“It was my turn,” Little wrote. “I worked steadily, knowing that the hole was now of a depth and size that only a smaller-built person like myself was likely to be able to effectively continue this operation. Frank was showing visible signs of fatigue and Gibby and Jack watched with mixed feelings as I made slow progress at the five-foot level.
“I pushed the shovel down as far as I could, removed a shovelful of dirt and saw a piece of wood in the soil. Picking it out, I handed it up to Jack, who examined it. Without comment he passed it to Gibby, who looked at it and, glancing around, pointed to an old stump a few feet away saying, ‘I think that’s a piece of the root of that old white pine stump; they stay in the ground a long time before they disintegrate.’
“I resumed digging and finally reached down to pick up another piece of wood and stopped to examine it closer. ‘This is the first root I’ve seen with a beveled edge!’
“The others agreed, ‘It’s a piece of pine—part of a box or something.’
“It was Jack who said, ‘That’s a mortice from the corner of a box—likely a casket or rough box you’ve found!’
“Digging with my hands I felt a smooth piece of board. As I pried it free from the soil a hollow space that could only be the exposed end of a coffin was revealed. I jumped out of the hole and handed over the piece of board which was in an advanced state of decay but readily recognizable as a machine-finished piece of wood. I explained what had been exposed at the bottom of the pit. Gibby jumped down head first to explore the opening. He thrust his hand into the aperture and pulled out a bone which appeared to be a foot bone of a human body.
“ ‘At last we’ve found the grave and body of Tom Thomson!’ shouted Frank.
“ ‘We have really hit it,’ exclaimed Jack.
“Gibby rejoined, ‘This is it, fellows!’ ”
Gibby’s account, which he gave to me during a visit to Huntsville on February 4, 1973, was somewhat different. At this point in his life, Gibby was having trouble getting around—both legs had been amputated below the knee due to circulation failure—but he remembered vividly that wet fall day when the men went up the hill to see what might be found in the graveyard at Canoe Lake.
“When we dug down I hit this board … and I got down on my hands and knees and I went down head first into the hole digging with my hands and I felt something so I grabbed a hold of it and pulled it out and it was a foot. And there was still part of an old blue woollen sock on it. Well, that was fine. We had the grave and he was there, so we just put a few old shingles on top and covered it up again and took the foot with us and went back to camp.”
Little claimed in his book that they’d dug until they could determine for certain that the hole held the remains of a rough pine box that had caved in on an oak casket, which had itself eventually caved in from the weight of the earth. The bones were covered in dirt, of course, following the collapse of the rough box and casket. But they also found casket handles in good condition—Gibby pocketed one of them for his practical joke on Winnie Trainor—and a metal inscription plate that read “Rest in Peace.” Little noted that at one end of the coffin the soil held the impression of a woollen sock, but there was no other evidence whatsoever of clothes or buttons, buckles or anything. The body appeared to have been wrapped in a light canvas shroud and nothing more.
The men headed back to camp with their bone. Dr. Harry Ebbs was staying at Little Wapomeo and Ebbs confirmed the bone to be a tibia from the left leg. Ebbs matched the bone to his own left leg and concluded it had belonged to someone “approximately my own height”—Ebbs being a lean man around six feet tall.
Realizing that they were now into the territory of possible ramifications, the men all agreed that they needed to call in the authorities. There were laws, after all, protecting graves. In the meantime, however, several from the camp decided to return to the gravesite to see for themselves, and take some photographs. One Canoe Lake cottager, Graham Matthews, told me recently that he and others also visited the grave after the authorities had carted away the bones for examination. In the surrounding dirt, Matthews found a decorative brass piece, which he believes came from the original casket Thomson was buried in.
More than a half century after the 1956 dig, Dr. Taylor Statten, then into his nineties, said he still shivered to remember “the sound the shovel made on the casket” when they took that second look at the grave that was supposed to be empty.
He was not surprised by the discovery, though. He believed then, and believes to this day, that the bones dug up by the four men that rainy Sunday in the fall of 1956 belonged to none other than Tom Thomson.
