The Many Deaths of Tom Thomson by Gregory Klages

Author:Gregory Klages
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dundurn
Published: 2016-04-19T04:00:00+00:00

If we found no evidence of a rough box or casket, then we would know that the official version (now firmly accepted by the Thomson family, the Department of Lands and Forests, and the Attorney General’s Department) was indeed a fact. This would, we believed, forever stifle those unbelievers, including ourselves, who seriously questioned whether the alleged exhumation had ever taken place.

Little stated the men knew that any remains they discovered would be Thomson’s, as “[w]e knew no other graves had been dug, or burials recorded other than those of the Hayhurst child, the millhand from Parry Sound, and Tom Thomson.” Discovery of a grave, “complete with casket and body,” in the location where Robinson reported Thomson was originally buried, would indicate that the rumours had always been correct, that Thomson’s remains had never been exhumed.

Little suggested that aside from testing the idea of whether Thomson’s remains were buried in the park, the men were also interested in resolving if Tom Thomson had been murdered. Of course, answering this question would really first require finding remains.

Little recounted that Robinson had suggested to him that Thomson’s original burial place was “just to the north of the other two” marked graves. The men concluded that any grave would likely be within twenty feet of the existing cemetery enclosure. After clearing underbrush from the north side of the cemetery, they began to dig in the first spot they expected a burial might have been made. Little noted the soil was sandy and “easily moved save for a variety of tenuous roots.” By the time they reached a depth of six feet, they had only encountered “clean stratified sand and loam.” When a second hole did not produce any promising results either, the men began to rethink their faith in the rumours.

Diverging from Braught’s account, Little stated that Jack Eastaugh spotted a depression in the ground further away from the cemetery. The hole was about two-and-a-half feet across, underneath a spruce Little estimates to have been about twenty-five feet high. The depression, Little reported, “extended from one side of the tree’s branches to the other. The tree trunk lay dead centre in the depression. Checking due south of the location we noted that the ends of the depression lay in exact line with the two graves and our recent excavations.”

The men began digging. In Little’s version of the story, he was the man who made the first discovery of any signs of a burial. As he described it:

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