Northern Light

by Roy MacGregor

  And what of Shannon Fraser’s time check?

  What if Shannon Fraser was truthful about the time and about Tom paddling away? What if Tom was seen by several different people that Sunday morning? The only sensible conclusion is that he could not possibly have been struck by Fraser late Saturday night and disposed of, as Daphne Crombie’s tale seemed to suggest.

  Thomson supposedly paddled away that Sunday afternoon and collected some gear at the Trainors’ cottage. Not long afterwards, Martin Blecher, Jr., and his sister Bessie said they had seen a canoe floating but had not investigated. The presumption has always been that it was Thomson’s canoe. But they would have recognized his very distinct, dove-grey canvas canoe and would have investigated, no matter whether it was right side up, as some later claimed, or upside down, as others claimed. That is the first law of the lake. Yet Blecher said he thought it was just a canoe from one of the lodges drifting and he would see to it later. Mark Robinson’s journals make it clear that a canoe was lost briefly on Canoe Lake by the Algonquin Hotel and later retrieved during the search. This is the canoe the Blechers saw Sunday afternoon. If it had indeed been Tom’s canoe that was floating empty, whether upside down or not, it is impossible to imagine how others on that small lake would have missed it. Tom’s actual canoe was not found until sometime Monday, July 9th, by all accounts.

  Instead of dumping his canoe shortly after leaving Fraser standing at the dock staring at his watch, what if Thomson did go down to Gill Lake and fish and come back under cover of dark, unnoticed? This would be common practice for anyone on the lake, not just for Thomson. And what if, at some point, Fraser had gotten it in his head that someone needed “to teach Thomson a lesson”—and who better than he to do so? He could have come to this decision a variety of ways, perhaps in conversation with a concerned or even outraged Hugh Trainor, perhaps in discovering on his own that Thomson had shipped his camping equipment off to South River and was planning to slip away unnoticed from certain commitments, perhaps in being told by his wife that she had discovered something alarming in snooping through Thomson’s letters from Winnie Trainor.

  Brad McLellan, the young neighbour of both Winnie Trainor and the widowed Annie Fraser on Minerva Street in Huntsville during the 1950s, told me shortly before his death that he had overheard Annie tell his parents the story of Fraser teaching Tom “a lesson” only to have the lesson go tragically wrong. The question would then be when that “lesson” occurred.

  According to all the analysis so far, Tom Thomson would have died on Sunday, July 8, 1917. The last he was seen being 12:50 p.m. that day.

  Yet George Thomson, in a letter sent years later to Blodwen Davies, who was then researching her book on Thomson, says that among the personal effects that came back from Canoe Lake was Tom Thomson’s watch.

  It is stopped, George Thomson writes, at 12:14.

  P.M. or A.M.?

  The time-frozen watch is by no means proof that it stopped as a result of falling into the lake at the time of Thomson’s death or the time in which his body hit the water. It could have wound down on his dresser as easily as having been stopped by the water, but George may even have retrieved it before Tom’s body was found. Still, it seems unusual that George would note the precise time it had stopped. This suggests—but certainly does not prove—the watch was on Thomson’s body when he went to the bottom of Canoe Lake.

  The timing, 12:14, also suggests the possibility of another scenario. It is conceivable that Shannon Fraser and Tom Thomson fought late in the evening of Sunday, July 8, 1917, after Thomson had returned from his fishing trip down the lake. This would be consistent with Mark Robinson’s 1953 claim to have seen Tom and Shannon Fraser that morning. However, this consistency does not constitute verification, as I do not believe there was any Sunday morning rendezvous between Shannon and Tom at Joe Lake dam, with Mark Robinson looking on through his binoculars and eavesdropping on them. The big trout story is extremely unlikely for the time of year. But let us accept, just for the sake of argument, that Thomson was indeed around Canoe Lake on Sunday morning. In that case, Daphne Crombie’s belief that Tom and Shannon had fought after the drunken Saturday night party could not have happened.

