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

by John Vaillant

  Once a load of otter skins had been procured, a ship would head south to Hawai’i for resupply, ready sex, and perhaps an ancillary load of sandalwood. From there the ships would cross the Pacific to Canton, braving both Asian and European pirates along the way. (The Russians, who had a half-century head start on the Europeans, sent their furs overland, mainly through the town of Kiakhta on the northern Chinese border.) All profits from the sale of skins would be reinvested into Chinese tea, silk, and porcelain. Once reloaded, the Nor’westmen would make their way south into the Indian Ocean, around the Cape of Good Hope, and back up through the Atlantic to their home ports. A typical “round” might take two years and cover more than sixty thousand kilometres, during which the Nor’westmen emptied and reloaded their holds twice and traded with dangerous and widely divergent peoples speaking a minimum of four unrelated languages. In addition to English and French, the Chinook trading jargon was popular on the south coast as far as Vancouver Island while a Haida-based equivalent came in handy up north. Someone on the ship also had to be familiar with Hawaiian and Cantonese.

  Meanwhile, up and down the coast the locals were having surreal first contact experiences with strange craft inhabited by beings who could do things that no ordinary human should be able to do: they could remove the tops of their heads at will (wigs); they could shed their colourful skins and pull objects out of their bodies (close-fitting clothes); they had weapons that could pierce battle armour made from wooden slats and the thick hides of sea lions. And their eyes were blue. As the Natives got to know them better, these aliens became known, first, as Iron Men and, more specifically, as Boston and King George Men. They appeared to be of only one gender; with the exception of the occasional captain’s wife or Hawaiian mistress, there were rarely women aboard. However, this and their peculiar smell were overlooked because they carried with them a wide variety of amazing items they seemed eager to part with, including chisels, nails, copper pots, scissors, mirrors, buttons, blankets, and brass bells. But travelling with them, too, were the Four Horsemen in the form of rum, guns, contagious diseases, and a strident worldview. These visitors from afar were not, it turned out, returning from the land of the dead; rather, they were bringing it with them. Within a century a stranger travelling the West Coast and seeing, firsthand, village after village strewn with the bones of the unburied might have reasonably supposed that the Land of the Dead was right here, in North America. It wasn’t that the people of the Northwest Coast were strangers to murder and mayhem, or even to disease—not by a long shot: the Haida took their enemies’ heads, after all, and smallpox almost certainly preceded the traders. It would be the scale, as well as the range, of devastations that they would find so overwhelming.

  Without a doubt, the advantages of novelty and surprise did give the foreigners the upper hand in the first rounds of trade. Some of Cook’s men, for example, realized a profit of 1,800 percent on the otter skins they procured from the Nuu-chah-nulth, thereby setting off a near mutiny among some of his crew who wanted to abandon their “voyage of discovery” and head back to the coast for more skins. However, the Natives quickly reassessed the value of these new trade items in relation to their own, and from then on every deal became a game of wits.

  As much as they might have liked to believe otherwise, the new world the Nor’westmen found themselves in was not an innocent or naive place by any stretch of the imagination. Intertribal trade was well developed by the time the foreigners showed up, and a wide variety of goods, ranging from copper and puffin beaks to human slaves and the scalps of woodpeckers, were finding their way back and forth from California to Alaska, and from the outer islands to the Prairies. The newcomers learned, much to their annoyance, that such fundamental laws and practices as supply and demand, false advertising, gouging, circumventing the middleman, not to mention the old bait and switch, were already in wide usage on the coast. As one Nor’westman put it, “These artists of the northwest could dye a horse with any jockey in the civilized world, or ‘freshen up’ a faded sole with the most ingenious and unscrupulous of fishmongers.” Throwing the horny all-male crews still further off-balance was the fact that North Coast women, who tended to be less sexually available than the Hawaiians, often played a major role in trading negotiations.

