Northern Light

by Roy MacGregor

  Winnie, very much alive, was often seen walking the trail up to the cemetery, always alone. Who can know what she was thinking? About the life together she and Tom had lost? About the child, if indeed there was one—the baby that might have been left behind in Philadelphia with another family, lost forever to the birth mother? She may have felt she was the only one still dwelling on the tragic events of the summer of 1917, unaware that her Tom was becoming the subject of growing interest to a woman who had no connection to Algonquin Park or Huntsville and who had never even met the painter, but had become so fascinated by the possibility of his murder that she was determined to solve the never-opened and therefore never-closed case of one of Canada’s greatest artists.

  Blodwen Davies, who began gathering material on Tom Thomson in the late 1920s, worked mostly by letter, looking for new information and new leads. On March 23, 1930, Mark Robinson responded to a letter from Davies from his station in Brent. He spoke of his own experiences with Thomson and ended with a short list of others Davies might like to contact:

  Miss Trainor of Huntsville Ontario to whom it is said Tom was engaged could tell you a lot of fine things about Tom if she will talk.

  Ed Godin Park Ranger Achray Stn CNR Ont via Pembroke Ont Tom put up with Ranger Godin when in that section of the Park.

  J. Shannon Fraser and wife of Canoe Lake Ont and daughter Mrs Arthur Briggs all knew Tom extra well and if Fraser will tell the truth much could be got from him but weigh well his remarks.

  You might interview Martin and Bessie Blecher but again be care-full. They possibly know more about Toms sad end than any other person. Canoe Lake PO Ontario.

  Edwin Thomas and wife Kish Kaduk Lodge [Govt?] Park Station Ont knew Tom very well and were reliable friends of Toms.

  Either Davies never contacted Winnie, the first person on Robinson’s list, or Winnie refused to be interviewed.

  By 1930 interest in Tom Thomson was once again on the rise. That summer the “pirate ship” of Taylor Statten Camps—a large, cumbersome boat flying the skull and crossbones—was cruising the lake and stopping so the youngsters on board could explore various trails and portages, when eight-year-old Lionel Robert of Toronto reportedly found the remains of what had once been Thomson’s beloved canoe.

  Apparently, the familiar, dove-coloured, canvas-covered canoe had been used for years by Shannon Fraser as a guest canoe for Mowat Lodge—without payment to, or permission from, the Thomson family, though the canoe should have been considered part of the painter’s estate. It had at one point been left at a small lake for the use of those who hiked in. It had long been the subject of Taylor Statten searches but, like the painter’s paddle, had never been found.

  The camp and others also organized what was called “Tom Thomson Day” (August 16th). A representative of the Algonkin tribe, Matt Bernard of Golden Lake, came for the ceremonies, which included filling a birchbark canoe with wildflowers and floating it about the lake. Almost unbelievably, the National Gallery shipped in twenty-five original Tom Thomson sketches for the event, allowing the camp to display them in the dining hall while the campers ate. Most unusual of all, however, was that a West Coast–style totem pole was solemnly erected next to the Thomson cairn on Hayhurst Point. What the connection was—Thomson’s brief time in Seattle?—no one ever explained, yet to this day, the incongruous marker stands on the shore opposite the cemetery on the hill.

  At some point after Hugh Trainor became ill with stomach problems in 1931, the family returned to Huntsville and their two-storey frame home at the corner of Centre Street and Minerva. Hugh had not worked for several years, apparently, and forty-six-year-old Winnifred was the breadwinner of the family. The Forester “Personals” from November 1931 mention her as a “visitor” to Kearney, so the family would have moved back to Huntsville at some time before that date. Winnie easily found a job in one of the stores along Main Street.

  Hugh died on February 29, 1932, at Toronto Western Hospital, four days after having surgery for stomach cancer. His funeral was held from the Minerva Street home the following Friday afternoon. In the obituary in the March 31st issue of the Forester, Hugh was described as an “expert timber cruiser and evaluator,” who had spent nearly a quarter of a century in charge of bush operations, mostly for Huntsville Lumber Company. He was said to be “A man of quiet, but jovial disposition, whose friendships were sincere, and who enjoyed the respect and confidence of all who knew him.”

