Prior to Thomson's arrival, Canoe Lake was a key outpost of the Gilmour Lumber Company, who operated on its shores between 1893 and 1900. As part of an ill-fated scheme to drive logs all the way to its Trenton sawmills, the company built Joe Lake dam, which raised the water level and permanently connected Canoe Lake to its neighbouring waterways. This change in water level drowned much of the forest around the perimeter of the lake, riddling the shoreline with rotting trees, and forming tiny rocky islands that were once part of the mainland. When the log drives became impracticable (it took the lumber as long as three years reach Trenton!), sawmills were built on Canoe Lake; the village of Mowat grew out of the surroundings. A bay near the village was filled in by thousands of tons of mill debris to form a chipyard--extra room for stacked lumber. The cutting of giant pines and spruce that had once encased the Canoe Lake within the forest left hundreds of "deadheads" (decaying stumps) poking just above or lying just below the surface of the water. Even now, deadheads still dot the edges of the lake like razor stubble on a jaw line.

The Gilmour company was long gone by the time Thomson arrived, but the damage had been done, and other logging companies were still operating in the vicinity. The village of Mowat still existed, but its population had dwindled from a peak of 500 to approximately 150. Thomson often stayed at Mowat Lodge, a tourist retreat operated by Shannon and Annie Fraser, which made use of a converted Gilmour company building. The railroad originally built by J. R. Booth in the service of the lumber industry still snaked its way through Algonquin Park just to the north of Canoe Lake. For Thomson and his peer--years before the construction of Highway 60--trains provided the only easy access to the area. Despite all of this human influx, Canoe Lake was still a place of incredible beauty, as Thomson's paintings reveal.

Now the lumber companies and the railroad are gone, and Mowat is a ghost town. There are as many humans as ever on the waters of Canoe Lake, but now they come only to observe it or paddle across it, not to profit financially from it. Scars of human intervention remain, but so does the beauty that Thomson captured in his work. Highway 60 makes the lake readily accessible to all, although, in my own case, I added a healthy prelude of toil and sweat to my visit by first hitchhiking from Ottawa, and then spending four days backpacking on the Highland Trail (never take the easy way out, if you can avoid it).

After a night at Tea Lake Campground--marred by a barrage of logging trucks rattling past at all hours, I walked the three kilometres to the Portage Store (known to die-hards as the "P-Store") on the southern tip of Canoe Lake. I rented a canoe for a standard four-hour time slot (cost about $20), which allows ample time for a thorough tour of the lake. The day was dry and hot and the lake was very calm. It took about twenty-five minutes to paddle the six kilometres from the P-Store to the Tom Thomson cairn at Hayhurst Point, which juts-out to split the north end of the lake in two. I left my canoe on a small jetty and ascended the steep embankment to where the cairn and its accompanying totem-pole overlook the lake. The cairn was erected by future members of the Group of Seven as a memorial to Thomson. Its inscription was composed by Thomson's friend, painter J. E. H. MacDonald, and reads in part: "To the memory of Tom Thomson artist woodsman and guide who was drowned in Canoe Lake, July 8th 1917....He lived humbly but passionately with the wild....It sent him out from the woods only to show these revelations through his art. And it took him to itself at last."

Beside the cairn stands a totem pole that was erected in 1930 as an additional memento to Thomson. A poem mounted on the back of the pole was composed by F. E. Braucht; frankly, it is godawful. A sample verse reads: "Twas on the painter's palette/ He forged a tie to bind/ His name, with the illustrious/ Whose acts enrich mankind". Braucht's later claim-to-fame was to join a party of men in an impulsive decision to dig up what was purported to be Thomson's grave to the northeast of Canoe Lake. Instead of Thomson (his remains had been moved to a family plot in Leith, Ontario), they found the remains of an unknown aboriginal. Perhaps they should re-dedicate the totem pole to the aboriginal, nail a better poem to it, and leave the cairn for Thomson.

After my visit to Hayhurst Point, I paddled due west to the old ghost village of Mowat, which is now occupied by only a few cottagers with a taste for remoteness. Starting at the north end of the old townsite, I paddled a little ways into the swamp that was formed after the gradual decay of the old chipyard. On the bank above the chipyard is the site of the old Gilmour sawmill, the foundations of which were used to build a second Mowat Lodge after the original building burned down. This, too, burned in 1930, and now there is little to see on the site besides a very modern looking cottage. What does survive from Thomson's day is a little white frame cottage known as The Manse, just south of the Mowat Lodge site. This was the home of Winnifred (or "Winnie") Trainor, who was rumoured to be engaged to Tom Thomson when he died. Many have speculated that a romantic rival, Martin Blecher, murdered Thomson out of jealousy. Blecher lived in a cottage just south of The Manse, and its boathouse can still be seen. One theory has it that Blecher shot Thomson from the boathouse as he paddled by. However, anyone who knows the clarity with which sound travels across an Algonquin lake would discount this theory--a gunshot would have given Blecher away to anyone around Canoe Lake who wasn't deaf.

