Tom Thomson, the Canadian painter whose 1917 death on Algonquin Park's Canoe Lake continues to haunt and confound many observers, and whose wilderness landscapes still dazzle the eye with their bold use of color, once remarked that the hardest color to paint is grey. "I have to have, definitely, each shade of grey," he told Mark Robinson, a park ranger and close friend.
Shades of grey. It's something I think about on the sultry July afternoon that I paddle up Canoe Lake, searching for a few certainties about Thomson's life and death. Since his abrupt demise 80-plus years ago at age 39, there has been so much mythologizing of the man, and so much wild speculation about his strange end, that sorting out fact from fiction—getting the greys right—is a daunting task.
This much we know: Thomson first came to Algonquin Park from Toronto in 1913. He would spend the better part of the next four years here, based at Canoe Lake, painting, fishing, and occasionally hiring himself out as a guide or fire ranger. His strong canoeing and swimming abilities are well documented. We also know that Thomson had a love interest, although this wasn't public knowledge until long after the fact.
Dr. R. P. Little, a regular visitor to Algonquin from the U.S. and an acquaintance of Thomson's, commented in 1955: "Some say that Tom was too wrapped up in his work to care much for women, and that his bride was the wild mysterious beauty of the northern woods. Actually, however, Tom did have a girlfriend—the comely Winnifred Trainor." Winnie, who Little describes elsewhere as "tall and dark," was a member of one of Canoe Lake's first cottaging families. She remained curiously tight-lipped about the affair throughout her long life, but her nephew, Terence Trainor McCormick, who still summers at Canoe Lake in the family cottage, confirmed his aunt's relationship with Thomson after her death in 1962. McCormick further revealed from letters he'd inherited that the pair was, in fact, engaged to be married.
Of the events leading to the discovery of Thomson's body in Canoe Lake, there are many perplexing grey areas, but the basic details are known. Thomson was last seen by Robinson on the morning of July 8, fishing at the north end of Canoe Lake. A few hours later a number of people said they saw him depart in his canoe from Mowat Lodge—a ramshackle building where Thomson often stayed—after first picking up a few provisions, conceivably for an overnight fishing expedition. It was a calm, humid afternoon, not unlike the one I have chosen for my own pilgrimage. Thomson paddled out of sight of the tiny Canoe Lake community and—according to the official story—was never seen alive again.
Later that same afternoon his canoe was found drifting upside down in the lake. Eight days later his body bobbed up, with a bruise on the temple, blood issuing from one ear, and copper fishing line wrapped around an ankle. The death was pronounced an accidental drowning. But was it? It's a question that's been posed often in the years since Thomson—then a virtual unknown outside of Canoe Lake circles—surfaced in this small Algonquin lake. Blodwen Davies, in her 1930 biography, was the first to bluntly suggest foul play. "Who met Thomson on that stretch of grey lake, screened from all eyes, that July noon?" Davies also wondered how the body could have remained submerged for so long, unless the fishing line had perhaps been attached to a weight. "Did Thomson's body take eight days to rise in a shallow lake in the middle of July?" she asked incredulously.
On this July afternoon, as I hover in my own canoe over the approximate spot where Thomson's canoe was sighted, I find myself dwelling on that first sign of trouble. Martin and Bessie Bletcher, a brother and sister who summered two doors down from the Trainor cottage and knew Thomson well, said they spotted the canoe at 3:05 p.m. on July 8, less than two hours after the painter left Mowat Lodge. Curiously, they didn't report the sighting until the morning of July 10. In his diary entry for July 10, Robinson notes, "They didn't stop to examine the canoe as they had heard there was a canoe that drifted away from its moorings."
William Little (no relation to R. P. Little), author of the 1970 book, The Tom Thomson Mystery, was baffled by this explanation for the delay. "No apparent effort was made to ascertain whose canoe it might have been, even though Canoe Lake was a small settlement and all its boats were well known to residents of the area." Especially, we can assume, Thomson's boat. The artist painted his Chestnut canoe himself, mixing in some of his own oils to get the precise hue he wanted. Thomson's canoe was a specific shade of grey. A dove grey.
Things get murkier as I continue up Canoe Lake, pausing to stare down into the inscrutable depths from where Thomson's body finally arose. Much has changed since the days when this landscape provided the inspiration for Thomson's feverish painting, and his almost equally feverish fishing (Thomson is said to have been highly self-deprecating when it came to his art, but mighty proud of his angling). The forest has grown up around the slash piles that still littered the shores in Thomson's time; the water level has risen.
Algonquin Park, created in 1893, was still largely unknown when Thomson came here; now 65,000 paddlers visit the park's interior annually. The majority do so through Canoe Lake, the most convenient jumping off point for anyone wanting to explore the vast network of lakes and rivers to the north.
