The burial ground at Mowat on Canoe Lake had never been an official cemetery for
which records were kept. Also, while Ontario deaths and burials were supposed to
be reported and recorded, compliance at Mowat in 1897 had already proven to have been spotty as is
demonstrated in two other cases. Antoine Chouinard and the earlier death on May 25,
1897 of James Watson, known to have been buried in the Mowat Cemetery but for
whom there is no similar official Ontario government record.
It was not until 1956 that Thomson’s drowning in Canoe Lake, burial, exhumation
and reburial in the Auld Kirk Cemetery became an inextricable part of his legend as
Canada’s greatest landscape artist. Algonquin Park’s Mowat Cemetery, David
Silcox, wrote, “has ever since been muddied by the clubfooted wading of art ghouls
and plain fools, who turned Thomson’s creative adventure into the pedestrian plot of
a bad drugstore paperback novel.”
What happened in 1956 causing a sensation across Canada was the discovery by
Judge William T. Little of the skeletal remains of a body in an unmarked grave that
many believed should not have been there. Even greater astonishment resulted,
however, from the official forensic conclusion that the skeletal remains found were
not that those of Tom Thomson but instead possibly of a native Indian nobody knew
had ever been buried there.
It was not the discovery of the remains or their less than conclusive identification,
however, that gave the discovery its great significance. To those interested in Tom
Thomson’s death and final burial, the utterly remarkable fact was the condition of the
skull. On the left temple was a dime-sized ragged hole, an injury matching-up with
one of two old written reports of a four-inch bruise on the left or right temple of
Thomson’s skull when his body was found in Canoe Lake in 1917.
Thomson mystery investigators have struggled in disbelief ever since against Dr.
Noble Sharpe’s conclusion that the remains found were probably those of a nearly
full-breed Indian who was likely younger and certainly shorter than Thomson and
whose skull possibly had been opened by a rare surgical operation called
trephining
**To read more on this theory please visit: http://www.algonquinelegy.com/Chouinard.html