Not everyone, however, shared that opinion.
“We agreed to notify the proper authorities,” Little wrote in his book, “and that it was not appropriate to advise the press at this point. Such information without proper authenticity would be both premature and mere sensationalism. We carefully replaced the tarpaper and covered it with soil, finally completely filling in the grave pending further study of the contents.”
Further study was almost immediate. Harry Ebbs went to Toronto that week and met with officials of the office of the provincial attorney general. It was decided that Ebbs should return to the gravesite with an Ontario Provincial Police officer, who would oversee the exhumation, and it was further decided that Dr. Noble Sharpe, the ranking medical official in the crime detection laboratory of the attorney general’s office, should be present. Gibby returned to his digging under the eye of the authorities. “We dug him up and sifted every inch of it through fine, fine screen,” he remembered. “And there wasn’t a button. He was buried with just a shroud on, that’s all. Anyway, they took it all away with them.”
Almost instantly, the story of the grave discovery was leaked to the press. The Globe and Mail of October 10, 1956, ran a long story by Don Delaplante, headlined “Long a Mystery of Art World: Body May Answer Riddle of Tom Thomson’s Death”:
Algonquin Park, Oct. 9 – A body dug from a wilderness grave on a hill overlooking picturesque Canoe Lake may answer the riddle of the death of Canadian painter Tom Thomson 39 years ago.
The body was discovered by four men, William Little, superintendent of the Ontario reformatory at Brampton, Jack Eastaugh, principal of the Norseman public school, Etobicoke, and Leonard Gibson and Frank Braught of Guelph.
The discovery is being investigated by the Attorney-General’s Department. It is reported there was a hole in the skull of the exhumed body, which was found in a rotted coffin in a pine box.
The death of Thomson, one of Canada’s foremost painters and a contemporary of the famous Group of Seven, has been a mystery of the Canadian art world for nearly four decades.
The discovery was made 10 days ago during a sketching trip by the four men. It was done on chance, said Mr. Little from his home in Brampton.
The men were not convinced that the artist died accidentally. They favored the theory that Thomson was a victim of foul play.
“We had paddled across the lake looking for a place to sketch. The north shore looked attractive so we pulled up near the site of the old Mowat Lodge. We gravitated up to the well-known place where residents of the lake believed Thomson was buried.”
There were two marked graves on the hill about a half a kilometre inland from the west shore. One was the grave of Alexander Hayhurst, 8, who died in 1915 of diphtheria. The little boy’s family had a cottage at the lake and because of the nature of the disease authorities forbade his body to be carried from the bush.
The other is that of James Watson, a lumberjack employed by the Gilmour Lumber Co. who died May 25, 1897.
The mystery grave was found between 12 and 15 feet north of Watson’s grave. According to an old story here Thomson had been buried a few feet north of a tall white birch tree which now towers about 150 feet in the air.
Mr. Little said they had no thought of searching for the grave when they left on the trip but once in the area they decided the opportunity was there for them to make an at
tempt, just to satisfy their own curiosity.
“We found it on the third try,” he said.
There were three depressions in the ground. The party dug the conventional five to six feet in the first two depressions, and found nothing.
“The other was a chance discovery. We had practically given up our digging. Then I caught hold of what I thought was a small root but it turned out to be a pine plank. This led us to believe that we had discovered something.”
They soon unearthed what seemed to be the remains of a rough pine box and a coffin and some bones. They got in touch with Dr. Harold Ebbs of Toronto, who was holidaying at the lake at the time.
“We got him to view the bones we had. I think he realized the significance of the discovery. We then closed the grave immediately. We were satisfied that we knew what we had found. Dr. Ebbs then advised the proper authorities.”
Mr. Little said the Attorney General’s Department has stepped into the case and a pathological examination of the bones was to be made.
He said Dr. Ebbs believed the bones belonged to a white man about 40 years of age.
Dr. Noble Sharpe, medical director of the Attorney-General’s crime detection laboratory said last night he is currently examining the bones.
