Toronto Mike'd: The Official Toronto Mike Podcast - The Many Deaths of Tom Thomson: Toronto Mike'd #364

Episode Date: August 7, 2018

Mike chats with Dr. Gregory Klages about the life of Tom Thomson and the mythology surrounding his death in Algonquin Park in 1917 at the young age of 39.

Welcome to episode 364 of Toronto Mic'd, a weekly podcast about anything and everything. Proudly brought to you by Great Lakes Brewery, a fiercely independent craft brewery located here in Etobicoke. Did you know that 99% of all Great Lakes beer remains here in Etobicoke. Did you know that 99% of all Great Lakes beer remains here in Ontario? GLB. Brewed for you, Ontario. And propertyinthesix.com. Toronto real estate done right.

And Paytm, an app designed to manage all of your bills in one spot. Download the app today from paytm.ca and our newest sponsor Census Design and Build providing architectural design, interior design, and turnkey construction services

across the GTA. I'm Mike from torontomike.com and joining me this week to discuss the many deaths of Tom Thompson is Dr. Gregory Clogis. Hey, Mike.

Nice to see you. Thanks for having me. Bye. Doctor, are you a medical doctor? I am not a medical doctor. So, Michael, if I suddenly have some kind of an episode,

a medical episode, you won't be an extraordinary help here. Well, I can dial 911 pretty quickly. Tell me about how you are a doctor. I'm just impressed when someone has doctor in their title. Well, a doctor, there's two types of doctor, of course. There's the medical doctor, and then there's a doctor who has completed their PhD, and I'm one of those latter doctors. And why I put doctor in front of it is because oftentimes, say, my students or other people will call me Professor Klages, but to be a professor, you have to be hired full-time, permanent with the university.

Tenured or something? Tenured, exactly, yeah. And so because I'm not a professor, putting the doctor there just helps to clarify kind of my title or status or qualifications to speak about something. See, I would actually go back to school and get a PhD just to become a doctor, Dr. Toronto Mike. I think that would be amazing. Well, you know, it's only like a five-year commitment or something like that. Why not? Do I have five years left?

I'm just doing the math, I think. So I might have to do that. Wait, I'm going to play a jam right off the top here. This, of course, is the Tragically Hipped Three Pistols. And it opens with, well, Tom Thompson came paddling past. I'm pretty sure it was him. And he spoke so softly in accordance to the growing of the dim. Tell me, can we begin by you telling those who may not be as aware, not as savvy as some others, who was Tom Thompson?

Tom Thompson died about 100 years ago, so in 1917. And when he died, he wasn't a particularly well-known individual. He was a painter. He'd been painting for about five years. He'd trained as a sort of illustrator, essentially. And he was living in Toronto about that time for part of the year, making paintings, and spent the rest of the time living in Algonquin Park

in sort of central Ontario. And while he was there, he was painting these scenes and selling his paintings. And then when he died, of course, this tragic death, his name kind of, I don't want to say faded, but essentially his paintings took on extra value or gained extra attention because of what some of his friends did. And his friends became members of the Group of Seven,

a group of Canadian painters who most people have some sort of passing reference to. They recognize them as important. And they pointed to Thompson as a huge influence on their work. When they exhibited in the United States, when they exhibited in England, when they exhibited in France, they took his works along and exhibited his works with theirs. And they said, this guy really showed us new and interesting things. Jumping further ahead, by the 1940s, people like Hugh MacLennan, a famous Canadian novelist, is saying Thompson is one of the 10 most important Canadians. And another tragically hip song, of course. Another courage. Exactly. And then, of course,

by this time period, you know, today, Thompson Works are selling for, I think the most one is sold for, is around $3 million. They have become hugely collectible. His name has become widely known across the country and beyond. Probably every public school and post office across the country has a Tom Thompson print in it. Your crazy uncle, whatever, has a Tom Thompson tie. Or at your cottage, you've got a Tom Thompson jigsaw puzzle. He's just become part of the cultural fabric, a part of the way many Canadians see their country

because of his art. Now, okay, so he lived in Toronto and he spent a lot of time in Algonquin Park and that's where he did the paintings. And so you've already stated this, but let's make this clear. He's not a member of the Group of Seven. He's like affiliated.

He died in 1917, the summer of 1917 and he was a co-worker with a couple of guys who went on to become members of the group of seven but the group wasn't actually founded until 1920 three years after thompson died so as i said they they recognized him as an influence he was the one who told them for instance you guys have to come up to this algonquin park place and see what's going on here. He had the same patron as some of the members of the Group of Seven. So many of them were closely linked. They'd been friends for five years or so, but he wasn't actually a member of the Group of Seven.

And you mentioned his death. Now, the bulk of this episode is going to be about the, as you say, and we'll get into, you know, why you're in authority on this topic, but the many deaths of Tom Thompson. But a couple of things, just to clarify, also, I go biking sometimes, and there's a great Tommy Thompson Park in Toronto, but this is a different Tommy Thompson, right? This is a completely different Tommy Thompson. And strangely enough, you know, going back to the Group of Seven era, that's the same thing that a lot of times people spell Thompson's last name with a P in it. This is not correct.

There's no P in the Thompson name. But I think where part of that might come from is one of the historical people who recorded a lot of information about Thompson's life quite frequently spelled the name incorrectly too. So yeah, but not to be mistaken for Tommy Thompson Park. No P in our Tom Thompson. That's a different Tommy Thompson. And we don't in our Tom Thompson. That's a different Tommy Thompson.

And we don't have the park. A park is a different Tommy Thompson. But I can definitely see people assuming it's one and the same. Like this is probably a common misconception here in the city. And that's probably why people often... I mean, Gord got it right. He said Tom Thompson. But we'll call him Tommy Thompson.

And I think of that Tommy Thompson park all the time. So completely different guys. He's always not a member of the group of seven because he predated the group of seven. That's right. But they, of course, he blazed the trail,

if you will, for the group of seven, he was instrumental in that regard. And he, these paintings. So he lived in Toronto and he, he, he,

I guess he had a job, I guess here, like painting, like commercial painting in Toronto. Is this his, to pay the bills, this was his full-time job? Yeah, there was a few things that he did. So I think about 1905 or so, he moved back to Toronto. He had been working for a couple of years in Seattle, Washington. And he had also worked in various places in Ontario before that.

He grew up in Ontario. But he went to Seattle and was working as essentially like an illustrator, graphic designer, making advertising posters, ads for newspapers, things like that. And then when he came back to Toronto, he got a job here with a design firm. And he worked at that, I think, until about 1914, if I remember off the top of my head correctly. He also had a patron. And a patron said to him, essentially, look, I'll buy enough of your

paintings that you don't have to worry about your living expenses. And although that agreement only lasted for about a year, they maintained a really close relationship. And this guy, Dr. James McCallum, who was a Toronto ophthalmologist or type of eye doctor, throughout Thompson's life, he kept helping Thompson move his artworks. He helped Thompson with his finances, that sort of thing. So for the last couple of years of Thompson's life, he lived off of selling his paintings. He lived off of doing things like guiding fishing parties in Algonquin Park. He lived off money he'd already had saved up. He had a few different streams of income, like many artists today.

I did read one person's account of Tom Thompson, and he compared him to, he said he was Canada's Van Gogh. Is that a fair, would that be a parallel that we could kind of draw, just so people, and that was, I wish I could cite the source on that one but uh i just thought it was an interesting uh parallel that you said that that tom thompson was canada's vincent van gogh i certainly can see where people might make that comparison but then there are also some things about that comparison that might lead people astray of course we know van gogh had some pretty deep mental health issues. We don't have any evidence that Thompson had those kinds of issues. He died, I think, or at least as I would argue, tragically by accident, not by his own hand.

And he died on a date, just to be specific. The date was July 8th, 1917. And he died at the very young age of 39. Yeah, he died about two weeks before his 40th birthday. So 39-year-old Tom Thompson, and you say we'll dive into this much deeper, but you say he died an accidental drowning? That's in 1917 when his body was examined. That was the conclusion of both the doctor who examined his body and the park ranger who examined the body. Since that time, there have been other theories proposed.

