Northern Light

by Roy MacGregor

  Sharpe said he could not criticize Dr. Howland for the lack of any internal examination of the body. He argued that decomposition would have “masked indications of drowning as the cause of death. Even the absence of water in the lungs would not rule out the possibility. I am, however, puzzled by the bleeding from the ear. If this, whatever the cause, occurred in the water, it would in all probability have been washed away. Dried blood implies a time lapse before immersion.”

  In more detail than in the earlier report he prepared for the attorney general’s office, Sharpe recounted the 1956 dig. With him and the OPP officer on hand, several men dug the skeleton out, finding bones about four and a half feet down. They found wood fragments of oak and cedar, coffin handles, a metal plate marked “Rest in Peace,” a small fragment of canvas and part of a sock. As for the hole in the left temple, “A superficial examination left one with the impression it was not a bullet hole.” Sharpe then concedes that “[t]he feeling among us at the grave was that these were Tom Thomson’s remains; that we had found them in his original grave; and by outward appearances that he may have died of a gun-shot wound.”

  Dr. Sharpe went on to detail the forensic examinations he carried out with Dr. A. Singleton and Professor Linnell, the three agreeing that the hole bore more resemblance to “a trephine opening rather than a bullet hole of entrance.” While Sharpe admitted that trephination was not very common in 1917, he wished that his examination had taken place a decade later, when he could have used a more sophisticated method of analysis.

  “To add to the mystery,” Sharpe wrote, “we found the skull was not the Caucasian type one would expect Tom Thomson to have. I consulted with Professor J.C.B. Grant of the Department of Anatomy and Anthropology at the University of Toronto. He was given no information but was asked to examine the remains and express an opinion regarding (i) Race; (ii) Height; (iii) Sex; (iv) Age; and (v) probable time of death and/or burial. In due course, Professor Grant reported the skull was of the Mongoloid race and, under the circumstances, that of a North American Indian, full blooded, or nearly so; five feet eight inches (plus or minus two inches) in height; male; under thirty years of age and buried at least ten to fifteen years, but how much longer he could not say.”

  Sharpe was becoming convinced. Photographs of Thomson suggested he was approximately six feet tall and nearly forty years old. “His family knew of no Indian blood in their family tree.” Sharpe did say, however, that the material he had to work with in 1956—photographs—was rather “unclear” and he could find “no evidence of Mongoloid bony parts nor of agreement of bony parts.” Later, working with superior photographs supplied to him by the CBC, he became certain. “The skeleton was not that of Tom Thomson. I suggested Mr. Walter Kenyon of the Royal Ontario Museum be consulted. He agreed with my opinion.”

  So, too, did Dr. Philip Hall, the forensic specialist who ruled out suicide as the cause of Thomson’s death. He was still teaching at McMaster University in Hamilton when he wrote to me in 1977. Hall praised Professor Grant as being beyond reproach, the author of Grant’s Atlas of Anatomy and Grant’s Method of Anatomy, both standard texts. He said he and a colleague were in complete agreement with the revered Grant’s claim: “[T]here is not much if any doubt that the skeleton was as reported by Dr. Grant that of a North American Indian, whose height was within two inches of five feet eight inches … Thomson was more than six feet in height, and certainly not Indian.”

  Many years after he had left Hamilton for Winnipeg, Hall remained adamant that the scientific evidence from 1956 was irrefutable. Grant, he said, was “internationally respected as a forensic anthropologist” and had done his job properly. As for Sharpe, Hall added that he, too, was a professional to be trusted: “[H]e was Canada’s most experienced forensic investigator at that time.”

  It all sounds definitive and incontestable. And yet, in Sharpe’s article in the Canadian Society of Forensic Science Journal, he seems to express some doubt. Sharpe noted that the OPP had been unable to link the skeleton with any missing Indian. Nor could police find any record of a missing or deceased Native person who had once been through a trephination procedure. “The teeth,” he pointed out, “were in excellent condition. They were the typical shovel type usually associated with Mongolians. Photographs of the jaws were shown to the artist’s family but they were not able to help. Dental charts were not kept in 1917 to the same extent as they are to-day.”

