The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed

by John Vaillant

  This is easy enough to say from the vantage point of twenty-first-century North America, where the experience of clearing wild land by hand is virtually unknown, but the act of removing branches, trunks, and roots from even half a hectare of thick forest was back-breaking—sometimes heartbreaking—work. Estimates vary as widely as the terrain, but, roughly speaking, it would take two men a year to make barely five hectares of eastern forest “fit for the plough.” Most of those trees were felled with an axe. This crude but effective tool originated in the Stone Age and yet it has remained in wide usage throughout the world ever since. In 1850 it would have been as ubiquitous as the telephone is today; just about everyone would have known how to handle one. Axes—along with chainsaws—are still standard equipment for professional woodsmen, and they were used actively for tree falling—even on the West Coast—into the 1950s. But the “axe age,” as one historian calls it, reached its zenith in the late nineteenth century, and the North American version represented its highest state of evolution. During one demonstration, a man named Peter McLaren hacked his way through a thirty-three-centimetre gum tree log in forty-seven seconds. Dozens of manufacturers, competing with hundreds of styles, had elevated this humble implement from a mere tool to a potent—even sexualized—facilitator of manifest destiny. Model names were often an axe’s only distinguishing characteristic, and many sound as if they were dreamed up by the same ad agencies that promote motorcycles and firearms today. Climax, Demon, Endurance, Cock of the Woods, Red Warrior, Hiawatha, Hottentot, Black Prince, Black Chief, Battle Axe, Invincible, XXX Chopper, Woodslasher, Razor Blade, Stiletto, Forest King, and Young American were just a few of the choices. One model, for sale in Vancouver, was called the Gorilla.

  BY THE MIDDLE OF THE nineteenth century, the boundaries between British and American territories (and forests) were painfully clear on the Northeast Coast, but they remained far more tenuous in the Pacific Northwest. After the Spanish had been factored out of the northwestern equation in 1795, Britain and the United States were left to divvy up this huge, unwieldy slice of the continental pie. Unable to agree on a boundary dividing the western portion of British Canada from the rapidly expanding United States, the two rivals settled on a kind of territorial joint custody. From 1818 to 1845, Oregon Territory, a vast area extending from present-day Oregon’s southern border all the way to southeast Alaska, was declared an “area of joint occupancy.” Thus, for almost thirty years the Queen Charlotte Islands were considered part of Oregon, despite the fact that they were 1,500 kilometres from the Columbia River and a day’s sail from the nearest land. Meanwhile, the British-owned Hudson’s Bay Company was operating one of the West Coast’s first lumber mills on the Columbia, five hundred kilometres south of the current U.S.–Canadian border. The situation became intolerable and, in 1846, under pressure from President James Polk and his saber-rattling campaign slogan, “Fifty-four forty or fight!”*6 the current boundary was determined by the Treaty of Oregon. Eight years later the colony of British Columbia was created, but in 1858 the province was invaded by tens of thousands of American gold miners, who posed yet another threat to British sovereignty.

  By this time, the West Coast otter trade was finished. The Nor’westmen didn’t linger in those barren waters but quickly redirected their efforts toward seals and inland fur species. At the same time, masts and spars, harvested from the mainland coast during layovers, became an increasingly important part of the West Coast traders’ cargo; much of it was sold at Hawai’i, which had by then become a major crossroads for Pacific whalers and traders. Meanwhile, after their heady, destabilizing ride on the fur-driven economic bubble, the Haida came down with a crash. The otter, it turned out, was more than a spirit relation and a source of clothing, it was a bellwether for the tribe. Once it was gone, the Haida were reduced to selling carvings to passing sailors and trading potatoes with former enemies. While their steel weapons rusted and their European clothes turned to rags, a biological holocaust of smallpox, influenza, tuberculosis, and venereal disease swept up the coast and over the islands. The Haida and their mainland neighbours died by the tens of thousands; villages turned to ghost towns; the culture was changed forever. In less than three generations, a legendary nation of untold age had traded its first otter skins to Europeans, glowed with a feverish intensity it had never known before, and flamed out. Miners, missionaries, Indian agents, and settlers followed, but the archipelago wouldn’t attract the world’s attention again for nearly a century. Next time, they would come for the trees.

