Northern Light

by Roy MacGregor

  On the day of the early October 1956 dig, the Ebbs family was just sitting down for a meal at their cabin on Canoe Lake when William Little and Jack Eastaugh, both wet and dirty, arrived and called Dr. Ebbs outside, to discuss an important matter.

  “I went out the back,” Ebbs recalled, “and they had a little box and they opened it up and said, ‘We’d like you to tell us what this is.’ I looked at it and said, ‘Well, you’ve got the bones of a human foot, where did you get it from?’ And they said, ‘Well, would you like to come over to the cemetery and see whether you think it’s Tom Thomson’s grave.’ ”

  Ebbs was keen. He had, unbeknownst to nearly everyone at the lake, twice before been involved in seeking out the grave. He had even gone to the cemetery with biographer Blodwen Davies in the 1930s with the intention of digging up the remains, but they’d run into such a tangle of roots and rocks that they’d given up. Ebbs had returned much later with Charles Plewman, a pallbearer in 1917, and Plewman, then an elderly man, tried to point out where, exactly, the original grave had been. Ebbs figured he knew the location as well as anyone now that Mark Robinson was gone.

  The men had crossed the lake by boat and hiked up to the graveyard where Ebbs found a rectangular depression in the ground under a small tree at approximately the position he believed the original grave to be. They examined the grave and Ebbs was able to come up with two more bones from a lower leg, which he packed up. As the Ebbs family was shortly to leave for their home in Toronto, he volunteered to handle matters from that point on.

  “On Tuesday morning,” Dr. Ebbs went on, “I went into the attorney general’s office.” The attorney general would have been Kelso Roberts, who had been brought into cabinet the year before by the new Ontario premier, Leslie Frost, Mark Robinson’s fellow soldier and good friend. Ebbs also called in Frank MacDougall, who had gone on to become deputy minister of the Department of Lands and Forests after serving as superintendent of Algonquin Park—nicknamed “the flying superintendent” because he piloted his own float plane about the park.

  “We had a little conference for a few minutes,” said Ebbs. “They said, ‘Would you go back up, if we gave you one of our inspectors, and investigate the whole thing?’ ”

  Ebbs agreed. He returned to Canoe Lake, and on Thursday morning, picked up Dr. Noble Sharpe of the Ontario Provincial Crime Laboratory and Ontario Provincial Police officer A.E. Rodger at the docks by the Portage Store, a small grocery and outfitting operation at the south end of the lake near to Highway 60, and took them back up the lake. Along with Frank Braught, the retired teacher who was still at the lake, they hiked back to the graveyard, Gibby Gibson bringing the camp Jeep up the trail and using it to haul down the troublesome tree with a chain. The men then went to work with shovels.

  “It was very easy to dig,” Ebbs remembered. The sand was soft and rock free, and they were down approximately three and a half feet when they came to the remains of a box.

  “We carefully removed that,” Ebbs said, “and there was a perfect skeleton, clean except for there was nothing on it except the remains of ankle-length deerskin moccasins, pieces of that and little pieces of gray ribbed wool sock which hadn’t rotted completely. The hinges and clasps were beautiful metal, you know, well finished, but the wood was pretty well all rotted. We took out the bones and put them in the box … and I did an estimate of making sure we had all the bones which was quite easy to get.

  “But when I got the skull out, the roots of the tree had gone through the orbits and into the ears and mouth and so on. But I just brushed the sand off it and there was this hole on the left hand side and so I held it up, on the very side to the inspector”—this would appear to have been Dr. Noble Sharpe, rather than the OPP officer—“and I said, ‘What do you think that is?’

  “Without any hesitation, he said, ‘That’s a .22-calibre bullet. Nothing else could do that.’ ”

  From that moment on, Ebbs was convinced that Tom Thomson—for these had to be his remains, he also believed—had been shot by someone as he was paddling down Canoe Lake that wet July day. He believed to the end of his life that the murderer had been Martin Blecher, Jr., the same suspect Little had named and the man Mark Robinson always suspected of being a spy and worse. While a young man at Camp Ahmek, Ebbs himself had had a number of unsavoury run-ins with the ill-tempered Blecher, including one close call on Potter Creek, near where the Stringers lived, when Blecher, convinced that Ebbs was cutting too close to him in the camp motorboat, angrily swung his paddle at Ebbs’s head.

