Northern Light

by Roy MacGregor

  It could even be (for those wondering about the intriguing claim by the Trainors’ young Huntsville neighbour Brad McLellan) that Fraser had been asked, surely by Hugh Trainor, as this would be considered the business of men in that time, to teach Thomson “a lesson.” The request could even have had a different take on the business of having to get married. Hugh Trainor, still working in the bush, could have heard from others in the area lumber business that Thomson had a reputation as a bit of a philanderer (an exaggerated reputation, in the opinion of Thomson researcher Iris Nowell). Given the social mores of the time—conservative, backwoods Ontario in the post-Victorian period—there might not even have been a pregnancy, just a promise, even a misleading one, that Thomson would marry Winnie, who, at age thirty-three, was on the verge of dreaded spinsterhood. Being “jilted” would have been humiliating to her and greatly insulting to the proud Trainor family.

  The Trainors might also have learned that Thomson planned to sneak away to the West soon, having secretly shipped his camping gear off to Tom Wattie in South River. It is even possible that Shannon Fraser, who spent considerable time around the train station, might have just learned of this himself, put two and two together, and decided entirely on his own to teach Thomson “a lesson.”

  If there was a fight and it happened as Annie Fraser told Daphne Crombie—Shannon Fraser striking Tom hard, Tom falling and striking his head on the fire grate—it may be that Thomson was still alive when he sank in Canoe Lake. But the Frasers might have believed he was dead. All Annie said to Daphne was that she had been forced to help her husband cover up what had happened.

  Shannon Fraser would have panicked. Thinking he had killed Thomson, or certain he had done so, he determined to make the artist’s death appear to have been caused by accidental drowning. With Annie’s help, he got Thomson into his canoe, tied the portaging paddles in place, badly, stashed some supplies to make it appear Thomson was heading out and then used fishing line to attach some sort of weight to the body to keep it down.

  In Annie’s tale, her husband then towed Thomson in his canoe out on the lake and easily dumped it, setting the canoe free to drift. As Thomson had, of course, not been paddling, the missing working paddle was likely still on the Mowat Lodge dock when Fraser returned. If he noticed it, he would have destroyed it, likely by burning, to protect the story of Thomson falling from his canoe while out on the water. It didn’t occur to him that people would search for it for years and that the missing paddle would become an essential part of the mystery. If Thomson wasn’t paddling, how did he get there?

  This entire procedure would have taken some time. In that season of the year, the sun sets after 9 p.m. Perhaps Thomson didn’t get back until 10 p.m. or even later. Shannon and Annie Fraser would have been working on the cover-up of the assault until about midnight and perhaps even past midnight.

  If so, then Tom Thomson did not die on Sunday, July 8, 1917, as has always been presumed. He might have died on Monday, July 9th—perhaps shortly after midnight.

  Could this have happened?

  It could well have. Shannon Fraser, remember, made much in his testimony at the inquest of the fact that, when he had checked his pocket watch as Tom Thomson was paddling away from the Mowat Lodge dock on Sunday, the time was exactly 12:50 p.m. And that was the last time, it has always been said by subsequent investigators, that anyone saw Tom Thomson alive.

  Yet seventeen years later, on April 23, 1934, when George Thomson wrote to Blodwen Davies in response to various questions, he said he was in possession of much of his brother’s property from Canoe Lake, including his sketches. “I have his watch,” George added, “and it stopped at 12:14.”

  12:14.

  Shannon Fraser swore in testimony that Tom Thomson had paddled away from the Mowat Lodge dock at 12:50.

  Had Tom Thomson’s watch mysteriously stopped thirty-six minutes earlier? Had it merely wound down while sitting on the dresser of his room back at Mowat Lodge? (We don’t know whether George gained possession of the watch during his trip to Canoe Lake before Tom’s fate was known, or whether the watch had later been returned with their property.) Or had it stopped on entering the waters of Canoe Lake? (The first waterproof watch would not be marketed by Rolex for another nine years, and such watches did not become popular until the 1930s.)

  And if so, is it possible that the painter’s watch stopped at 12:14 a.m.—fourteen minutes past midnight on Monday, July 9th?

