Northern Light

by Roy MacGregor

  So there remained two final possibilities:

  One: the investigators connected with the office of the provincial attorney general and the Government of Ontario were wrong.

  or

  Two: Tom Thomson’s body and the “Indian’s” were one and the same.

  Intriguingly, art curator Andrew Hunter, in his fine essay “Mapping Tom” in the art book Tom Thomson, suggests that “the inference that Thomson was ‘Indian’ was certainly common.” There was also a possible connection between Thomson and Grey Owl—a British Caucasian who fooled the world into thinking he was Aboriginal. It has been stated that the two met in the Mississagi River country in northern Ontario during the summer of 1912, though there is no documented or photographic evidence that Tom Thomson and William Broadhead met Archie Belaney at this time. In a letter I received in 1973, Canadian historian Donald Smith, Grey Owl’s biographer, said, despite all the claims that the two knew each other: “I still don’t know for sure.”

  Respected art critic William Arthur Deacon, writing in the Toronto Mail and Empire on November 9, 1936, told his readers that he’d had lunch at the Toronto Book Fair with Grey Owl, who was in from Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, and Albert H. Robson, author of The Literary Map of Canada. Robson, Thomson’s former art director at Grip, greeted Grey Owl as if they already knew each other, but the great “Native” author had no recollection of having met Robson. “You came down from the north more than 20 years ago,” Robson protested, “and got me to do some phoning for you to locate Tom Thomson.”

  Grey Owl was said to be “incredulous,” not realizing until this moment that the fire ranger had been the renowned painter. “I saw a lot of those rangers on Lake Minnissinaqua,” Grey Owl said. “The one who painted made especially good doughnuts. He sent me some of his pictures.”

  Robson said that was the one, that he remembered when Tom worked as a fire ranger—“and I well remember you, Grey Owl,” he added. “You and Thomson are almost exactly the same size and build.”

  Yet while it might have been argued that Thomson “looked” somewhat Aboriginal, as Grey Owl certainly did, the scientific evidence had proved otherwise. The key, anatomy and anthropology professor J.C.B. Grant had argued, lay in the shovel-shaped incisors found in the 1956 skull, teeth that could belong only to someone of Aboriginal heritage.

  Dr. Noble Sharpe, in his later writings, did hint at just the slightest self-doubt years after he officially declared that the skeleton uncovered at Canoe Lake in 1956 was not that of Tom Thomson. He had worked from photographs, he said, most of them grainy, many of them taken at a distance. “Had I been able to obtain a full-face and profile pictures of Tom Thomson,” he said when pressed about how absolute his conclusions were, “I could have made those to scale and compared them with bony points on the skull.”

  This statement—even though Sharpe was certain the scientific conclusions of 1956 were correct—long intrigued Dr. Bob Crook, an Ottawa dentist who had taken over the Blecher lease on Canoe Lake, torn down their old home and built a handsome new cottage. Crook searched out all available photographs of Tom Thomson and eventually found one that gave a fair profile of the painter—a shot of Thomson in a canoe, leaning with one elbow on a shoreline stump, as he gets ready to head off fishing with fellow artist Arthur Lismer.

  In the summer of 2009, Dr. Crook began working with Ottawa orthodontist Dr. Jim Hickman, who has done extensive study of facial bone structure, and the two compared the photo of Thomson in profile to the various photos of the skull that was dug up in 1956. They found that the supraorbital ridges (eyebrow ridges) in the Thomson photograph were similar to those on the skull, and they noted that “the extent of ridge development is relatively rare.”

  Crook and Hickman also did facial proportioning and concluded that Thomson’s head revealed “an excessive mandibular development resulting in an imbalance between the lower and the middle face heights.” In most skulls, these heights are roughly equal, but in both the photographed skull and the photographed profile of Thomson, the lower face height is more than one and a half times that of the middle face. Such a degree of imbalance, Crook and Hickman believe, occurs in less than 5 per cent of the population. Both investigators were also struck by the “very prominent anterior chin point” they found in the skull photographs and felt this feature correlated to the “forward sweeping” chin Thomson’s photographs show. In addition, shadows in photographs of Thomson indicate “a very prominent cheek bone”—similar to the features of the skull found in 1956. Such a “degree of prominence,” Crook told me, “is not apparent on most people.

