July 10, 2025 - Today is the anniversary of the day in 1917 when park rangers, guides and friends continued to search for artist Tom Thomson, last seen paddling Canoe Lake alone on July 8, 1917.

And today is the date in 1917 when Martin Blecher Jr. and his sister Bessie discovered Thomson's upturned canoe floating in Canoe, but did not alert the searchers. Later they claimed they believed it was a lodge canoe from Joe Lake's Hotel Algonquin, owned by Lawrence Merrill from Rochester, NY. This tidbit factors greatly in the ensuing controversy over Thomson's fate.

Pathfinder was in the midst of her 4th season, and camp trips were throughout the Park. Many CPI trips used the train to 'truck' to and from canoe routes, and doubtless were at Joe Lake and Canoe Lake stations during the search period. The First World War raged on in Europe, with allied and German forces stalemated in gruesome trench warfare. At home in Canada (American had not yet entered the war) food and fuel shortages and the loss of a generation of young men to the war, affected every aspect of life.

By this time, the park railway saw trains on the average of one every 20 minutes, as troops were moved from the prairie east, along with grain and timber, and the summer's tourists coming to Algonquin to stay at the early lodges and cabins, some converted from logging company buildings.

Mark Robinson, the ranger stationed at Joe Lake and a friend of Thomson's since the two first met on the platform at Joe Lake Station in 1911, coordinated the search while updating the Park superintendent George Bartlett on Cache Lake. Robinson would later himself become park superintendent. His fascinating daily diaries inform much of the scholarship on park history that we have today.

On July 8, Thomson had told Mowat Lodge owner Shannon Fraser (overheard by Robinson) that he planned to paddle into Sam, Gill and Drummer to catch a nice trout, taking only his tackle, signature blue-grey canoe, paddles, skillet, flour, sugar and tea pail. This was common Tom Thomson practice and no one was concerned when he didn't return to Canoe Lake and Mowat for a couple of days.

Thomson's body would be discovered six days later on July 16, when cottager Dr. Howland alerted two searching guides, Lowrie Dickson and George Rowe, to something floating in the lake. The guides paddled up to their friend's gruesome corpse, verified it as Thomson, and were ordered to moor Thomson in a shallow bit of shoreline water at Little Wapomeo Island, while Robinson alerted headquarters and the coroner and crown attorney were summoned.

The life of Canada's most celebrated painter was over, but the intrigue was just beginning.

Here are a famous snapshot of Thomson at Mowat with a day's catch, and a close up of today's entry in 1917, in ranger Mark Robinson's diary, now sitting on a shelf near Pathfinder material in the special collections branch of the Trent University Libraries.

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