After Mowat, I paddled through a narrow channel east of Little Wapomeo island, where abundant evidence exists of the past logging operations that created a ghost forest to match the ghost town. Many "deadheads" can be seen sticking out of the water, and some caution needs to be taken to avoid submerged ones if you are paddling close to the shore. Circling below Little Wapomeo and paddling east, I approached a green styrofoam buoy which marks the spot where Tom Thomson's body was found in 1917. He had died several days prior to the recovery of his corpse. Because of its advanced state of decomposition, the body was buried in a makeshift grave before a proper inquest could take place. It was later relocated to Leith, upon the orders of Thomson's family, by a rather shady undertaker who was later suspected of having shipped them a sealed coffin full of sand to save himself the trouble of handling the rather ripe corpse. These suspicions gave birth to the controversy over the location of Thomson's body that culminated in the grave-robbing incident in which Frank Braucht was involved. Between Little Wapomeo Island and a larger island known simply by the name Wapomeo, is the spot where Thomson's overturned canoe was found shortly after his disappearance, and before his body surfaced. Martin Blecher fuelled suspicions of his involvement in Thomson's death by reporting that he had seen the canoe on the way back from a fishing trip, but had taken little notice of it. Blecher's attitude was strange, since an overturned canoe is not a thing one generally ignores--rarely do they flip over unless something, or someone, is falling out of them. Oddly, Thomson's paddle was never found, and it has been further speculated that it was used as the murder weapon and then hidden or destroyed, thus explaining why it was not found floating on the lake.

South of where the canoe was found, between Wapomeo Island and the west shore of the lake, is the area where Tom Thomson was last seen paddling his canoe before he disappeared in broad daylight on July 8th, 1917--never to be seen alive again. Speculation varies as to what happened to him. Beyond the possibility that Blecher murdered him with a gun or a canoe paddle is the theory that Shannon Fraser, owner of Mowat Lodge, murdered him after an altercation involving some money that Fraser owed Thomson. The official cause of death was drowning, but others have suggested everything from a heart-attack, to suicide, to the scarcely believable notion that the body found was that of the unknown aboriginal, not Thomson (where, then, did he go--South America?)

The most likely cause of death, in my opinion, was a canoe accident. In precisely the area where he was last seen, not far from where the canoe and Thomson's body were found, there is a particularly nasty stretch of deadheads and submerged rocks. One huge deadhead lies inches under the surface near a tiny nameless island off of the west shore. It is marked by a buoy fashioned from an old plastic jug. If the buoy hadn't been there, my canoe could easily have crashed into the deadhead. This led me to a few speculations of my own. Suppose that, unlike me on the day I visited the spot, Thomson was paddling quickly to reach a specific destination. The force of hitting a deadhead the size and depth of the one I encountered could easily have overturned his canoe, and a rock or a second deadhead could have knocked him unconscious, whereupon he'd have drowned. Thomson had set out to fish on the day he died. Suppose his line snagged on the log-riddled bottom of the lake and he stood up in his canoe to free it--I have seen many fishermen do a similarly foolish thing. In such an instance, the canoe might have tipped him onto a rock or deadhead, or onto its own gunwale. Significantly, a single four-inch gash was found on the head of Thomson's corpse--evidence of a violent head injury. If someone had bludgeoned Thomson, they would likely have hit him more than once; a bullet hole, moreover, would not be four inches long. The odd circumstance of the missing paddle remains unexplained, but it is conceivable that Thomson stepped on shore with his paddle and then left it for some reason. Perhaps his canoe drifted away and he dropped the paddle to run or swim after it. An accident might have ensued, and the paddle could have been missed in subsequent searches.

Whatever the cause of Thomson's death, it is improbable that it will ever become less of a mystery than it is now. All of the people who were at Canoe Lake at the time of his death are themselves dead. Varying accounts of his life and death over the years have, unfortunately, only contributed speculations that have no attainable answers. But Thomson's death would not be nearly so interesting if his art had not been so great; ultimately, it is what he produced at Canoe Lake, not how he died there that counts the most. But for those who enjoy a little mystery along with their fresh air, Canoe Lake offers a unique opportunity for a one-day outdoor adventure of a different kind.

I was heading from Whitney to Huntsville delivering Bushwhacker Magazine a few years ago when I picked up Peter Webb who was hitchhiking to Canoe Lake to research the above story. The story never ran because I wanted a photo of the Thomson memorial to go with it. I lost Peter's contact information shortly after he sent me the story. At that time Peter was the editor of the Ottawa-based arts and culture newsletter Nelson Street News. His love of hiking and camping has taken him to various locations around Ontario, to Saskatchewan, Alberta and to the coast of Wales.

The photo was taken by Kevin Callan and appears in his book Paddler's Guide to Algonquin Park