be just a horrible memory—and smell. One couldn’t re-solder it fast enough. And to get a good look, more than three-quarters of the soldering would have to be melted away. What a mess it would have made: bent metal, melted solder, pungent odours and maybe even leaking fluids sloshing around from the handling of the casket. Not nice.”

  After the casket had arrived in Owen Sound, Tom’s sister Margaret wrote that “None of us wanted to see him even if the body had been fit to see.” She said in her letter to sister Minnie that the body had remained at the undertaker’s on Friday night and that they’d held a very quiet private funeral at the Thomson home Saturday morning (July 21st). “At one time,” she confessed, “we dreaded the time when he would be brought home but when the time came, it seemed so good to have him with us.” She noted that “Mr. and Mrs. Fraser of Canoe Lake” had sent flowers—“but we were glad that there was not an overabundance of them. People no doubt understood his tastes and knew he would not like a display.”

  Four years after the 1969 Sun Times story appeared claiming that the family had indeed viewed the body, Toronto researcher Iris Nowell travelled to Owen Sound to interview the McKeen sisters for David Silcox and Harold Town’s book Tom Thomson: The Silence and the Storm. Margaret, known as “Etta” to the family, was then ninety-four and Agnes, ninety-six, yet both were eager to talk. Etta even offered the perplexing nugget that a small child was also buried in the family grave at Leith, along with Tom Thomson’s casket, which was said by some to be “Tom’s by some Indian woman—but who would bury it with Tom?” To the sisters, it was just one more example of the many lies that kept sticking to the late artist.

  “It’s not right the way people say things,” Agnes McKeen told Nowell. “Not at all right when you think of the nice boy he was.”

  The McKeen sisters held to their story that a cousin had viewed the body with John Thomson. Nowell also went to see Wilson Buzza, whose brother had later lived on the Thomson farm following the Thomsons’ move to Owen Sound.

  Buzza claimed the story of the viewing was true, and yet it struck Nowell as notable that several times in the conversation he repeated, “Just keep him buried in Leith” as if idle gossip alone were capable of shifting the ground where the painter supposedly lay.

  One possible explanation for the “viewing” myth is that John McKeen and old Mr. Thomson might have said they had seen the body, to provide comfort to the family at the onset of the earliest rumblings about whether or not the body had been returned. If telling white lies to protect loved ones were a crime, there would be no one left to sit in judgment. The other possibility, of course, is that the McKeen sisters, having reached such ripe old ages, were either misremembering or deliberately concocting a story in the hopes that it would put an end to the gossip.

  There was no viewing.

  Charles Plewman believed that Winnie Trainor had been directly involved and therefore knew the truth about where the body lay—which was, in his opinion, at Leith.

  “Fraser and Mark Robinson did not know that Winnie had made separate arrangements with Churchill for the exhumation of the body,” Plewman wrote in his posthumously published notes. “She desperately wanted to see the body to determine if indeed foul play had occurred. Personally, I believe that she got her father and brother to help Churchill, and at the same time inspected the body for foul play. From their cottage close by, they would watch Fraser return from the cemetery after leaving Churchill there. They could then go over and help him. This may be one of the reasons they took the body out of a new coffin to put it in a steel one. But why all the secrecy? Miss Trainor did not want the Chief Ranger, Mark Robinson, who had so recently thwarted her efforts to see Tom’s body, to know.”

  This is a most peculiar statement, given that Winnie had left for Huntsville following the discovery of Tom’s body and, as the Bell telephone charges to Winnie and the letter from Tom’s sister Margaret both show, immediately set to work handling affairs as much as possible on behalf of the Thomson family. Also, Winnie did not have a brother. And while it might have been possible for someone at the Trainor cottage to notice Fraser and his wagon returning from the cemetery, it is hard to imagine Winnie and her father making their way in the dark to the cemetery, which is a considerable distance to hike.

  Plewman argued that Winnie Trainor must have been correct in her stated belief that Tom’s body had been removed for burial as “it was her habit years afterwards to remove flowers that had been left in his memory in the little cemetery on Canoe Lake.” I agree with Plewman that she thought, or at least prayed, that Churchill had done his job. After all, it was she who had engaged Churchill on behalf of the Thomson family, and Winnie took enormous pride in being dependable and trustworthy.

  She had to be sure that he was buried in Leith; otherwise, she had failed the family, and by extension, Tom.