We're going to dive into all this, right? We're going to dive into the many deaths of Tom Thompson. I know. Setting the table here. So now we know who Tom Thompson is. He's referenced in that fantastic hip song, Three Pistols, from Road Apples. I was on a road trip a couple of years ago. We were driving to PEI, but we were going through

Quebec, and I saw the road sign for Trois Pistoles that inspired the title of that great, great, tragically hip song. And I'm wearing my Jaws shirt here today. I figured we're going to play some Gord. I'll wear the Jaws shirt that he wore on his farewell

tour. So, Dr. Gregory, do I need to call you doctor? Can I call you Gregory? You can call me Gregory. Okay, good. I don't have a lot of doctors on this show. So, Gregory, before we do a couple of sponsors mentions and then we dive into the many deaths of Tom Thompson,

could you please tell us who you are and how you became an authority on all things Tom Thompson. Who I am. Well, I teach things like Canadian history and Canadian politics in a couple of different Toronto universities. And I have training in art history and Canadian history. Before I undertook my graduate work, I worked for not quite 10 years, a little under 10 years in the art gallery sector. So part of my interest in Thompson's work in art in general, Canadian art in general, comes from handling those objects on a

regular basis. And then about 2003 or so, I encountered a group called the Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History Project. And what that organization has been doing is digitizing big collections of Canadian historical documents that otherwise might be really difficult for people to get access to. You know, if you are, say, a high school student in northern Saskatchewan, and you want to know how a historian works and see what they handle, it's probably difficult to get to an archives or to see these things. So what this project does is we've selected, I think, up to now 13 significant, interesting mysteries associated with Canadian history. And each of these mysteries reflects a Canadian time period, a significant issue of the Canadian past. And I pitched to them, hey, the Toronto, sorry, the Tom Thompson death mystery

might be an interesting one. So at the time, I just started my PhD. So we kind of delayed for a while doing the project, but we completed it and it launched. It's called Death on a Painted Lake, but we completed it and it launched, it's called Death on a Painted Lake, the Tom Thompson tragedy. And it's a book-length website, so about 100 to 150,000 words, fully bilingual, comes with teaching plans for teachers to use in the classroom, etc. And it's all historical archival documents related to Tom Thompson's life, death, and the context of his life. So things like the history of Algonquin Park, exhibition reviews from Toronto art exhibitions of the time, that sort of stuff. First of all, you're wearing the T-shirt. So when we take our photo after this episode, they can see the great unsolved mysteries in Canadian history. The T-shirt is great.

Even the T-shirt is bilingual. Of course. That's excellent. We planned out our uniform for today. That's right. That's right. That's right. Now, I love the idea that, you know, I'm thinking like I majored in history at U of T and I just, you know, I was always interested in Canadian history,

but I just wish we had like interesting lessons on stuff like this that would kind of interesting topics like this. I don't remember the Tom Thompson on the curriculum. Like this is great though for teachers to teach Canadian history. So your death on a painted lake, the Tom Thompson tragedy, on the curriculum. This is great for teachers to teach Canadian history. So your Death on a Painted Lake,

the Tom Thompson tragedy, is there a URL where we could find this, or do we just Google it, or is this still online? Off the top of my head, I can't remember the full URL. Google it, people! Yeah, if people type in essentially either Death on a Painted Lake or Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History, they'll get to the site,

and that's probably the easiest way to tell them to get there. And there are 13 of them, so they cover regions and time periods, not only across the country, but throughout a thousand years of Canadian history. There's one about the Vikings, for instance, right? It goes a fairly long time back. And people, I think, and this is part of what I tried to do with The Many Deaths of Tom Thompson, the book. Okay, so this is another book.

So you wrote a book. In fact, it was, I can tell you, because you might not want to toot your own horn, but it was a National Post bestseller. You wrote a book, The Many Deaths of Tom Thompson. That's right. So the Death on a Painted Lake site, once all that had been put together, for a variety of reasons, things like copyright permissions and cost and all kinds of sort of pragmatic concerns, I didn't put everything I had on that site. And debated at that point writing a book with all this research and documents I'd collected. But it seemed sort of to frustrate the effort if I assign students or have a project for students to do and then essentially answer all those questions in a book that they can go to their library and get.

So waited until the 100th anniversary of Thompson's death, which was in 2017, to develop and write The Many Deaths of Tom Thompson. And in that book, what I do is take all that evidence that I've collected and analyze it and try to answer or address all the sort of concerns that I had about the evidence and to make sense of the evidence for people. Fascinating. And that's the primary subject matter today, The Many Deaths of Tom Thompson. I should also point out that this book you wrote, The Many Deaths of Tom Thompson,

was among the Writers' Trust of Canada Best Books I guess that was of 2016. So maybe this came out in 2016. This came out in 2016, yeah. So it's been about 101 years since Tom Thompson died at the young age of 39. That's crazy, 39 years old. It also might be useful, I realize,

depending on when your listeners are listening to this, but August 5th of 2018 would have been Thompson's 141st birthday. There you go. We should have scheduled this for that day. What's wrong with us? Well, it was a holiday Sunday. That's all right.

I would have made an exception for you. I would have made an exception. So let's thank some very kind organizations and people who help keep this podcast going. I cannot thank these people enough. And one of the primary sponsors we've had here for years, I've been seeing all over the news lately. So Great Lakes Brewery.

Firstly, they have a gift for you, Greg. They have, Greg, can I call you Greg? That's fine. Well, let's see if we're buddies now. That six pack in front of you is all yours to enjoy. Thank you, Mike. And GLB. GLB.

And the reason I mentioned they're all over the news is because I saw that Troy from Great Lakes Brewery was on CTV Toronto News last night because Great Lakes said they weren't going to offer a buck a beer. I guess that's the... I saw that. And I know as we speak right now, I believe Doug Ford is announcing the specifics on this rollout of buck a beer. I actually can't believe the amount of time and energy

and press and all this stuff about this focus on getting cheaper beer. I just think there might be other priorities in other places we could assert our efforts and money. It certainly is an interesting conundrum with there's not enough money to maintain basic income pilot, but we can try to subsidize a buck a beer.

But apparently this right now, and I won't go too politically here, but the floor right now apparently is $1.25 a beer. I think McGinty brought this in, I think. And it's not mandatory. But no one's doing it. Apparently there is no $1.25 a beer. I think McGinty brought this in, I think. And it's not mandatory. But no one's doing it. Apparently, there is no $1.25 a beer. So as we speak right now,

there is no brewery in Ontario selling at the floor. So I don't see there being this great need to lower the floor. You know what I mean? It's not like there's a whole bunch of breweries out there saying, we sell our beer for $1.25,

but we wish we could sell it to you for $1. But the government said we can't. And so this whole notion of rewarding or subsid of breweries out there saying, we sell our beer for $1.25, but we wish we could sell it to you for a dollar. But the government said we can't. And so this whole notion of like rewarding or subsidizing breweries for actually selling cheap, crappy beer, 25 cents a beer cheaper than they could do it now, but they aren't for obvious reasons because there's some quality control, I hope, at breweries. So Great Lakes says, you know, we're going to keep doing what we're doing, which is producing quality craft beer, fiercely independent quality craft beer at a very reasonable and fair price. So they're just going to keep moving forward as they have been. Anyway, that's been news lately.

But that, how long he took for it is totally politicized beer, which I find fascinating. But Great Lakes Brewery, gift for you, Gregory. Thank you so much. I also want to thank, very much want to thank, here, let me play his jingle. Propertyinthe6.com The second longest serving sponsor of this show is Brian Gerstein.

And Brian Gerstein, he just loved the podcast and wanted to help keep it going. And Brian Gerstein is a real estate sales representative with PSR Brokerage, and he can be reached. Call him anytime. If it's four in the morning, I'll make sure he answers your call. 416-873-0292. If you're planning to buy and or sell in the next six months, just call Brian, have a meeting with Brian, chat with Brian, Brian's an honest guy he's full of integrity

he's got great references and he's the guy behind propertyinthesix.com I want to thank Brian I'm hoping he can make the next Toronto Mike listener experience he was at the first one in his Expos jersey, he's a proud Montreal Expos

fan, which is kind of sad, you know, to be a fan of a team that does not play. That makes me sad. But I've never had to experience that. I always felt bad for like, imagine you were a Vancouver guy and you were big on the Grizzlies and then they just sort of disappeared one night.