  For well over a hundred years, there has been a strong tendency throughout much of the Northern Hemisphere to idealize Native Americans; this extends, in many cases, to the Natives themselves. They are often depicted as proto-environmentalists—stewards of a continental Eden who revered their prey and nurtured the land until it was laid waste by invading Europeans. Such rose-tinted hindsight is surprising given that so much information about the realities of tribal life survives to this day. But it wasn’t just the likes of John Muir, Edward S. Curtis, and Grey Owl who subscribed to this view; even George Armstrong Custer, of all people, was known to wax rhapsodic about the passing of what he and many of his contemporaries called the “noble race.” And yet, before the westward expansion, before any of these romantics was yet born, the West Coast otter trade was helping to set the tone for every extractive industry that has come after.

  Though food was generally plentiful on the Northwest Coast, Natives would certainly have been familiar with hunger and hard times in the form of bad winters and poor fish runs. While it was not a common food item, the sea otter provided some of the finest clothing available anywhere. And yet, despite its practical importance, and despite a necessarily keen sensitivity to the rhythms of the natural world, the West Coast Natives pursued this creature to the brink of extinction. In doing so, they demonstrated the same kind of profit-driven shortsightedness that has wiped out dozens of other species, including the Atlantic salmon and, more recently, the Atlantic cod. It is an eccentric and uniquely human approach to resources: like plowing under your farmland to make way for more lawns, or compromising your air quality in exchange for an enormous car.

  From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, it is hard to say who was more inebriated by greed: the Europeans who were seeing profits in the hundreds of percent, or the Natives who were suddenly able to leapfrog their way to the top of the social hierarchy and put on spectacles of largesse hitherto unimaginable by any potlatch host on the coast. So eager were the Natives to get their hands on the traders’ various technological marvels that a man would readily sell the otter cloak off his wife’s back and, on occasion, her back as well. And so desperate were the Iron Men to acquire these skins that they would trade away virtually anything that wasn’t crucial to the journey home; this included Native slaves from down the coast, firearms, silverware, door keys, and the sailors’ own clothing. These were boom times for all concerned, a rapacious festival of unrestrained capitalism.

  Despite the claims of western movies and popular history, the West, in fact, went “wild” seventy-five years before the arrival of the railroad, Jesse James, or Sam Steele and the North-West Mounted Police. By the time Lewis and Clark arrived on the Pacific coast in 1805, the local Natives were already heavily armed. As early as 1795 the Haida were returning the traders’ cannon fire with cannonades of their own—the guns having been pillaged from captured European ships. By 1810 some chiefs possessed such formidable arsenals that they were selling top-of-the-line swivel-mounted cannon back to the Nor’westmen. The Haida reportedly had such weapons mounted on the bows of their canoes. The Haida had understood the art of fortification since well before the arrival of Europeans, and at least one Haida village near Masset had a stockade armed with plundered cannon. Farther north, the Tlingits were taking measures of their own; annoyed that the Russian American and Hudson’s Bay Companies were encroaching on their role as middlemen between inland and other coastal tribes, they reduced the Russian and British forts to smoking ruins. Meanwhile, of the dozen or more trading vessels taken by West Coast tribes before the collapse of the otter trade in the 1850s, fully half were seized by the Haida.

  AN EARLY SOURCE OF TENSION emerged around the fact that the
ft was an accepted practice among virtually all the people the traders encountered. To say that Natives would take anything that wasn’t nailed down was, apparently, an understatement: John Meares, one of the first of the Nor’westmen, reported that “it has often been observed when the head of a nail either in the ship or boats stood a little without the wood, that they [Natives] would apply their teeth in order to pull it out.” Thefts were perpetrated with a sporting attitude, similar to the Plains Indian practice of counting coup;*5 the assumption seemed to be that whatever you couldn’t effectively protect—whether it be a soupspoon or a schooner—you didn’t deserve to own in the first place. The white traders were, of course, practicing their own version of this: while the Natives were making off with tools, laundry, and rowboats, traders thought nothing of coming ashore and helping themselves to water, timber, and game—all items that Natives considered to be their property.

