Northern Light

by Roy MacGregor

  No body at Leith, a body with a hole in the skull at Canoe Lake—certainly that of Tom Thomson. The implications are obvious. There would need to be a proper murder investigation. And yet, if Dr. Harry Ebbs’s words are to be taken as truth, the attorney general of Ontario and a deputy minister, acting in the belief—well-intended and surely accurate—that the Thomson family did not need to be put through “any more fuss” in the media, acted to ensure that all would go away quietly. So no proper investigation was ever initiated, despite requests that dated back to Blodwen Davies in the early 1930s.

  And this, essentially, is the story of Tom Thomson’s death: stop the fuss, put an end to the furor, protect reputations, at every possible step. Superintendent Bartlett didn’t want trouble, so he embraced the possibility of accidental drowning and signed the papers allowing for a hasty burial. Coroner A.E. Ranney walked into a situation where a fuss could only ensue—the papers already signed, the body already buried—so he washed his hands of the entire thing, never examined the remains, let Bartlett’s decision stand and got out of Canoe Lake on the first available train. I doubt Ranney ever even filed the report that has always been described as “missing.”

  The sole voice of authority at Canoe Lake, Ranger Mark Robinson, knew there was “considerable adverse comment” about the taking of evidence, but he kept his suspicions to himself at first and began voicing them only in later years. Dr. James MacCallum, Thomson’s great patron and the man assigned to sell the works George Thomson had brought back from Canoe Lake, refused to listen to Daphne Crombie when she tried to tell him what Annie Fraser had told her. The Thomson family, keen to rely on Winnie Trainor during the confusing days of the burial and supposed exhumation, quickly distanced itself from her, turned down her written promise to Tom Harkness (“If I see you I can tell you all”) and soon dismissed her as being “not in her right mind” and under the care of a “guardian,” which was never the case.

  Thomson’s friends who went on to form the Group of Seven all had their concerns and suspicions, yet they all took J.E.H. MacDonald’s approach: “the silence of an old friend.” A.Y. Jackson deliberately exorcized Blodwen Davies’ leading questions concerning Thomson’s fate when he oversaw the re-publication of her 1935 biography. One attorney general of Ontario refused Davies’ entreaties to have the investigation re-opened in the 1930s; another attorney general of Ontario sought to “stop the fuss” in the 1950s by embracing the suspect findings of a forensic scientist who refused to countenance any argument from Dr. Harry Ebbs. Dr. Noble Sharpe, according to the statement Dr. Ebbs left behind following his death, went from declaring with certainty that the hole was caused by a bullet wound when the skull was first uncovered at Canoe Lake to embracing Dr. Grant’s highly contentious declaration that the skull belonged to an “Indian” who had once had a brain operation. The elderly McKeen sisters brought out their remarkable story of a cousin supposedly viewing the remains with Thomson’s father, hoping to quiet yet another “furor” brought about by the 1969 CBC documentary and the 1970 publication of William Little’s book…

  It didn’t much matter what anyone else said, though, the locals around Canoe Lake were certain that Thomson had never been moved and lay buried where he had been placed on July 17, 1917. Thomson’s friends Taylor Statten, the camp owner, and Ranger Mark Robinson never believed otherwise. Robinson had died the Christmas before the 1956 dig, but Statten was still around at the time. On Halloween night, 1956, Statten sat down in his log cabin on Little Wapomeo Island and typed a letter to Ottelyn Addison, Robinson’s daughter. The dig, Statten wrote, “has created some excitement in this neck of the woods. It is too bad that it did not break while your father was alive.”

  Statten mentioned, and contradicted, the just-published claim by Churchill, the Huntsville undertaker, that Robinson had assigned four men to help him with the exhumation of Tom Thomson’s body in 1917: “Both your father and Shannon Fraser told me that Shannon met him at the station, took him to the cemetery, asked him to come with him to Mowat Lodge for the night, but he said he would stay all night and do the job. In the morning Shannon picked him up along with the casket and shipped it on the morning train.”