Like that would be really sad to have your team go away. I've never lost a team. Remember, I mean, from my perspective, you're speaking to a historian, right? All the things I'm interested in aren't around anymore. That's right. That's right. That's a different kettle of fish, though. So thank you, Brian. Again, go to

propertyinthesix.com and contact Brian Gerstein from PSR Brokerage. And PayTM Canada, these guys, just tremendous supporters of the podcast. I think I might have been the first podcast they sponsored,

and now I see they're sponsoring a bunch of podcasts. And now I see them, like, their marketing efforts. I see they're, like, on the side of the Gardner, I'll see a Paytm Canada sign. Or at Yonge and Dundas Square, I'll see a Paytm Canada sign. Like it's just great to see them out there making people aware of this fantastic app. I pay all of my bills with Paytm Canada. So go to paytm.ca, download the app for free on your smartphone, set it up. And when you make your first bill payment, I don't know, pay your hydro

or whatever, your natural gas, your property tax, pay anything, Rogers, Bell, whatever, and use the promo code Toronto Mike when you make that first bill payment because they'll give you $10 in Paytm cash that you can use towards a future invoice. So $10 sitting there for free, no charge, an amazing app. Like regardless, forget the $10. I did take advantage because, you know, I want 10 bucks, but it's an amazing app and I use it all the time to pay all of my bills. So thank you, Paytm Canada. And I used to play The Fixer by Pearl Jam, which was a better idea because it just jumps right into it. And then the other day, I was thinking of XTC's Senses Working Overtime.

And then I was hearing it in my head as Senses Working Overtime. And I said, oh, I just said, that's too perfect. But then when I played it, I really, it takes a long time to get to that part. So I need to really,

what do you call it, vamp? Is that the, I need to vamp here. But here's what I'll tell you. Good people at Census Design and Build and they provide architectural design, interior design and turnkey construction services across the GTA. And to learn more about the

possibilities for your home call them at 416-931-1422 or visit censusdesignbuild.ca. Census Design and Build. Call them today to schedule your zoning and cost project feasibility study. And I never mentioned this. I should mention it more, but patreon.com slash Toronto Mike.

That is where you can become a patron. And I really look out for my patrons. So join the club. I really would appreciate it. You can get in there for like a dollar a month. It starts a dollar a month. And any amount is truly appreciated to help keep Toronto Mike going.

So here we are three 64. I'm breaking the format. I've kind of got a predictable format at this point. So now I kind of, once in a while, I like to break that format. Like it's fun to break the format, busting it up,

busting it up. So then it's like, what Mike, what's this? Like, are you, is it, who is that?

Is a Maryland Dennis with you now? No, here we are. We're Dr. Gregory Clagus, and we're going to talk about the many deaths of Tommy Thompson. Can I call him Tommy Thompson? He's not around to disagree with you, so you can give it a go.

That's right. We've already established he was not a member of the Group of Seven, but he was the honorary. Can I call him an honorary member? He's not going to stop me there either. No, I think that would be perfectly legitimate to call him an honorary member of the Group of Seven. And he was not famous.

When he passed away at the young age of 39 in Algonquin Park, he was not famous, right? Not at all, no. He had sold, if I remember correctly, I think one work to the province of Ontario, the government of the province of Ontario, and one or two works to the National Gallery. But other than that, he really wasn't very well known. He'd had some paintings exhibited in Toronto and a couple outside of Toronto.

His death merited some newspaper attention, but I think just as much for the sort of shocking or surprising accidental death as much as that he was an artist. And outside of the Toronto art scene, he was an unknown. Do you personally have a favorite Tom Thompson painting? Like, is there one Tom Thompson painting that's your favorite? That's a good question, actually. I've never really thought of that before. I think, because I've looked at them so many times and for so long,

I think generally the most well-known ones, the Jack Pine, the West Wind, I kind of, I won't say I'm tired of them, but I just feel like... You've seen them so many times, right? I've seen them enough, yeah, to kind of get it. And oftentimes my eye sort of picks out imperfections or things that I don't like about them. What I've come to really like are some of the really early works from about 1911, 1912 that are kind of dull and a narrow palette and, you know, sort of browns and grays and flat. But there's something really labored about them.

Like this guy is really fighting against something to try and figure out how to make these interesting images. And they're compelling objects to look at to see and know how this guy's painting would develop over a very short period of time. All right. So let's, what do we know? What do we know? Like, what are the indisputable facts about the death of Tom Thompson? Is that a good place to start? Tell me if I, if there's a better place to start. Maybe just like, like, what do we know to be indisputable at this point about the death at the age of 39 of Tom Thompson in Algonquin Park? I think it's a really interesting place to start because one of the challenges, as I talk about in The Many Deaths of Tom Thompson, there is very little that is indisputable that we know. And yet there have been lots of claims made by

people to say, look, here are all these facts, all these things we know. But most of the things that we have been told about the death of Tom Thompson, there are contending tales or alternative stories. So what we do know is that on July 8th, 1917, Tom Thompson had been living in Algonquin Park for a few months, living there, painting, maybe guiding some fishing parties, etc. It's probably pretty reasonable to assume he and some of his friends were having a bit of a competition to say, we're going to catch this one big fish. Nobody had caught it yet, and he decided, I'm going to play a joke on this buddy of mine. I'm going to go and catch a big trout in another lake and tell him I've caught this big fish. So about noon on July 8th, he gets in his canoe. Maybe one person saw him, maybe a

few people saw him leave. And off he goes to catch this fish. On Sunday afternoon, it's a relatively calm day. It's about 15, 16 degrees, no high winds, rainstorms, anything like that. About 3 p.m. that afternoon, some people boating across the lake see Thompson's canoe overturned in the water. Now, what they do about that, we don't have. I can't say it's indisputable, so I won't say what they do about it. But essentially, they see this canoe, but nothing happens. On July 10th, so two days after Thompson has left,

someone at Canoe Lake, where Thompson was living, reports him as missing. And what they say is, we should drag the lake for Thompson's body. The park ranger who the death is reported to goes and interviews these people who saw the canoe overturned. And he writes in his diary that day, oh, Tom should probably be back soon. The assumption is that he's not injured very badly. He's maybe on the shore.

His canoe got away from him or he twisted his ankle getting out to Portage or whatever. So for about six or seven days, they search theline they search the portages they search some of the local trails looking for thompson and then on the morning of july 16th thompson's body comes to the surface of the lake within about a half a mile of where he departed his body is found um It's brought to shore. Park authorities are notified, the coroner's notified, and everybody kind of sits on their hands and waits. Thompson's body is left in the lake, but anchored on the shore. That night, undertakers show up. They've been summoned as well. There's still no coroner. So everybody's kind of feeling anxious. They don't know what to do about

this. The next morning, the park ranger responsible for that area of the lake contacts the park superintendent. The park superintendent says, look, if the coroner hasn't showed up, bury the body. It's been in the water for eight days. It's clearly decomposing. It's a mess. And so a doctor and the park ranger examine the body, make notes about what they see. Then they take the body and bury it in a cemetery in Algonquin Park.

That evening, the coroner arrives. But the body that the coroner is supposed to examine has already been buried. So the coroner interviews people around the lake and agrees with the finding of the doctor in the park ranger that Thompson died by accident. And then the next day, an undertaker arrives because the family, the Thompson family, didn't want Tom buried in Canoe Lake.

They wanted him buried in a family plot in a village called Leith, just outside Owen Sound. So Thompson's body is exhumed from Algonquin Park and transferred down to the Leith Cemetery. And I'd say those are pretty much the core indisputable facts. So all that is pretty much indisputable, all of that. Okay. Pretty much.

Not all of it, but pretty much all of it. And it goes without saying that Tom Thompson was a very capable paddler and familiar with the area. Like this is, he's lived there. Canoe Lake is part of Algonquin Park, right? Exactly, yeah. And for those who might not be familiar with Algonquin Park, if you've ever been there,

Highway 60 goes through sort of the southern middle half of Algonquin Park. And if you go to the Portage store, that's on Canoe Lake, but it's at the other end of the lake from where Thompson is kind of living and moving, just to help people get oriented. Sure. At that time, in 1917, there's no roads going into Algonquin Park. There's only trains going through there. But he had moved around Canoe Lake. He had

been in and out of the park for about five years, so he knew that lake well. He'd been certainly in 1917 living there for a couple of months already. As for whether he was an expert paddler or not, even that isn't indisputed. There's a great set of documents, a historian researcher named Blodwin Davies in the 1930s was corresponding with a lot of Thompson's friends and family members and things like that. And she deposited her letters in the National Archives. So you can go and see what all these people had to say about Thompson. And even there, there's these contending reports about, oh, he'd dump his canoe. He wasn't that skilled. Or others, of course, would say, no, no, no, he was a really great canoeist. He knew what he was doing. And it's sort of intriguing even to see the response in 1917, where

Robinson just assumes, well, he could have had an accident. Well, if he was so skilled or so great, it's kind of hard to get your head around the idea that he had an accident. Right, because the weather wasn't a factor. As you said, it was a calm, nice 16-degree day or whatever it was. Yeah, there was no great windstorms or tornadoes or anything like that being reported. Not even a thunderstorm. Not even a thunderstorm.

