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

by John Vaillant

  The Mounties visited Hadwin in person. After arresting him, charging him and ordering him to appear at the courthouse in Masset on April 22 (Earth Day), they released him on $500 bail. Already known to—and suspicious of—the police, he was offered no protection and did not request it. He was considered by some to be a flight risk, but there was so far no legal justification for keeping him in custody. Hadwin soon relocated to Cora Gray’s home in Hazelton, 280 kilometres up the Skeena River, but his presence there caused other members of the Gitxsan tribe to fear that they would be seen as complicit in the crime, and they tried to distance themselves from the strange but generous white man in their midst.

  Shortly after his arrest and release, the entire text of Hadwin’s letter was published in the local papers, and for the next couple of weeks he carried on a dialogue with infuriated locals through newspapers on both sides of Hecate Strait. In an article entitled “Upset about the Golden Spruce? Re-examine your perspective, says Hadwin,” he told a reporter for the Queen Charlotte Islands Observer that “we tend to focus on the individual trees like the Golden Spruce while the rest of the forests are being slaughtered.” He then compared corporate set-asides like this and Vancouver Island’s Cathedral Grove to circus sideshows. “Everybody’s supposed to focus on that and forget all the damage behind it. When someone attacks one of these freaks you’d think it was a holocaust, but the real holocaust is somewhere else. Right now, people are focusing all their anger on me when they should focus it on the destruction going on around them.”

  While Hadwin did acknowledge his insult to the Haida, he fell short of a full apology. “There was no intent on my part to offend the Native people in any way,” he explained. “They should see a person who is normally very respectful of life and has done a very disrespectful thing and ask why.”

  But this was asking too much. Hadwin had cut down what may have been the only tree on the continent capable of uniting Natives, loggers, and environmentalists, not to mention scientists, foresters, and ordinary citizens, in sorrow and outrage. Meanwhile, newspaper and television reporters from across Canada were flocking to the islands to cover the story, which also found its way into the New York Times and National Geographic and onto the Discovery Channel. Scott Alexander, a spokesman for MacMillan Bloedel, was surprised by the flood of media attention: “This seems to have opened some kind of wound,” he told one reporter. “I’m not sure why, but it’s taking off more and more with each passing day.” Cartoonists, poets, songwriters, and visual artists were also horrified and captivated by the death of the tree, and attempts to honour its memory were rendered in a variety of media that ran the gamut from doggerel verse to an exquisite Aubusson-style tapestry that would take a master weaver and her apprentice a full year to complete. In a few instances, these paeans veered off into uncharted territory: “Can there be another Golden Spruce?” lamented a columnist in Victoria’s Times-Colonist. “Can there be another Gandhi or Martin Luther King?”

  “When society places so much value on one mutant tree and ignores what happens to the rest of the forest, it’s not the person who points this out who should be labelled,” Hadwin told a Prince Rupert reporter who questioned his sanity. In the short term at least, the collective reaction to the loss of the golden spruce ended up proving his point: that people fail to see the forest for the tree.

  No one openly supported Hadwin, but there were those who sympathized with him. “I considered him misguided,” explained one local logger, “but I could relate to his rationale—his hatred for M&B. Sometimes I’d just like to throw a bomb in their office.” In an effort to explain how he was able to remain inside the industry under these circumstances, he said, “You don’t allow yourself to think—if you start looking at it too hard, you’re going to go crazy.”

  A young Haida man from Skidegate thought that what Hadwin had done was “a great idea. It was M&B’s pet tree,” he said, “but it’s no more special than the thousands of others being cut down.” In the past, he had worked as a logger when jobs were available. “You have the attitude,” he explained, “that ‘If I don’t do it, somebody else will.’” Any of this man’s ancestors hunting for sea otter pelts would have been driven toward the same logic and by exactly the same market forces.