  “For the individual in the photo to have developed the same relatively rare facial characteristics to the same degree as the individual represented by the skull, and for both persons to have been interned in the same gravesite, is unimaginable,” Crook wrote to me. At the end of their examination—restricted, it is important to point out, to photographs of Thomson and the recovered skull—the two “agreed that… [they] could find no features on the facial or skull photos which would indicate a negative correlation between the two individuals.”

  In other words, as far as they were concerned, the skull that had been returned with the bones of the “Indian” for reburial in the Canoe Lake cemetery had to be the skull of Tom Thomson.

  This admittedly amateur forensic work of the two Ottawa dentists suggested that errors might have been made by the lead provincial investigator Dr. Noble Sharpe and, even more so, by the man whose decision had carried the greatest weight in 1956: esteemed Professor J.C.B. Grant of the Department of Anatomy and Anthropology at the University of Toronto. Yet to challenge their conclusions, whether as dentists familiar with bone and jaw structure or as an author who simply suspected, would be folly. A challenge from an irrefutable source would be required.

  In late 2009 I contacted Ronald F. Williamson through a friend. Dr. Williamson is one of North America’s leading archaeologists—an adjunct professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto—and he is the founder of Archaeological Services, a Toronto-based company that has some 3,500 projects to its credit. Archaeological Services was involved in the discovery and exhumation of the bodies of twenty-eight American soldiers who had fought in the War of 1812 at the Snake Hill Cemetery in Fort Erie, Ontario—and this led to the subsequent repatriation of the soldiers’ remains. Williamson and his team were also involved in the exhumation of the bodies of fifteen hanged men at Toronto’s old Don Jail. But Archaeological Services also has particular expertise in the identification and exhumation of Aboriginal remains.

  At Dr. Williamson’s behest, I supplied him and his staff with as much photographic material related to Thomson as I could locate. I was also able to give him access to the various photographs of the remains found at Canoe Lake in 1956 and a never-before-published photograph owned by the Taylor Statten family of the skull as it had come out of the ground that autumn day. Dr. Williamson, who has long been passionate about Thomson’s art, asked various staff members and colleagues to compare the Thomson photographs, using sophisticated modern measures and analyses that at times seem straight out of CSI.

  But Dr. Williamson himself began by using a time-honoured method of scientific investigation: looking with his own eyes. “My first step was to study the photographs [of the skull] myself,” he wrote to me on November 5, 2009. “I thought immediately that the individual looked European based on general cranial morphology, orbit morphology in particular and the good shape of the teeth. This, however, is not my area of expertise but on that basis was agreeable to distributing the photos for a couple of opinions that count.”

  It would have been preferable to work with the actual skeletal remains, of course. “In these times,” Williamson said, “actual DNA is the only truly reliable evidence for personal identity.” And yet, within this reality, today’s science can do a great deal with sophisticated instrumentation, photographic analysis and computer software that simply was not available to
Sharpe or Grant in 1956.

  With this understanding, Williamson turned first to Alexis Hutcheson, a biological anthropologist who works for Archaeological Services and has expertise in the excavation and identification of both Aboriginal and European remains. She was asked to work “blind,” with no other reference but the photographs of the skull, to identify ethnicity, age and gender. She soon reported that, in her expert opinion, the skull belonged to an adult male European.

  Next to study the skull was Dr. Susan Pfeiffer, an internationally respected physical anthropologist with a particular interest in forensic archaeology. Dr. Pfeiffer had just completed a five-year post as dean of Graduate Studies at the University of Toronto and was returning to her first love, research. (Coincidentally, she is responsible for the Grant collection in the university’s Department of Anthropology.) She worked directly with the photos of the skull—including the recently discovered close-up that shows the teeth particularly well—without the advantage of any previous research directed specifically at connecting the skull with Tom Thomson.

