The Many Deaths of Tom Thomson: Separating Fact from Fiction

[Gregory]

**National Post (Canada) Bestseller - Nonfiction**

The renowned Canadian landscape painter Tom Thomson likely died on July 8, 1917. We don’t know for sure. Just like we don’t exactly know how he died.

Most believe that he disappeared on a calm, overcast Sunday afternoon, canoeing on a lake he knew well. A week later, his decomposing remains surfaced within a kilometre of where his trip had begun.

Thomson’s death was pronounced as accidental drowning. It did not take long, however, before other explanations were being suggested. Some claimed Thomson was too skilled an outdoorsman to meet such a tragic end. He must have committed suicide or been murdered they offered.

Speculation about how Tom Thomson died hasn’t stopped since 1917. The jumbling of facts, errors, and outright guesses regarding Thomson’s death has left us with provocative, entertaining, but untrustworthy stories. There have been claims that he was clubbed to death with a paddle, that he was shot, that he fell and hit his head during a fistfight. Some have speculated Thomson committed suicide because his lover became pregnant, that he fell overboard while urinating, or was thrown overboard by a waterspout.

Of course, changing evidence has made it difficult to arrive at a consistent version of events. Key witnesses in the case altered their testimony repeatedly. For instance, over four decades, the park ranger who led the search for Thomson’s body, and who examined Thomson’s remains, left three quite different accounts of what he saw. New ‘eyewitness’ testimony was still being offered in the 1970s, more than fifty years after Thomson’s death.

Given the changing evidence from which to draw inspiration, it is not surprising that writing about Thomson’s death has moved further and further away from what was recorded in 1917. It is unfortunate, though, that the wild stories of murder and suicide — often involving suggestions of conspiracies and cover-ups — have distracted us from the evidence recorded at the time of Thomson’s death.

After a century, it’s time to clear away the fuzzy conspiracies and ill-founded speculation from talk about Thomson’s death.

[Gregory]

Dec. 2016: The Writers' Trust of Canada included The Many Deaths of Tom Thomson in their list of 'Best Books of 2016'.

http://www.writerstrust.com/Home/Reco...