  And yet the fight doesn’t need to have happened after that drinking party for Daphne to be correct in her interpretation of the fight—her error may have lain only in the timing.

  I do not believe that Shannon Fraser carefully checked his watch as Tom Thomson paddled away from the Mowat Lodge dock, noting that the painter had last been seen at 12:50 p.m. that Sunday. It seems an unlikely thing to do—or at least to recall so accurately. His report of so carefully noting the time seems convenient for someone who could do with such a time reference as an alibi.

  It is possible Shannon saw Tom Thomson for the last time later that day.

  Between the time Fraser saw Thomson off at about noon and Tom’s return under cover of dark, something may have happened to fire Fraser’s well-known temper. It has never been established whether Winnie’s parents were at the lake at this point or not—though Hugh Trainor was certainly on hand when the body was found—but if the Trainors were there, perhaps a visit from Hugh Trainor convinced Fraser that he was the one to “teach him [Thomson] a lesson.” Less likely is the possibility of a telegram reaching Mowat or a letter arriving on the train. Given the moral strictures of the time, and the potential delicacy of the subject, it just doesn’t seem possible that any such suggestions of jilting or, even more unlikely, pregnancy would ever be put down in print or telegraph code. It is, however, possible that the necessity of a “lesson” could have arisen out of Fraser’s own discovery, by whatever means or method, that Tom was planning a quick exit from Canoe Lake, whereas Winnie Trainor and her family had been led to believe they were to be married.

  According to Mark Robinson, one unopened letter from Winnie Trainor had been found among Tom’s possessions. It might have arrived when Thomson had already steeled himself to leave. Robinson said he opened it, read it, and gave it to Hugh Trainor, dismissing it as insignificant. It’s hard to imagine his reading a personal letter in front of the letter writer’s father, but Robinson did say he read it. The letter might have held nothing important, as he concluded, or it might have contained another request from Winnie for Tom to buy a new suit. Robinson might have missed the implication of that request, whereas the snooping Annie Fraser, reading the letter she found lying in Tom’s room at Mowat Lodge, may have understood it. Annie Fraser had become convinced, in reading the letter or letters she’d found, that Winnie was pressing hard for Tom to get back the money he’d lent to Fraser, so he could buy a suit for the wedding. Possibly even a necessary wedding.

  It is even possible that Thomson arrived back at the lodge that evening and deliberately left the letter unopened, fully aware of its contents. If Thomson and Fraser then fought over money—and not because Fraser wanted to teach him a “lesson”—it could have been either that Thomson was going to go through with the marriage, feeling a gentleman’s obligation, or that he wanted the money so he could head for South River and points west as quickly as possible.

  Daphne Crombie believed the fight was based on money owed, rather than the honour of the Trainor family, and that seems the simpler, and also plausible, explanation. Fraser did owe Thomson money. Both men could also have been drinking, as Daphne also believed. There was obviously a great deal of drinking around Mowat Lodge at the time, as in the coming days, Superintendent Bartlett instructed Mark Robinson to bring an end to the alcohol supply coming in by train. Whatever the reason for the argument, Fraser and Thomson fought, and Fraser struck the blow that sent Thomson sprawling into the fire grate and caused the grievous injury to the painter’s left temple. Not the right side of the temple, as Dr. Howland wrongly recorded and later changed to “left.” The blow could even have been struck with a fire poker as the fight turned nasty.

  Whether Thomson died instantly or not, Fraser panicked. To cover up, he had Annie help him di
spose of the body. One or both of them tied a weight to Thomson’s left ankle, using fishing line. They did not place the portaging paddles in their correct position as Thomson would have placed them. And as Thomson would not be using them, they left behind at the dock his axe and working paddle, which Fraser would deal with later by tossing them into the fire.

  Under cover of dark, Fraser, possibly aided by Annie, towed Thomson in his own canoe out toward Little Wapomeo Island and dumped it over, leaving the empty canoe to drift and be sighted and instantly identified when light came to the lake that Monday morning.

  With the weight attached to his ankle, Tom fell fast to the bottom, his watch quickly stopping once the water got into it.