  Stopped suddenly when a panicking Shannon Fraser turned that canoe over under cover of dark?

  TWELVE DAMAGE CONTROL

  Shannon Fraser moved with remarkable speed in the days following the discovery of Tom Thomson’s body. He was directly involved in the move to bury Thomson before Coroner Ranney’s arrival and appears to have ignored a telegram from the Thomson family asking that the body not be buried at Canoe Lake but be returned to them. He was part of the hasty inquest that seemed to ask next to no questions before declaring the artist had drowned, with the unstated presumption being that it had been an accident. And when so many groused about the expediency of the inquiry and the slack “taking of evidence,” it was Fraser who began the rumour that Tom Thomson had taken his own life.

  Thomson’s artist friends moved quickly, and with sincerity, to ensure that their colleague would be warmly remembered. A.Y. Jackson, still overseas with the war effort, wrote to MacDonald in August 1917, saying that “[w]ithout Tom the north country seems a desolation of bush and rock. He was the guide, the interpreter, and we the guests partaking of his hospitality so generously given.” Jackson felt indebted to Thomson for showing him “a new world, the north country, and a truer artist’s vision because as an artist he was rarely gifted.”

  In September 1917, the Toronto painter friends of Thomson erected a cairn at Hayhurst Point, near his favourite Canoe Lake camping spots, with J.W. Beatty contributing the stonework and MacDonald creating a bronze plate that read:

  To the memory of Tom Thomson, artist, woodsman and guide, who was drowned in Canoe Lake, July 8th 1917. He lived humbly but passionately with the wild. It made him brother to all untamed things of nature. It drew him apart and revealed itself wonderfully to him. It sent him out from the woods only to show these revelations through his art. And it took him to itself at last.

  MacCallum, who footed much of the bill for the hagiographic plaque and cairn, was first off the mark to write fond remembrances of Thomson. He contributed a long article to the Canadian Magazine that appeared at the end of March 1918. “With the tragic death of Tom Thomson in July, 1917,” his essay began, “there disappeared from Canadian art a unique personality. Thomson’s short and meteoric career, the daring handling and unusual subjects of his pictures, the life he led, set him apart. Living in the woods and even when in town avoiding the haunts of artists, he was to the public an object of mysterious interest. He lived his own life, did his work in his own way, and died in the land of his dearest visions.”

  MacCallum praised Thomson’s painting and his woodsmanship equally. The painter’s “knowledge of the appearance at night of the woods and lakes was unrivalled,” he wrote in prose so purple it would itself rival the northern lights:

  He was wont to paddle out into the centre of the lake on which he happened to be camping and spend the whole night there in order to get away from the flies and mosquitoes. Motionless he studied the night skies and the changing outline of the shores while beaver and otter played around his canoe. Puffing slowly at his pipe, he watched the smoke of his campfire slowly curling up amongst the pines, through which peeped here and there a star, or wondered at the amazing northern lights flashing across the sky, his reverie broken by the howling of wolves or the whistling of a buck attracted by the fire. In his nocturnes, whether of the moonlight playing across the lake, or touching the brook through the gloom of the forest, or of the tent shown up in the darkness by the dim light of the candle within, or of the driving rain suddenly illuminated by the flash of lightning, or of the b
are birch tops forming beautiful peacock fans against the cold wind-driven blue skies, one feels that it is nature far apart, unsullied by the intruder man.…

  MacCallum saved his strongest words, however, for the critics. “It has not been the fortune of any of our artists to have had during their lifetime a vogue with the Canadian public,” he claimed. “Thomson was no exception. To the art critics of the daily press he was an enigma, something which, because beyond the pale of their experience, it seemed quite safe to ridicule. Yet in one magazine a courageous writer ventured to say, ‘Tom Thomson can put the spirit of Canada on a piece of board eight inches by ten inches.’

  “The intelligent public rather liked his work, but was not quite sure whether it was the safe and proper thing to say so. He found recognition, however, among his fellow artists, who looked forward with pleasure and curiosity to see what he would show at each exhibition. It is to the credit of the Ontario Government and the trustees of the National Gallery of Ottawa that they recognized his value. He never exhibited at the Ontario Society of Artists without having one of his pictures bought for the Province or the Dominion. These will remain for succeeding generations, the ultimate arbiters of the reputation of all artists. Confidently we leave to them the fame of ‘Tom Thomson, artist and woodsman, who lived humbly but passionately with the wild.’ ”

  Many years later, in a 1930 letter to a friend, MacCallum would boast that his magazine piece had set a tone that remained unsullied. The article, he bragged, “has been the source from which all the articles written about him have been drawn.”