Anyone who knew Thomson is now dead, and much else that might help clear up the mystery has also vanished. Thomson's canoe disappeared a few years after its discovery, and both of his paddles are also lost (one was missing when the canoe was found; the other disappeared later). Even the coroner's report that issued a verdict of accidental drowning—although no autopsy was performed—has somehow vanished. Also gone, I notice now, is the Bletcher cottage. The last time I visited Canoe Lake, not even a year earlier, the original building still stood, as did the old boathouse (not the original, I'm told, but one built in the same location as the first). Both boathouse and cottage have suddenly evaporated, to be replaced by a new wooden cottage with a glinting steel roof.
William Little was convinced that Martin Bletcher killed Thomson, either by accident or design. Another individual, Dr. Harry Ebbs, who summered on Canoe Lake and knew Bletcher, even went so far as to posit that the cottager shot the painter from his boathouse. "Bletcher was suspected of doing all kinds of things that were illegal, one of them having rifles," said Dr. Ebbs in a 1975 interview. Asked how a bullet hole could be confused for a bruise (as was noted on Thomson's temple), the doctor suggested, "being in the water for eight days, (the body) would be in pretty bad shape and you wouldn't see a hole anyway."
Animosity between the two men likely did exist: they were said to have butted heads on a number of occasions, perhaps over conflicting views of the war. Bletcher was an American of German ancestry, who appears to have sided with his forbears in the conflict (and may also have been hiding out at Canoe Lake to avoid participation in the war). Thomson was a pacifist, but had friends fighting overseas in the Allied forces. Little, in his book, describes a boisterous drinking party on the night prior to Thomson’s disappearance, during which the two men nearly came to blows.
A second culprit for a case of murder (or manslaughter) was introduced by journalist Roy MacGregor in 1977, as the result of an interview with Daphne Crombie, a woman then almost 90 who had been a resident of Mowat Lodge in Thomson’s time. Crombie said that lodge proprietor Shannon Fraser, an Irishman known for his quick temper, had gotten into a fight with Thomson on the eve of his official disappearance—that same night of July 7 that William Little describes as a night of heavy drinking—over a bill Fraser had not yet paid to the artist for a pair of canoes he supplied.
This information wasn't firsthand; the story, Crombie admitted, had been communicated to her by Annie Fraser, the proprietor's wife. During the fight, Fraser "hit Tom and Tom fell and hit his head on the fire grate," according to Crombie. Rousing his wife for assistance, Fraser then lugged an unconscious Thomson into his canoe, paddled him out into the lake, and faked an accident by tipping him over—perhaps tying a weight to his leg for good measure.
Crombie's testimony contradicts Robinson's report that he saw Thomson the following morning, and the word of several others, who all said they saw him leave Mowat Lodge in the early afternoon of July 8. (Admittedly, the main person to speak of this departure was Fraser, who could have been covering his tracks. But could Robinson, a close friend and careful observer, have confused Thomson for someone else, even from a distance?) The fact that Crombie's report is based on hearsay, and communicated at an advanced age, also makes it questionable.
I'm inclined to believe at least one part of the elderly woman's testimony—a part that may not account for how Thomson died, but certainly, if true, fleshes out what was going on in his life at the time. Crombie spoke of a letter from Winnie Trainor to Thomson, the contents of which she'd been privy to. According to Crombie, Winnie wrote: "Please Tom you must get a new suit because we'll have to be married." MacGregor, in his article, puts the emphasis on have. "We'll have to be married." The journalist says Crombie interpreted this statement to mean Winnie was pregnant. It's a suspicion he evidently shared, as he went on to write a novel based on the idea that Tom and Winnie produced a child which was given up for adoption. In his author's note he stresses that the story is fictional, but asserts that Winnie did disappear for a time following Thomson's death—first to northern Ontario, then Philadelphia. A time that was long enough, he suggests, for Winnie to have had a child and given it up before returning to her hometown of Huntsville, located just west of Algonquin Park.
Would the prospect of having to get married and become a responsible, bread-winning father been enough to drive Thomson to suicide? The painter was just hitting his stride as an artist, and, while perennially broke, appears to have preferred freedom and solitude to a steady income or steady female companionship. He once proposed to a young woman in Seattle, but was either rebuked or misunderstood; this may have made him wary of marriage for good.
Thomson's family certainly never accepted the theory that he killed himself. When George Thomson, Tom's brother, learned that Shannon Fraser had suggested as much during the hasty inquest held the night after his brother's discovery, he accused Fraser of "fastening upon Tom's memory a stain that would be difficult if not impossible to wipe out." Tom, George insisted, "met his death by accident or foul play." Fraser wrote back on Mowat Lodge stationary to vehemently deny having mentioned "such a thing as suicide at the inquest." Yet another commentator, Charles F. Plewman, who was present at the time of Thomson's death (he acted as a pallbearer at the funeral), revealed in 1972 that Fraser had told him personally that Tom was suicidal. Thomson was known to be overly sensitive, a heavy drinker, and prone to fits of depression. But was he suicidal? Many people who knew him claimed he would never have killed himself, as he had too much to look forward to—he'd recently sold a couple of paintings, and appeared to be in his element at Canoe Lake. Then again, people of Thomson's artistic temperament aren't always capable of focussing on the positive.