  As for the wild new story that some “Indian” had been buried in the cemetery and dug up instead of Tom Thomson, Statten clearly believed otherwise. “Pete Sauvé has been around Canoe Lake since the Gilmours came in the early 90s,” he wrote, concerning his camp’s longtime cook, “and he is sure that there were only two burials in the cemetery. Watson, the mill hand, and the Hayhurst boy. So it goes!”

  The next morning, November 1, 1956, Taylor and Ethel Statten, “Gitchiahmek” and “Tonakela,” went to work on their little island garden, lifting and moving some large stones that they wanted to position before spring planting. “I’m bushed,” Taylor told his wife and said he was going into the cabin to lie down. He died in his sleep.

  Nearly a month later, Ottelyn Addison wrote to Roy Dixon, the original undertaker who had buried Thomson in the Canoe Lake cemetery, to thank him for the letter to the editor he’d written to the Toronto Star in which he took issue with all the reports that there had been “foul play.” He said he knew the body had been removed because Mark Robinson had told him later that the body “was in a remarkable state of preservation and must have been well embalmed.” We know, of course, that Robinson never saw the body after it was buried at Canoe Lake and was, likely, merely offering comforting words, a little white lie, to ease the concerns of his cousin the undertaker.

  “Dear Cousin Roy,” Addison’s November 27, 1956, letter began. She said she had been following all the Tom Thomson publicity and was “wondering just what could have been the purpose for starting it all. Mr. Little and Mr. Eastaugh called one evening but I did not find out the answer. I also felt it was not going to help anyone to have the situation ‘probed’ further so I was most grateful to read your letter to the Star. I do hope it has put an end to their investigating.”

  Addison then condemned Churchill’s story that Robinson had assigned four men to work with him, referring to Taylor Statten’s October 31st letter and also to her father’s daily journals. “But,” she added, “there was going to be no actual good to come out of disproving the second undertaker’s statement, so we are keeping very quiet.”

  And yet, despite this commitment to “keeping very quiet,” Mark Robinson’s daughter then went on to tell their cousin: “But between ourselves, Dad always felt Tom had met foul play. Jack was 12 when he helped Dad, every day, to look for the body and he has a very clear insight into the whole picture. But all this is past history and is best to remain that way.”

  How similar this sounds to J.E.H. MacDonald’s call for “the silence of an old friend.”

  In fact, it is just possible that much of the Tom Thomson story became so confused over the years because of such convenient silences. Given that Bartlett had declared the death by drowning in his park capacity as “ex officio coroner” when no true coroner was available, who was Ranney, the real coroner, to cause a problem by allowing his little inquiry to suggest otherwise, no matter how he might have felt about Bartlett jumping the gun and permitting the body to be buried? Bartlett certainly felt he was in a position to decide it had been a drowning and to approve the burial. His first obligation, he believed, was to make sure his superiors had no trouble. After all, Premier Arthur Hardy had specifically requested that Bartlett make the new park “a credit” rather than “a blot.”

  The silence of friends and others. The undertaker, Churchill, claims four men were assigned by Robinson to help him and Robinson’s daughter, knowing full well this is untrue, decides to remain silent on the matter as it is “past history and is best to remain that way.”

  And the convenient white lies, perhaps intended only to give comfort. What harm, after all, could there be in the elderly sisters saying their cousin and Tom’s father had viewed the body prior to its burial at Leith?

  Not nice, but saying the body had b
een seen was not only easy but also awfully convenient if you wished to put an end to disturbing chatter. Same for the skeleton dug up in 1956. Once the scientists said they believed it was an “Indian,” we suddenly find people stepping forward saying an “Indian” was buried there in 1894 or 1913 or, as Winnie herself is said once to have claimed, some time after 1917 in Tom’s now-empty plot.

  Surely we can now accept that Thomson’s body still lies in the Canoe Lake cemetery, which is where many believe he would most wish to be. But one part of the great mystery is still not known—that is, exactly how Tom Thomson died and who, if anyone, was responsible. While I believe I can make a pretty fine guess about what happened and who killed him, I admire the attitude taken by the painter’s great-grand-niece, Tracy Thomson, who several years ago told the Toronto Star’s Ellie Tesher that she feared “that once people know the truth, that’s the end of the intrigue and the chatter about it.”