  “The skull appears to be from a north European/British Isles population, based on shape of vault, jaw and nose,” Dr. Pfeiffer reported back. “Based on the complete teeth, he is clearly a mature adult.” As there were no indications of advanced age, she concluded he was “middle aged.” (Thomson was nearly forty.) Pfeiffer concluded that the skull belonged to “a 50-ish northern European (let’s say Scottish) male who died sometime in the twentieth century.”

  Dr. Pfeiffer did not think the cranium was that of an Aboriginal person, as Grant had argued. While acknowledging Grant’s previous work in the area of Aboriginal anthropological study—he once delivered academic papers on the Cree and Saulteaux First Nations of northeastern Manitoba—Pfeiffer added that “modern scientific methods can contribute new perspectives.” The university’s Department of Anthropology did not have a faculty member with osteological [bone structure] expertise until several years after Grant had reported to the Ontario attorney general’s office that, in his opinion, the remains belonged to an Aboriginal male half Thomson’s age who had once had an operation performed on his brain.

  “If Grant placed strong emphasis on shovel-shaped incisors,” Dr. Pfeiffer said in a later note to me, “that would have been consistent with scholarly practice in those days, when racial groups were seen as distinct, and certain anatomical features were seen as diagnostic.”

  Grant, of course, had done precisely that. He was correct in saying that shovel-shaped incisors were indicative of Mongoloid or Aboriginal origins but wrong to exclude origins in the British Isles. Ron Williamson was able to provide learned studies that showed shovel-shaped incisors common in the British Isles, including one study that found such teeth in 95 of 622 nineteenth-century Irish Catholics—“a very significant percentage and a good sample,” he says, “and has contributed in our discipline to changing views of this attribute and its role as an indicator of Aboriginal ethnicity.”

  Dr. Pfeiffer also took issue with Grant’s claim that the “Indian” had once been operated on, hence the hole in the left temple of the skull. It seemed a most unlikely spot for a cranial trephination if, in fact, one had taken place. “This,” she wrote, “is because there are two layers of bones at this location (temporal bone overlying sagittal) and there are significant vessels immediately beneath the bone, so placing a hole there is dangerous to the health of the patient. Also, I know of no tradition for this kind of surgery among any of the First Nations of Ontario.”

  As for the hole itself, Dr. Pfeiffer had several thoughts: “The images do not show radiating breaks as might be created by a powerful projectile, but there are various other scenarios that could be explored if the image were better or the skull itself was available, including a breaking away of the bone from a glancing blow (before or after death), the postmortem erosion of the bone from a significantly sized, acidic plant root, even a healed area from a wound obtained much earlier in life (cranial holes do not normally ‘grow over’). All I can say is that trephination is improbable.”

  Dr. Williamson agreed that the 1956 investigators put too much emphasis on the shovel-shaped incisors. “At the time,” Williamson says, “that trait was thought to be far more indicative of Aboriginal ancestry than today.” In Williamson’s opinion, Grant had made “an honest mistake.”

  At the end of this phase of the investigation, the scientists reported that, in their opinion, the skull belonged to a European male, not an Aboriginal person, as the government authorities had reported. Further, they believed that the injury to the skull was caused by a sharp object, not a bullet or trephination.

  Having established this, Dr. Williamson turned his attention to the actual identification of the skull. The firm was able to use a photogrammetric comparison of the skull with various images of Thomson taken from a variety of profiles. The work was carried out by Andrew Riddle, who was just completing his doctorate in archaeology at the University of Toronto and joined Archaeological Services in 2007.

  Riddle used photogrammetric software to compare facial structure in frontal and profile views, employing distances and angles between the eye orbits, maxilla, glabella, auditory meatus and mental eminence. Working with two-dimensional images, he was able to match and examine facial features from the photographs and compare them to the facial features that would be produced by such a skull. “Based on these results,” Riddle reported back, “… in combination with more general observation of cranial form, there is no morphological characteristic that suggests the skull belongs to anyone but Tom Thomson.”

