Chasing Shadows
The Simon Gunanoot story

It was one of the longest and most famous manhunts in the history of Canada, and yet even today, a hundred years later, the real story of Simon Peter Gunanoot is shrouded in mystery. Accused of murdering two men in 1906, in the Hazelton region of northwestern BC, Gunanoot vanished with his family of eight into a wilderness one quarter the size of the province.

Suddenly, one spring day in 1919 - 13 years later - he walked out of the bush and turned himself in, igniting a media firestorm. For not only had the fugitive captured the imagination of a nation; standing beside him at the log police post was no less than Stewart Henderson, Canada's top criminal lawyer.

"The trail is a pretty cold," a Gitxsan elder warned when I first began researching the documentary Chasing Shadows for The Canadians series on The History Channel. "Most everyone is dead, and about all that's been written is lies!" And there had been a lot written, at least three books and a couple of dozen feature articles.

Adding to the elusiveness of the story, everyone in the north has a tale which they swear to be true. One man told me that Simon was really a bum and never lived in the bush; instead he drank liquor in a shack outside of Hazelton.

On the other side, there are many stories that Gunanoot not only did all that was attributed to him, but that he had supernatural powers - "Indian magic." For example, he could deflect bullets, just with his will, making them curve away from his body. He could become invisible and pass through his pursuers' camps unseen, his dogs trained to never make a sound or leave a track.

Still, there is an accurate account, a book titled Outlaw Trapper, by Recardo Williams. Williams was a lawyer and an amateur historian who was able to interview a number of Gunanoot’s children before they died. Because of his legal interest, Williams' coverage of Gunanoot’s trial first awakened me to the idea that something else was going on. But the element that most compelled me to take on the documentary is the vast splendor and raw hostile beauty of the country through which Gunanoot traveled.

The circumstances surrounding the murders that June evening in 1906 are well known. Simon Peter Gunanoot was a Gitxsan man who walked in two worlds. He was the son of two hereditary Gitxsan chiefs, and he had learned the ways of the bush traveling with his father, Nah Gun, on the trapline. Simon was educated, articulate in English, and was a prosperous Kispiox merchant who traveled as far as Seattle for goods. He owned a prime ranch in the Hazelton region.

On that fateful evening in June he was returning from Hagwilget and stopped at a nefarious tavern, where he got into an argument with a Hazelton dock worker named McIntosh. A fight ensued and Gunanoot was badly beaten. At that point, as is reported in his trial transcripts, Gunanoot told McIntosh that he was "going to get a gun and fix" him.

A few hours later McIntosh's body was found on the trail to the Hazelton hospital, where he was going to have a wound from the fight bandaged. Constable James Kirby was called to the scene, but no sooner had he investigated McIntosh’s murder than reports came that a second body had been found nearby, that of a stump farmer named Max Leclair.

Based on the reports of the fight and threat, Kirby and a posse set out for Gunanoot’s ranch along the Skeena river near Kispiox. Although Sarah, Gunanoot’s wife, and their children were there, Gunanoot and his brother-in-law, Peter Himadam, were gone. Finding tracks leading towards the fishing village of Kitsegas, Kirby and his men took off in pursuit.

?Unfortunately, while in Kitsegas questioning the villagers about Gunanoot, the posse’s horses "accidentally" got loose, forcing Kirby and his men to walk the 40 kilometers back to Hazelton. Adding insult to humiliation, on their return they discovered that Gunanoot had returned, packed up his and Himadam’s families, and disappeared into the wilderness, not to be seen by Kirby for the next decade and a half.

As attempt after attempt failed to capture Gunanoot, he became a folk hero in the eyes of both First Nations and white settlers, as well as the obsession of Mr. Hussey, Superintendent of Provincial Police, and even Premier McBride. In the time that the Gunanoot clan lived in the bush, the provincial government spent an equivalent in today's money of $1.5 million dollars and hundreds of thousands of man-hours chasing Simon's shadow.

At one time the manhunt involved not only the BC Provincial Police, but also the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the famed Pinkerton Agency (the company that had previously captured Jesse James and Billy Miner). And though a substantial reward had been posted, no one turned Gunanoot in. Still, hundreds of bounty hunters, often prospectors who had failed in the gold fields, joined the chase. All failed!

Then, one day in 1919, Simon Peter Gunanoot walked out of the wilderness and turned himself in. And that should have been the end, but it was just the beginning.

Standing beside him that day was his best friend George Beirnes, a Kispiox rancher, a packer for the telegraph line that cut through Gunanoot’s land. (Beirnes had been instrumental in handling Gunanoot’s business affairs, renting his ranch, selling the fugitives' furs and depositing the money in a bank account for Gunanoot).

Standing on the other side of Gunanoot was Stewart Henderson, Canada’s top criminal defense lawyer. With Henderson at the helm, the case immediately became high-profile and Simon a cause célèbre, lionized as a superman who had survived in the harshest wilderness in North America. Stories ran in all of the provincial papers and even the Globe and Mail.

When the case came to trial in Vancouver, Henderson argued convincingly that the evidence was circumstantial and that there were a number of other plausible explanations to the murders. Reportedly, the jury deliberated for 13 minutes, and returned with a verdict of "Not Guilty."

In the past, historians and researchers have focused on the question, "Was Gunanoot really guilty?" For me, the far more intriguing question is, "Why did the provincial government spend so much money on a case that was very weak?"

The answer came from the very source by which Superintendent Hussey directed his manhunt, ie. the Yukon Telegraph Line. Hidden in the provincial archives, amongst the piles of telegrams between the searchers and Hussey, is a record of the obsession and growing fear of Gunanoot which made his capture imperative.

To understand the source of this fear, one must look at the times. By the turn of the century the west coast of British Columbia had become the last intersection between aboriginal culture and European expansionism. With the advancing railroad and rampant settlement of traditional lands, native rights were being extinguished - not legally, but by the white belief in occupation by Divine Right. Consequently, the land claim issue had come to a flash point, with native activists like Joe Capalino taking a delegation of West Coast native leaders to England to meet with King Edward. At the same time the Nisga’a had already petitioned Ottawa for recognition of their territorial rights. And, with the help of James Tait, the Tahltan of the Stikine had drafted a ‘Declaration of Independence.'

Recognizing the volatility of the situation, Hussey and McBride were fully aware that in spite of the huge reward offered for Gunanoot… no one, neither native nor white, would turn him in… though apparently, everyone knew where he was. They feared that he was an icon of resistance, uniting traditional enemy nations into a single voice. In short, they were afraid that Gunanoot would be another Louis Riel, who had been executed just 30 years earlier for speaking out for his people.

In the end, it's my opinion that what made Gunanoot the target of such a massive chase had little to do with the Hazelton murders. Rather it was his stature and status in both worlds that marked him.

Ironically, though the manhunt and subsequent trial seemed to take the political spirit out of Gunanoot, he did become a metaphor for aboriginal resistance. Sixty years after his death his son David would provide critical evidence about Gitxsan tribal boundaries in the famed Delgamuukw case. And, in 1999, the Supreme Court ruled that BC aboriginal rights had not been extinguished and still had to be negotiated.

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