  “If I hadn’t ducked,” Ebbs said, “he would have crowned me right there on the spot.”

  Ebbs knew the story of the July 7, 1917, drinking party and the threat supposedly uttered by Blecher toward Thomson. He believed, as did others on the lake, that there were two sources of possible conflict between the men: the course of the war (with Thomson presumed to have been despondent over being unable to enlist and Blecher presumed to be a German sympathizer as well as an American draft dodger) and Winnie Trainor (with Blecher jealous of Thomson’s effortless success in gaining her affections).

  Ebbs would spend countless hours during the years to come thinking about how the killing might have happened. He knew that when he’d cleared off the face of the mud-coated skull, he saw that the upper-right incisor (the eye tooth) was missing but that all the other teeth were in excellent shape. With the policeman, he had sifted the surrounding sand carefully in a search for the bullet that they figured should have been inside the skull—but found nothing.

  The missing tooth and absence of a bullet puzzled Ebbs terribly. He conducted his own experiments at the lake, carefully calculating how Blecher could have hidden in his boathouse—thereby muffling the sound of the shot—and lain so low that he would have fired slightly up, the .22 bullet striking Thomson (who would have been at an angle, paddling on the left side) in the mouth area. The eye tooth would then have been dislodged as the bullet burst out of, not into, the left temple. This, Ebbs reasoned, was why no bullet was found within the skull. The bullet would have been at the bottom of Canoe Lake.

  Ebbs was saying all this, it should be noted, in 1975, two years before Daphne Crombie stepped forward with the version Annie Fraser allegedly told her—that Annie’s husband, Shannon, had fought with Thomson and Thomson had fallen into the fire grate, which caused the puncture to the left temple. Had Ebbs heard this explanation, he might have changed his mind about the .22 bullet.

  Ebbs was hardly alone among Canoe Lake regulars convinced that a serious crime had taken place there in July 1917 and had been either covered up or ignored by the authorities. He knew of Mark Robinson’s suspicions, and he was also convinced that Winnie had always believed that her Tom had been murdered. He claimed that she “continued to write letters to the prime minister, to the attorney general, right up until she died demanding that an investigation be held into the death of Tom Thomson; she persisted.” Whether such letters exist or not, he certainly believed that they did.

  Ebbs had walked away from the graveyard in October 1956 firmly convinced that they had a murder, or at least manslaughter, on their hands, and that an investigation would be required, even if Ebbs’s most likely suspect, Blecher, had been dead nearly twenty years.

  “We closed it in,” Ebbs recalled about filling in the gravesite with the Ontario Provincial Police officer, “and I took him down to the Portage Store and loaded the Sunkist Orange box with all the bones in it in the trunk of the car and sent him off.”

  He could not believe what then happened. “About five or six weeks later,” Ebbs said, “when I talked to the attorney general’s office, they said that Professor Grant had reported that it was probably a 22-year-old Indian because of the measurements he’d done of the bones and that the cause of death was not known. The hole in the skull, he said, could have been due to a trepanning operation which is boring a hole through the bone in order to probe the inside of the brain.”

  Ebbs was flabbergasted by what he took to
be an absurd contention. Had he and Dr. Noble Sharpe, the province’s forensic medical expert, not discussed the hole and Sharpe declared it caused by a .22 bullet? Why would Sharpe have changed his mind? Angry and confused over the news reports he was reading, Ebbs returned to Toronto and took direct issue with the provincial government’s scientific conclusion that this Aboriginal person had undergone a trephination: “I countered that by saying I didn’t think that in 1917 there was very much of that kind of operating being done and that it was hard to believe that an Indian would have had an operation like that and go up to Algonquin Park without anybody knowing anything about it.”

  He met with Professor Grant, the scientist who had determined the skeleton was Aboriginal, and the two men argued. “I asked him,” Ebbs recounted, “if he even looked at the photograph of Tom Thomson, the one of him standing with his canoe in which I pointed out the cheekbones were high and that I didn’t know of any Indian ancestry in Thomson, in his family. On the other hand, there was certainly a resemblance in that regard, but that as far as I was concerned, the facial contour in the photograph would certainly fit that particular skull.”