  At fourteen minutes past midnight, July 9, 1917.

  It is possible—just as it is possible they fought after the Saturday night party and the questionable Sunday morning sightings never took place.

  We can only speculate as to how Tom Thomson met his death. The mystery, however, has always contained two critical elements: one, what happened to Tom Thomson, and two, what happened to his body?

  He lies, still, at Canoe Lake. The undertaker, Churchill, had no desire to do the job in the first place, and didn’t. There was no “viewing” of the body at Owen Sound, as the McKeen sisters wished us to believe. Winnie Trainor insisted all her life that he had been taken to Leith and buried because she had to believe this, having personally made the arrangements. George Thomson insisted that the body was at Leith, as well, because he, after all, had been the family member charged with bringing his brother home and, if there was no body in the grave, he would have failed.

  The Thomson family feels strongly that they have a duty to respect George’s decision not to exhume the body at Leith. “I know it angers some people who feel our family is pulling a power play,” says Tracy Thomson, “but since we do have the legal right in these decisions, why not try and make the right decision for Tom and the gift he gave all Canadians? It has always been my family’s position, beginning with George Thomson (my great-grandfather) not to exhume the grave at Leith. And his descendants have to honour that decision.”

  Tracy does admit to wishing there were some very private way that a DNA test might be carried out and the family “keep a lid on it”—but that would be impossible, given the fame of the painter and the interest in the mystery. “I would love to know as much as anyone what became of him,” she told me in the spring of 2010.

  I asked her how she would feel if it turned out that he had never been exhumed and lay buried, still, at Canoe Lake?

  And she answered, “It wouldn’t bother me at all.”

  There was never any “Indian” buried at Canoe Lake in either 1894 or 1913. Nor was there any “Indian” dug up by the four men in the fall of 1956. There was no “Indian” discovered who had once had a complicated medical procedure performed on his left temple—precisely where Ranger Mark Robinson had noted in his journal that Tom Thomson’s body appeared to have been struck.

  What remains alarming about the “Indian” story is not so much that Professor Grant made mistakes in his science—an “Indian” or “half-breed” half Thomson’s age and shorter than he was?—but that Attorney General Kelso Roberts and Deputy Minister Frank MacDougall turned aside the protests of Dr. Harry Ebbs, the first medical doctor who saw the 1956 bones. As Ebbs said in the notes he left behind to be seen only following his death, they decided that because the family “did not wish to have the thing opened up and any more fuss.”

  In other words, assuming that Ebbs was right in concluding that the skeleton was Thomson’s (and it turns out he was right), they would hush up and, in effect, cover up evidence that would suggest a criminal investigation must follow, regardless of the thirty-nine years that had passed since Tom Thomson’s death.

  Ontario has no statute of limitations on murder.

  Ebbs claims he was told by the ranking lawmaker of Ontario that the Thomson family “were satisfied with the verdict of accidental drowning and they would like it just left alone.”

  Such is not an option where murder is concerned.

  In the fall of 2009, I asked the Ministry of the Attorney General what had become of the skull that had been kept for examination, even after the remaining bones—surely including both shinbones—were returned to Canoe Lake for re-burial. “Our best information,” the attorney general’s office responded, “is that the skull in question was not retained by the Centre for Forensic Sciences. It was examined in the mid-1950s and returned for re-interment at Algonquin Park.”

  So Tom Thomson, whole, is buried where he should be: at Canoe Lake.

  EPILOGUE

  It is again summer at Canoe Lake. More than ninety summer seasons have gone by since guides Lawrie Dickson and George Rowe towed Thomson’s bloated, damaged body from the deep waters of the lake to the edges of the nearest island. It will soon be forty years since Jimmy Stringer, emboldened by that second bottle of Brights President sherry, announced, “The truth’s still not told” and, within days of striking a pact with me to correct that shortcoming, broke through the early spring ice and drowned in the same waters that Tom Thomson sank into fifty-six years earlier.