  The weekly newspaper also carried a report of the Easter service at All Saints’, which Winnie and her mother would have attended. The altar had been covered in snapdragons and carnations, and Mayor Frank J. Kelly, himself a native of Bermuda, had given a bouquet of Bermuda lilies to be placed over the organ. Rector Smith, who had recently buried Hugh, had the children line up to present their Lenten mite boxes. He then delivered a moving sermon on “the uncertainty of life, as evidenced by recent bereavements.”

  It seemed there was no escape to be had. The movie playing that week at the King George theatre on Main Street was The Silent Witness.

  Winnie had returned to Huntsville to stay. She would live another thirty years, her only move being to the upstairs of the big house on Minerva, so she could earn some income renting out the lower floor. She rented to various tenants, including a high school vice-principal, Norman Massie, who gave drum lessons in the house, and longtime renters the Bulls and the McEowns. She would tell prospective renters that they were not allowed to paint the dining-room walls, as they would be eating in the only room in the world that had been painted by Tom Thomson. There were those in town who took this as evidence of Winnie’s madness. A precious few—such as Addie Sylvester, Winnie’s lifelong neighbour who had met Thomson and seen him paint—knew it to be true.

  On October 17, 1935, the Huntsville Forester announced on its front page that “Our readers will regret to learn that Mrs. Hugh Trainor, one of our highly-respected citizens, passed away at her home Tuesday.…” Winnie’s mother was seventy-seven years old. It was the middle of the Great Depression, and the country was in a foul mood. Prime Minister R.B. Bennett, who was largely blamed for economic conditions vastly beyond his control, was tossed from office, along with a dozen of his cabinet ministers. Mackenzie King’s Liberals were returned with the largest majority in history: 168 Liberals, 41 Conservatives, 8 CCFs, 17 Social Credit and 10 others of varying political persuasions. Muskoka had elected its first Liberal since 1878, sending a retired farmer, Stephen Furniss, off to Ottawa. He was, the paper noted, a man of “iron integrity.”

  Less than two weeks after Mrs. Trainor died, the corner of Minerva and Centre Streets was struck again when Mrs. Hanna Sylvester, Addie’s mother, dropped dead of a heart attack in her home. Her husband, Richard, had died twelve years earlier, so Winnie Trainor and Addie Sylvester were now twins of a sort, two spinsters living alone in large, wooden homes directly across from each other.

  Addie stuck to her job as the night operator at Huntsville’s Bell Telephone switchboard. Winnie worked in various places, including, at one point, running the laundry at Grandview Inn, out on Peninsula Lake. She occasionally visited her sister in Endicott, New York, and sometimes had two or more of Marie’s four children staying with her in Huntsville or at the cottage on Canoe Lake.

  For a while she found company in a small dog, name forgotten by those who still remember her pet. There was an unfortunate incident involving this dog—the story recounted by H. Eleanor Wright, the daughter of Joe Lake ranger Bill Mooney and granddaughter of Ranger Albert Patterson, who had been dispatched to Huntsville following Tom Thomson’s disappearance. In the late 1930s Winnie was walking with her dog near the Mooneys’ cottage on Joe Lake when the dog suddenly charged the Mooneys’ kitten and shook it to death. “She was a very strange, unfriendly and embittered woman,” Wright later wrote in her self-published Joe Lake: Reminiscences of an Algonquin Park Ranger’s Daughter, “who didn’t have the courtesy to apologize for this unfortunate incident. Of course, I was he
artbroken, but eventually got another cat.”

  “She used to take long walks by herself,” Eleanor told me in the fall of 2009 during an interview. “She’d come along the old tracks and go down through our place and past the ice house and on through Calverts’ property. In those days, you could walk across the dam if you were careful and she’d sometimes take that as a shortcut back. She was always moody. She wasn’t very conversational.”