  For now, there was more than enough wood down south to keep the newcomers busy. In fact, it was almost too much of a good thing. Both the coastal forests and the country in which they grew were so grossly out of scale in comparison to anything the pioneers had seen previously that many were at a loss as to how to proceed. “The great size of the Timber and the thick growth of the underwood have been sadly against us in clearing the ground,” wrote James McMillan, founder of Fort Langley, which was built in 1827, fifty kilometres upriver from present-day Vancouver. “[T]he jungle on the banks of the [Fraser] River is almost impenetrable and the trees within are many of them three fathoms [five-and-a-half metres] in circumference, and upward of two hundred feet [sixty metres] high.”

  “When I stood among those big trees,” wrote a pioneer woman shortly after her arrival on the coast, “I felt so afraid, of what I do not know. Just afraid.”

  “I raised my eyes to the sky and could see nothing but the worthless timber that covered everything,” wrote another. Even if you succeeded in knocking one of these monsters over, how would you dispose of it, much less remove the sprawling stump so you could do something useful with the land such as plant crops or feed your animals? Some advocated abandoning the region altogether; as late as 1881, when settlers had already established a solid foothold on the Northwest Coast, a London magazine editor wrote, “British Columbia is a barren, cold mountain country that is not worth keeping. Fifty railroads would not galvanize it into prosperity.” Prosperity, of course, was the name of the game; the Bible decreed it, and the government encouraged it. If not for profit, advancement, or adventure, why else would one leave all that was safe and familiar to do battle with giants? The notion of forest conservation, a practice that had only recently caught on in Europe, was anathema in a land of such awesome bounty. The problem of the day was not how to preserve or manage the forest, but how to master it, fulfill the mandate of manifest destiny, and turn this infinity of trees, and the land on which they stood, into something productive.

  IN 1852, FAR TO THE SOUTH, the first giant sequoia was felled—not for the fantastic amount of wood it contained—but simply to prove that it could be done. However, with the California gold rush in full swing and San Francisco booming, it didn’t take the Americans long to figure out what to do with all that wood. Within a decade, they had secured a virtual monopoly on the West Coast timber market. Companies with such names as the Douglas Fir Exploitation and Export Company were doing a brisk business out of San Francisco, handling the wide and flawless timber coming south from the coastal sawmills of Oregon and Washington. Meanwhile, north of the border, in British Columbia, a wood supply that dwarfed even the vast U.S. reserves was languishing. As early as 1864, the British Columbian lamented that

  the numerous and extensive milling establishments on Puget Sound [Washington] have enabled our enterprising neighbours…to enjoy much of a monopoly of the great lumber trade of this Coast. Although we have harbours and pineries not one whit inferior to theirs…they, having so much the start of us, have thoroughly established trade, whereas we have to a great extent yet to make ourselves known abroad.

  Canada was not yet confederated when this was written, but it articulated a disadvantage that, to this day, continues to plague the country, which has a population and a GDP one tenth the size of its southern neighbour’s. In an effort to rectify the situation, resource maps and promotional pamphlets with titles such as British Columbia’s Supreme Advant
age in Climate, Resources, Beauty and Life were liberally distributed in the east. “It makes little difference to the people of western Canada where the money comes from,” observed a turn-of-the-century writer in a trade magazine called Western Canada Lumberman, “as long as the country is developed.” In keeping with the spirit of the times, Vancouver’s official motto paid no Latin lip service to Truth, Duty, Faith, or Light; instead, it sounds more like a corporate slogan: “By Sea and Land We Prosper.” Not surprisingly, a lot of development capital came from American investors. John D. Rockefeller optioned thousands of acres of prime forest on Vancouver Island, while Michigan timber magnate Frederick Weyerhaeuser—along with the famous California railroad owner and university founder, Leland Stanford, and others—invested in railroads whose primary purpose was to access lucrative B.C. timberland.

