The official murder-suicide ruling never fully silenced suspicion because Simpson's death may have involved the very documents that recorded his Arctic achievements. Before leaving the Red River Colony, he was carrying journals, correspondence, maps, and other papers connected to his explorations. His brother Alexander later suggested that Simpson's traveling companions might have wanted to steal the material and sell it to American rivals of the Hudson's Bay Company. The theory gained an especially ominous detail when Sir George Simpson, Thomas's powerful cousin and a senior Hudson's Bay Company figure, sent the papers to Alexander three years after the death: the diary and all correspondence between the cousins were missing. Historians have therefore proposed three competing explanations—a genuine murder-suicide caused by Simpson's derangement, a conspiracy in which the companions killed him for his papers, or a shootout in which the survivors killed Simpson and invented the suicide account to avoid prosecution. The remote investigation relied on depositions rather than a thorough forensic inquiry, and later historian Vilhjalmur Stefansson called the official explanation unconvincing though possible. No definitive resolution has emerged.
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AI concept artworkArchive Record · 1840s
The Missing Expedition Papers Behind the Thomas Simpson Death Controversy
Thomas Simpson and Sir George Simpson / 1840s
The official murder-suicide ruling never fully silenced suspicion because Simpson's death may have involved the very documents that recorded his Arctic achievements. Before leaving the Red River Colony, he was carrying journals, correspondence, maps, and other papers connected to his explorations. His brother Alexander later suggested that Simpson's traveling companions might have wanted to steal the material and sell it to American rivals of the Hudson's Bay Company. The theory gained an especially ominous detail when Sir George Simpson, Thomas's powerful cousin and a senior Hudson's Bay Company figure, sent the papers to Alexander three years after the death: the diary and all correspondence between the cousins were missing. Historians have therefore proposed three competing explanations—a genuine murder-suicide caused by Simpson's derangement, a conspiracy in which the companions killed him for his papers, or a shootout in which the survivors killed Simpson and invented the suicide account to avoid prosecution. The remote investigation relied on depositions rather than a thorough forensic inquiry, and later historian Vilhjalmur Stefansson called the official explanation unconvincing though possible. No definitive resolution has emerged.
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