So, okay, so there we go. It sounds fairly reasonable to assert that Tom Thompson had an accidental drowning. Who am I? But that was what was decided there by the doctor and the park ranger before they buried him. Then you mentioned they exhumed the body because the family wanted the body moved to, I guess, outside of Owen Sound. There was a village where they had a family plot. So they exhumed the body.

And this is all still back in 1917, right? That's right. 1917, right? That's right. So now, please guide us through the various, like, where does the urban legends and the mythology and the many deaths, where do they come from? Maybe walk us through all that. Sure.

Anytime there's an accidental death, I think people always ask the questions of how could this have happened? I mean, the guy's 39 years old. There certainly was the idea that this wasn't a particularly risky undertaking that he was doing, canoeing across a fairly calm lake. In 1917, in the fall of 1917, there's some correspondence we have with the Thompson family, where there was some gossip about maybe Tom committed suicide. And the family said, we completely reject that idea. We completely reject that theory. And writing to Thompson's friends and saying, well, if you are his friends, how could you even suggest such a thing? What would make you say that? And the whole story just very quickly faded from the discussion. By the 1930s is where alternatives first start being suggested, really. And it goes

back to that park ranger that I mentioned earlier, a guy named Mark Robinson. And he was the park ranger responsible for the Canoe Lake region. And Blodwin Davies, that Thompson researcher, she had written sort of a biography of Thompson in 1930. And in that biography, she mentioned very little about Thompson's death. She gave it a couple of sentences and didn't mention anything about anything, sorry, any theories like suicide or murder. She just said he died by accident. But in researching that book, she was writing and corresponding with a lot of Thompson's friends and family, Mark Robinson's park ranger included. And he suggested there are some people who know things that if you're careful,

you might learn. And he suggested there were some fishy things around the death. And so Davies corresponded with Robinson more. And he suggested, for instance, that when Thompson's body was found, there was a fishing line around the ankle that would seem to suggest something else going on. He referred to the death as mysterious. And when Davies went up to Algonquin Park and talked to Robinson, she came away convinced that Thompson had been murdered. And so in her book, she self-published a book in 1935 where she suggested that Thompson had been murdered. Because it was self-published and there weren't a whole lot of copies sold, the story didn't really make much of an impression. There was no podcasts for her to go on.

There were no podcasts at all. She didn't even get on. Even though I learned earlier, Tom Thompson had a Patreon account, essentially. He had the Patreon helping keep his art going so he was the first canadian i think to have a to have a patreon account but please continue long in advance of the technology he was really working on um in 19 jumping strongly or jumping quite ahead um in 1956 there were uh four guys in algonquin park and they had camp there as kids they had cottage Algonquin Park, and they had camped there as kids. They had cottage leases in the park, and they had heard gossip from people like Mark Robinson

that maybe Thompson hadn't died by accident, and also to complicate things, that his body had never actually been exhumed from the park. So these four guys decide, and I can't find any evidence of this, but I can't help but think maybe alcohol was involved here. They get the clever idea to go over to the cemetery where Thompson was originally buried and dig around. Oh, alcohol was definitely involved. I can confirm that. Right.

So they get this clever idea. It's a long weekend, the end of September of 1956. And they go over there and they sink one hole beside the cemetery because they don't know exactly where Thompson was buried even originally, right? There's no headstone marking it because there's no body there anymore. So they sink one hole, they come up with nothing. They sink a second hole, they come up with nothing. They sink a third hole digging beside a cemetery. And to make a long story short, they find human remains. Which you might find in a cemetery, I would think.

You'd think it's not implausible. Not that unusual. Yeah. But they are very excited by this because they believe right off the bat they have located Tom Thompson's remains. And what they've been told about the exhumation is wrong. And so they get a doctor at the lake, who's holidaying at the lake, to look at the remains. And the doctor says, yeah, these are human remains. The OPP is notified.

And the doctor says, yeah, these are human remains. The OPP is notified. The head of the Attorney General's laboratory, Dr. Noble Sharp, comes up with an OPP officer. And about a week after the discovery, they exhume the bones. As they're exhuming the bones, they go through the whole process. But what really makes things interesting for everybody is the skull. And they find the skull, and the skull has a hole in the left temple. And of course, when they first pull this out of the ground, if this is Thompson's body, it suggests he didn't die by accident. If he's got a big gaping hole in his skull.

There's a hole in this body's temple that would suggest some kind of violence involved. Exactly, yes. And so everyone who is at this exhumation assumes, well, this is Thompson's body, and the guy's experienced some kind of foul play. So they take the remains back to Toronto, and they're examined by an anthropologist, and the skull is x-rayed, and all these sorts of things. And very quickly, I shouldn't say very quickly, but within about a month, the OPP announced that not only are these not Tom Thompson's remains, they're in fact those of an indigenous man. So it's not even a man of European heritage.

And that the hole in the skull wasn't caused by violence, it was caused by a surgical procedure called traffination. Okay. So we would think, well, that sort of kills the whole Tom Thompson was murdered story and that it's not even Thompson's body. But one of those men, William Little, one of the men who found the remains, never accepted that this wasn't Tom Thompson's body. And so in 1970, he wrote a book called The Tom Thompson Mystery, where he argues that Thompson was murdered. He died in a fight or as

a result of a fight with another man at the lake. And so that's where the murder theory really begins to take off. The CBC television does a documentary called Was Tom Thompson Murdered? That'll do it, yeah. Yep. And so, and this, it's really fascinating because there's some files in the archives, for instance, of like school kids who watched the show and then wrote letters to the Attorney General telling the Attorney General what they thought. So the idea that Tom Thompson was murdered then really takes off about 1970. And let me step back a moment. So we talked about when he dies in 1917, he's not famous.

Like the average Canadian doesn't know who Tom Thompson is. So help us understand, when does he become famous? Well, in the 1920s, the group of seven, or sorry, 1920, they were formed. In the 1920s, they're exhibiting not only in Canada, of course, but they have an international exhibition that's in the United States, it's in Paris, it's in London. This is really, from a perspective of Canadian artists, the first time Canadian artists are really making an international splash or international presence. And they include Thompson's work in their exhibition. In fact, they give him his own room. And in reviews that we can read on the Death on

a Painted Lake website, we've reproduced some of these reviews, reviewers are often paying more attention to Thompson's work than they are the group of seven's work. There's also, of course, the factor that Thompson's tragic death in the, and I'll put this in quotation marks, you know, the great wild untouched wilderness lends credence to what the group of seven is doing, right? This unique Canadian style, unique Canadian landscape, and it's dangerous. You got to be tough and masculine and brave to be out there painting this stuff, which makes Thompson seem even cooler in a way, right? Well, one thing, you know, die young and leave a good-looking corpse.

You know what they say? Yeah, he's a rock star. He does wonders. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dying at 39 does wonders for your legacy. Exactly. For sure. Yeah, and of course,

there are no more Thompson paintings going to be made. So if you want one, you've got to get one while the getting's good. By the way, what would Tom Thompson sell for nowadays? What kind of coin are we talking about here? Depends on the quality and the size. I mean, they're all out of my budget. See, I have one.

I want to know what I can get for it. If anybody's gifting one, I'm available. But in terms of a large work or one of the later works, they could sell for millions of dollars. I think that the highest they've ever sold for in the last five years or so is about $3 million. Recently, though, there was an earlier work, a small work about the size of a sheet of paper. And I think it sold for, and now, of course, I'm going to forget, but I think it was maybe around $400,000. I could be wrong on that, though, but certainly six figures, no doubt.