  HADWIN HAD BEEN CHARGED with indictable criminal mischief—damage in excess of $5,000, and the illegal cutting of timber on Crown land. Ordinarily crimes like this draw a fine and/or minor jail time, but this was not an ordinary case and both the provincial authorities and the Ministry of Forests intended to prosecute to the fullest extent of the law. “He was going to get hammered in court,” opined an RCMP officer from Masset named Blake Walkinshaw. “The courts are very lackadaisical in B.C.—from my point of view—but I think this one here was going to be an example.” As an afterthought he added, “A person like that would have a hard time surviving in jail.”

  But this was a strange case. The law knew how to deal with timber poachers who cut down protected old-growth cedar, and it knew how to deal with arsonists who destroyed beloved cultural and historic sites, but how would it punish someone for cutting down a unique and sacred tree as an act of protest when most of the surrounding forest had already been felled for profit? On paper, Hadwin was facing years in jail and a heavy fine, but there was no precedent in Canada for how a local judge and jury might compute the far less tangible losses to the Haida, to the residents and economy of Port Clements, or to science.

  There was, however, a precedent in Texas. It was set around the state capital’s famed Treaty Oak, one of a group of trees known as the Council Oaks. Local Comanche Indians had once performed ceremonies within this sacred grove, and it was under the sole survivor that Stephen F. Austin, the founder of the state, allegedly signed the first border agreement between Natives and settlers. Once declared the most perfect specimen of a North American tree by the Forestry Association Hall of Fame for Trees, the five-hundred-year-old live oak was poisoned in 1989 by a man named Paul Cullen; his motive, he claimed, was unrequited love. After extensive rescue efforts (financed with a blank cheque by the billionaire industrialist Ross Perot), a third of the tree was saved. Cullen was charged with a felony and sentenced to nine years in prison. Given that he tried to kill the Lone Star State’s most venerable symbol, some might say that Cullen got off easy, and relatively speaking, he did: a life sentence had been seriously considered. No doubt alternative punishments had been contemplated as well, just as they were for Grant Hadwin, a man who some suspected wouldn’t survive to see his court date. It was believed by the Mounties, as well as by local employees of the Ministry of Forests, that the Masset Haida might deal with Hadwin themselves. “A lot of problems are taken care of by the locals,” explained Constable Walkinshaw. “That’s why we don’t have much trouble here. He might have been right [to fear for his life].”

  One senior member of the Tsiij git’anee clan chose his words carefully, but did acknowledge that “unofficially, something could happen to him.”

  Masset is divided into two distinct communities: New Masset (population 950), the primarily Anglo village which includes the main shopping district as well as the federal dock and the courthouse; and Old Masset (population 700), the Haida reserve, which is, with the exception of non-Haida spouses, almost completely Native. In addition to his more obvious crimes, Hadwin had disrupted the flow of life in this segregated community. “There’s a rhythm to a small town,” observed Constable Walkinshaw. “Old Masset, New Masset—everybody gets along quite well. Even Fran, the court stenographer, goes to the potlatches. Outsiders—people like Hadwin—put the rhythm out of sync. Somebody’s going to get to him.”

  “Almost everyone in this community was ready to string that man up because of the hurt that was done to us,” recalled Robin Brown, an elder from the Tsiij git’anee clan. “It was as if one of us had died.” Ron Tranter, the Anglo resident of Old Masset to whom Hadwin had given his saw, was, briefly, a suspect in the crime, and he was furious. “If I see him,�
� vowed Tranter, “I’ll kill him.” But there was, it seemed, a waiting list for this honour. “The consensus,” claimed Eunice Sandberg, a bartender at Port Clements’ Yakoun Inn, “is this guy should be done away with.” A local logger named Morris Campbell suggested that they “nail his balls to the stump.” One Haida leader also suggested that Hadwin be nailed to the tree; others were wondering “whether we should cut a part off the person who did this, to see how they like it.” Talk is cheap, of course, but there is actually a kind of precedent for punishments of this kind. In The Golden Bough, Sir James Frazer’s classic exploration of magic and religion, he wrote:

  How serious the worship of trees was in former times may be gathered from the ferocious penalty appointed by the old German laws for such as dared to peel the bark of a standing tree. The culprit’s navel was to be cut out and nailed to the part of the tree he had peeled, and he was driven round and round the tree till all his guts were wound around its trunk. The intention of the punishment clearly was to replace the dead bark by a living substitute taken from the culprit; it was a life for a life, the life of a man for the life of a tree.