  But Grant would not even concede that he ever looked at any Thomson photographs. Grant so adamantly “stuck to his guns” that Ebbs quickly came to the conclusion that the eminent scientist “was a person you didn’t argue with.”

  “So then,” Ebbs continued, “we had a meeting with the attorney general and Frank MacDougall [the deputy minister of the Department of Lands and Forests] and agreed that because of the family, the Thomson family, [we] did not wish to have the thing opened up and any more fuss. They were satisfied with the verdict of accidental drowning and they would like it just left alone.”

  Harry Ebbs did not know what to do. Here were Attorney General Kelso Roberts, Premier Leslie Frost’s chosen lawmaker, and Deputy Minister Frank MacDougall, who had previously been the highly respected superintendent of Algonquin Park, telling Ebbs that they did not wish to have “any more fuss.”

  The attorney general, surely, would have believed he was acting in the best interests of the Thomson family. It is highly debatable, however, whether it could be said that the attorney general of Ontario and a ranking deputy minister were acting in the required interest of the law.

  Still, they had Grant’s report that it was an “Aboriginal” who had once had an operation who had been found in the grave, despite Ebbs’s strong protestations to the contrary. And they could use this to quash any further suggestion that Thomson’s remains had been found and the hole in the skull suggested foul play. With scientific “proof” that the body belonged to an Aboriginal person with an explainable hole in his skull, they could put an end to the “fuss.” And the Thomson family would not have to suffer more disturbing questions concerning the whereabouts of the remains of its most famous member.

  Ebbs reluctantly agreed. He felt powerless against such forces. He gave Kelso Roberts one photograph of the skull, gave Frank MacDougall a second and, later, lent a third to Robert McMichael of the McMichael gallery in Kleinburg, Ontario, where several Thomson originals hang, along with a remarkable collection of Group of Seven paintings. A fourth photograph remained with the Statten family before being passed on to me in 2009 for the purposes of further scientific study.

  A discouraged Ebbs returned to Canoe Lake and was sickened to read the Toronto Daily Star headline that landed on October 19th: “Kelso Roberts, ALGONQUIN PARK BONES NOT THOSE OF THOMSON.” Ebbs felt he had been party to a fraud—worse, to the deliberate and intentional cover-up, by no less than the attorney general of Ontario, of either murder or manslaughter.

  In early 1967, undoubtedly alerted that the CBC was preparing a documentary on Thomson’s mysterious demise, the office of Ontario’s attorney general asked Dr. Noble Sharpe to prepare a report on the remains found at Canoe Lake. His memorandum, which he delivered to F.L. Wilson in the office of the attorney general on February 20, 1967, stated he was present at the exhumation virtually by accident, as he had been asked along by OPP corporal Rodger, whom he had encountered at an inquest in Ahmic Harbour, a small community outside the park, north of Huntsville. He also indicated that, as they drove away with the remains, “We assumed it had been necessary to rule out foul play.” He does not explain, but seems to tie this decision to considerable “local feeling about prohibiting the artist group [Little and his accomplices] from Algonquin Park as a result.”

  Sharpe said he was now “quite satisfied that this was an unknown Indian and that [there] were no signs of foul play. I think it quite possible he was buried in Tom Thomson’s original empty grave and the coffin could have been the one used for him at the first burial.”

  Some three years following the 1956 dig, Sharpe noted, he and colleague Dr. Ward Smith met with William Little for lunch and “We came away convinced that the artist group would still believe our Indian was Tom Thomson. They think he was not removed to Leith. At the time of the removal, a local man said the undertaker did not have time to do it and the coffin was too light. The undertaker indignantly denies this. Tom Thomson’s brother is so convinced the body was removed to Leith that he will not consider having the Leith grave opened. I have read a lot about Tom Thomson and I feel it is no use contacting him by a medium as he would not care where his bones are now.”

  Sharpe appears not to be joking. It seems, rather, that this scientist working for the Government of Ontario gave serious consideration to attempting to reach Tom Thomson’s spirit in the afterworld to ask where, in fact, his own bones were hidden.