  Sharpe referred to the “facts” he and the other scientists had gathered but added that many refused to accept them as “facts.” He mentioned “the report that one or more of the local folk had heard a shot fired”—the “shot” that he himself first mentioned now transforming itself into fact, with collaborative backing of perhaps a second or third person hearing the rifle shot. Sharpe then recounted all the arguments—Thomson being an expert canoeist and swimmer, the fishing line, the poor job of lashing the portaging paddle, Mark Robinson’s suspicions that the undertaker couldn’t have done all that work alone and so quickly, the light casket—and returned again to the issue of the mysterious “Indian.”

  “It was also emphasized,” Sharpe wrote, “no Indian could have been buried there without someone witnessing the occurrence and, furthermore, it must be remembered the nearest portage Indians might use is a mile and a half distant.”

  Sharpe made some excellent points, such as noting that even the best canoeists can slip on a portage and that the fishing line around the ankle could have resulted from Thomson fastening a line as he trolled. The sixteen to seventeen wraps could then have been the result of the body rolling in wave action, though it is hard to imagine that, since the line was apparently so deliberately wrapped.

  Sharpe conceded that “criticism of certain aspects of the investigation may be justified.” However, he believed there could be no doubt that Thomson was buried at Leith, as the official line had it. He said the second undertaker, Churchill, had been “indignant” regarding any suggestion that he had not done his job. “He stated he had only to dig at the end of the grave,” Sharpe wrote, “by the slope of the knoll, break open the end of the coffin and pull out the body. He did not have to expose the entire length of the coffin top.”

  This image is, nonetheless, impossible for anyone who has been at the cemetery to imagine. The area of Thomson’s burial was in flat ground north of the picket fence, with the knoll not beginning for some distance. There was no “end of the grave” and no convenient slope to work with. Sharpe, who had visited the site, should have realized this.

  But it seems that Sharpe was very much a man to take people at their word. He even placed Winnie Trainor at the station when the body was transferred, whereas she was not even at Canoe Lake at the time but in Huntsville. “The lady whom we believe was engaged to Tom Thomson told me,” Sharpe wrote in this particular version of his encounter with Winnie, “when I questioned her, that she and her father were at the railroad station when the casket was loaded aboard the train and they were certain the body was in it. Though I tried I never did determine by what means, or when or where, she learned Tom’s body was, in fact, in the casket.”

  Sharpe accepted the undertaker’s word without question, though such a recovery of the body would have been impossible without first excavating the end of the grave closest to the other two graves. He accepted Winnie’s conviction that the body had been moved, though, in fact, she was not a witness. And, finally, he accepted the word of some member of the Thomson family who claimed “they were satisfied the body was in the casket at Leith. The odour was strong.”

  Sharpe returned again and again in his article to the matter of the “Indian,” seemingly changing his mind with every sentence. “And,” he wrote, “as for burial of an Indian at this particular site, it seems to be the logical locale for a secret burial, particularly following a brawl or a fight. What better place could one find than over or beside another grave? Location of the settlers’ gravesite [referring, obviously, to the Watson and Hayhurst markers] was c
ommon knowledge in the area. Besides, the depression marking the location of the settler’s grave would make for easier digging. An Indian burial with a coffin built of oak and cedar, without the knowledge of others in the district, would be nigh impossible. I have personal knowledge of Indians passing through the area—even at my cottage on Lake of Bays I had Indian visitors as late as 1940. So friendly were they, one left his dog sledge with me one Spring and picked it up again the following Winter; and, I might add, no one saw him come or go.”