  While the Native residents of the islands have always been oriented toward the coast and the water, European settlers here have been inlanders—forest people—as much as they have been fishermen. Even today, the relationship many loggers have with the forest goes beyond simply cutting down trees. In this sense, not much has changed for a long, long time. It is hard for people outside this life to understand the logger’s appreciation for his environment, but Jack Miller, who has spent sixty years in and around the logging industry, tried to demonstrate it with the following story.

  Miller and his supervisor were cruising timber on Nootka Island, off the west coast of Vancouver Island, back in the fifties when his supervisor found an uncommon orchid and pointed it out. Miller soon found another one some distance away and said, “Here, I’ll pick it for you.”

  But his supervisor told him to leave it where it was.

  “Why?” asked Miller. “It’s all going to be logged anyway.”

  “Leave it there,” his supervisor ordered.

  The individual’s love of the woods exists in tandem with a collective industrial “rape and run” mentality that over time has left scoured valleys and fouled streams littered with machinery, fuel drums, old tires, and thousands of metres of rusting cable. Loggers, as with most people who work for a living, see what they do as necessary. “It’s a resource and it should be used” is a rationale one hears over and over again. But for most of the residents of Port Clements, what Hadwin did had little to do with resource use or environmental protest; like the Haida, they saw his act as the wanton destruction of a treasured symbol, a kind of sacrilege. Port Clements’ mayor, Glen Beachy, echoed many of the Haida, when he told a reporter that “it makes me sick. It’s like losing an old friend.” But he had other things on his mind as well: “Why would a tour bus even come through here now?”

  Mayor Beachy then declared a Random Acts of Kindness Week in Port Clements.

  In an editorial, the managing editor of Prince Rupert’s Daily News compared Hadwin’s logic to that of the pro-life activist who would kill a doctor for performing abortions. By the end of January, feelings were running so high that the RCMP, under pressure to resolve the case as quickly as possible, moved Hadwin’s court date ahead by more than two months. He was now to appear in Masset on February 18, just three weeks away. “They’re making it as nasty as they possibly can,” Hadwin told a reporter at the time. “They’ll want me over there so the Natives will have a shot. It would probably be suicide to go over there real quick.”

  And it may have been.

  Photo Insert

  A battle between the U.S. fur trading vessel Columbia and Kwakwa ka’wakw warriors in Queen Charlotte Sound, 1792.

  Nuxalk canoes from the central B.C. coast, 1914 (from a dramatization by photographer Edward S. Curtis).

  The full outfit of a north coast warrior.

  Haida war dagger with an eagle crest on the pommel. Collected at Masset by A. Mackenzie, 1884.

  This dance mask represents a gagiid, a person trapped between the human and spirit worlds by the experience of nearly drowning at sea in winter. Collected in Haida Gwaii by Israel W. Powell, 1879.

  Ox team hauling logs on a “skid road” through what is now downtown Vancouver, c. 1900.

  Loggers on a “railroad show” with a freshly loaded fifty-ton log, c. 1935.

  Haida fallers c. 1925, posing on a springboard with one of the thousands of huge Sitka spruce that once stood in Haida Gwaii.

  A high rigger topping a spar tree (a) and taking five (b), c. 1925.

  Faller watching for widowmakers in winter rain.

  A feller buncher represents the future of logging: smaller trees and bigger machines.

  Clearcut with logging road and subsequent erosion, Haida Gwaii.

