Let’s start at the end. We still don’t know with certainty how Tom Thomson – revered painter of the Canadian wild, beloved contemporary of the Group of Seven, maybe a star-crossed lover, maybe a murder victim, maybe just a lout who needed to be taught a lesson – died out there on Canoe Lake in 1917.
But the Tom Thomson story is one of Canada’s best, one of Canada’s most mysterious, one of Canada’s most beguiling, one of Canada’s most enduring. It has captivated writers, poets, television producers, criminologists, psychologists, outdoor adventure outfitters, forensic scientists, historians, fishing guides, naturalists, tourists, generations of Algonquin campers from Ahmek to Tanamakoon and anyone who has taken even one footstep into the Portage Store just off Route 60 or has splashed even one J-stroke from the stern of a canoe in the waters of Canoe Lake.
This is the greatest Canadian story never fully told, a tale that combines the arts, sciences, maybe romance, maybe crime. At the centre of it is a painter who, as his backwoods Boswell, Roy MacGregor, puts it, is “certain to live forever as a Canadian icon that was half art, half mystery.”
Now, thanks to MacGregor, who travelled these waters before in a well-loved novel now called Canoe Lake but originally published as Shorelines, we – all of us who are drawn to Thomson’s Jack Pine, all of us who are touched in an elemental and sentimental way by Summer Day – are about to set off again in the direction of Hayhurst Point, site of the memorial cairn in the artist’s honour, and to visit all of the other landmarks in the Tom Thomson saga, including, we now know, almost for sure, the spot that is the Thomson gravesite overlooking Canoe Lake.
This time, our companion is Winnie Trainor, the woman who loved him, who thought she was betrothed to him, who might have carried his baby – a woman of mystery and mysterious motives whom, it turned out, MacGregor knew in his own Algonquin boyhood. She is the fulcrum in MacGregor’s new volume, Northern Light.
Anne Winnifred Trainor, born in Bracebridge, Ont., known as Winnie and remembered for her utter failure in art class, grew up in Huntsville, Ont., now teeming with life, at least between blackflies and Thanksgiving weekend, but in her time a mill town years from its modern role as the latchkey to Algonquin Park.
She was 28, Thomson was 36, when they met, probably in 1913, he handsome and romantic, she attractive and formidable, the area only then beginning to acquire a bustle to match its beauty. In later years, there would be conjecture that Winnie was “Laura” in Thomson’s 1915 Figure of a Lady, likely painted on a hill overlooking Canoe Lake.
Northern Light is a biography, mystery, travelogue – and forensic investigation, leading to the positive identification of Thomson's skull, a big deal in the expanding circle of the Thomson-obsessed. And, like much of what MacGregor has written in his books and for this newspaper, a love letter to a special part of North America – one that, it must be noted, held more people in Thomson’s day than in our own, though the bear and the fox likely were more numerous – until, that is, the park’s first superintendent marked them for death, ordering that they be “destroyed without mercy.”
Thomson – part-time fire ranger, full-time painter and probably not the most skilled canoeist these lakes has ever seen – loved what modern visitors crave from Algonquin, though unlike most of the summer people he also was drawn to what MacGregor calls “the rumblings and moanings of the dying ice.” But he was a strange character – MacGregor’s grandfather distrusted him as a lazy bum – and most of the other two-legged denizens of the forest looked askance at him.