“However, I would be very surprised if these were Thomson’s bones. That story is only a local legend.”
He confirmed there was a hole in the skull, but from a cursory examination he did not feel it was caused by a blunt instrument or a bullet.
“It is more likely perfectly normal erosion.”
Dr. Sharpe said he received the bones, making up a complete human skeleton, during the weekend. In the next two or three weeks he will try to determine the age, size and racial origin of the person and check for [some words illegible] thought the bones had been interred for at least 50 years…
Thomson was staying at Mowat’s Lodge, about half a kilometre from the grave when he met his death. He is reported to have been on poor terms with a man at the lodge, which was burned to the ground about 30 years ago.
However, some residents think the body may be that of an unidentified lumberjack who worked for the Gilmour firm many years ago.…
Two days later, the Toronto Daily Star advanced the Globe story by publishing a testy letter from the undertaker, M.R. (“Roy”) Dixon, who had embalmed Thomson and now, thirty-nine years later, was living in Parry Sound, about an hour west of Huntsville. Dixon was reacting to the news concerning foul play. “I was the undertaker who embalmed and interred the remains of Tom Thomson at Canoe Lake in 1917,” Dixon wrote, “and have a very distinct recollection of all the official proceedings at that time. I beg to take issue with reports that appeared last week suggesting death by foul play.
“I was called from Algonquin park headquarters to remove the body from the water and prepare it for shipment. When I arrived at Joe Lake Station I was met by Mark Robinson, ranger. His first question was, ‘Is the coroner from North Bay on the train?’ He was not and I informed him I could do nothing without a death certificate. He got in touch with Mr. Bartlett, the superintendent of the park, and he sent over a certificate of accidental death by drowning.
“As superintendent, he said, he was ex officio a coroner. We brought the body to the island and proceeded to embalm it.
“There was certainly no blood on the face or any indication of foul play, just the usual postmortem staining that is on the body of any person that is in the water of a small lake for 10 days in the heat of the summer.
“No one else assisted us. The relatives or friends did not arrive on the next train so Mr. Bartlett gave me a burial permit to inter the remains in the burial ground there. A tourist who was a minister conducted the service. The casket was not a cedar coffin but a good hardwood one.
“I cannot believe Mark Robinson said, as reported by Mr. Little, that the body was never removed. He [Robinson] told me they removed the body some time later and that it was in a remarkable state of preservation and must have been well embalmed. If these people wanted to make sure of these ‘old wives tales’ why didn’t they get an exhumation order and examine the casket that was alleged to be empty instead of desecrating the cemetery at Canoe Lake? In British Columbia they put them in jail for that kind of thing.”
Dixon’s letter to the editor again raises the issue concerning park superintendent Bartlett sending over a burial certificate that already officially declared the cause of death. It is not difficult to imagine the situation faced by the real coroner, Ranney, who arrived on the scene after a body had already been buried and was handed a signed burial certificate declaring that the death had been by drowning. That Ranney held such a quick and cursory “inquest” becomes rather more understandable, including the lack of interest he showed in pursuing any possible evidence to the contrary.
That same day, October 12th, the Canadian Press moved the story quoting the Huntsville undertaker who might or might not have exhumed Thomson’s body during the night of July 18, 1917, in the Canoe Lake cemetery. F.W. Churchill was now seventy-three years old and living in Kirkland Lake. His confused letter claimed Blodwen Davies had engaged him and Mark Robinson had assigned four men to help. Neither statement was true.
A few days later, on October 19, 1956, the bombshell landed. “ALGONQUIN PARK BONES NOT THOSE OF THOMSON,” screamed the headline in the Toronto Daily Star. Ontario attorney general Kelso Roberts announced that forensic scientists had determined that the bones found by the four grave diggers three weeks earlier were not those of the famous artist, but of “a male Indian or half-breed of about 20 years of age.” Officials, added the attorney general, were continuing to investigate the hole found in the skull the men unearthed.