  Because of this, deals were often brokered in an atmosphere of mutual suspicion and contempt barely hidden beneath a thin veneer of carefully orchestrated protocol: gift giving, invitations to dine and visit the other’s living quarters, etc. However, as competition and inflation grew with explosive speed, it didn’t take long for the presents and feasting to degenerate into tense, heavily armed encounters that bore a strong resemblance to a contemporary drug deal or hostage exchange. Much of the character of an individual transaction came down to the personalities of those involved, and there were honourable square dealers to be found on both sides. But bad news travels fast, and one man responsible for the early and rapid deterioration in trade relations was James Kendrick, who will go down as one of the most destructive (and prophetic) trade ambassadors in early American history. Kendrick was, among other things, the first man to sell large quantities of arms to the West Coast tribes, including the Haida, and it is thanks in part to him that the Queen Charlotte Islands have the bloodiest history of any place on the coast.

  Things might have turned out differently if Captain Kendrick, one of the “Boston Men,” hadn’t had his underwear stolen one day in June 1789 and decided to teach the local chief, Koyah, a lesson by sticking his leg in a cannon barrel, cutting off his hair, and painting his face. This was a devastating humiliation for Koyah, a renowned and wealthy chief, and restoring his lost status became an obsession. When Kendrick returned two years later, Koyah was waiting for him; he managed to capture Kendrick and his ship, but was out-gunned in the end. A massacre ensued in which as many as forty Haida were killed and scores more were wounded (the battle was later commemorated in a broadside called The Ballad of the Bold Northwestmen). Koyah survived, and the next ship to visit his territory was burned to the waterline and her crew slaughtered, with the exception of one man who was enslaved. That same year, one of Koyah’s allies gave another vessel the same treatment. In 1795 Koyah led an attack of more than forty canoes carrying approximately 1,200 warriors against yet another American ship called the Union; the assault was repelled by overwhelming force and as many as seventy Haida were killed. “I could have kill’d a hundred more with grapeshot,” wrote the Union’s twenty-year-old captain, “but I let humanity prevail & ceas’d firing…. None of us was hurt.”

  Chief Maquinna, the same man who had given Captain Cook such a warm welcome, was driven to a similar extreme. Five years after Cook’s visit, he was paid a call by the Sea Otter, the first fur-trading vessel on the coast. Maquinna was invited aboard and shown to a seat of honour that had been booby-trapped with a charge of gunpowder. The chief was subsequently blown out of his chair; he survived but was scarred for life. When Maquinna’s warriors attacked in retaliation, dozens were killed by gun and cannon fire. On other occasions, traders ransacked Maquinna’s home and summarily executed his subchiefs. Nearly twenty years after the exploding chair incident, Maquinna oversaw the seizure of the Boston and the massacre of all but two of her crew; only the highly valuable armourer and a fortunate sailmaker were spared.

  Of all the sticky endings met by Nor’westmen, Captain Kendrick’s may have been the most poetically just. In 1795, six years after his first battle with Koyah, the moody, alcoholic Kendrick was in Honolulu Harbor where he requested a cannon salute from a British ship called the Jackal. The Jackal obliged—accidentally, with live ammunition—and James Kendrick went down in a hail of grapeshot. A month later the Jackal’s master was killed by Hawaiians. Kendrick’s brother was subsequently killed by an ally of Koyah’s.

  WHILE THE LOCALS could always retreat to their village forts or, if worse came to worst, into the deep forest, the Nor’westmen had nowhere to go but their ships, and at anchor they were sitting ducks. Traders reported being surrounded at times, by hundreds of canoes, some of which would have been longer than the ships themselves; they were also far more manoeuvrable in close quarters. Escape, under these conditions, would have been impossible, and there was always the possibility of attack, even in the most apparently benign situations. William Sturgis, a veteran fur trader from Massachusetts who would become one of the harshest critics of his colleagues’ behaviour on the coast, created a formula for an efficient, nonviolent trading environment. His recipe for success was, in short, a seamless defence coupled with a compelling display of ready firepower.