  So much has changed since Jimmy Stringer claimed to have Tom Thomson’s shinbone in his shed. Jimmy and Wam are gone, and the old Stringer home on Potter Creek has long since been torn down and replaced with a new summer home. The Empire Hotel has been converted to apartments and has suffered fire damage. The “Snake Pit” became a lounge, the Formica tables and beer-sticky floors gone and no longer any separation between “Men” and “Ladies & Escorts.” The Liquor Control Board of Ontario store has moved twice since those days, and the place where you would fill in your form and slip it over the counter to Babe Malloy is now the Huntsville Public Library. Brights President sherry is selling for $8.25, when you can find it.

  The house at No. 3 Minerva Street, where Tom Thomson had once painted the living room and where Winnie Trainor lived out so much of her long and lonely life, is also now long gone, replaced initially with a low, brick building that held the North Muskoka Medical Clinic. That building is now occupied by Portage Promotionals, a small business dealing in sportswear and gifts.

  A twenty-first-century town beautification project has brought murals representing the works of Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven to various downtown walls. The wall of the building where Winnie Trainor lived is now painted with a giant canoe, dove grey in colour. The mural, The Canoe, Tom Thomson’s painting of his own canoe, empty. Those who organized the mural paintings could not possibly have intended to create such sad irony.

  The shoreline along Canoe Lake has also changed greatly since 1917. The water level is higher. Beaches have long since been cleared of stumps and deadfall. The Taylor Statten Camps, Ahmek for boys and Wapomeo for girls, dominate the northeastern shore and one of the islands. It takes some looking to identify newer buildings, for discretion is the guideline for Algonquin Park as much as garish ostentation is the rule of the day in the nearby Muskoka Lakes. Only those who know precisely where to look can find signs of the mill that once stood along the northwestern shore. Newcomers have no idea that the gravel road that brings them around the northern edge of the lake and past the Joe Lake dam was once a busy rail line, carrying singing troops from the West off to the front in Europe; they see paths where once there were spur lines. As for the busy lodge where Tom Thomson stayed, they see nothing in the place where it once stood.

  And yet there are also those things that never seem to change. Loons still float on the water and, for those few who know where to look, red-fleshed lake trout swim far below the surface of the lake. Purple pickerelweed grows along the feeding creeks. The most striking feature of the islands is still their sudden outcroppings of Precambrian Shield granite, often with mica-holding white quartz sparkling in the sun. Seen from a distance, the water seems impossibly blue; seen up close, it appears to be the colour of lightly steeped tea. Pine and cedar grow down to th
e water’s edge in places; scruffy spruce and tamarack, tall hemlock, poplar, aspen, bear-scarred beech, white and yellow birch and maple seem to climb the surrounding hills. Every so often, along the high horizons, a magnificent white pine stabs so far above the forest ceiling that it reminds the eye of what brought loggers to this rugged country in the first place and how, when the white pine was mostly gone, the mills and the train soon followed. The cottagers, the campers and the summer visitors—now as likely to be from Asia as America—all stayed.

  Out on the water, the chop is mild, thanks in part to a park restriction to twenty-horsepower or less outboards. There are no Sea-Doos here, no wakeboarding. In the deep waters out from Taylor Statten Camps, the lake is filled with white sails, some rippling from learners’ hands, some billowing tight as skin as the small sailboats tempt tipping in the deliberate hands of bronzed, teenaged instructors who may never again be so admired in the lives they will spend in the three seasons that make up the “real world” of Canada.

  Everywhere there are canoeists, some slipping so silently along you can almost hear the kiss of water on lacquered cherry as the J-stroke—said to have been developed on this very lake—is deftly turned to maintain direction. Most canoes, however, are moving erratically from side to side as they zigzag between the Portage Store docks and the Tom Thomson cairn. This summer scene, in fact, has not changed much since the early 1960s. Tourists are still unfamiliar with the tippy canoes, the instructions brief but sufficient to send them off through the channel and out onto the lake. In fair weather, they usually make it far enough to visit the popular site and photograph their party standing by the stone cairn and the incongruous West Coast Native totem pole.