  For decades such pristine treatment of Thomson rendered him only as the man described on the Canoe Lake plaque, the words of which MacCallum chose to end his article. This Thomson was as pure as the waters he paddled. His art friends might not be quite so pure as the driven snow—Varley was renowned for his drinking and womanizing, and Harris’s marriage collapsed—but Tom Thomson’s image was burnished.

  MacCallum was protecting not only his friend but also the estate holdings and his own investments in Thomson’s work. Daphne Crombie said that she had tried to talk to MacCallum about what had really happened at Canoe Lake, but MacCallum would hear nothing of it. He wished only to hear what Daphne thought of the rumour spread by Shannon Fraser, which had quickly reached the city. Did she think that Tom had killed himself? MacCallum asked Crombie.

  “I said, ‘Utter bosh rubbish,’ ” she later told the park archivist who interviewed her in the late 1970s. “[Tom] was getting all excited about his paintings because they were being recognized. He told me with great big round eyes that he’d just sold one to the government for five hundred dollars. He was all up in the air about his painting.” MacCallum seemed deeply satisfied to hear this, she later said, but he showed no interest in any other of her opinions on the artist and his end. She did not attempt to raise the issue again.

  The Thomson family worked through MacCallum when it came to selling Tom’s paintings and some of the many sketches that George Thomson had brought back from the Trainor cabin at Canoe Lake. This might not have been a very happy arrangement. When researcher Iris Nowell went to Owen Sound in 1973 to talk to the family about the upcoming Silcox and Town book, The Silence and the Storm, she was told by Jessie Fisk, Thomson’s niece, that MacCallum had once asked for a specific painting Thomson had done at Go Home Bay and that the family had given it to him only on condition that he one day give it to the National Gallery.

  “Tom owed him nothing,” the niece said of MacCallum. “He got plenty.”

  In 1924 MacCallum approached Eric Brown, then director of the National Gallery of Canada, urging Brown to buy more Tom Thomson works to establish Thomson’s place in the Canadian art world. The gallery had already purchased three canvases—Moonlight, Spring Ice and Northern River—before Thomson’s death and had since picked up two more major canvases, The Jack Pine and Autumn’s Garland, as well as some two dozen small sketches. MacCallum wanted even more. He had, Brown later wrote, “almost a paternal concern for the painter.”

  MacCallum was able to sell one painting, In the Northland, to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, but his hopes that the Art Gallery of Toronto (later Art Gallery of Ontario) would buy several paintings were not realized. The gallery had purchased Northern Lake many years earlier and, in the mid-1920s, was given The West Wind as a gift from the Canadian Club. The apparent lack of interest infuriated MacCallum, and he held a grudge against the gallery. When the protective art patron died suddenly in late 1943—dropping dead at eighty-three in his medical office—he left a will stipulating that most of his vast art collection go to the National Gallery. Of the 135 works he gave to Canada, 83 were Tom Thomson works.

  MacCallum’s concern that no one think his beloved painter had killed himself was certainly shared by the Thomson family. They were angry with Shannon Fraser, even before Fraser’s gossip got back to them. Tom Harkness sent a sharp letter to Fraser on September 12, 1917, about the money he still owed the painter’s estate. Harkness was also concerned about payments requested for the two guides who had found Thomson’s body, as well as demands from the undertaker who had come for the initial burial. Harkness, who had already taken strong issue with the undertaker’s bill, wrote back in obvious anger:

  Dear Sir,

  Your letter received tonight with five dollars enclosed brings the balance on two canoes you claim due the estate of the late Tom Thomson. Also the letter from Flavelle about his account. I had to go to Toronto to look after some affairs of the estate and get the balance due the estate at the bank. I was then ready to pay Flavelle’s account but was waiting to hear from you in answer to my letter of Aug. 9th. Now Mr. Fraser there are some things I don’t understand. In your letter to me Aug. 7th you claimed to have paid Mr. Rowe $5.00 and Dickson $3.50 for finding Tom’s body. Tonight you send receipt from Rowe for $5 and from Dickson $10.00. Then Dr. MacCallum told you to send the account for finding Tom to him which you did and he paid you. We do not understand this. Why should you send any account to anyone out of the family & why did you not let me know that you collected from Dr. MacCallum? You told Geo Thomson that you owed Tom a small amount—but you have not given me any information about it. Now Mr. Fraser the Estate demands a full account of everything. Surely Tom had some personal property. Had he no trunk or grip or clothes except what you showed Geo. Thomson and how do you account for Tom only having .60 cts when found. I knew what he drew from the bank when he went away…

  I tell you frankly Mr. Fraser I am suspicious that you are not dealing square and I hope you will be able to give me a satisfactory explanation on everything. Another question I would like to ask did you pay Tom for the canoes he bought for you? And when.

  Now I am ready to pay Mr. Flavelle’s account just as soon as you can give me a satisfactory explanation for everything.

  I am waiting your reply.

  T. J. Harkness

  The Thomson family never forgave Fraser for his behaviour. When Iris Nowell interviewed Jessie Fisk in 1973, Fisk referred to Fraser as a “crook” and dismissed him as “ignorant” and “an ignorant liar”—a man who could not even write a proper letter. She was not much easier on Annie Fraser, saying Shannon’s “poor wife was a snoop.”

  The family had also been disturbed by Winnie’s comments to Margaret when they ran into each other at the CNE in August 1917. During that conversation, Winnie not only claimed that Fraser had not fully paid back Tom’s loan to him, but also said he’d ignored George Thomson’s telegram of instructions and allowed the Canoe Lake burial to take place before the coroner could arrive from North Bay. “Sometimes I wonder,” Margaret speculated in a letter she wrote to MacCallum on September 9, 1917, “if the man did do anything to harm Tom. I suppose it is wicket [sic] to think such a thing but if anyone did harm him it was not for the little money they could pocket.”

  Winnie Trainor certainly shared the family’s disenchantment with Fraser, who in the years that followed always liked to portray himself as
Thomson’s good friend. She had told Margaret that Tom had not liked Fraser because he “hadn’t a good principle.” And in letters Winnie wrote to the Thomson family in the weeks after Tom’s death, she railed several times against Fraser.

  Mark Robinson’s daughter, Ottelyn Addison, who died in 1998 at age eighty-nine, once told me her father believed that Shannon Fraser had owed Thomson significant money for four or five canoes and Thomson had “repeatedly asked for it.” It is not known how much was still outstanding at the time of Thomson’s death. Fraser’s gesture in his letter to Harkness would seem to suggest a mere $5. Winnie believed the original loan was for $250 and had been made two summers earlier but did concede that, to her knowledge, “most of it” had been paid back. The Thomsons remained suspicious, however. They believed Fraser had even tried to sell Tom’s snowshoes, which had not been returned to the family in the bundle of belongings that was shipped to Owen Sound following his burial.

  Addison recalled Fraser as “such a devious person” and had long wondered why it was that Fraser had so often told people that Thomson had killed himself rather than face the prospects of marriage and settling down. “I now think,” she said, “it may well have been a cover-up—that Shannon Fraser was trying to make sure nothing came back to him.”

  The suicide gossip—if that’s all it was—worked to a degree. J.W. Beatty was the first of the group of artists to become convinced that Thomson must have killed himself. But when Beatty expressed this opinion, he faced the wrath of others. “I cannot for the life of me,” Tom Harkness wrote to MacCallum, on November 3, 1917, “know how he, claiming to be a friend of Tom’s, can so easily swallow all Fraser’s bunk and knowing that Tom was one who had a high moral sense of duty to his fellow man, and he must know perfectly that he had nothing to run away from. I’ve thought the thing over from every viewpoint, and the more I think of it, the more fully I am convinced that Tom had no hand in taking his life. But it makes me feel sore to think Fraser, who claimed to be a friend of Tom, would make all those suggestions and Beatty ready to take them all in.”