  Technical expertise was imported as well; it was Matt Hemmingsen, a logger out of Wisconsin, who was brought out to Vancouver Island to break up one of the biggest logjams in West Coast history. Most of the early loggers on the coast were easterners coming out of Nova Scotia, Maine, and the Midwest, where floating logs downriver to market was standard practice, but the huge timber of the Northwest was ill-suited to this method as it tended to run aground. A particularly bad logjam could pile up as much as twenty-five metres high, and when Hemmingsen arrived on the scene, he was confronted with a tangled snake of giant timber eight kilometres long. In the end, he broke it up by blasting all the river bends.

  British Columbia’s timber industry didn’t really come into its own until after World War I, and it was due in large part to Harvey Reginald MacMillan. “H.R.” Macmillan was a penniless, fatherless boy from a small Quaker community outside of Toronto who entered Yale’s school of forestry in 1906; he went on to become British Columbia’s first chief forester and, later, a bona fide timber tycoon who, it was said, “would be selling to the moon if he could get delivery.” He very nearly did; in 1915, in an effort to challenge the U.S. timber industry’s stranglehold on West Coast exports, MacMillan literally circumnavigated the globe, drumming up business for B.C. wood products. His efforts paid off handsomely, and for much of the twentieth century his name was synonymous with Canada’s largest wood products corporation. In time, MacMillan Bloedel’s holdings would extend from southeast Asia all the way to the Yakoun River and the golden spruce.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Fatal Flaw

  Midway upon the journey of our life

  I found that I was in a dusky wood;

  For the right path, whence I had strayed,

  was lost.

  —Dante, DIVINE COMEDY, opening lines

  MACMILLAN BLOEDEL’S INFLUENCE over the global timber industry was cresting at the same time that Grant Hadwin began having serious second thoughts—not just about the logging business, but about the role he wanted to play in it.

  The seventies had been banner years for the industry and Hadwin had ridden the wave; it was a good time to have a forest technician’s degree, a two-year ticket he had earned in 1973. In many ways, Hadwin’s mandate wasn’t all that different from Mackenzie’s or Lewis and Clark’s: go into the wilderness, find out what is of value, and come back with a plan for extracting it. In addition to an understanding of forests and their relative commercial values, the job requires a great sensitivity to the lay of the land. Through a dense and sheer mountain wilderness, one has to be able to visualize and engineer a gentle pathway—in effect, wheelchair access—for heavy equipment. The catch, in Hadwin’s case, was that if he did his job correctly, it would mean that the same wilderness he took such pleasure in exploring would soon be accessible to off-road logging trucks capable of carrying one-hundred-ton loads (twice what’s allowed on the highway) and men with orders to level the designated cutblocks as rapidly as possible. Hadwin wasn’t just good at this, he had moments of true brilliance.

  Wilderness road layout has become an increasingly tricky business in the past thirty years; for one, you have to “think” like a gigantic piece of heavy equipment which needs gradual inclines, strong shoulders, and a minimum of hairpin turns. But more relevant is the fact that by 1980 much of the easily accessible coastal timber was gone; left for last were the places that were hardest, and most expensive, to get to—places like Seton Ridge. “He had a sixth sense when it came to layout,” recalled a field partner named Dewey Jones. “He laid out one road up this steep mountain face south of Lillooet—it was really a challenge: you’d look at the side of that mountain and say, ‘There’s no way you can put a road in there.’ But he did; it was sort of an engineering marvel.”

  This is the Seton Ridge road, a twisting intestine of crushed rock and dirt that so closely follows the terrain’s precipitous contours as to be all but invisible from below. A lot of timber was hauled out on it, and more than twenty years later the scars are still visible from miles away. Even under the most favourable circumstances, it takes nature a long time to recover from a clear-cut. Known as “harvests” in the timber industry, they are shocking things to behold: traumatized landscapes of harrowed earth and blasted timber. The devastation is often so violent and so complete that if a person didn’t know loggers had been through, he might wonder what sort of terrible calamity had just transpired: an earthquake? A tornado? After a few years the stumps tend to bleach out, giving the impression of headstones in a vast, neglected graveyard. Such scenes can be found throughout the Pacific Northwest, though today many of them are artfully hidden from public view by thin screens—“beauty strips”—of spared forest.

