Defiant Spirits (27 page)

Canadians also resented the hysterically anti-British tone of
German-American propaganda. Bletcher, a German-American who spoke with a slight accent, was therefore almost guaranteed to raise hackles at Canoe Lake. He had already attracted suspicion and hostility. Feelings against Germany and German immigrants ran so high in Canada that the teaching of German literature was banned in schools, orchestras refused to play German music, and soldiers of the 118th Infantry Battalion, based in Waterloo, vandalized German-owned local businesses. Thousands of “enemy aliens” were interned in camps across the country, including (until the spring of 1916) at nearby Camp Petawawa.

Bletcher fell foul of these anti-German sentiments. Mark Robinson, newly returned from Europe after being wounded while serving with the Peterborough Rangers, believed him to be a German spy.
31
The suspicion, however unfounded, was not completely unreasonable. Under Count Johann von Bernstorff, the German ambassador to the United States, members of the German Foreign Office in Washington were recruiting and organizing German-born Americans for missions in Canada as saboteurs. In 1914 British intelligence warned the Canadian government of a German plan to bomb the Welland Canal. Although that attack never took place, soon afterwards a
cpr
bridge in New Brunswick was destroyed by dynamite on orders from Arthur Zimmermann, undersecretary at the Foreign Office in Washington (and future author of the infamous “Zimmermann Telegram”). Then in June 1915 a German agent from Detroit named Karl Respa, a one-time homesteader in Alberta, planted dynamite at a factory in Walkerville, Ontario, and at an armoury in Windsor. Only the former detonated, but within a few days more dynamite was found on the premises of both a Windsor truck company and a machine works due to be transformed into a munitions factory. Respa was apprehended and, in March 1916, sentenced to life imprisonment in Kingston Penitentiary.
32

Whatever the exact nature of their disagreement, cottagers at Canoe Lake had already noticed “some ill feeling” between Thomson and Bletcher, and on the night of July 7 it erupted into open hostility.
33
Insults were traded, and the altercation stopped shy of an exchange of physical discourtesies only thanks to the intervention of Fraser and Rowe. One account described the aggrieved Bletcher storming from the cabin with a final drunken threat to Thomson: “Don't get in my way if you know what's good for you!”
34

Thomson returned to his room at Mowat Lodge (he was not sleeping in his tent at this point) and the next morning, in heavy rain, went fishing on the north end of Canoe Lake. Later in the morning, at the Algonquin Hotel, he had a cup of tea, as well as “a piece of cake and pie and so on,” with the owner, Molly Colson.
35
Shortly before one o'clock he went to The Manse, not to visit Winnie, who was in Huntsville, but to collect his fishing gear. He was planning a longer fishing expedition, probably to Gill Lake. He asked Shannon Fraser to load his canoe—his distinctive blue-grey Chestnut—with supplies such as bread, bacon, maple syrup and pancake flour. He did not pack his sketching equipment. Fraser wrapped the provisions in a rubber groundsheet and placed them in the bow.

In the summer of 1916 Thomson had positioned himself on Hayhurst Point, a peninsula on the north end of Canoe Lake. Here, occasionally cleaning his brush on the rocks, he painted the waters and islands spread below him.
Islands, Canoe Lake
shows a stretch of gloriously prismatic water—soothing licks of salmon pink, lavender, ultramarine—beneath a teal-coloured sky. One year later he paddled onto this shimmering lake, navigating into the middle because the passage along the shoreline was blocked by sawlogs. He was wearing a grey lumberjack shirt, khaki trousers and canvas shoes. The last Fraser saw of him, he was already fishing, trolling with his copper fishing line in the middle of the lake. By Fraser's fob watch it was 12:50
pm
. The temperature was in the upper teens, the morning's heavy rain turning into a light drizzle.

