Northern Light by Roy Macgregor

Author:Roy Macgregor [MacGregor, Roy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-37604-6
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2010-10-05T04:00:00+00:00

Thomson had long been friends with ranger Tom Wattie, who lived in South River and kept a cabin on Camp Island in Round Lake (now called Kawawaymog) and manned the ranger station on North Tea Lake, just inside Algonquin Park’s western boundary. (Today, there’s a cairn to the memory of Wattie where L’Amable du Fond River dumps into North Tea.) Thomson liked to purchase his sketching panels in South River and, over several trips, he and Wattie had struck up a close relationship. In her September 17, 1917, letter to George Thomson, Winnie Trainor said that two years earlier Tom had purchased a new canoe and a silk tent while journeying through South River. While in South River, he would often stay at the hotel and visit the Wattie farm on the river, but he also sometimes stayed over at the Wattie island cabin. Some believe he sketched The West Wind at Round Lake in 1916 before turning it into a major canvas over the winter of 1916–17.

Ken Cooper, now seventy-seven, is the son of Amelia Christina Wattie, known as “Tootsie” to the family, and the grandson of Tom Wattie. Tootsie was seventeen the summer Thomson died and, apparently, a great favourite of the painter. According to Cooper, Thomson gave his mother four paintings, three of which now hang in major Canadian galleries. One was lost to a thief who simply walked into the unlocked Wattie cabin on Round Lake and took it from the wall while the artist was still alive. “Tom Thomson told her after that that she’d better keep them safe somewhere,” says Cooper.

The Wattie family has its own lore about Thomson. They joked about how he had, over time, become revered as an expert outdoorsman. “He was not an expert canoeist,” says Cooper. “He hadn’t even seen a canoe until he got to the park.” But Thomson was game and generous, and the ranger Wattie took him under his wing, even at one point lending Thomson his Winchester .30-.30 so the painter could guide some hunters along the park’s northwestern boundary. The family always believed that Thomson had drowned after becoming tangled up in his fishing line. In all his visits, they never heard him mention Winnifred Trainor or any intention to get married and settle down in the summer of 1917.

In fact, they perhaps had proof that he had no such plans at all—proof that lay in storage in the old Wattie home through most of the rest of the twentieth century with no one but immediate family and close friends being aware that it even existed.

Eight decades after Thomson’s death in 1917, Cooper persuaded his uncle (Tom Wattie’s son Gord), then into his nineties, that the family should donate their Tom Thomson belongings to the Algonquin Park archives. Some in the family were reluctant to part with the material, but eventually Gord Wattie agreed, and the family handed over their Tom Thomson treasures.

Ron Tozer of Algonquin Park received the Wattie material. His handwritten notes from August 19, 1998, list the items:

1.

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