The “truth” eluded Canadians for nearly a century, right back to July 16, 1917, when the missing painter's body surfaced on Algonquin Park's most famous lake – a bruise over his left temple, one ankle wrapped round and round with fishing line.That suspicious death – accident? murder? suicide? – and the subsequent question as to whether his body remained at Canoe Lake, where his friends had buried him, or had later been exhumed at the Thomson family's request and taken to Leith, Ont., has made Tom Thomson Canada's greatest enduring mystery, his famous works inextricably tied to his fate.
In 1956, a body was unearthed at the Canoe Lake cemetery that some thought might have been Thomson's, particularly because of the hole in the skull. Others said it was was a young aboriginal man who had undergone trepanation. Just this past year, modern technology was brought into the picture to determine just who the skull with the hole in it belonged to. Link -via Nag on the Lake