  When the Hadwin family first showed up in Gold Bridge in the late 1950s, the surrounding valleys were thick with virgin, high-altitude timber. Today, as in much of British Columbia, vast clear-cuts push outward in every direction, giving the mountains the appearance of enormous animals unevenly shorn of their coats. It was Grant, in his most successful incarnation as a forest technician, who laid out many of the roads that gave loggers access to the remote forest around Gold Bridge. While doing the work he loved he helped to raze the site of many of his happiest memories. In a sense, this was a family tradition; as with many older West Coast families, the Monks and the Hadwins had played an active role in opening up the country. Hadwin’s father oversaw the massive hydroelectric dam complex that would power much of Vancouver, and his grandfather had come west to cash in on the timber boom, homesteading in West Vancouver and retiring as the proprietor of a successful logging supply company.

  What is eerie is that, despite the logging industry’s profound impact on our lives and on this continent, few people outside the industry have actually witnessed a logging operation. While some of the mystery can be traced to the industry’s skittish attitude toward spectators, it also owes much to the average consumer’s lack of interest in the origins or true costs of the resources we take for granted. Most people don’t handle wood except in a finished state, and even those within the industry tend to be aware only of their particular link in the chain. If you were to ask a logger where his trees go, or a carpenter where his lumber comes from, there is a good chance that neither one would be able to tell you, and once that wood has been transformed into a chair or a paper towel, its provenance is anybody’s guess. In the course of its refinement, a tree’s identity devolves from a living appendage of the planet, to a dead and uniform commodity bought and sold by the cubic metre, to a still more rarified product purchased by the linear foot, and from there to a safe and familiar feature on our own domestic landscape that is valued less for its raw materials than for its utility and style. By then any connection to the tree it once was is as remote and abstract as a cheeseburger is to an Alberta steer.

  There is another reason we are so far removed from this process, though, and that is because, in most cases, the process is so far removed from us. Old-growth loggers are latter-day frontiersmen letting the light into the last dark corners of the country; we don’t see them because they are pushing deep into places where the bulk of the population wouldn’t las
t twenty-four hours. This is one reason the woodsman’s lifestyle appealed so strongly to Hadwin, but problems arise if one stops to look down. In the timber industry, awareness causes pain. The evaluation of success involves a strange and subjective calculus: at what point does the brown cloud over an industrial city become a “problem” as opposed to a sky-high banner proclaiming good times? When does the ratio of clear-cuts and Christmas tree farms to healthy, intact forest begin to cause aesthetic and moral discomfort, or real environmental damage? How does one gauge this in a place as big as British Columbia, or North America? Hadwin, as with a lot of people in ethically ambiguous occupations, found his success progressively harder to live with. He was the first in his family to see the end coming, and over time he grew to believe that it had fallen to him, personally, to redress the imbalance.

  Hadwin’s colleague and friend, Paul Bernier, described him as “a considerate logger and a careful road builder” who believed in taking the good with the bad, the best with the bug-ridden—when it was standard practice to just skim the cream and move on. Even his house was an effort to put his money where his mouth was. In a town—and in an industry—where people, resources, and even homes are exploited and abandoned, the Hadwin house stands alone as a kind of monument to permanence.

  But as it turned out, Hadwin’s timing couldn’t have been worse; he was advocating restraint and moderation at a time when the logging industry was entering one of its most aggressive phases ever. The eighties were the era of the infamous Bowron Clear-cut; initiated in an effort to control an explosive pine beetle infestation, there is an ongoing debate about where containment ended and unbridled opportunism took over. In any case, the result was a starfish-shaped swath of shaved planet spreading for more than five hundred square kilometres across British Columbia’s central interior.*7 Local foresters described it proudly as the only man-made object besides the Great Wall of China that was visible from space. It wasn’t long after this, and similar events, that British Columbia was given the derogatory nickname “Brazil of the North.” Since it was replanted and renamed a “New Forest,” the Bowron no longer stands out quite so starkly, but it lives on as an infamous symbol of the ambiguous and codependent relationship between the provincial government and the huge multinationals that now control most of the timber industry.