Wow, that's crazy. Now, so just to recap as we go forward uh so you mentioned in the 30s the book right and because at that point tom thompson is is kind of a mythical figure like a famous famous canadian mythical figure died at 39 algonquin park uh led to the group of seven etc etc and then in the 50s with this these with these guys, what boggles my mind is that they go to a cemetery, probably in a drunken stoop or whatever. They go to a cemetery to dig up a body. They just get a body with no markings and no map

or no idea of where he was buried. Of course, we all know he was exhumed, so he's not even there. But they abody and they are like, so sure this is Tom Thompson. The odds were always pretty high that that was not Tom Thompson. That's just one body you find and you just assume that's Tom Thompson. To me, that's a great leap of faith.

It is a strange thing. Am I thinking too logically about this? Well, I think there's a couple of factors to consider. The one is that, and perhaps it's useful to clarify here, that this cemetery, right, this is a cemetery in the middle of Algonquin Park, so it's not like there's a thousand bodies here. There are two registered burials in this cemetery. Okay, that is a good thing you're mentioning, because I'm thinking of a more traditional cemetery where there's dozens and dozens of bodies. Okay. No, there's two bodies there. One of them is a lumber worker who died in 1897 in the park, like in that

area, and marked with a big stone. The other is a child, I think it was about eight years old or so, who died in 1915 of, I think, diphtheria. And so there's these two registered or marked burials in the cemetery, and there's a little sort of picket fence around them and a tree marking them. What's intriguing here is that these guys, they didn't know where Thompson was originally buried. All they were told by the park ranger was it's somewhere around here. And so they went and, as I said, they sunk three holes before they came up with the body, but the body wasn't inside the cemetery fence. So it does seem like, well, that's very strange.

But we do have accounts of people who were at Thompson's burial who said the body was buried inside the fence. Right. So it does, it is sort of odd, indeed, that they find a body and we think, well, could be perhaps Tom Thompson. But also there's the possibility that many people have suggested is that there's unmarked burials there, either of people of European heritage, lumber workers, etc., or indigenous peoples who, you know, for sake of convenience, they buried a body near where others were buried.

So that's what was determined by some forensic analysis determines that this was in fact an indigenous male and that, again, you mentioned the hole was not from violent means, but some kind of treatment. Do you know any more about that treatment that puts a hole in your skull? I think essentially, I haven't looked into it too much, but essentially the- You are a doctor, that's why I'm asking.

The idea is that, for instance, if there's swelling in the skull or perhaps some kind of injury or something that has caused bleeding around the skull, taking a small circle of bone out of the skull would allow the swelling or bleeding or whatever to be drained without causing brain damage. And part of it, and it's useful to look at in the notes from the people who examined the wound, it's not like there are shatter marks coming away from the wound or

anything like that, that you would think if there was a bullet or being hit with a paddle or anything like that, that would cause a piece of bone to be knocked out. There would also be shatter marks around it. There would be cracks in the skull. There would be beveling around the wound. And none of those things are present. I just watched a documentary. I'd seen it before, but they updated it on Netflix called The Staircase.

And it's all these forensics about how you're, what would happen to your skull, your brain and your skull if you were to fall down the stairs and die. In any case, it's all fresh in my head. So I consider myself now a forensic specialist. So you're a doctor, I'm a forensic specialist. So the 1970s, it sounds like it became sort of like in vogue, the legends about the death of Tom Thompson spread kind of like spread like wildfire.

They became rather popular in the 1970s. Absolutely. The talk about Thompson's death became a cottage industry for a while in the 1970s. So in that period, after Little's book comes out, a lot of people start talking about Thompson's death. And we have people who claim to be or were witnesses in some way or another, not to Thompson's death, but people who had been around Canoe Lake in the summer of 1917. A guy named Charles Pluman, who claimed to have been a pallbearer at Thompson's

burial in the park. A woman named Daphne Crombie, whose husband and she were living in Canoe Lake for part of the summer of 1917. They both came forward with testimony that they'd never offered before. Authors like Roy McGregor write some magazine articles about the case, where they make new claims about the case. Art historians, scholars like Joan Murray, who was a curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario, and David Silcox, they came out with books also looking at the Art Gallery of Ontario. And David Silcox, they came out with books also looking at the case

where they were focusing on Thompson's art, but they also talk about his death as a way to make sense of his creative output. Now, most of this is fairly unsubstantial, but could we, like each theory or each, I guess we'll call them conspiracy theories or urban legends, but each one regarding, could you maybe specifically mention maybe what the theory is and then either debunk it or maybe what your research has led you to believe about these theories? Sure, of course. Well, there are really three main theories about how Tom Thompson died.

The one that we've already introduced is that he died by accidental drowning. And that was offered almost immediately upon discovery of his remains in 1917. And even there, there are various sort of sub theories around what type of accident he might have experienced. So there are people like David Silcox, for instance, who has said, well, he maybe stood up in his canoe to have a pee and, you know, fell out, bonked his head on the gunwale or something like that, and passed out, fell in the water and died. As I said, there's a variety of sub-theories around the accident then. Another theory that was introduced, and as I suggested really by William Little, who wrote it, but others may have suggested it earlier, is that Thompson was murdered. And here too, we have a whole bunch of sub-theories about the night before Thompson died, Little claimed there was a big fight, a

drunken fight, a fight about the war, that Thompson perhaps was pro-Canada, and he got in a fight with a guy who was arguing in favor of Germany. There are other claims that Thompson was trying to get someone to repay a debt, and they got in a fight over money. There are claims that Thompson was shot by a man. So a whole variety of theories that Thompson was murdered. And then the last one is that Thompson committed suicide. And here, too, we have a whole set of sub-theories that Thompson was depressed over his

art, that either it wasn't going the way he wanted or it wasn't selling enough or just lost his vision. There's the idea that perhaps a woman was pressuring him to get married and he didn't want to get married and couldn't find a way out of it. This woman's referenced in Three Pistols, right? That's right. Yes, okay. Very interesting.

So all my Canadian history comes from Tragically Hip Songs, you have to understand. That's not a bad place to start. But it's funny because with that song, once again, a lot of those references go to the mythology. And one of the things that I discovered when I was undertaking the research for Death on a Painted Lake, probably like many people, when you first encounter a story, you read a lot of the secondary accounts, the people who summarize it up and make it easy to digest. And after having read those accounts, I went back to the archival documents to say, now I want to find

where that story gets told for the first time. And what I was really shocked and amazed to discover is that a lot of those accounts don't come from the time period of Thompson's death. They're told decades after. They're not substantiated by anybody who was there. And you can often kind of show that they're introduced with very little solid foundation, but by being repeated uncritically over and over, people begin to accept them as fact. So for instance, this story about the woman sweeping the flowers from Thompson's grave, talking about in Three Pistols, this woman named Winifred Traynor, Roy McGregor has suggested, for instance,

that she was very likely pregnant with Thompson's child. And so this idea of this mourning woman whose love, either husband or the potential father of her child, died tragically by accident, is in this ongoing mourning process. You know, it's now entered popular culture, right? But very poorly founded or poorly grounded. So that may not be true. Like, that doesn't appear in your undisputed truth list. That's open to discussion. Absolutely. You know, it's open to discussion. Absolutely.

It's very intriguing because, for instance, it's sort of almost taken for granted now in storytelling about Thompson's life that they were in a relationship. But we have no documents where they actually, for instance, communicated with each other. We don't have a letter that Thompson sent her. We don't have any letters that she sent Tom. We don't have any evidence, for instance, that he really talks about her or she talks about him.

And what about this child that would have been born in whatever, 1917 or 1918? Like this, do we have any evidence this person existed? That was an idea introduced in the early 1970s. And almost the entire basis for that story is that that fall, there's a newspaper article, not even an article, but just like a little, you know, almost like a classified listing in the local Huntsville newspaper, saying that she and her mother were going to Philadelphia for the winter. But also her aunt lived in Philadelphia, and came and stayed in Huntsville quite regularly. And, you know, so it's not implausible that they were simply traveling.

But on the basis of the fact that she left Huntsville for the winter of 1917, 1918, it's been suggestible she must have been pregnant. That's the only reason she would have left the town. That's speculation and hearsay. I think I saw that on Law & Order. Yeah, I'd say pretty significant speculation and hearsay. When we go back to that, there really seems to be no communication between the two. And what I think makes far more sense is when we look at what she was doing after his death, there have been a number of other people who said she was really interested in Tom.