  Grant Hadwin returning from a swim at Rushbrook Floats, Prince Rupert, January 6, 1997.

  Grant Hadwin embarking from Prince Rupert by kayak, February 12, 1997.

  Border crossing, Hyder, Alaska, a place Grant Hadwin visited several times.

  Leo Gagnon, Tsiij git’anee chief-in-waiting (right), and his son, with the stump of the golden spruce, October 2001.

  Mortuary poles at Nan Sdins, UNESCO site, Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve, Haida Gwaii.

  Memorial pole for Ernie Collison (Skilay), spokesperson for the golden spruce. The pole was carved by Chief Jim Hart and assistants, and erected by the community in 2003.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Myth

  I will tell you something about stories

  [he said]

  They aren’t just entertainment.

  Don’t be fooled.

  They are all we have, you see,

  all we have to fight off

  illness and death.

  —Leslie Marmon Silko, CEREMONY

  WHEN THE GOLDEN SPRUCE FELL, it knocked down every tree in its path. From a distance it looked like the wreckage left by a lightning strike, or a freak wind, which in a way, it was. After all, what were the chances? The golden spruce was one in a billion, and so was Grant Hadwin. “Whoever did this,” said a MacMillan Bloedel spokesman shortly after the tree was found, “had to be hell-bent.” He was referring not just to the logistical details, but to the raw effort required to access the tree, and then to cut it down in the middle of the night. It is hard to imagine anyone else with the same combination of motive, obsession, endurance, and skill required to do such a thing.

  The golden spruce fell in such a way that the last six metres or so hung out over the river, and it was a sorrowful sight: the still-luminous golden boughs thrown up like skirts, exposing the dark green under-layer; the sheared stump so startlingly white in the dark forest; the damage so small, relative to the great size of the tree, and yet so thoroughly irreparable. On Sunday, January 26, three days after the golden spruce was discovered by the wife of a MacMillan Bloedel employee, the tree became the subject of a sermon in Masset’s Anglican church. But it felt more like a eulogy. “This was not just a physical tree of unusual beauty,” proclaimed the Reverend Peter Hamel, “it was in fact a unique symbol of the islands and ourselves. It was a mythic tree that sustained our spirits whenever we saw it…. The presence of this tree…brought us together and lifted us from the familiar to the divine.” Hamel then called upon the great Romantic poet William Wordsworth to say what he could not:

  Oft have I stood

  Foot-bound uplooking at this lovely tree

  Beneath a frosty moon. The hemisphere

  Of magic fiction, verse of mine perhaps

  May never tread; but scarcely Spenser’s self

  Could have more tranquil visions in his youth,

  More bright appearances could scarcely see

  Of human forms and superhuman powers,

  Than I beheld standing on winter nights

  Alone beneath this fairy work of earth.

>   “Confining the spiritual to the inner dimension of life,” concluded the Reverend Hamel, “has given licence to the violent exploitation of nature. The trees who clap their hands at God’s justice suggest otherwise. All of reality is the realm of the spirit, of transforming upward encounter. The destruction of a tree, and in particular the golden spruce, has deep implications for us. This gift from Mother Earth connected us with our deepest spiritual needs. Its senseless destruction wounded each one of us as much as the loss of its wondrous beauty in the sacred grove by the Yakoun River.”

  The next day more than a hundred Haida travelled up the Yakoun in order to reconcile with the spirit of the golden spruce. “The elders were crying, praying in their own language,” recalled a Haida clergy-woman named Marina Jones who attended the ceremony. “You could feel the heaviness—it was like losing one of our children. People were wearing their blankets inside out.” Jones salvaged a golden twig from the tree; she had it freeze-dried and she keeps it in a hermetically sealed plastic package, like a piece of the True Cross. Urs and Gabriela Thomas, the proprietors of the nearby Golden Spruce Motel, keep a large golden sprig in a jar of alcohol by the reception desk, where it looks more like a specimen of rare coral than of a local tree.