  Both Owen Sound papers reported on the artist’s demise four days after Thomson’s body was found. The Times report was formal and str
aightforward, simply saying he had “drowned in Canoe Lake” on July 8th, giving family history and offering some complimentary background to the artist’s landscape work:

  Every year he went to Algonquin park for six months. Here he went far into the wilds, traveling at times by way of canoe and at other times on foot, and often entirely alone, so that he could study nature in its different aspects. He was with nature so much that he became a part of it, and this enabled him to paint just what he felt.

  In the winter months he enlarged his sketches and he had a wonderful collection in his studio in Rosedale, Toronto. His work was steadily growing in esteem and he had a very bright future before him. His pictures were steadily sought for, for the collections of the Ontario and Dominion governments. He had a bright and cheerful disposition and was filled with kindness for all. He was loved by all who knew him…

  But the Sun did not shy away from the central issue. One headline read “Still a Mystery as to How the Drowning Took Place.” Even so, the paper declared that “the finding of the body clears up all the uncertainties.”

  The Sun went on to say that Thomson had:

  … possessed a rare charm and promised to become famous amongst art lovers of the Continent for the excellence of his work. He not only painted nature, but lived and felt and understood the great beauty of the wilds. His work possessed a truth and fidelity that could only come from direct and sympathetic touch with his subject and that he had died on the threshold of fame makes his demise the more to be regretted. He was one of the fine type of young manhood that the country has every reason to be proud of…

  Referring to the work of the late Mr. Thomson, Eric Brown, in a recent article in the London ‘Studio’ says: ‘Critics look to him to carry forward the Canadian landscape painting far beyond anything at present realized. Wandering alone the best part of the year in Algonquin Park, inured to hardship and reputed the best guide, fisherman and canoeman in the district, he lives with these wonderful seasons and they live through him. Here, again is the decorative sense … developed and visible in every composition. There is no loss of character; the northland lies before you, whether it is a winding river fringed with spring flowers seen through a screen of gaunt black pines, or whether the green blocks of melting ice float on blue liberated waters of the lake.

  The newspaper reports at the time shied away from suggestions of foul play, but speculation was rampant around Canoe Lake, as confirmed in Mark Robinson’s journal entry concerning “adverse comment” about the gathering of evidence. To the residents of Canoe Lake, Dr. Ranney, the North Bay coroner, had seemed more interested in Mrs. Blecher’s home-cooked meal than in taking issue with Superintendent Bartlett’s quick declaration that the cause of death was accidental drowning. Nor did he show much patience in sorting through all the contradictory evidence concerning lost and found canoes, the state of the canoe when truly found and, most curious of all, the state of the body: blow to temple, left or right side, air in lungs, fishing line wrapped, apparently deliberately, about the left ankle…

  Yet if Coroner Ranney had no complaints about the manner in which the affair had been handled, Winnie Trainor certainly did. She had acted in haste, and presumed fury, in arranging for the body to be exhumed and taken to Owen Sound. While she had every reason to believe that her chosen undertaker, Churchill of Huntsville, had carried out the orders she had conveyed on the family’s behalf, she remained convinced that Flavelle of Kearney had botched matters when he came to Canoe Lake with a casket that did not meet the strict shipping requirements of the railway. His refusal to correct the situation despite her numerous phone calls to him on July 18th served only to increase her distrust of him—a distrust she must have passed on quickly to the Thomson family.

  Tom Harkness, the brother-in-law who handled the details for the Thomson family, wrote to Flavelle on July 23rd, less than a week after the Canoe Lake burial, to question the bill Flavelle had sent on behalf of himself and Dixon. “I may say,” wrote Harkness, “that I think your account is exorbitant and I will not pay it in full, but will deduct $15.00 off price of casket and $10.00 off embalming fees, and if you are not satisfied, I will pay amount of account less $25.00 into court and you may proceed to collect the balance.”

  Harkness went on to explain that he was making such a large deduction only after first consulting with “competent undertakers” in Owen Sound. “I might say,” he added, “that the man we got to furnish metallic lined caskets to bring the body home only charged $75.00 for his work and the casket.” As for the wooden casket that Flavelle had supplied, Harkness added that it would still be at Canoe Lake—he naturally presumed empty—“and it may still be of some use to you.”

  Flavelle immediately responded to Harkness’s tough letter, writing from Kearney on July 26th that “it is an utter impossibility to alter prices.” The casket he supplied, he said, “was the best I had,” and he said “the buyer” (not identified) had chosen the $75 model rather than cheaper ones he had available for $50 or $60. The model used, he added, was a 619C—sarcastically adding “for the benefit of your competent undertaker.”