She liked him. He wasn't interested in her. She was really interested in Tom. She liked him. He wasn't interested in her. And after his death, she kind of created her own mythology around the relationship that they had. But even she never claimed, for instance, that she had been pregnant with his child.

And at the time, there's no mention, either from her or anyone else, that they were engaged or anything like that. Could they exhume the body that is buried in its new plot, the family plot? Well, on sort of a simple basis, yes, of course, they could exhume the body that's buried in Leith. They could also dig in the original site in Algonquin Park. The burial site in Leith, however, they would need the family's approval. And to date, at least, family members have said, we have no interest in that being done.

And I've been asked by a number of people to say, well, why wouldn't the family want to know? But I think it's useful to come back to the perspective. If this was your family member, and if you were comfortable or sure of the idea that, you know what, our uncle or great uncle or whatever, we just want him to rest in peace. We are comfortable that's where he is, and we don't want to satisfy your prurient curiosity to dig him up. That, I think, is plausible. It makes sense. As for the site in Algonquin Park, that is an unidentified body, but at the time, in 1956, the Attorney General and the OPP didn't see any signs of foul play. So there really would seem to be, you know, unless there's a family member or something like that who says, we think this is our family member and has a reasonable case to exhume that body.

Oh, the Indigenous male. Exactly. There doesn't seem to be much of a case to exhume that body either. Very, very interesting. So obviously, accidental drowning, this is the, I guess, most likely scenario. There's no evidence to suggest otherwise. So the accidental drowning, but it's the least sexy scenario. So you have a 39-year-old painter, great figure now, now famous in Canadian mythology, if you will. And I think we naturally look beyond that obvious and kind of want to see something more spicy or sexier. I don't know. But the murder, of course, I could see the theories for the murder.

But let me explore for a moment that other theory that he took his own life. So it was 1917. And he's an able-bodied 39-year-old Canadian male. Now, I just got some context here. I'm re-watching because my wife had never seen Band of Brothers. So we're revisiting Band of Brothers, which is World War II, not World War I. But there is references to the men who didn't serve suffering from a depression,

serve suffering from like a depression, like there being a higher rate of suicide because of this feeling that they weren't helping out with this just cause. I mean, this is the good old days when the wars had black and white. It looked like there was a good side and not, we haven't had one since World War II, I don't think. But is there any possibility that, why wasn't he enlisted to fight World War I? There's a couple of different points of concern around that. The first one is useful to keep in mind his age, that in 1917, he was 39 years old. So he's getting on in age.

Even the park ranger, Mark Robinson, for instance, he was serving, he was sent to Europe, but within something like three months, he was returned to Canada and rendered surplus, right? So there are some peers of the same age you can see are being sent back. There was also some speculation that he had a foot injury, and he had tried to enlist either in the Boer War, 15 years previous, And he had tried to enlist either in the Boer War, 15 years previous, essentially, or First World War and had been turned down because of some sort of disability or foot injury. There is also the suggestion that he was opposed to the war effort. And we do have one letter where he talks about one of his peers, A.Y. Jackson, the painter A.Y. Jackson, who was volunteering, who served and volunteered.

And he says, oh, you know, poor A.Y.' Jackson, who was volunteering, who'd served and volunteered. And he says, oh, you know, poor A.Y.'s caught up in the machine, right? And so there seems to be this suggestion that maybe he wasn't that eager to go out and serve because, you know, not necessarily he didn't approve of the values, but he just simply didn't want to get caught up in that war effort. And perhaps, I don't know, perhaps if it's true that he was flat-footed or whatever he was diagnosed with, that would have helped keep him out. Like he wouldn't, he'd be a-okay with that if he had any kind of moral, anything against the military complex and the war effort. And what has been partly suggested is also he may have been under some pressure, for

instance, people like his patron to say, you know, Tom, you are, you're more valuable than to go over there and become cannon fodder. And so we don't really want you to volunteer. So even if he had wanted to, there may have been people actively dissuading him from volunteering. If indeed he did have flat feet or didn't think he would be accepted to serve, he may have believed that being up in the park and working up in the park was some sort of contribution that he could make, whether it be guiding parties. In the summer of 1916, he worked as a fire ranger in the park.

So he may have believed that by filling a role that some other man might have played who was off serving, he was at least contributing to the home effort. Now, there is a perception the the young artist dying young which leads to like thinking of suicide as being plausible that this whole idea of creative genius in the wilderness uh like that type of persona character you don't picture them as getting old like they seem to die young and this is all based this is based on even less than some of these theories. But it would lead people to kind of want to see the whole idea of him taking his own life at the age of 39. And this goes back

to, as you mentioned earlier, Tom Thompson as Canada's Vincent van Gogh, right? The tragic, tortured artist. But aside from stereotypes or myths or, you know or sort of notions that aren't grounded in evidence, I think what's useful to consider that if someone living in Algonquin Park in the summer of 1917 wanted to commit suicide, that the best or most effective method they could come up with would be to canoe out onto the middle of a calm lake on a Sunday afternoon and throw themselves out of a canoe. It's true, man. It doesn't really seem very plausible when you've got guns, knives, axes, trains, poison, leg hold traps, a multitude of things. And you could go off into the bush where no one would ever find you and have it be done with.

Yeah, that might be the, that's a terrible way to do that. You're right. Yeah, that's a good point. If you were going, if you wanted to kill yourself, might not be the way you you'd choose to do it it seems not a particularly high certainty of success now we look at the the murder theory uh now these fights and everything do we have like do we have any insight into him being a divisive or feisty character any maybe a pugilist of some sort well i'll go back a step because there's some elements

that will help your listeners put this into context. When the body was examined by the doctor and the park ranger, they noticed a couple of things that people have pointed to to say, well, maybe this is an indication of a fight. One is that he had a bruise on his temple

and bleeding from one ear. And so people have said, oh, well, this is a sign clearly that there was some sort of violence done to the body. But what's useful to note here is that even in 1917, both the doctor and the park ranger, in their notes about the body, write there are no other signs of violence on the body. They also both note that this bruise on the head and the bleeding from the ear is likely caused by falling on a body. They also both note that this bruise on the head and the bleeding from the ear

is likely caused by falling on a rock. Yeah, it's consistent with him standing up to take a leak in the, was it Canoe Lake? Yeah, in Canoe Lake, and then losing his balance and maybe falling and hitting his head on something. Or slipping on a rock when he gets out to portage or any, you know, multitude of possibilities there. But so these wounds to the body, people have often said that this is not resolved by the accident or suicide theory. So maybe there's murder involved. Mark Robinson in the 1930s, the park ranger, seemed to suggest indirectly that people knew things about Thompson's death that they weren't saying. It wasn't until the 1950s, however, that Robinson came out and said, or at least we have any sort of recorded evidence that he said,

I believe Tom Thompson was murdered. And then when that body is discovered in 1956, and there's the hole in the skull, the people who believe that that was Thompson's body said, aha, now we have evidence. The wild thing that I discovered in looking at all the evidence is the first claim that I discovered in looking at all the evidence is the first claim that Thompson died in a fight and the sort of the story of this drunken fight was introduced in 1970.

Yeah, and he died in 1917. More than 50 years after his death. It's first introduced after, you know, after anyone involved really can no longer deny the claim or say that's wild, that's bunk. We have no evidence that anybody in 1917 made any mention of anything like this. The park ranger who's making daily notes about what's going on in the park and the search and the inquest mentions nothing about a fight, mentions nothing about any conflict. No one else involved makes any mention of any sort of conflict. So that doesn't seem to be particularly plausible. But what happens in 1970, this guy William Little, who wrote the Tom Thompson mystery, creates this great narrative, very compelling

dialogue of Thompson and another man named Martin Bletcher getting in a fight about the war. And he actually has quotations from Bletcher, you know fight about the war. And he actually has quotations from Bletcher, you know, saying like, you better get out of my way if you know what's good for you, or stay out of my way if you know what's good for you. But of course, this is the first time this story's ever been told, any even suggestion of it's been told. And I mean, as one of the men who discovered the remains of that indigenous man in 1956, that's William Little. So William Little, he's one of the men who discovered the indigenous man with the hole in his temple.

He's incented, like he's sort of, he's in deep, like he's incented to create more mythology around the theory that that body was not an indigenous male who was receiving, I can't even say the word. What treatment was that called again? Trephination. Trephination.