  Let the chatter never end.

  But let it also spare a few kind words for the second tragic victim of whatever happened that cool, wet July day in 1917 at Canoe Lake: Winnie.

  EIGHTEEN AFTERMATH

  Winnie Trainor never said a word in public about the dig, but she did express her outrage to friends and family. “They can do all the digging they like,” she told neighbour Minnie Carson. “They won’t find him up there.” She told Ray and Jean McEown, her downstairs tenants, that she would speak to Leslie Frost, the premier of Ontario, with whom she claimed a friendship, about the grave tampering. She may have felt she could call on the premier, as Frost and Mark Robinson had remained in contact from the days when they had served together in Europe during the Great War. She had also met Frost when he visited Canoe Lake, but there is no evidence to suggest she ever did attempt to make contact.

  She did, however, speak to Dr. Noble Sharpe a couple of times. Sharpe said she claimed to have been at the Canoe Lake station with her father when the casket containing Tom Thomson’s exhumed body was being shipped to Owen Sound. There is no evidence whatsoever to suggest that she returned to Canoe Lake from Huntsville on July 18, 1917, for the exhumation she had arranged with Churchill on behalf of the Thomson family. And Mark Robinson made no mention of her or her father being at the station when he noted in his journal that he was surprised to find Churchill waiting there, alone, with the casket when Robinson had not even been informed of the exhumation. Churchill also made no reference to either Winnie or Hugh Trainor being there, though he did claim Robinson had given him four men to assist with the digging. Winnie’s statement to Sharpe was likely just one more of the multiple white lies told in the hopes of putting an end to distasteful speculation.

  In late 1956 Winnie was not well. Dr. Pocock had her moved to Toronto General Hospital in the New Year. (At some point she underwent surgery for a growth in her left breast, and it might well have been during this time.) On January 30, 1957, Winnie sent Pocock a pink card with a floral front from hospital room 602:

  Dear Dr. Pocock,

  Dr. Shier was just in and said I could go home anytime—and to go to the hospital at home under your care—so would you please tell me what to do—and what train to arrive on—I’ll see about my bills here today when my friend Mary Summers comes in—she looks after my bills.

  I am so glad I am so well.

  Best wishes to yourself & Mrs. Pocock,

  Sincerely,

  Winnifred Trainor

  P.S. I have 92 days Blue Cross, I think.

  Winnie returned to her flat on the upper floor of the big brown house on Minerva Street and gradually regained her health. She was in her seventy-second year, overweight and surviving on a small pension and the rental income from the downstairs apartment. She put in a new furnace for Ray and Jean McEown, finally replacing the coal furnace that Ray so hated. The cost may have been covered, as her neighbours the McLellans believed, by the sale of one or more of the Thomson sketches she owned. Winnie refused, however, to pay the added cost of having the heating pipes extended upstairs to her own apartment. Instead, she had a space heater installed for herself, a noisy contraption that reeked of oil when you visited in cold weather.

  Huntsville was in the midst of the postwar boom, its population soaring above three thousand. The Bell Telephone Company needed to expand and came to Winnie’s prized double lot at Minerva and Centre but could not persuade her to sell, not even at a bonus price. “She said she wouldn’t sell,” said Jean McEown. “She said she’d give it away to a religious order of sisters before she’d ever sell it to anyone.”

  Winnie still told people that Tom Thomson had painted her dining room. She would not allow the McEowns to paint over it, even though they were eager to redecorate to their own liking. “One time I had to paint the kitchen,” Ray recalled. “There was six doorways into it. It was a monster. She gave me a quart of paint to do the whole thing.”

  But the McEowns were good tenants and helpful to her as she grew older, despite the odd misgiving. “I used to hide when I seen her coming to cut her god-darned toenails,” Ray remembered with a laugh. “I used to hate that.”

