Amid rumours of foul play, four men decided one October day in 1956 to open the original grave of artist Tom Thomson near Canoe Lake in Ontario’s Algonquin Park. The body, supposedly, had been moved to his family plot in faraway Leith, Ont., two days after the initial burial in 1917. But the four men found the remains of a man in the Canoe Lake grave. Who was it? Was it Thomson?
John Little
So begins the non-fiction book Who Killed Tom Thomson? by John Little, a Bracebridge, Ont., author and the son of Bill Little, one of the four gravediggers. The provincial Attorney-General’s department concluded the bones were those of an Indigenous man, although other evidence later suggested that Thomson’s body had not been moved as ordered by his family, and a load of rocks and dirt had been put into a sealed coffin for burial in Leith, on the south shore of Lake Huron’s Georgian Bay.
Little has been steeped in Thomson lore since childhood, largely because of his father’s involvement in the exhumation and his authorship of the 1970 book, The Tom Thomson Mystery. Some say Thomson died accidentally. Others say it was suicide. Yet others say murder. Little wanted to solve the enduring mystery, so he gathered all the evidence he could find and gave it to two experienced detectives from the Ontario Provincial Police. It was the first time police had examined the case.
The two detectives, Daniel Mulligan and Scott Thomson (possibly a distant relative), concluded the famed artist was murdered. But by whom? Let’s just say the question in the book’s title is answered, in a fashion. But before the end, you will encounter tales of a roller-coaster romance, excessive drinking, money problems, a suspicious undertaker – and a mystery that just won’t die. ■
Who Killed Tom Thomson by John Little: Skyhorse Publishing, New York, 2018.