  Dr. Sharpe said that the Ontario Provincial Police officer assigned to the “case,” Corporal Rodger, had later returned the “Indian skeleton” to the grave and erected a marker. (If that marker was where the white cross currently stands, then Corporal Rodger missed the site of the original grave by several paces.) Sharpe said he had reported his findings to the necessary officials in the fall of 1956, including then attorney general Kelso Roberts.

  Sharpe was also interviewed in the late 1960s by Peter Kelly and Hugh Kemp for the CBC documentary Was Tom Thomson Murdered? He said that the lack of water in Thomson’s lungs was not the proof of foul play people might think it would be, since in almost one of ten drownings, throat spasms will prevent water from entering the lungs. When asked about Winnifred Trainor, Sharpe replied: “The lady you refer to phoned me several times in 1956–57. She was very indignant and insisted she and her father were present when the undertaker returned and are positive the body was in the casket, but I couldn’t get her to say she had actually looked in.” This would seem to underscore the belief that Winnie was adamant that Tom had been moved, as she herself had asked the undertaker Churchill to perform the task. It was Sharpe’s opinion that the body had indeed been removed, though he added, in parentheses, “But no one looked in and I don’t blame them; the body would have been a very, very disagreeable sight due to decomposition.” However, he also said he wished the point had been settled years earlier by a proper viewing of the body.

  Sharpe told the CBC that he thought “Tom Thomson may still be buried somewhere in the Park but I also think we may have opened his original grave and he was not there.” This, so far as I have been able to determine, is the only time, apart from Jimmy Stringer’s musings at the Empire Hotel that spring day, that a third grave has ever been mentioned as a possibility. If Thomson’s body was still in the park and if Sharpe’s conclusion was correct (that the original grave had been opened in 1956 and did not contain Thomson’s remains), then another factor would have come into play. Someone would have had to remove, and hide, the body sometime between the hasty burial in the summer of 1917 and Churchill’s presumed exhumation.

  Once the CBC two-part documentary aired, there was a brief push to open the grave at Leith, but the initiative did not gain any support from the Thomson family or from the provincial government of the day. “I have no intention of ordering that the grave be opened at all,” Attorney General Arthur Wishart told the legislatur
e in response to Opposition questioning. “Perhaps if I were to get a request from some close members of the family, I would consider it, but I would hope that nobody would disturb the situation any more than it has been disturbed.”

  Still, the case continued to fascinate Sharpe. In June 1970 he penned a long article in the Canadian Society of Forensic Science Journal, in which he began looking more deeply into the circumstances and motivations surrounding the case. He almost certainly wrote the article without knowledge of Little’s book, which was also published that year. Given the “lead time” of learned journals, the essay would have been submitted many months prior to publication. It also seems unlikely Sharpe was consulted by Little or given an advance manuscript, as Sharpe is one of the few involved figures not personally thanked in Little’s long list of “Acknowledgements.”

  Sharpe said that, in 1956, he had had a telephone conversation with a woman, obviously Winnie Trainor, though not identified, who said she had been engaged to Thomson. Sharpe had found her “charming.” He recounted the rumours of the so-called “rival” and the quarrel between the two, without mentioning Martin Blecher, Jr., by name. And Sharpe even added his own slightly bizarre ingredient to the mix—considering he was the forensic scientist on the “official” side—by saying “it was rumoured a shot had been heard coming from the direction Tom had taken when he was last seen.”

  This is most strange. Mark Robinson had never mentioned any such thing. Nor had Annie Fraser ever mentioned a shot in her talks with Daphne Crombie. And nothing about a “shot” was mentioned at the coroner’s inquest. In her two works on Thomson’s mysterious death, Blodwen Davies covered every imaginable scenario but failed, somehow, to mention this amazing “rumour” that was now being described by the Ontario government’s own forensic expert, the man who had declared, in his official capacity, that it was not Tom Thomson’s body in the grave. Instead, Sharpe had declared the remains of some shorter Indian who just happened to be in the area when he died and was buried in exactly the same plot and who, even more remarkably, just happened to have had surgery in exactly the same spot where Ranger Mark Robinson noted Thomson had been injured. Now Sharpe was himself suggesting something might have happened to Thomson.