Each July as camp is in full swing, we note the anniversary of fateful Algonquin days in July 1917, when park rangers, guides and friends continued to search for celebrated artist Tom Thomson, last seen alive paddling Canoe Lake alone on July 8, 1917. 

 

Pathfinder was by then in the midst of just her 4th season. Even as camp trips were moving throughout the Park, and certainly around Canoe and Joe Lakes, often using the railroad to shuttle into the backcountry, the search for Thomson became a recovery, a burial, an inquest, and a controversy.

 

Thomson (apparently) didn’t return that day or the next from a solo fishing outing. On July 10, Canoe Lake cottager Martin Blecher Jr. and his sister Bessie discovered Thomson's upturned canoe floating in Canoe, but did not alert searchers who by then noted Thomson as overdue. (see Robinson diary entry).

 

Later the Blechers claimed they believed it was a lodge canoe from Joe Lake's Hotel Algonquin, owned by Lawrence Merrill from Rochester, NY. Yet the canoe colors were completely different; Thomson’s canoe was a unique blue-grey. This tidbit factors greatly in the ensuing suspicions about the Blechers and controversy over Thomson's fate.

 

The First World War raged on in Europe, with Allied and German forces stalemated in gruesome trench warfare. At home in Canada (America had just organized to enter the war in June) 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. The summer's tourists still came to Algonquin to stay at the early lodges and cabins, many 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 Park superintendent George Bartlett on Cache Lake. Robinson would later himself become superintendent. He looms large in Park history, and his fascinating daily diaries inform much of the scholarship on Park history we have today.

 

On July 8, Thomson had told Shannon Fraser and others 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 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. (see Robinson diary entry)

 

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

 

Thomson’s photo with trout is courtesy Algonquin Park Collections. Mark Robinson's diary entries, now sitting on a shelf near Pathfinder material, are in the Special Collections branch of Trent University Libraries.

Noonway,

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