The Globe and Mail carried even more detail: “Scientific investigation has established that a skeleton dug up by amateur artists in an unmarked Algonquin Park grave was not that of the great Canadian painter, Tom Thomson, who thirty-nine years ago died.” According to Dr. Noble Sharpe, the paper declared, the bones were of a man roughly 5’8”, aged 20–30 and “Mongolian type, either Indian or nearly full-breed Indian.”
Those involved in the digging of the Canoe Lake grave were stunned. Gibby told me in 1973 that when he was down in the hole and grabbed hold of the skull, Dr. Sharpe had watched carefully as Gibby pulled the skull free and examined it.
“I was talking to him about it,” remembered Gibby, “and he said, ‘That’s Caucasian.’ Well, the next thing you know he had turned ‘Indian.’ ”
The Toronto Daily Star quoted William Little at length, with Little saying he had been told by Ranger Mark Robinson a quarter of a century earlier that Thomson’s body had never been moved to the Thomson family plot. The reason they had gone exploring with their shovels and picks, said Little, was to “prove to our satisfaction that Robinson was wrong.” This, of course, was a convenient fib. It was, in fact, exactly the opposite of their real reason—to prove Robinson was right—but Little was media savvy enough to know the public would be far more receptive to the one purpose than the other. The four men had already suffered enough criticism for their “desecration” of hallowed ground.
For the determination of race, Sharpe had relied on the expertise of Professor J.C.B. Grant of the Department of Anatomy and Anthropology at the University of Toronto. To determine the cause of the hole in the skull—said to be round, approximately three-quarters of an inch in diameter and on the left temple—Sharpe had consulted with Professor Eric Linnell of the Department of Neuropathology at the University of Toronto. Linnell reported back that the opening was consistent with trephination—a rare surgical procedure sometimes used to relieve pressure in the event of a brain injury or severe hemorrhaging.
The hole in the skull, whether created by accidental injury, intentional injury or erosion, was on the left, not the right. However, Dr. Howland, the medical practitioner who had first sighted Thomson’s body after its discovery by the guides (and whose expertise had been accepted during Ranney’s inquiry) had de
clared in his affidavit of July 17, 1917, that there had been a bruise on the right temple. Mark Robinson, on the other hand, always maintained—and had even noted in his personal journal the very day Thomson’s body was found—that the injury had been to the left temple. Dr. Howland may have had the credentials, but it is important to point out that he also maintained that the cause of Thomson’s demise had been “death by drowning” despite the serious curiosities of bleeding from the ear and no water being in the lungs. And in a much later letter in which he repeated his official declaration, Howland reported that the damage to the temple was on the left side.
As for the “trephination” argument, this suggests that a male Aboriginal, half the age of, and slightly shorter than, Tom Thomson just happened to be passing through Canoe Lake and died, perhaps following a brain hemorrhage that required an immediate operation that failed to save his life but had been performed at precisely the same spot in the skull where Ranger Mark Robinson said Tom Thomson had been injured.
Dr. Harry Ebbs could not believe his ears. Surely what he was being told by the provincial authorities was a mistake. He had, after all, been the “attending physician” when the remains were recovered from the grave and he believed that they had uncovered a Caucasian skull and leg bones that suggested a man who would have been Thomson’s height. Ebbs had long been fascinated with the painter’s story, as his own connection to Canoe Lake went back to the 1920s, when he had first gone to Taylor Statten Camps as a young counsellor. He’d returned as a medical student and stayed on permanently following his marriage to Adele Statten, Taylor’s sister.
On November 26, 1975, Ebbs agreed to an interview for the Algonquin Park archives with oral historian Rory MacKay. But he requested that any material from the interview not be released until he’d completed the book he hoped to write. And if the book was not completed, he asked that the information not be made available until after his death. He passed away in 1990, the book never undertaken. The Statten family graciously agreed to release the full contents of the Ebbs interview for the purposes of this book. I was stunned by what he had to say about the events that followed the discovery of the bones at Canoe Lake.
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