Thomson: Canada’s classic who or whatdunit
His body was found at Canoe Lake, Algonquin Park, in just the kind of natural setting whose wildness and force he became famous for capturing, as it hadn’t been captured before.
Compared to the salon formalism that had hitherto characterized landscape art here, Tom Thomson’s paintings seemed burned on the canvas, in blisters of raw excited colour and lyrical inflammations of f amiliar shapes. His paintings “felt” like Canada.
“It has to begin and end with the art (such as his famous “The Jack Pine”),” Roy MacGregor tells me.
But in between, oh, the often de- licious mystery.
Thomson’s death at age 39, in July, 1917, 100 years ago, was at first tidily explained away as an accidental drowning. But as Thomson’s reputation grew, alongside the waxing fortunes of the Group of Seven, whom he influenced, questions arose and re-arose.
The wound at his temple. The fishing line around his leg. The location of his remains. The rumours of a pregnancy. Why wasn’t a paddle found? Could he have been killed by a) poachers; b) a German spy; c) a man who owed him money; d) himself, in a suicide?
The aforementioned Roy MacGregor, celebrated Canadian author/journalist, “poet laureate” of Canadian hockey, will be in Hamilton on Saturday to talk about the legacy, legend and lore of Tom Thomson. It’s a free public lecture sponsored by the Hamilton Association for the Advancement of Literature, Science and Art (HAALSA).
Roy comes to his subject, a lifelong passion for him, not only as a curious author and researcher (he wrote “Canoe Lake,” a novel based on Tom Thomson, and later “Northern Lights: The Enduring Mystery of Tom Thomson and the Woman Who Loved Him”), but as a person connected, albeit tangentially, to the very web of the thing.
“I grew up with the story,” he says. “My grandfather was a forest ranger in Algonquin Park and disliked Tom Thomson.” Many did. He was an “artist,” an unusual one at that.
But, beyond that, Roy knew Winnie Trainor. When he was a child, she once beat him with an umbrella for some horseplay. He remembers her as a fearsome embittered figure.
So who is Winnie Trainor? She might have been the subject of one of Thomson’s paintings, “Figure of Lady,” decades before Roy knew her. She almost certainly had some kind of love affair with Thomson. Many believe she became pregnant by him.
“She (Winnie) and her mom took off all of that winter,” says Roy. “They left for Philadelphia, for nine months.”
It was Winnie who first started questioning the circumstances of Thomson’s death. It sounds like the ketchup bottle effect, slow to reach the critical point, but once Canada decided to care in earnest about the mystery, we went at (and still do) in a great gush. A party of men dug up what they thought was his grave in 1956. The remains they discovered turned out to be, it was thought, those of an Indigenous man. The false trails and conspiracy theories have abounded ever since, and so have the plays, songs and books about it.
“I don’t know the answer to the mystery,” Roy admits. “It’s like a Rubik’s Cube. You might never figure it out, but it’s fun to play with the patterns.
“One of the best stories is that a water spout killed him, spinning him up high in the air.” Another is that a man who owed him money killed Thomson when Thomson came to collect, then tied his body up in fishing line, dragged it to the lake and put it in a canoe to simulate a drowning. “Or maybe it was Winnie’s father, a tough woodsman, trying to teach him a lesson and going too far.”
In his talk, Roy will discuss CSIlike forensic evidence that scientists have uncovered using modern techniques; some of the characters, like Jimmy Stringer, whom Roy’s met in his research; and much, much else, including slides and PowerPoint.
How can you resist? A who or whatdunit with a love angle and a lake. Only in Canada.