  Winnie had a knack, however, of turning up at mealtime. Wright said she would strategically arrive at the station agent’s house, then home to the Armstrongs, on the pretext of borrowing sugar and stay to eat with the family. She especially liked to arrive at the home of the Stringers (whose son Jimmy would later claim to have Tom Thomson’s shinbone in his woodshed), knowing that Mammy Stringer would always invite her to stay. “She was a great moocher,” remembered Wright.

  There might have been more to it than a free meal, though. She was obviously lonely in the years following her mother’s passing—the little dog a brief substitute for companionship. And there would be no more great romance in Winnie’s life.

  Joe Runner, an Aboriginal actor from Treehorn, Manitoba, once went to Winnie’s home in Huntsville with the idea that he would make a movie about Tom Thomson. Runner had worked for many years in CBC drama and also for a small summer theatre company in High Falls, New York. He had become entranced with Thomson while staying at Taylor Statten Camps on Canoe Lake and listening to Ranger Mark Robinson tell the Thomson saga around the campfire. He asked his Canoe Lake friend Leonard “Gibby” Gibson whether an introduction could be made, and Gibby said he would try. At first, Winnie refused, but Gibby persisted and, finally, she agreed to speak to the actor, who was quite young at the time.

  “She knew as soon as I got in that I was there for something,” Runner told me in 1973. “There was a strangeness in her face that has always haunted me.”

  He recalled that while he was nervously trying to break the ice, there were sounds from outside like someone banging on her door. “She went running out of there like a bat out of hell,” he laughed. “And I think she had a bat! There were kids on her porch and she didn’t like kids and she chased them halfway up the block.”

  I might well have been one of them.

  Runner’s overall impression was far from the one those kids would have had—those kids racing up the street with their hearts in their mouths. “I thought she was very attractive,” he said. “And she seemed very soft and quiet.

  “I think she was a young woman who decided when she wanted something and went after it. Once she met Tom she decided, ‘That’s it for me. I want him.’ And I think her mistake was that she wanted too much. I think he felt he was sort of being forced into getting married.”

  She was polite to Runner but not helpful. The actor persisted with his film idea, at one point even doing a screen test at Canoe Lake with his hair combed in Thomson’s style, and those who saw the photos thought the resemblance “eerie.” The CBC’s Warner Troyer, who had a summer home on nearby Smoke Lake, was also interested in the Thomson saga and agreed to produce the film. At the time, Runner estimated he’d spent $7,000 to $8,000 of his own money on development. The film, however, was never made and both men have since passed on.

  Increasingly, Winnie withdrew from any outside interest in Tom Thomson that would surge periodically as a result of an exhibition or a magazine feature. Though she saw Joe Runner as a favour to Gibby, she refused all other interview requests and requests to see the sketches she was rumoured to own. Her friend Wilfred Pocock became concerned about her after she sent those sketches to a dealer in Toronto for appraisal. There were originally fourteen, he said, but when they were returned to Winnie, “one of the best sketches was missing.” It’s not known whether she’d allowed one or two of the sketches to be purchased during this trans-action—to pay for a new roof and furnace, as neighbour Brad McLellan has said. Pocock thought it outrageous that a painting sent in good faith might not be returned in equal faith, yet there seemed no way of proving that anything untoward had taken place.

  “I remember once coming to see her and she talked about her will,” Pocock wrote to me in 1977. “I asked her where she kept it and she rolled back the sheets of her bed in the old home on the second storey … then rolled back the mattress and between the mattress and the springs of the bed was her bundle of valuable paper and her will. I immediately arranged everything with her lawyer and had the papers put in a safety deposit box at her bank.”

  Winnie turned seventy in 1955. She was now considerably overweight and concerned about her own health. Her brother-in-law, Roy McCormick, had died three years earlier, and her sister, Marie, was struggling with diabetes. Even the seemingly indestructible Mark Robinson was soon gone—he’d died the day after Christmas 1955, at the age of eighty-eight.

  In the fall of 1956, just a few weeks after Thanksgiving, there was a knock at the door of Winnie’s home on Minerva Street. She slowly made her way down the stairs and stared out the small window in the storm door to find Gibby Gibson from Canoe Lake standing on her porch. He told me he’d intended to surprise Winnie but that he didn’t realize how badly she would take his little joke.