I can't help but think that the one person capable of shedding some light on what happened to Thomson, was his betrothed, Winnie Trainor. I think about this as I paddle by the cottage she frequented—one that, unlike the Bletchers', still remains standing. Spruced up a bit, perhaps, but bearing the same unmistakable features of the modest cabin that appears in early photographs. Thomson is known to have visited Winnie here often.
What did they talk about? Were they desperately in love? Was Thomson hoping to get the money Fraser owed him in order to buy a suit for his marriage, as Crombie implies in her interview? Or was the painter, who cherished his privacy, getting cold feet? Was Martin Bletcher, who cottaged two doors down, envious of the position Thomson found himself in?
I stare at the plain, white building, with its simple veranda, and think of the secrets it must contain. I have one more stop on my itinerary: a visit to the tiny cemetery said to exist on a wooded knoll behind the abandoned logging village of Mowat, a settlement already reduced to a ghost town by the time Thomson arrived. Although I've been to Canoe Lake numerous times, I have never actually located this famous site. Thomson was the last of only three individuals ever known to have been buried here, and it's possible that the spot has become completely swallowed by forest.
I nose my canoe through a shallow boggy area, heading toward what I hope is the hill containing the cemetery. Lining the lake bottom, I notice, is a solid mat of old lumber—remains, I later ascertain, of the chip yard once affiliated with Mowat's saw mill. I beach my canoe and clamber out onto what must be an old logging road, now apparently used by one or two cottagers. Almost immediately, I find a trail forking off into the woods. It's overgrown, but looks to be in about the right place. My heart thumps.
Incredibly, the Thomson intrigue doesn't end with speculation about how he died—it even extends to the whereabouts of his remains. A couple days after being buried at Canoe Lake, Thomson's family ordered an exhumation of the body, and re-interment at the family plot in Leith, Ontario. Individuals who encountered the undertaker on his way out from Canoe Lake, however, were shocked by the lightness of the casket. Suspicion that Thomson was never removed from his Canoe Lake grave began to circulate almost immediately.
In 1956, a group headed by William Little took it upon itself to clear up the mystery once and for all. Locating the place where they felt Thomson's grave must exist—the artist had been buried outside a fenced-in area containing the earlier two graves, and there was no grave marker—they began to dig. When bones and a skull were unearthed, Little and his colleagues were not only convinced that they had found Thomson, they also felt they might have turned up some incriminating evidence. At the precise location on the skull where a bruise had been documented on Thomson's temple, there was a small but definite hole.
Forensic scientists who studied the remains in Toronto concluded, however, that the bones belonged to an aboriginal, and that the hole was the result of a trephining operation, a rare medical procedure (a sharp instrument like a pick or arrow were also contemplated as the cause). Little and others were astounded, reasoning that the chances of an unknown Indian (there are no records of such an individual dying at Canoe Lake, let alone being buried there) with an uncommon scar, being placed in the exact same hole as Thomson's, were too incredible to even consider. Yet that is where the investigation ended.
A photograph of the cemetery, included in Little's book, shows a gnarled old birch tree surrounded by a rotting wooden fence. Could these same landmarks, I wonder, possibly be awaiting me at the end of this overgrown path? Little's photograph was taken in 1956, and both the tree and fence looked like they were about to collapse then. It's now more than 40 years later.
The path curves up a sandy hill, through a thick grove of spruce, and suddenly, I'm looking at it. The oldest birch tree I've ever seen, and a freshly repaired picket fence (I later learn that cottagers on the lake have diligently preserved this site). Inside are the two graves that preceded Thomson's; twenty feet to the north, is a single, unmarked, wooden cross. Thomson. I find myself thinking about the funeral that was held here for the artist, those many years ago in 1917. Winnie Trainor, along with her parents, was in attendance, as were the Bletchers. According to Robinson's diary, Martin Bletcher Sr. read the service. Shannon Fraser's horse drawn cart brought the coffin up that sandy hill.
Interest in Thomson's remains flared up again more recently, in 1996. Ellie Tesher, a columnist with the Toronto Star, reported that descendants of the artist were considering granting permission to dig up the grave at Leith—something no Thomson had ever done before. Tesher also said that the skull of the apparent Indian might have remained in a forensics lab in Toronto, and, if so, could now be clearly identified through DNA testing. Nothing came of it. Only one grandniece turned out to be open to the idea of disturbing the Leith grave; other family members still felt it would be a desecration. And in July, 1997, Tesher was forced to admit that the skull would not be an option for further investigation either. The skull, she had learned, had been returned to the Canoe Lake cemetery with the rest of the anonymous aboriginal's bones.