TWO HOURS LATER, a few minutes after three o'clock, Martin Bletcher and his sister Bessie, crossing the lake in their small motor launch, spotted a capsized canoe near one of the islands, Little Wapomeo, in the middle of the lake. Not recognizing it as Thomson's, despite the unique colour, they assumed it was one that had come loose from its moorings at the Algonquin Hotel. Rogue canoes, like stray logs, were not an uncommon sight: earlier that morning Thomson and Shannon Fraser rescued an abandoned canoe from the north end of the lake.
36

When the Bletchers returned a short while later, intending to tow it back to the hotel, the canoe had disappeared. No one realized Thomson was missing until the next morning when the Bletchers finally reported their sighting to Shannon Fraser. Mark Robinson and the park superintendent, G.W. Bartlett, were immediately alerted, and the search began on both water and land. Robinson assumed that Thomson, while portaging, “must have broken a limb
. . .
or fallen someplace and injured himself.”
37
Gunshots were fired and whistles blown. On Tuesday, two days after Thomson disappeared, the capsized canoe was spotted by Charlie Scrim and brought ashore. The portage paddles were lashed into place and a few provisions stashed in the bow, but Thomson's handmade black-cherry paddle, axe, fishing rod and dunnage bag all were missing. A telegram reporting the discovery was sent to Thomson's parents in Owen Sound. The
Owen Sound Sun
reported that the state of the canoe meant it could have drifted from its moorings, leaving Thomson marooned, but alive and well, on one of the islands.
38

On Thursday, July 12, Robinson wrote Dr. MacCallum to inform him that Thomson was missing but that “everything is being done that can be done.”
39
That same morning Thomson's older brother George arrived at Canoe Lake from where he had been holidaying in Owen Sound. He remained in Mowat for two days before returning to comfort his elderly parents. By then the
Toronto Globe
was reporting that “one of the most talented of the younger landscapists” was thought to have been drowned or “the victim of foul play.” The suggestion of foul play may have surprised the paper's readers given the drownings that routinely occurred in the region every summer. In the same week Thomson went missing the papers were reporting the drowning of a seventeen-year-old boy after a canoeing mishap on a lake near Bobcaygeon and the death of two men after a capsize on Drag Lake in the Haliburton Highlands. Foul play was not mentioned in connection with either case.
40
The
Globe
ended its story on a gloomy note: “There is still a chance that Mr. Thomson may be alive, but this is considered doubtful as four days' search has failed to find a trace of him.”
41

Thomson's body was finally found on Monday, July 16, more than a week after he went missing. It was spotted at ten o'clock in the morning by a vacationing Toronto neurologist named Goldwin Howland. Dr. Howland had impressive medical credentials, not to mention an alluring Canadian pedigree. His grandfather had been one of the Fathers of Confederation, and his father, William Holmes Howland, was the reforming mayor of Toronto whose zeal for shutting down bars and brothels in the late 1880s had earned the city its nickname Toronto the Good. Dr. Howland was himself a distinguished figure, the country's first consulting neurologist and a pioneer in the treatment and rehabilitation of wounded soldiers.

In the summer of 1917 Dr. Howland was renting Little Wapomeo Island and its cottage from Taylor Statten, future founder of Camp Ahmek. He was sitting on the veranda (or, other sources claim, fishing with his daughter in a boat) when he saw a body floating on the lake. He immediately summoned Larry Dickson and George Rowe, who recognized Thomson from his clothing. Securing it with, presumably, a fishing line, the two rangers towed the body several hundred yards through the lake to Big Wapomeo Island. Here they tethered the dead artist to, poignantly, the roots of a pine tree.

TOM THOMSON WAS buried twice: first in Canoe Lake, and then again, in a metaphor for how he would never truly be laid to rest, four days later, after exhumation, in his hometown of Leith.

The Canoe Lake ceremony, performed on July 17, was a forlorn and improvised affair. “The sky was overcast and the rain was falling,” recalled a visitor from Toronto enlisted as a pallbearer even though he was utterly oblivious to Thomson's identity and reputation. “It had all the earmarks of a backwoods funeral.”
42

The funeral was held, on the advice of Dr. Howland and with the permission of G.W. Bartlett, because of the deterioration of the body. The coroner had not yet arrived, nor were any of Thomson's family or friends from Toronto present. The brief telegram sent by Shannon Fraser to the Thomson family—“Found Tom this morning”—had failed to indicate whether he was alive or dead, painfully prolonging their suspense. An ensuing telephone message, received, according to the local newspaper, “in a roundabout way,” did little to clarify.
43
The family would not learn positively of his death until the day after his funeral.