  He asked her to open up, that he had something to show her.

  When she did, Gibby put his hand in his jacket pocket and pulled out a brass handle—a carrying handle from a casket.

  “Winnie,” he said, grinning from ear to ear, “we found Tom.”

  The look on her face was one of total shock. And pain. She went white, and Gibby thought for a moment that she was going to faint.

  FIFTEEN THE DIG

  In 1956 Canadian Thanksgiving fell on Monday, October 8th. Winnie had been in New York, visiting her sister. She knew nothing about the now-famous “dig” until she was confronted with Gibby’s rather sick joke at the front door after she’d returned home.

  The “dig” had taken place at the Canoe Lake cemetery on the weekend before Thanksgiving. William T. Little, a family court judge, and Jack Eastaugh—friends since university days, when both had worked as counsellors at Taylor Statten’s Camp Ahmek—had come to Canoe Lake for a weekend of sketching and exploring their old college-days summer grounds. They paddled to the cairn on Hayhurst Point, checked out the footings where the mill and then the second Mowat Lodge had stood and took a hike up the hill that led them, eventually, to the formidable birch tree towering over the two marked graves and the rickety picket fence of the little cemetery. The treeline was lower then, and from various points, they could see out over the lake in the distance. So they sat and sketched for a while.

  As Little sketched, he remembered the tales Mark Robinson had told about Thomson around the Ahmek campfire. He’d once asked Robinson exactly where Thomson was buried, and Robinson had pointed just north of the fenced-off area holding the grave of the Hayhurst child and the larger stone over J’as Watson, the millworker. Then, as Little subsequently wrote in his book, “like an echo from the past,” Robinson said, “ ‘I don’t believe they ever took Tom’s body from Canoe Lake.’ ”

  Little and Eastaugh began exploring the surrounding terrain in search of a depression that might indicate where the original grave was. Heavy growth to the north suggested it could not have been that far from the picket fence, but there remained a good stretch of tangled forest floor that might once have been a final—or even temporary—resting place. Then Little suggested they could check and see whether the old stories were true. What if Tom’s body was still there?

  After they decided to investigate, Eastaugh and Little returned to Ahmek, which was almost deserted, and chatted with Gibby and Frank Braught, a retired teacher from Guelph, about their cemetery musings. Both were also keen on the adventure. If they found nothing, the official version of Tom Thomson’s reburial in Leith would be true, just as the Thomson family and all government agencies claimed. They could put an end to the rumour mongering of the unbelievers—though all four men counted themselves among the many who w
ere convinced that Thomson’s body had never been moved. So if they found a casket and bones…

  Next morning, as Little wrote, Gibby took the initiative by asking the others: “You fellows ready to solve the mystery of Tom Thomson?” They all were. So, after breakfast, they gathered up the necessary tools and headed across the lake. They hiked up the hill to the little cemetery and, once there, paced out what they felt might be an appropriate distance from the other graves, keeping to the north as Mark Robinson had suggested. It started to rain as they began clearing underbrush in preparation for the dig.

  Except where they hit tree roots, the earth moved easily. They tried one spot but stopped when they got six feet deep. If they’d struck nothing by the six-foot level, they assumed, there was nothing to strike. They started digging a second hole another three feet or so to the north, but this also proved fruitless.

  It had begun to rain hard, the work difficult and the results discouraging. Little was becoming convinced that the body had, in fact, been exhumed and taken to Owen Sound for burial. The digging was therefore pointless and no fun at all. Then Jack Eastaugh called Little over to look at a spruce tree, somewhat farther yet to the north. Under its boughs he thought he could make out a depression nearly three feet across. The spruce, Eastaugh estimated, could easily have reached its impressive height in the nearly forty years since the grave had been dug.

  However discouraged they’d become by the rain and the sweaty work, the four men were now enthusiastic about the new possibility. They decided that if they found nothing in this third attempt, they would quit and accept the official line. They took turns digging, using axe as much as shovel. The spruce roots were extremely difficult to deal with, and the hole, wide at the top, kept narrowing.