I got to write that one down. Trefonation. He's so deep. It's almost like these 9-11 truthers and stuff. It's like you're in so deep that you sort of will change the narrative and mold the facts to prove your case. So he was incented to make people believe that that body that he found in Algonquin Park belonged to Tom Thompson. Yeah. So he introduces, there's a number of things that he found in Algonquin Park belonged to Tom Thompson.

Yeah, so he introduces, there's a number of things that he introduces that there is no evidence to support, right? Once again, it's useful to keep in mind, this is more than five decades after Thompson's death, and these new stories are being told. It's the 1970s. And William Little, of course, never met Tom Thompson. He wasn't there in 1917.

So he suggests things, for instance, you know, that the idea of the fight, he introduces the idea that the fight took place at some drinking party, that the fight was about the war. We don't have any evidence of any of those things. He also took, the park ranger, Mark Robinson, left really three accounts, one in 1917, a couple in the 1930s, and one in the 1950s. And what Little does is takes all the claims from the 1950s account, the one furthest from the events, as the authoritative ones. And what's strange is when you compare the three accounts that this park ranger told, they don't all agree.

Each version, further from the death, he introduces more details. He introduces events and things that don't occur in the 1917 account at all. Things like the fishing line around the ankle. So that was not documented in 1917, the fishing line around the ankle. They make no mention of the fishing line around the ankle. In the 1930s, he says there was a fishing line around one of his ankles. In the 1950s, he says, oh, it was wrapped carefully around his ankle 16 or 17 times. What's really funny is in the 1950s, he claims, I know this because I have it written

down in my diary. But when we go back and look at his diary, it's not there at all. Yeah, they're trying to suit their narrative here. Now, so what was the name of the CBC documentary again? Was Tom Thompson Murdered. Have you seen this documentary? I have. And in fact, I think about a year or two ago, CBC digitized it and made it available on their website. Okay, you know, I'm going to watch this.

So you too can go and watch that. I'm going to watch this. Where is it? Early 70s? When about? It was made in 1969. 69. Okay.

So once, you know, in 1969, I mean, heck, you could say this about 89 i suppose but you know cbc was was forget going on a podcast like you didn't have internet you didn't have cable yeah you know cbc was monster i mean everybody was watching cbc because you had so few options to entertain yourself with and this documentary would just be pouring gasoline on the fire here. Absolutely. And essentially where the documentary came from was William Little's research. Right. That he, I don't know how he managed to do this, but he got the CBC or CBC producers

interested in his story. So that documentary came out six or eight months or something like that before his book came out. And they worked with him, you know, essentially they were telling his theory or his version of events. Well, really, this is the 1969 equivalent of clickbait. This is a sexy story with a salacious question mark headline. And heck, I would have watched in 69. I'm going to watch in 2018. I can't wait to check this out.

So in the 1970s, which is like this cottage industry of the conspiracy theories around the death of Tom Thompson shows up. Now, I guess it's like all things of this nature just sort of peters out at some point in the 70s and calms down. I don't remember a lot of... No. Okay, please, no. Educate me. I was born in 74. So I start being aware of things.

The first kind of pop culture thing I remember being aware of was the death of John Lennon. This is the first. So that's where it all begins for me there. It gives you an idea of 1980. But I don't have any recollection of like, Tom Thompson was murdered. He committed suicide. It wasn't a natural.

I don't have this recollection. So please educate me on what I was missing. Sure. I mean, I don't think there's any need to sort of apologize for being outside of this story. I'm Canadian. That's what I do. I apologize for everything. But I think, you know, there are lots of people, for instance, who don't even or barely know who Tom Thompson is, let alone the controversy about his death.

But that CBC documentary was probably the most mainstream event. in the 1970s, as I've suggested, with that William Little book, a lot of other people kind of come on board and want to tell other versions of the story or add their own two cents to it. Like, we still talk about two cents now that we've gotten rid of the pen? That's a good point.

Yes, we do, because we do, like, a rule of thumb and all these other silly archaic things. But essentially what happens is, so there's, for instance, articles in Maclean's magazine, you know, these sorts of things. And where it really starts to heat up is, of course, in 1972, 1973, someone suggests, well, there was this woman who was pressuring Tom to get married, and so he committed suicide. That adds a whole new wrinkle. It's maybe not murder.

It's maybe suicide. And then in 1977, an Algonquin Park historian is interviewing a woman named Daphne Crombie. And she and her husband had been living in the park in 1917. Her husband was sent there for a respiratory illness. And it's like the idea of the cold, clear air of Algonquin Park. I bet you that would work, actually. I think lots of people still go there, not for a respiratory ailment, but just clean air. But essentially, to make a long story short, what this lady claims right off the bat in the interview is, I want to tell you this interesting story. I was living in Algonquin Park that summer, and the lady who operated a place called Mowat Lodge, where Tom was staying in 1917, had befriended Daphne Crombie. And apparently,

according to Daphne, this woman, Annie Fraser, told her, one night my husband came to me, him and Tom had gotten in a fight, Tom was dead, and so we went and dumped the body in the lake. Wow, yeah, that would keep more gas on the fire. we go here's the forgive the pun the smoking paddle where you know tom thompson has been murdered and here's somebody saying in fact they hid the body and what happened and so now this story of accidental death really is is according to him and many others blown out of the water because we have someone saying no i i was involved and does this reappear in you know the newspapers across the country in the late 70s? Is this like this revelation? Would you read about it in the Toronto Star, for example, or Globe Mail?

No, it didn't. It didn't, once again, sort of get mainstream attention. But for people who were interested in Tom Thompson's life, it was certainly controversial. And McGregor has continued to write about this case and to advance the murder theory. He wrote a fiction book based on his theories about Thompson's case that was published, I think, in 1980 and then republished about 2002, 2005.

Oh, but it's in the fiction section of the bookstore. Exactly, yes. It's like when O.J. wrote If I Did It. I think that's what that is. Yeah. So McGregor tells that story. And then in 2010, writes another book, essentially arguing that Thompson was murdered and that his body remains in Algonquin Park.

And also during that, we have more and more biographies of Thompson being told where elements of this case are being retold as if they are simple facts, right? Secondary accounts that simply retell, well, you know, Roy McGregor wrote this or William Little wrote this without going back to the original documents to see, in fact. Right. They're cited as the source without actually seeing what were their sources on that. And then we would discover that there's no there there. Yeah. It's kind of it's kind of like the Wikipedia version of history. Very, very interesting. So very, and then at some point,

I mean, to bring us up to speed, so where are we now? That's late 70s, and then throughout the 80s, was there, I guess, periodically, this would come up again, I guess, because once in 1969, if that doc sounds like it sparked

a whole new modern wave of Tom Thompson fan fiction. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, since that documentary, and I think more importantly, the 1970 book, The Tom Thompson Mystery, these claims, this interest in how Tom Thompson died, the argument, perhaps you call it that, over how Tom Thompson died has never really gone away. And I think part of it is that everybody now who writes about Tom Thompson's life has to weigh in in some way or another. They have to mention how he died. And so they either have to repeat

one of the, what we'll call them, urban legends about his death, or they have to argue against them. But it's no longer, I think, really possible to talk about his life without in some way or another talking about how he died and trying to make that make sense of it, to fit it into some kind of mythology about who he was and the meaning of his work and his importance for Canadian history. Absolutely. And then to bring us to 2016, you authored The Many Deaths of Tom Thompson, which is anybody who's curious about this story at all

needs to read that book, right? This is you, great research and citing proper sources and everything, sort of debunking some of the popular mythology around Tom Thompson. Well, what I wanted to do is, when I first produced that website in 2008, as I said, reading all these secondary accounts and then going back to the archival documents saying, well, where does that story first appear? and realizing that a lot of these claims these things that we can read about Thompson's life whether it be the fight story or the fishing line or all these sorts of things there's no evidence from the time he died they come them come along 50 60 years after

his death without any kind of corroborating evidence and that was pretty mind-boggling to me but I didn't want to sort of diminish the work put into the website by publishing that immediately after. After the website was produced, however, there's been a number of books produced since then that just repeat those stories. Focus on these, I don't want to use the term sexy, but I mean these salacious stories, these sexy stories

about murder and suicide of a 39-year-old Canadian painter in the wilderness, like this stuff just, it does grab you, like it makes you want to dive deep. Absolutely, yeah, and I think, you know, that idea of salacious is a really good word to describe it, because if you're careful about the evidence and go back to where these stories first appear, you can say, you know, this really doesn't, it's not very well supported, but they get retold because they're interesting to read, they're compelling reading. And so what I've tried to do in the book is the first section, explore the mythology, what we've been told about Thompson's

death, you know, sort of the popular version. And then the second part of the book is to assess how these stories have been told about Thompson's death from 1917 up to 2016. And to introduce, for instance, where did the fight story first crop up? Where did the fishing line story first crop up? Who told it? And what were their interests in telling this version of the story? And then the last section of the book, having hopefully, I think, separated out the reliable evidence from the gossip and the speculation and the hearsay is to look at the accident theory, look at the murder theory, look at the suicide theory and say, what real solid evidence do we have for each of those?

