Tom Thomson : The Life and Mysterious Death of the Famous Canadian Painter

by Poling, Jim

• ISBN13: 9781551539508
• ISBN10: 1551539500
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-10-15
• Publisher: Altitude Pub Canada Ltd

Summary

"An overturned canoe. A body recovered. Presumably Thomson drowned. That should have been the end of it. It was only the beginning." This book will be especially fascinating for all readers interested in: biography, history, the visual arts or true-life mysteries. Tom Thomson is perhaps Canada's most famous artist. His short and glorious career was abruptly and brutally ended on July 8, 1917. Since the recovery of Thomson's body, theories as to the cause of his death - accident? murder? - have preoccupied sleuths for more than 90 years.

Table of Contents

Prologue

Georgian Bay

Toronto

Algonquin Park

Tensions at Canoe Lake

The Last Weekend

A Body Twice Buried

The New Grave Diggers

The Investigations Begin

Solving the Mystery

A Story without an Ending

Epilogue

Bibliography

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

PrologueThe Ojibwa called them jiibyag - the ghosts.Their voices ride the night mists that slide quietly over the dark waters of Canoe Lake after the sun falls below the pines. They are most often heard off the three bigger islands - Wapomeo, Gilmour, and Cook - those sentinels that squat at mid lake as if to block access to the secrets that lie beyond. They whisper of amazing events that occurred here long ago.Sometimes the mist carries more than the voices. On some summer nights, it is said, a dove grey canoe emerges from the north bay and slides southward, seemingly riding the mist itself and not the water. In it sits a man ina tan bush shirt and holding a paddle. He waves, then disappears.The mist drifts to the western shore, then up the hillside overlooking the lake where a tiny graveyard struggles for its own existence against a relentless Mother Nature. Decaying picket fences and two tombstones gnawed by 10 decades of weather mark the graves of the two bodies officially buried there. One is a young man who died May 25, 1897, in a lumber mill accident. The other is a boy taken by a diphtheria epidemic at the lake.But there is a third occupant there. And therein lies a mystery. A mystery wrapped in mysteries that no one can ever explain completely.No one but the jiibyag.