So here we are, I think. Me, and three ghosts, one of which refuses to declare its identity. I spend the night camped a bit deeper into the park. In the morning, I pack my stuff and begin paddling south. It's been a brief trip, but I feel like I've just traveled several hundred miles. As I paddle back down past the bog that was once a field full of slabs, past the Trainor cottage and the new Bletcher place, past the places where Thomson's canoe and body were found, I realize that the present is simultaneously rushing up to greet me. Surging towards me now are dozens of canoes—in pairs, in flotillas of four or six, occasionally a single craft being soloed like my own. Some move with fluid ease; others lurch, zigzag, clang, and just generally look like they could flip over in an instant.
When I asked Chuck Gray, a 60-year resident of Canoe Lake, how many watery deaths had occurred here in the 82 years since Thomson's, he could only think of four. One of those drownings was in winter—Jimmy Stringer, a local, went through the ice. Another was the result of alcohol, which I think can be ruled out in Thomson's case (he was probably hungover, but I doubt drunk). A third was a case of youth and inexperience, neither of which could have been a factor for Thomson. The fourth, and most recent, is also unlike Thomson's death in its particulars, but in other ways has an eerie similarity. Joe Runner, a Broadway playwright and actor who held a lifelong fascination with Thomson, drowned in 1993 at the age of 62 while swimming across Potter Creek, at the northwest end of Canoe Lake. Runner had spent numerous summers on this lake, as well as one full winter when he lived in a barn. In the 1970s he completed a screenplay for a 13-episode TV series about Thomson. Although never produced, Runner aspired to both direct and play the part of Thomson. According to Gray, who knew Runner, the playwright was halfway across Potter Creek when a friend shouted out to ask how he was doing. Runner replied, "I'm okay." Moments later he sank below the surface and drowned.
Thomson's death will probably always be a mystery. The trail has long gone cold, and short of digging up the grave at Leith, no new information is likely to present itself—if even then. The controversy over where his body lies has always struck me as something of a red herring. Even if the skeleton at Canoe Lake could be unequivocally established as Thomson's through DNA testing, it seems unlikely that the hole in the skull would be interpreted much differently today than it was in the 1950s. If a bullet had created the opening, there would have to be either a corresponding exit hole, or a bullet still present in the grave. Neither was the case.
So what can we reasonably conclude? Suicide seems unlikely, if only because the method itself was so bizarre. A person seeking to annihilate himself surely wouldn't do so by batting himself on the head, or by leaping overboard with a rock tied to his leg. And even if the doctor who examined the body missed a bullet hole in Thomson's temple, there is little reason to think Thomson possessed such a thing as a rifle. He was a pacifist and had forsaken hunting years earlier.
As to the official story of an accident: how does an experienced paddler manage to capsize on a calm, warm afternoon in July? How does an accomplished fisherman ensnare himself in his own fishing line? Speculation that Thomson slipped somehow and banged his head on a gunwale doesn't seem any more reasonable; in all my years of paddling, gunwale-bobbing, even jousting from canoes, I've never seen anyone smack their temple on a gunwale (one might smack the back of their head, if anything). The theory that somebody bumped into Thomson before he disappeared does not seem farfetched. But who was it? Shannon Fraser seems an improbable candidate, simply because Mark Robinson said he saw Thomson the morning after the lodge owner is alleged to have tussled with the artist.
This leaves us with Martin Bletcher. Putting aside the less-than-flattering reports we have about his character (which could easily have been prejudiced, given his German background), I think he does make a good suspect. By Bletcher's own admission, he was on the lake the afternoon that Thomson disappeared. It's conceivable that the two men crossed paths, and something ensued—a simple scuffle, perhaps, but one that nevertheless resulted in tragedy. Winnie Trainor remained silent on the matter, and never personally revealed the pair's wedding plans. Until her death, she remained unmarried.
As I paddle down Canoe Lake and away from the site of this intrigue, one final image sticks with me. In an interview given in 1976, Rose Thomas, whose family lived above the Canoe Lake train station, recalls Winnie's arrival by rail in the aftermath of Thomson's death, wearing "a beige coat and a big beige hat," her long black hair woven into braids. "She come up after he was drowned and got off the train. I asked her in but she said she'd rather not, so she went and stood on the bridge... I can always remember her standing on the bridge and looking down into the water."
What did Winnie see there? A reflection of herself in her big beige hat? Or something deeper and more unsettling? Or did she merely see, as we all do now, the same darkening shades of greys?