  In other words, even lacking the absolutely conclusive evidence DNA would provide, these scientists believe that Tom Thomson lies where he was originally laid to rest at the Canoe Lake cemetery.

  Williamson had one final suggestion. He wanted to send the skull photos—including the new, extremely clear one from the Statten family—to Victoria Lywood, a Montreal-based forensic artist who boasts a long résumé of successful reconstructions for criminal investigations. Williamson requested that Lywood attempt a two-dimensional facial reconstruction of an unidentified cranium he called “John Doe.” She was given the photographs of the skull, none of Thomson and the following extra information: “John Doe” would likely be a Caucasian approximately forty years of age. He would have lived in the early twentieth century and worn his straight black hair medium length, parted on the left.

  Several weeks later, Lywood delivered her professional illustrations to Williamson, who emailed me immediately: “SIT DOWN, TAKE VALIUM, OPEN SLIDE.” I skipped the Valium but did sit down before opening the slide as instructed.

  And found myself looking at Tom Thomson.

  The West Wind, c. 1916–17. There is much debate about the precise location of Tom Thomson’s best-known work, painted over the winter of 1916–1917.

  In the fall of 1956, four men—left to right: Leonard “Gibby” Gibson, William Little, Jack Eastaugh, Frank Braught—decided to check the Canoe Lake cemetery and see if Tom Thomson remained buried there, as locals had long claimed. They uncovered a skeleton—but a far bigger shock followed their discovery.

  Dr. Wilfred T. Pocock was a close friend of Winnie Trainor’s during the years she lived in Kearney, Ontario, and later in Huntsville. Pocock was executor of her estate.

  Dr. Harry Ebbs of Taylor Statten Camps oversaw the 1956 exhumation. He left behind papers not to be revealed during his lifetime that suggested the Ontario Attorney General’s office engaged in a cover-up to ensure that there not be “any more fuss.”

  In September 1917 Tom Thomson’s artist friends erected a memorial cairn at one of Thomson’s favourite camping spots on Canoe Lake. J.E.H. MacDonald wrote the tribute that appears on the bronze plaque: “… He lived humbly but passionately with the wild. It made him brother to all untamed things of nature.…”

  This small white cross was placed in the Canoe Lake cemetery in the late 1960s to mark the spot where Tom Thomson was buried. The marker misses by
several feet the actual grave where the painter still lies today.

  This close-up photograph of Tom Thomson’s skull as it was removed from the Canoe Lake grave in the fall of 1956, provided by the Statten family, has never before been published.

  Photograph taken by the Ontario Centre for Forensic Science of the skull unearthed in 1956 and cleaned in Toronto.

  Internationally recognized forensic artist Victoria Lywood worked with the various photographs of the skull, including the previously unpublished photograph provided by the Statten family, to produce this overlay of features. She worked blind, unaware of the origins of the skull or to whom it might belong.

  This comparison of photographs of Tom Thomson to forensic artist Victoria Lywood’s interpretation of the face belonging to the skull was compiled by Dr. Ronald F. Williamson, adjunct professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto and founder of Archaeological Services, an internationally recognized company that specializes in the identification of long-buried remains.

  SEVENTEEN THE POWER OF SILENCE

  As Dr. Harry Ebbs later told Ottelyn Addison, Mark Robinson’s daughter, they all just wanted “to put an end to the furor” that the digging up of the grave had set off in the media. And the authorities—acting, no doubt, in the belief that doing so was in the best interests of the Thomson family—did so, Ebbs adamantly believed, knowing full well that the body uncovered at Canoe Lake had been that of Tom Thomson and that the hole in the skull strongly suggested foul play, perhaps even murder. It bothered him terribly that he had been unsuccessful in challenging the “official” story—one he sensed was a lie—that the Ontario government produced. In his view, it made him party to a cover-up. Dr. Noble Sharpe, the main official scientific voice of the provincial government, understood the implications. Years later he would write that the day might come when the Thomson family would wish to prove once and for all that the body was buried in the family plot at Leith. He, for one, was certain Tom lay there. But, “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.”