Separating fact from fiction in a 100-year-old mystery

By Joel Wittnebel/The Oshawa Express

His art is seen as some of the most influential in Canadian history, his landscape paintings have become quintessentially Canadian images. However, Tom Thomson’s legacy is forever enshrined in mystery and speculation after he died in Algonquin Park 100 years ago.

Since that day in July 1917, when Thomson’s canoe was discovered floating unmanned in the park’s Canoe Lake and the discovery of his decomposing body eight days later, the story of what exactly happened to the painter has taken many twists and turns.

For writer, historian and professor Gregory Klages, his book, The Many Deaths of Tom Thomson, looks to the facts for that very answer, delving through the rumours and hearsay to find the 100-year-old evidence to back up these claims.

Klages was recently in town as part of the Oshawa Museum’s speaker series, and spoke with The Oshawa Express about what it was like to analyze a mystery that will be a century old this summer.

The information contained in the book is the result of research that stems back 10 years, when Klages was helping create an online database for the Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History project, focusing on the primary information and source material that stemmed from Thomson’s death, most of which currently sits in the archives of various institutions.

“Our plan was to digitize excerpts from these documents, pictures, maps, sound files, all these sorts of things so that people could get a sense of what it’s like to work as a historian and that you don’t get the sort of pre-digested story,” Klages says.

It was during the work for that project that Klages came to a realization, and what he sees as a “critical moment.”

“I went back to these original documents from 1917, the time of Thomson’s death, to look for the sources of these stories and what I often discovered was many of these stories, there is no evidence from 1917 to support many of these stories,” he says.

And the stories abound; anyone familiar with Thomson’s death will know the case is shrouded in uncertainty and hearsay from years of talk and speculation — stories that Thomson was murdered over a lover, that he committed suicide to avoid dealing with a pregnant girlfriend, or maybe he simply had an accident and was the victim of an unfortunate drowning.

Fuelled by traumatized friends, a poor telegraph connection out of Algonquin Park and people attempting to find answers through tragedy, the story around Thomson’s death became one of urban legend. Then, when the Group of Seven artists, many of whom were Thomson’s friends and influenced by his artwork (though the group itself didn’t form until three years after Thomson’s death) included Thomson as a kind of honorary member, a mystique began to build around the deceased artist who seemed to have the qualities of rugged outdoorsman and sensitive artist.

“This whole mythology begins to collect around Thomson’s death, there was excuse making and storytelling behind the scenes for the people who had been there and once a generation passed away, what did we have left? Well, we had left the rumours, the gossip, the mythology, that had just begun to take on a life of its own,” Klages says.

Has Klages solved the mystery? Well, he says that was never his intention.

“The initial impetus for the book wasn’t to answer the question of how Tom Thomson died,” he says, noting he was more interested in finding how he didn’t die.

“Once we take away kind of these secondary accounts and all the stuff that has accumulated over the last 100 years that isn’t grounded in the 1917 evidence, where do these theories stand?”

The three most popular explanations for his death on that day in 1917 include: murder, suicide and tragic accident. Klages dedicates a portion of his book, analyzing the evidence available to pick apart these theories. He comes to one conclusion.

“What I discovered once I had written all of this up, two of those theories have very, very, little evidence supporting them,” he says.

“They’re mostly based on conjecture and gossip and hearsay and wild speculation and only one of them seems plausible and reasonable.”

More information on Klages, his book and upcoming tour dates can be found at manydeathsoftomthomson.blogspot.ca.