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

Joseph Jones is librarian emeritus at the University of British Columbia
Library. He is the author of Reference Sources for Canadian Literary
Studies.

The golden spruce was a 300-year-old mutant tree in the Queen Charlotte
Islands. A native Haida legend saw it as the transformation of a boy who
transgressed by looking back as he escaped from a doomed village. The
tree owed its striking colour to a chlorophyll deficiency, and its
vitality to an unusual conjunction of favourable conditions.

One night in January 1997, Grant Hadwin swam the 60-foot-wide Yakoun
River and cut into the six-foot-diameter trunk so the tree would fall in
the next strong wind. A 47-year-old veteran of the logging industry,
Hadwin wanted his

action to draw attention to the rape of British Columbia’s forests and
the complicity of “university trained professionals” in the
degradation of the planet. Widespread media coverage followed.

In fall 2002, John Vaillant published a 5,000-word account of Hadwin
and the golden spruce in The New Yorker. This book expands the story
with much background and sidelight. The core narrative seems more
gripping in the shorter version.

A capable woodsman, Hadwin disappeared into the wilderness on the way
to his trial for cutting the spruce. Months later, his kayak and some
equipment were discovered on the Alaskan coast. He may have perished; he
may have gone to Siberia. His personality encompassed unconventional
behaviour, a wilderness conversion experience, extreme physical
exploits, and symptoms associated with paranoid schizophrenia.

Into the Hadwin story Vaillant intercalates various accounts of Pacific
Northwest rainforest ecology, logging practices, forest camp culture,
histories of New World exploitation, tree mythology, oceanography,
Aboriginal life and customs, and plant genetics and propagation. The
best of these derive from interviewing.

The lack of connection between text, endnote, and bibliography can be
frustrating. It takes serious sleuthing to figure out the main source
for the history of the trade in sea otter pelts, or to track down the
collection that contains a Haida teenager’s written version of the
legend.

Vaillant’s tale of Grant Hadwin and the golden spruce captures a
quintessential paradox of majesty and ruin, doubled in the man and in
the tree he felled.

Vaillant won the 2005 Governor General’s Literary Award (Nonfiction)
for The Golden Spruce