Tom Thomson and Canoe Lake

A real, unsolved 1917 death at the heart of Canadian art

Tom Thomson painted the northern Ontario bush the way nobody had before him, and the painters who became the Group of Seven built on what he did. He never joined them, because he was dead before they formed.

On 8 July 1917 he left Fraser's dock on Canoe Lake in Algonquin Park sometime after half past twelve. Eight days later, on 16 July, his body was found in the lake, badly decomposed, with a four-inch bruise on the right temple. His watch had stopped at 12:14. The coroner, Dr Arthur E. Ranney, held an inquest and concluded accidental drowning, taking the bruise as an impact against a stone or similar in the water.

He was buried at Mowat Cemetery beside the lake on 17 July, and four days later, on 21 July, his family had him re-interred in the churchyard at Leith.

The part that keeps the story alive happened in 1956. Judge William Little and three friends dug at the original Canoe Lake grave and found human remains, which they believed were Thomson's. Medical investigators concluded otherwise: the body was that of an unidentified Aboriginal person. The Leith grave has never been opened. So there are two graves, one of which certainly contains somebody and neither of which has been shown to contain him, and the argument is still running. Roy MacGregor argued in 2010 that the 1956 remains were Thomson after all; Gregory Klages reviewed the same evidence in 2016 and concluded the original finding of accidental drowning stands.

Murder and suicide theories circulate and neither has ever been substantiated.

Canoe Lake is a straightforward paddle from the Algonquin access point, and there is a memorial cairn on the shore. Go for the water and the light, which is what he was there for.