  Sharpe said he was personally satisfied that Thomson was buried at Leith, but proof could come only by opening the grave, which the family was refusing to do. “Perhaps,” he said, “a descendent at some future date may grant permission. If I am wrong in my belief, and if and when the grave is opened no body is found, then, if circumstances so warrant, the investigation should be reopened in the Canoe Lake district.”

  But if Tom Thomson was indeed buried at Leith, he concluded with another air of mystery, “[W]hat of the Mongoloid skull with the three-quarter inch round aperture in the lower left temple area? Was the bone removed in surgery? Is it evidence of some foul deed, of murder? Who were involved? How did the Indian die and at whose hands?”

  By the time Sharpe had completed his own meanderings and speculations, the very mystery he had supposedly officially solved on behalf of the attorney general of Ontario was as confused as ever, perhaps even more so. He claimed that “the skeleton was not that of Tom Thomson.” Even if determining age was an inexact science, as Dr. Philip Hall argued, there was the matter of height. The scientists had concluded that the skeleton was that of a man within one or two inches of five feet eight inches, whereas Thomson was said to be somewhat around six feet tall. According to Dr. Harry Ebbs, the tibia shown to him in the fall of 1956 suggested a man his own height, which was roughly Thomson’s six feet. The toughest argument put forth was, as Sharpe put it, that there “was no bony point agreement between the skull found in the Canoe Lake grave and Tom Thomson’s head,” meaning that, in Sharpe’s opinion, Thomson’s face and head would not have fit the found skull.

  Sharpe was certain: the skeleton was not Tom Thomson’s but that of “an unknown Indian.” And “there were no signs of foul play.”

  It was an official conclusion that would not be seriously challenged for another forty years.

  SIXTEEN REVELATION

  In mid-October 1956, Winnifred Trainor returned from her short trip to New York to Gibby’s little joke with the casket handle and continuing news reports concerning the dig. She was angered, says her good friend at the time, Dr. Wilfred Pocock, “that such a horrid thing could have occurred.” Gibby says she was absolutely “furious” with him, both for his gag on her doorstep and for having anything to do with such a ridiculous thing as digging up a grave when everyone knew that Tom Thomson’s body had been removed, in no small part because of her own involvement.

  Gibby would have none of it. Like so many of the Canoe Lake regulars, he was convinced Thomson’s body had never been moved and that the bones they had discovered were, obviously and undeniably, the remains of the painter. “Certainly it was him,” he told me. And he was equally certain that Winnie herself knew this.

  “Personally,” he said, “I figure she knew darn well he was there. There was no way any grave digger could go up there and dig up the remains and keep it all straight and put them in a casket and not get a spot of anything on his clothes. He’d be stinking like a polecat.”

  As for the forensic report that the body they’d dug up was an “Indian” aged twenty to thirty and shorter than Thomson, Gibby roared with laugher. “Oh, that was a lot of malarkey,” he said. “Cripes, come on!

  “A lot of them tried to say that the Indians had been portaging by there. Well, I don’t know where they were portaging to.”

  Gibby said at one point that Winnie had tried to explain away the “Indian” side of the grave story. “I told her exactly what I thought,” he said, meaning that he insisted the remains they found were Thomson’s and the official report had been a “whitewash” convenient for a government not keen in upsetting a well-connected and respected family by disturbing yet another grave.

  “She told me that she gave permission to the Indians to use the casket that Tom was buried in to bury this Indian.

  “I said, ‘Well, where did he come from?’ and she said, ‘Well, they were just going by and he died.’ Anyway, there was people living there. Do you think that you could go and dig up that grave and bury somebody else in the casket without somebody knowing about it?

  “You can’t even go to the backhouse ’ceptin’ everybody knows about it. You can’t.”

  Others, however, believed you could. In his notes that were published in the Gull Rock Gazette camp magazine in 1977, Charles Plewman said he disagreed with those who “say that no Indians had ever been buried at the site. I disagree with this statement, for on good authority I have been told that one was buried in that same Thomson site about 1894.” But he fails to identify his “good authority.”