  Addie Sylvester, from across the street, continued to visit and often wondered why Winnie didn’t sell off more of those little paintings she never seemed to look at, so she could have a comfortable retirement. Addie heard the periodic rumours that Winnie had been pregnant with Tom Thomson’s child, but she put no stock in them. “Talk about her being pregnant is stupid,” she told me. “If anyone had a large family, she thought it was disgraceful. I don’t know why.”

  Winnie kept to herself in those years and was mostly quiet, though she did speak up when something upset her. When a bypass was announced for Highway 11 that would skirt the town to the west and pass over the Narrows between Hunter’s Bay and Lake Vernon, she told people she would have it stopped—she would personally speak to her friend Premier Leslie Frost—because the route was going to pass over an Indian burial ground. But the bypass was put through without any public issue, and by 1959 it was possible to travel from Toronto to North Bay and roar past the small town across the new bridge, barely even noticing Huntsville’s Reservoir Hill in the distance.

  The aging woman was also upset about a new taxi stand that was set up on Minerva Street, directly across from her home, in an empty lot back of Parker’s Bakery. The taxi dispatch office faced her and was noisy, with cars coming and going and headlights sweeping along her windows at all hours of the night. Nothing could be done about it, though, and it would be hard to imagine that she took any pleasure when her warnings that it would come to no good actually came to pass. In late June of 1959, two drivers from C&H Taxi went missing, and two local “toughs,” Mervyn McKee, twenty, and Calvin Wayne Sluman, only sixteen, were later arrested and charged with their grisly murder. The jury took forty-eight minutes to find them guilty, Sluman receiving fifteen years for manslaughter and McKee sentenced to hang at the Parry Sound jail.

  It was a time of fallout shelters and debate over whether movies could be shown on Sundays in Toronto the Good. Any mention of Miss Winnifred Trainor in the now sharply reduced “Personals” section of the Huntsville Forester were rare. Her nephew Terry won a scholarship in early 1960, and Winnie was identified as “the latter a daughter of the late Mr. and Mrs. Trainor, pioneer citizens of Huntsville.” Terry came to visit Winnie at Easter, and his sister Marilyn—spelled “Merlyn” in the paper—came for the following Christmas.

  I saw Winnie only periodically during these years. I was a youngster and, to me, she was a very old woman, usually cranky, of very little interest. She seemed to come from another time, also of no particular interest, whereas I was caught up in the now and in what was to come. It was a wonderful community to grow up in—for a kid who loved sports, there was hockey all fall and winter, lacrosse and baseball in spring and summer. And the town was booming, with 3,241 people, including 700 students in the various elementary schools and one high school. Skilled labourers, the town bragged, could make $1.25 to $1.75 in town, while w
omen were making $0.50 to $0.85 an hour.

  Huntsville sounded modern in the Chamber of Commerce brochures intended to attract new business to the town, but horse-drawn ploughs still cleared snow from the sidewalks, and many of the houses, including ours, were heated with furnaces fed with kiln-dry—the loose ends and waste from the Hay & Company’s hardwood flooring plant down on Hunter’s Bay. And that wood was delivered by horse-drawn wagon. But soon bread was delivered in a truck, and not long after that, the Huntsville Dairy followed suit. Eventually, home delivery would stop altogether, and there would be no coming home from school to find milk bottles on the stoop, their lids riding on white top hats of frozen cream.

  Modernization also meant that television was coming to town. The T. Eaton Co. at the corner of Main Street and West Road sold the first sets, though Huntsville could pick up only one channel, CKVR Channel 3 in Barrie. The picture was snowy and sometimes disappeared altogether, yet people were mad for the new shows they could see. Winnie often invited herself over to the home of her Centre Street neighbours, the Eastmans, on Monday evenings, when Don Messer’s Jubilee was on, and she went to see The Tennessee Ernie Ford Show on Thursdays.

  She liked the news and she particularly liked a Thursday night Canadian game show, Live a Borrowed Life, where guest actors pretended they’d lived another life and panelists had to identify the persons the actors were pretending to be.