  As for the embalmer’s fees, he said he was “well aware that $10 is the usual charge for any ordinary case in town or near vicinity, but this was no ordinary case, requiring double quantity of fluid otherwise necessary.” He told Harkness that the estate would have to take into consideration Dixon’s railway costs (eighty-five kilometres return), meals and lodging—forgetting, perhaps conveniently, that Dixon had stayed with Robinson.

  “As I said before,” Flavelle continued, “this was no ordinary case. We had to go 1½ miles through the woods after leaving train, then another mile by water, taking casket with us. We then took body to an island where we embalmed it and brought it back to Mowat Lodge Cemetery where we buried it.”

  On August 11, 1917, more than three weeks after the burial, Winnie Trainor wrote to Harkness and confirmed his suspicions about Flavelle. Winnie told Harkness that she’d been to see Churchill, who did not wish his name used in any dispute with Flavelle but agreed to speak to her in confidence. “I know nearly everyone for miles around,” Winnie boasted, “and I’m not refused anything I try. So I asked him plain questions.” In Churchill’s considered opinion, she wrote, Flavelle’s “bill was steep.” Flavelle forced the costs up when he took along Dixon, the embalmer from Sprucedale. (More likely, as Robinson and Dixon were related, it was Dixon who “took along” Flavelle.) Considering the type of casket Flavelle supplied, she was convinced he was overcharging the Thomsons.

  “A copper lining costs more than the casket itself,” she wrote. “So you see he is billing a good [illegible]. I would suggest to use your own judgment as you know the contents of the first telegram. Thought [illegible] composed—and you know the tangle now that has to be unraveled—owing to the thoughtlessness of not having a sealed casket—which anyone knows is needed in a case of that kind and also required by law.”

  She castigated Flavelle for cheap material—the rough box, she said, “I don’t think had any handles on it”—but portrayed Churchill as honourable.

  She also appeared to cast some doubt on charges levied on the estate by Shannon Fraser of Mowat Lodge. “If you knew Mr. Fraser,” she wrote, “I think you would use your own judgment. This is strictly confidential as the Frasers are all right in their own way.” She closed off by saying she would “certainly love to visit the grave at some future date,” obviously meaning the grave at Leith, where Churchill’s steel casket had been buried, and where she absolutely believed Tom Thomson now lay.

  Though Winnie dropped numerous hints to the Thomsons that she would like to visit and perhaps have members of the family visit her family’s place at Canoe Lake, no invitation was ever extended or taken up. Very quickly, the Thomson family began distancing itself from the one they had turned to in their time of need.

  Winnie’s letter to Tom Harkness also contained some information about letters that she and Tom had sent each other shortly b
efore he died. She said, “Five weeks ago to-day I wrote to Tom—but he did not receive it. He also wrote to me—& our letters crossed and to-night a sad note to his brother-in-law. It seems to me almost unbelievable.”

  Winnie knew that Tom had not received the last letter she had written to him because Mark Robinson had given her father a number of her letters, so he could return them to her, including one that the ranger had opened himself before passing it on. “They were just ordinary boy and girl letters,” Robinson said in 1953. “There was nothing extraordinary about them, and there was nothing in any way to think there was anything wrong with them, so I read them. There was one still to be opened. I opened it and I handed them back to Mr. Trainor. I said, ‘Your daughter’s letters to Tom,’ I said, ‘keep them, give them to her,’ and I expect he did so. We never asked for them afterwards for there was nothing in them in any way to cause any feelings of any kind, one way or another.” Mark’s interpretation of the letters he claimed to have read would one day prove to be wildly out of sorts with the interpretation of Annie Fraser, who admitted to having “snooped” on some Winnie-to-Tom letters she’d seen on the dresser of the room Tom kept at Mowat Lodge.

  On September 17th, two months after Thomson was buried at Canoe Lake, Winnie wrote another letter to the Thomson family. This one was addressed to George Thomson, who had written to her, likely to thank her for her assistance in arranging for Churchill to exhume the body and deliver the sealed casket to Owen Sound. Winnie had gone to Toronto to spend several weeks with Mrs. Irene Ewing (her much younger friend, formerly Irene May of Huntsville) and Irene’s new husband, and on August 31st they had gone to the “Ex” to take in a hastily arranged showing of some of Tom Thomson’s works. That’s where Winnie ran into Tom’s sister Margaret, who was attending the show with her niece, Jessie Harkness, and a little boy Winnie identified as “Charles.”