Tom Thomson's Tea Lake Dam, Fall 1915

This is another of those panels from the stack of Thomson's paintings retrieved from the Shack after he died.  Lawren Harris and J.E.H. MacDonald had taken on a formidable task in the spring of 1918. It was too big of a job and they can be easily forgiven for making mistakes. In this case, they missed the obvious details in  "Tea Lake Dam, Fall 1915". That’s ok, a bit of science and knowledge from the Thomson friends can sort it out.

Tom’s art has dazzled many in the last century so there is no reason for art historians or curators to be dismayed.  I consulted my Thomson friends and they spotted the errors right away. This is a spring plein air painting and not from the fall of 1915. Could it have been the spring of 1916 when Tom was using more oils and spreading his creative wings? Please let us explain. 

Tea Lake Dam Fall 1915
Oil on wood 8 3/8 x 10 5/16 in. (21.3 x 26.2 cm)
Tom's Paint Box Size, 1915.82 

One Thomson expert commented:

"I think this sketch may be spring rather than fall, for various reasons. It appears logs are being driven downstream and passed through the dam via the sluice which has been opened by removing the stop logs. It is clearly an active operation, as there are several men on top of the dam (including what appears to be one or two on top of the superstructure over the sluice), and at least one of them appears to be holding a pole to assist in the operation. Logs are floating around below the dam. 

The vegetation is consistent with spring - e.g.. fresh greenery in the foreground and on some of the more distant trees. Also the bushes in the foreground have no leaves out yet, though it appears there may be buds (or possibly catkins) on them. Some of the distant trees appear to be in bud but with no leaves yet.

The pole was likely a perch or perche (French) - a long pole the loggers used for maneuvering logs from a distance. See also The Drive and The Pointers. Whether they were actually 1 perch long (5 1/2 yards - i.e. a rod) is another question, but that sort of pole would have been in common use for survey measurements at the time. The French word perche means pole or stick, so it could have been a pretty generic term."

My Thomson friend added:

"I'm not sure if the poles the men in the photo are holding are peavys or perches or something in between.  My impression of peavys is that they are probably no more than 6' long, with the metal spike on the end - at least that's the size of one of the ones they sell in local hardware stores.  One current version is 49".  Perhaps the old ones (both perches and peavys) were not strictly of a standard size.  A large hook (cant hook) is sometimes added.  Stihl (among other companies) still makes them."

"I also had the thought that it's difficult to judge relative sizes of some things when comparing them to the men.  A lot of those fellows were quite small by modern standards.  There are a few artefacts in the Schoolhouse Museum at Meilleurs Bay, such as trousers and caulk boots, that are surprising for their small size.  I don't think my feet would fit into the boots." 

As my Thomson friend noted, people are getting taller. The striking upward slope in the graph is unmistakable. This data (see Our World in Data) for adult men shows that on average, North American men were 167.85 cm tall in 1896. By 1996, men were 175.97 cm tall gaining on average 3.3 inches in height to reach about 5 foot 10 inches. Three to four inches of extra average height in just a century is quite a lot.

Frankly, there is nothing to add and I totally concur with those learned observations. I just added some graphics. 

There was quite a crew of nine men guiding those logs downstream. The spring meltwater was gushing through the sluice hopefully taking these logs to market. 

Logging in the area started in 1830 long before Algonquin Park was established. Algonquin Park was created in 1893 to establish a wildlife sanctuary and by excluding agriculture, to protect the headwaters of the five major rivers which flow from the Park. Logging is banned in all Ontario provincial and Canadian national parks except for Algonquin where about 45% of the park remains open to logging. The following historical images reveal the grim reality that the lumbermen faced including those working hard at Tea Lake Dam whom Tom included with a flick of his brush. 

Being a logger was dangerous work. Caulk boots were rugged spike-soled footwear to provide some traction. It was appropriate if better spikes might save the life of a comrade should the owner of those caulk boots make a fatal mistake. Thank you to another extremely knowledgeable Thomson friend. 

Informed opinions are hard-won! A picture may be worth a thousand words but sometimes, to be informed, one must read more than the images (especially true in this age of Artificial Intelligence and unlikely AI images on demand). The following books describing the lumber industry are vital reading. 

"Logging on the Schyan" published 1986,

"A Life in the Bush - Lessons from my Father" published 1999,  

"Along the Trail in Algonquin Park: With Ralph Bice" published 2001 

"Algonquin Harvest — The History of the McRae Lumber Company" published 2006, 

"Holy Old Whistlin' — Yarns About Algonquin Park Loggers" published 2006,  

"Lumber Kings & Shantymen — Logging and Lumbering in The Ottawa Valley" published 2006, 

"The Last Forest Ranger" published 2021, 

"A History of Forestry in Canada" published 2013,  

"The Last of the Wild Rivers: The Past, Present, and Future of the Rivière du Moine Watershed" published 2015 

"Fire Weather" published in 2023 and 

"The Power of Trees" published in 2023 or in fact, any book by Peter Wohlleben 

Being informed is a prerequisite to having a relevant opinion. This "Century of Fire" (see "Fire Weather") and the "Sixth Mass Extinction" continue to threaten the Algonquin mandate for the protection of wildlife and the headwaters of five major river systems. The future of resource extraction needs to be urgently reexamined if Algonquin Park might achieve those original goals. 

