John Little - Who Killed Tom Thomson?: The Truth about the Murder of One of the 20th Centurys Most Famous Artists

1. Original Thomson gravesite

2. Thomson's body recovered

3. Mowat Lodge

4. The Trainor cottage

5. The Blecher cottage

6. Gill Lake portage

7. Alternate Gill Lake portage

8. George Rowes cabin

9. Canoe Lake train station

10. Mark Robinsons house

11. Joe Lake Station

12. Original Portage Store

13. Joe Lake dam

14. Favorite camping site of Thomsons

15. Thomson cairn (also a favorite Thomson camping site)

16. Thomsons canoe recovered

17. Post Office (former Hospital building)

18. Algonquin Hotel

Original Map by William T. Little. Revisions made by Brandon Little.

Copyright 2018 by John Little

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Rain Saukas

Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-3338-1

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-3341-1

Printed in the United States of America

To the memory and efforts of Mark Robinson,
Blodwen Davies, and my father Bill Little.

CONTENTS

To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth.

Voltaire

PREFACE

T he Little family has enjoyed (perhaps enjoyed is not the best word to use) an odd sixty-plus-year relationship with the Tom Thomson saga. I say odd because, after all, its not everybody whose father has held the bones of Tom Thomson in his hands.

This event occurred on an overcast day back in the fall of 1956 when my father, Bill Little, along with friends Jack Eastaugh, Leonard Gibson, and Frank Braught, unearthed human remains while digging on the periphery of a very small and rather obscure burial ground within Algonquin Provincial Park in southeastern Ontario, Canada. Local tradition had indicated that the body of the iconic artist had been buried here on July 17, 1917. But, the tradition continued, a mere two days after the burial, the artists family had contracted the services of an undertaker from Huntsville, a small town located approximately thirty-eight miles to the southwest, to retrieve the body and return it to the family plot in Leith, another small town located almost 181 miles southwest from the artists original gravesite. The Huntsville undertakers task had been a challenging one, as it had required that he dig through five to six feet of soil, remove both an oak casket and rough box, and then transfer a terribly decomposed corpse from its original casket into a metal one. The metal casket would then have to be soldered to seal it for transport by train to its final destination. The undertaker would later go on record that he then reburied the oak casket and rough box in the original grave from which he had removed them.

Making his task even more daunting was the fact that the undertaker had eschewed all help from the local populace, indicating that he preferred to work alone. That he chose to do so in the dead of night during the height of the mosquito and black fly season certainly raised a collective eyebrow from the denizens of the Canoe Lake area but, as they werent involved with the exhumation, and were probably quite content with this fact, it had been generally assumed that the undertaker had done his job and that the transfer of Tom Thomsons body had taken place and that it had subsequently been laid to rest within the Leith Pioneer Cemetery of the Leith Presbyterian (now United) Church. Consequently, thirty-nine years later, when news broke that Thomsons original grave was still occupied, a series of shockwaves spread across the nation.

In the ensuing weeks, newspapers throughout Canada reported on the discovery and, ultimately, the attorney generals office stepped in to render a conclusion on the skeleton that had been found within the unmarked grave of the little cemetery next to Canoe Lake. Based upon their examination, the attorney generals office had concluded that these were not the bones of Canadas most famous artist, but of an indigenous person who had, somehow, found his way not only into Thomsons original grave, but also into what was left of the artists original casket. As the reader can well imagine, such a pronouncement served to raise more questions than it answered. And, indeed, such answers as were proffered by the government as to how such a thing could have happened required such mental gymnastics to accept that many Canadians flatly refused to believe it, and loudly began to question, for the first time, just where Thomsons body was actually buried.

And that was just the matter of where the artists body had been interred! Even more intriguing was the manner in which he died, which has been fraught with controversy ever since his body was found floating in the waters of Canoe Lake on July 16, 1917. Thomson had barely been in his (first) grave when the rumors began to flyhe had committed suicide; there was a love triangle and he was killed by his jealous rival; he slipped and hit his head on a rock and drowned; he was murdered by a cottager over a disagreement about World War I. And those were just the rumors that appeared in the first half of the last century. The second half brought more statements and allegations, such as that the artist was drunk and fell out of his canoe and drowned, or that a lodge owner had killed him over a debt. If ever there could be said to have been anything that was truly a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, the Tom Thomson case was certainly it.

Twelve years after the attorney general had weighed in on the matter, my father was approached by the nations television station, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), and asked if he would assist them with research they were then conducting for a documentary on the late artist. He obliged their request and the television program entitled Was Tom Thomson Murdered? was viewed by millions of Canadians, and served to once again fan the flames of national interest in the matter of the artists death and final resting place. Sometime during his work with the CBC, a large publishing house had learned of my fathers research into the matter of Thomsons death and burial, and approached him with the idea that rather than allow all of his research materials to languish, he should coordinate his archive materials into a book that would throw further light on the mystery. My dad spent the next year writing The Tom Thomson Mystery, (quite literally, as he wrote the entire manuscript by hand and then had my older sister Sally type it out to submit to the publisher). And much to my fathers surprise, when the book was published by McGraw-Hill in 1970 it quickly became a national best-seller. The embrace of his book by the Canadian public revealed that my father was not alone in his belief that there was something quite suspicious about how the artist had met his end and where his body had been laid to rest.