However hasty and irregular these proceedings may seem to posterity, swift burials were the norm in Ontario at this time. The deceased was almost always buried within a day or two of death. When Professor George Blewett drowned under similarly inexplicable circumstances at Go Home Bay on August 15, 1912, his body was returned to Toronto on the Muskoka Express on the sixteenth and then buried at the Necropolis on the seventeenth, a Saturday.
44

A horse-driven cart carried Thomson's wooden coffin along a logging road to the tiny cemetery, encircled by a picket fence, that stood on a knoll behind Mowat. The location was eerily similar to the “secret ferny tomb” near Mattagami Lake where Neil McKechnie had been laid to rest almost exactly thirteen years earlier. Thomson knew the Mowat cemetery well. He had photographed one of the two graves, that of James Watson, a twenty-one-year-old Gilmour employee killed by a falling tree in 1897. Watson was, according to his grave marker, “the first white person to be buried at Canoe Lake.” His gravestone included a pair of couplets legible in Thomson's photograph:

Remember, comrade, when passing by

As you are now so once was I,

As I am now so you will be;

Prepare thyself to follow me.

Thomson was interred some twenty-five feet from Watson's grave, with Martin Bletcher Sr. reading the service. Several hours later a coroner named Arthur Ranney, summoned from North Bay but delayed by medical emergencies, opened the inquest. The body had been examined by Dr. Howland, who observed a bruise on the right temple—what the coroner concluded was consistent with “striking some obstacle, like a stone”
45
—and some bleeding from the right ear. Dr. Howland believed from his observations that Thomson died by drowning. The verdict was accepted by the coroner, a less distinguished medical practitioner than Dr. Howland. He concluded the inquest at 1:30
am
on the eighteenth and then, later that morning, caught the train back to North Bay.

Thomson remained in the Canoe Lake cemetery for less than two days. At eight o'clock on the evening of the eighteenth, an undertaker, a bowler-hatted man named Churchill, arrived from Huntsville with a metal casket and instructions to exhume the body and return with it to Owen Sound. He worked late into the night, literally prosecuting the resurrection that would be performed, figuratively, many times thereafter. On the following evening the casket was placed on a train that carried Thomson for the last time from his beloved Algonquin Provincial Park.

The second funeral service was performed on Saturday, July 21, at the Presbyterian church in Owen Sound. Interment followed in the family plot at the church in Leith. In the Burial Register of Owen Sound church, the Reverend P.T. Pilkey inscribed a strange clerihew: “Talented and with many friends, and no enemies, a mystery.”
46

tom thomson, despite painting in vibrant hues, once told Mark Robinson that “grey is one of the hardest colours I have to manage.”
47
It is cruelly appropriate that his life should have ended in shades of grey, the answers to what exactly happened on the afternoon of July 8, 1917, as elusive as the yellow-jerkinned phantom who local legend claims paddles through the veils of Canoe Lake mist: an insistent rejoinder to the poet Earle Birney's famous quip that Canada is haunted by a lack of ghosts.

The Reverend Pilkey was far from alone in his bafflement over Thomson's death. The mysterious disappearance, the rushed inquest, the simple verdict from a coroner who failed to view the body; such proceedings caused disquiet. By 1917 Thomson was an experienced canoeist who had shot the rapids of the Mississagi, paddled the gorges of the Petawawa, conquered the strenuous portages of the Mattawa. How could he possibly have drowned, not in one of these eerie wildernesses, but on a calm lake, in broad daylight, only a short distance from his lodgings and where the neat cottages of wealthy Torontonians sat perched on private islands?

As Arthur Lismer observed from Halifax, the circumstances were “strange enough for any amount of speculation.”
48
No sooner had the coroner departed on the eighteenth than Mark Robinson wrote in his diary, “There is considerable adverse comment regarding the way evidence had been taken at the meeting among the residents on the Lake.”
49
To a number of Mowat residents, Thomson's death seemed not to have received a proper investigation. Charles Plewman, the pallbearer, noted how there was “considerable speculation” as to how a man with Thomson's skill in handling a canoe could have drowned.
50
Most distressed and suspicious was Winnie Trainor, who, after the body was found, “appeared on the scene,” according to Plewman, “and demanded the right to see the remains, saying that there must have been foul play as she was certain that Tom didn't drown by accident in a small lake like Canoe Lake.”
51