  It is hard to overemphasize the importance of these vessels to the sailors whose lives depended upon them. The journeys these men were engaged in would be considered epic today; for all practical purposes, they were closer to being interplanetary than intercontinental. Like a spaceship, each vessel was a life-support system unto itself, serving as dormitory, mess hall, clinic, storefront, warehouse, board-room, fortress, armoury, and escape module rolled into one. Without it, there was no way home. If something went wrong en route, you would probably die; there was no way of calling for help, and rarely anyone to hear you even if you could. In the event that your ship was lost and you managed to make it to shore, it would, in most cases, merely prolong your suffering. A sailor separated from his mother ship was an extremely vulnerable individual; he stood an excellent chance of being killed outright or enslaved by people who were alien in every sense of the word. The difference between his experience and that of contemporary West African slaves would have been only a matter of scale.

  In retrospect, it is difficult to fathom why the traders were so willing to arm the Natives, particularly when one considers that, as one French trader observed, the Natives would frequently turn their weapons on the very men who sold them, and on the same day they had been acquired. (The Spanish had a policy of never trading arms with Natives.) In some cases, the sale of guns was intended to buy loyalty, as was the case with British fur traders who had cut arms deals with several Plains tribes. Because they often traded inferior weapons, some traders may have felt confident that they could always outgun the Natives if it came to a fight; others probably thought they would never return to the area so it didn’t matter what they left behind. Or maybe they just weren’t thinking. In any case, the speed with which the Native peoples adapted to new technologies and changing conditions caught many of the traders by surprise.

  IT SEEMS IMPOSSIBLE that participants on either side of the fur trade would have failed to envision for the sea otter the same fate that John J. Audubon could see awaiting the buffalo in 1843, when vast herds still blackened the plains. “Before many years,” wrote Audubon in his Missouri River Journal, “the Buffalo, like the Great Auk, will have disappeared; surely this should not be permitted.” In 1730 millions of sea otters flourished in the kelp beds that dotted the Pacific coast, from Baja California north to Alaska, and south again along the Aleutian Islands and Kamchatka, all the way to Japan; by 1830 the species had been all but extirpated from most of its range. And yet, while the Natives appeared, in most cases, to have been willing, even zealous, agents of the species’ destruction, the white traders had them over a barrel. Coercive techniques, including threats and hostage taking, were used by some traders, but in a sense the Natives were hostages, first and foremost, to the trade itself: once the
market for skins had been created, they really had no choice but to participate. Any village or tribe that didn’t would become the losers in the inevitable race for new arms, technology, and wealth. Once aboard a juggernaut like this, it appears suicidal to jump off—even if staying on is sure to destroy you in the end.

  As the sea otter population dwindled, intertribal warfare grew so vicious, and trade relations soured so completely—on all sides—that commercial ventures were no longer worth the risk. Increasingly mutinous crews, as well as the kidnapping and ransoming of Natives for skins, further exacerbated the situation. William Sturgis, who lost a brother to the Haida, gave what may stand as the fairest assessment of the situation on the coast at the start of the nineteenth century. Recalling his experiences in the otter trade, he wrote:

  Should I recount all the lawless & brutal acts of white men upon the Coast you should think that those who visited it had lost the usual attributes of humanity, and such indeed seem to be the fact. The first expeditions were…entrusted to such men as could be picked up ready to undertake a hazardous adventure. These were often men of desperate fortunes, lawless & reckless, who, upon finding themselves beyond the pale of civilization and accountable to no one, pursued their object without scruple as to the means, and indulged every brutal propensity without the slightest restraint…. I do not exaggerate when I say that some among them would have shot an Indian for his garment of Sea Otter skins with as little compunction as he would have killed the animal from whom the skins were originally taken.

  The quick and dismal failure of trading relations on the Northwest Coast can be traced to a pair of lethal ingredients: the fact that both parties brought extremely violent cultures to the bargaining table, and that neither side was willing to see the other as fully, “legitimately” human. This combination of violence and disdain, coupled with a strong sense of entitlement, helped set the tone for future settlers’ and investors’ attitudes, not just toward the New World’s human inhabitants, but toward its resources as well. Little, in fact, has changed since King William III declared from an ocean away that the forests of Maine were “the King’s Pine.”