  Given that Mowat was a thriving village in 1894, it seems highly unlikely that others would not have noticed such an occurrence. It would, after all, have been the first burial in the cemetery, with Watson the millworker not joining the “Indian” until 1897. The idea of the village unknowingly establishing a graveyard right where an “Indian” had been buried only three years earlier is a coincidence impossible to accept; but, on the other hand, if Watson was buried where people knew an “Indian” had been, then most of the village would have been aware of it. Yet no one ever made mention of an earlier burial in any known document.

  In the notes Philip Hall kept for his Winnipeg presentation on the Tom Thomson mystery, it is obvious that he was certain that Thomson’s body had been removed and buried again at Leith. Hall slammed William Little for his continued reluctance to accept the findings of the investigation conducted by Sharpe and other medical experts, some of whom Hall knew personally. “It might be worth noting,” Hall wrote of Little, “that his expertise was in juvenile delinquency and family discord.”

  Hall also accused the CBC of sensationalism in its speculation in the 1969 documentary that Thomson might still be at Canoe Lake, saying the public broadcaster chose to ignore the statement by Tom’s sister Margaret Tweedale that “the family had always known that Tom was in the Leith grave and had hoped to shut down all the rumours by simply refusing to discuss a private family matter.” He also repeated the family’s claim that Tom’s father and an old neighbour, John McKeen, had viewed the body.

  Hall endorsed art historian Joan Murray’s belief that family statements and reports in the Owen Sound newspaper confirmed beyond doubt that Thomson’s body had been sent to Leith. As for the “Indian” found in Thomson’s grave, Hall said, “Although this remains unpublished, Joan Murray told me that she found in the Ontario Archives a burial certificate of an Aboriginal male buried in the Mowat cemetery in 1913, who had a previous trephination.”

  This possibility absolutely floored me. I had never heard of such a certificate and was stunned to think such an important document could remain “unpublished.” Given the decades-long interest in the Tom Thomson story, proof like this—that an Aboriginal person had, indeed, been buried at the site—would have been a major news discovery. In March 2009 I contacted Joan Murray, and the noted art historian confirmed in part the statement attributed to her by Dr. Hall. She did, however, say that she’d found the reference at Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa, not at the Archives of Ontario in Toronto. “I did not note down the file,” she wrote back to me. “I am sorry.” If such a file could be located, it would provide the best proof possible that an Aboriginal male who had had an operation on his skull had indeed been buried where people thought Tom Thomson had originally been laid to rest. I immediately contacted Algonquin Park archivist Ron Tozer, who knew of no such certificate. I then contacted archivists at both Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa and the Archives of Ontario in
Toronto. Neither archivist was able to find the documentation that might confirm this.

  If an “Indian” had been buried in 1913, it would have been noted by a community, where, as Gibby put it, “you can’t even go to the backhouse ’ceptin’ everybody knows about it.” But even more telling is the fact that a grave dug only four years before Thomson was laid to rest would have been impossible to miss when the grave for Thomson was dug in 1917 (it would most assuredly have been much more obvious than the supposed “Indian” grave dating from 1894, which Plewman claimed existed). Out of respect alone, the grave diggers would have avoided the 1913 grave, if one ever existed, when preparing Tom Thomson’s resting place.

  The only conclusion that makes sense is either that there was no Indian buried in that spot in either 1894 or 1913 or that the “Indian” and Tom Thomson did not share a grave. This would require two separate graves: one for the “Indian” that Plewman and Murray believed had been buried at the Canoe Lake cemetery, albeit at different times (and that the Ontario attorney general’s office claimed had been dug up), and one for Tom Thomson, whose body Churchill claimed to have exhumed and which some others claimed had been “viewed” prior to reburial at Leith. Since the 1956 diggers did find a skeleton, the official declaration that it was not Tom Thomson’s would mean that the diggers had missed the spot where Thomson had been buried and simply happened to find another skeleton in another casket.