You know, I could see, like I mentioned, how compelling this is and doing the deep dive and kind of getting into it. And I have a friend, I have a good friend who seems pretty reasonable, except is way deep on 9-11 conspiracy theories. It's almost like a mental illness at some point, right? And with this regards to this, you could dive deep. It's far, I guess, more harmless, I think, than the 9-11 stuff, but your Tom Thompson theory. And then do these people

look at you as a bit of a, dare I say, a buzzkill. Like, who are you to come out here with all this reason and logic and facts and say, oh, the guy had an accident. Where's the fun in an accidental drowning on a canoe trip in Algonquin? Certainly, yeah, the idea that Tom Thompson died by a tragic accident is not a real sexy article title, right?

That people go, well, oh, okay, so he died by accident. That's not much fun. Yeah, end of story move on like now we'll just talk about the paintings yeah and and certainly i've been referred to as kind of like a stick in the mud yeah or that um you know there's been someone who said well if you're all concerned about the facts it's not going to be much fun telling that story around a campfire anymore and so you know it's it's not going to be much fun telling that story around a campfire anymore. And so, you know, it's a funny thing, because a hundred years later, his death and these theories and speculation about his death, the gossip and the hearsay, has displaced the historical facts.

It has now become mythology. And the mythology, you know, for many people, is either more functional or more fun or entertaining than the realities of the case. And I mean, there are examples where the, I mean, there's great movies, John Wayne movies and stuff made about sort of like the legend being more important than the facts. It's almost like you can make it, you know, you mentioned the campfire, like sitting around talking about Tom Thompson's death will introduce people to the paintings in a strange way. Like you might not be, you might think, oh, art, you might be, oh, art, like I don't do art, you know, art gallery. I don't do paintings. Like this is not my bag. But you start talking about this character and music, this guy, Tom Thompson,

Algonquin Park, paddle, death, murder, suicide. And by the way, don't kill yourself because a woman wants you to marry her. That's a terrible reason for suicide, but who am I to judge that? These are all unsubstantiated, of course. But what I'm saying is that you will kind of have a gateway into the world of Tom Thompson. And at some point, once you're in the door, you're going to look at those paintings and what inspired the paintings. And the next thing you know, you're learning all about the Group of Seven,

you're buying the prints, and you're learning a great deal of Canadian history along the way. Well, you know, it's funny. In 1977, another great Canadian painter, an abstract painter named Harold Towne, he and David Silcox wrote a book called The Silence in the Storm about Thompson's death. And in that, he was responding to all that 70s speculation around Thompson's death, and he referred to these people talking

about Thompson's death as club-footed ghouls who were muddying the water about what was really important, which is Thompson's paintings. And what I think is, part of what I've tried to do with this book is, I don't think anybody or very few people would argue any longer that Tom Thompson isn't important for us to know, right? That he's an important guy and his paintings are important for us to know, but we don't necessarily need some sort of salacious, gossipy theories about his death to make him an important and interesting guy. If we can get back to the facts of his life and what he did, he's a pretty fascinating guy, by his mid-30s, kind of a career change. He kind of flops around trying to find a career path

through his 20s. In his 1930s, he decides to take up painting, and within five years, he's starting to be recognized as a pretty interesting painter. And a hundred years later, we see him as one of our most critical cultural icons. We don't need to believe that he was suicidal or that he was murdered to make that an interesting person, right? The very fact that he existed and learned and worked in that time makes him a pretty interesting person. He's equally as interesting even if he stood up in a in a lake and took a took a leak on his canoe and fell back and hit his head on a rock and died that might even be a more canadian story right right a well-intentioned so like being canadian is i don't know what do you say just something making love in a canoe or

something like a canadian pierre burden was it i don't want to give credit to which Pierre did it. Was it Pierre Burden or Pierre Trudeau? One of the Pierres probably Pierre Burden said like being Canadian is knowing how to make love in a canoe or something like that. This is sort of along that line. More Canadian than everything. Oh, Dr. Gregory Clagus

I apologize. Your name, I wanted to call you. I told you when you came in, how do you say your name? And it is Clagus. And I was saying, oh, darn, I was wrong when you came in, how do you say your name? And it is Clogus. And I was saying, oh, darn, I was wrong. I had it rhyming with cages, like clages, but it is Clogus. Is there anything else?

Before we close out, first of all, I find this fascinating. I'm now hooked and I'm now going to go read your book, The Many Deaths of Tom Thompson. I'm going to seek out

that CBC documentary because I want to know what was going on in the 70s. And I'm going to just sort of dive in and learn more about the paintings, the paintings of Tom Thompson because it's just

I find it very, very interesting. And thank you, Gore Downey, for writing Three Pistols, which introduced Damascus to Tom Thompson paddling by. But is there anything you want to leave us with? Anything else you'd like to share about Tom Thompson before we wind down the episode here?

I think the one last thing I would mention to your listeners is, and you mentioned this earlier, people who go, I don't, I'm not interested in art. I don't care about Tom Thompson, whatever. And I think one of the things that I've tried to do with this book and with the website is to provide information for people who maybe aren't interested in art, but maybe you're interested in the history of Algonquin Park or the environmental movement in Canada. Maybe you're interested more generally in Canadian art history. What was life like as a painter during the First World War? Maybe you're interested in true crime stories and interested how an investigation of a crime takes place over a hundred years.

And what I've tried to do in Death of a Painted Lake and Many Deaths of Tom Thompson is to capture element of all those things, to recognize not everybody is a fan of Canadian art history. And so to try to make this a story, to try to make this an investigation of a person and his life and the context he lived and worked in, and Canadian society and how we investigate crimes and all kinds of juicy angles of approach. Now, you said it in passing, but there is a compelling serialized podcast here on Tom Thompson that does revolve. So basically, your book would make a fantastic, wonderfully compelling true crime podcast like that is the format du jour. And I'm a little biased on this front, not just as a podcaster,

but I just launched a company called TMDS. And part of what TMDS does is other people's podcasts. They bring the content and then I take care of the A to Z of everything else. But as I envision in my head, this would be compelling content

for a serialized podcast series. I absolutely agree. So we should do that. We'll talk about that. We shall talk. compelling content for a serialized podcast series. I absolutely agree. So we should do that. We'll talk about that. We shall talk. Thanks so much. And thank you, Mike, for having me.

And thanks to your listeners. Really appreciate it. Thank you for helping me bust the format. We will return to the regular format on Saturday when TJ Connors from Hits FM comes in to talk not only about his own career. I was talking to Freddie P from Humble & Fred earlier who said, TJ Connors should beits FM comes in to talk not only about his own career. I was talking to Freddie P from Humble & Fred earlier who said TJ Connors should be the new morning guy on Edge 102, and I'm going to mention that.

But we're going to talk about TJ's dad, Scruff Connors, legendary Toronto DJ at Q107 and Hits FM, and we're going to dive deep into that. But for today, it's all about the many deaths of Tom Thompson. And that brings us to the end of our 364th show. You can follow me on Twitter. I'm at Toronto Mike. Dr. Gregory Clogges is at Gregory Clogges, and I'm going to spell Clogges for you. It is K-L-A-G-E-S.

I'll clog us for you. It is K-L-A-G-E-S. Our friends at Great Lakes Brewery are at Great Lakes Beer. There's no buck a beer there, though, if you're going to pay a little more. That's all right. Propertyinthe6.com is at Raptors Devotee. And Paytm Canada is at Paytm Canada.

See you all next week. See you, everybody. Because everything is rose.