Next, I contacted my colleague "Johnny Weather". John Lade was a professional weather observer and meteorological adviser with very impressive credentials. John also taught at the Transport Canada Training Institute (TCTI) in Cornwall where his students knew him as "Johnny Met". 

"I had to research Tea Lake, the dam and the falls It seems like a beautiful spot for a picnic in the summer.  I think Tom picked the best area with the best view...  Regarding the weather, the cumulus clouds have lost their lift and the clouds are spreading into stratocumulus. The bases are darker indicating they are in the shadow of the tops. The visibility is really sharp with the distance hills some distance away. I don't think there was much pollution in Algonquin Park in 1915, I think that it was the second day of a high-pressure area with clouds looking a little torn by a brisk geostrophic wind."

Those are the kind of observations that one can make after a lifetime of experience! Johnny also makes the excellent observation that anticyclonic winds around a high-pressure area are stronger than the geostrophic gradient. The atmosphere resides on a spinning planet. The apparent centrifugal and Coriolis forces are introduced to compensate for our non-inertial frame of reference. 

Briefly, the centrifugal force points in the same direction as the pressure gradient force (PGF).  Suppose you curl the fingers of your Coriolis Hand (right hand in the northern hemisphere) anticyclonically in a ridge or around a high-pressure centre. In that case, your thumb must be pointing downward.  The descending airflow correlates with dry, fair weather. The observed gradient winds (anticyclonic blue arrow in the graphic) are stronger in the ridge. Meteorologists refer to the flow that includes the centrifugal force with the geostrophic wind as the gradient wind. This is one step closer to explaining what we actually observe in nature - on a spinning planet. 

For more information, the following blogs describe the science of the wind with graphics and your Coriolius hand. There are also several other blogs on the topic because moving air is so very important if you wish to appreciate the weather. The following links should be enough to get you started: 

• The Answer Really IS Blowing in the Wind,
• Applying the Gradient Wind Balance..., and
• Another Look at the Wind. 

The map below shows the terrain of the Tea Lake Dam area and the view toward the northeast. "Hill 1" in Tom's painting and on the topographical map is about 3.5 km from the Old Tea Lake Dam. Tom painted exactly what he saw and the bump in the terrain was a very deliberate stroke of his brush. 

In this case, applying the Estate Stamp to "Tea Lake Dam" did not cause much damage on the lower right of the panel. The mark of the stamp is barely recognizable in the lower right on the available image. 

Inscription recto: 

• 
  l.r., estate stamp 

Inscription verso: 

• c., estate stamp; 
• u.l., in graphite, NG; 
• u.l., in graphite, Tea Lake Dam 1915 National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (1523) 

Provenance:

• Estate of the artist 
• National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (1523). Purchased 1918

Thomson helped to record a colourful and rich history of the lumber industry but there is another side to this story!

Roy MacGregor's maternal grandfather was Tom McCormick, Algonquin Park Chief Ranger. According to Roy, his grandfather thought "Tom was a bum".  Tom McCormick's brother Roy, would wed Marie Trainor, the younger sister of Winnifred (1885-1962). Tom Thomson (1877-1917) met Winnie in the summer of 1913. Tom was painting on Canoe Lake and the comely Winnie (about eight years younger) was staying at her parent's cottage in front of Mowat Lodge.... but that is another story.  My friend Roy MacGregor tells that sad and tragic tale in "Northern Light - The enduring mystery of TOM THOMSON and the woman who loved him". That excellent story was published in 2010 and needs to be added to the above essential reading list.  There may be a lot of reading to be completed but at the end of that research, you will be very well informed. 

Judge William T. Little who wrote "The Tom Thomson Mystery" interviewed the trapper Ralph Bice, a recipient of the Order of Canada and someone who personally knew Thomson. Bice born in 1900, was the son of a park ranger who was working the rails, clearing the brush and cutting wood when he met Thomson.  Little was taken aback when the old trapper dismissed Thomson as “a drunken bum” and disparaged his memory. Further Bice added: “This is ridiculous! Why don’t they let it die? They’ve got a lake named for him. He couldn’t paint unless he had a bottle of gin beside him.” These memories might be tarnished with personal disdain for Tom but there is some consistency that must be acknowledged.  

Sadly, the nine hard-working lumberjacks moving the logs through Tea Lake Dam that spring day probably felt the same as Tom McCormick and Ralph Bice. Those men sweated and risked life and limb to make a hard living. They could not even come close to comprehending the creation of art and a fit and able-bodied man like Thomson dabbing paint on a panel. 

Once again, I am greatly indebted to my Thomson friends for their valuable insights and suggestions included in this post! The story behind the art can be just as illuminating as the brush strokes - a mix of history, weather, biology, science and even commerce. In this case, the painting was irrefutably completed in the spring of the year and most likely in 1916 as Tom was forging his own creative path using more expressive brush strokes. Thank you! The following graphic serves as a comparison of Tom's painting style in 1916.

One Thomson friend observed that "Spring, Canoe Lake" as included in the above graphic, was actually the view from the beach in front of the Out-Side Inn at Achray on Grand Lake. That issue will be addressed in another blog. Many inconsistencies in the Thomson catalogue can be solved with boots on the ground, open minds and some science. We just wish to assist...

Warmest regards and keep your paddle in the water,

Phil Chadwick

PS: Tom Thomson Was A Weatherman - Summary As of Now contains all of the entries to date.