This time around on the HTTM, I thought it might be a good time to profile the story of Hugh Glass, the inspiration for the movie The Revenant, which is out in theaters now. I knew that the film was based on a true story, but it wasn’t until a few weeks ago that I learned just what an incredible tale it was, when my dad sent me a message about it. He recounted the story to me of how he was sitting in a diner in Jackson, WY in the 80’s eating breakfast, and with little else to occupy him he was reading a story on his placemat. It was the harrowing tale of Hugh Glass, and it was powerful enough that my dad never forgot it after all these years. There are many accounts of Glass’ ordeal, so I’ll give you a boiled-down amalgamation of the several that I’ve read.
Hugh Glass was a bad ass mountain man who was nearing his 40’s when this story takes place. In the spring of 1823, he was a part of an 
expedition of trappers led by Major Andrew Henry. Henry’s men were exploring and trapping beaver along the Missouri River and its tributaries throughout the present-day states of Nebraska, South Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming. In those days, getting the boys together for a beaver hunt was more difficult than sending a group text on a Friday night. In June of 1823, Henry’s group of 27 men, while traveling upriver on canoes, was attacked by Arikara Indians. Fifteen of the men were killed, and Hugh Glass took a musket ball in the leg. Though injured, he and 9 other trappers escaped and regrouped.
After the attack, Andrew Henry and his remaining men decided it would be best to stick to land for the remainder of their voyage into beaver trapping territories. They forged northwest into what is now South Dakota, ever cautious of the imposing Indian threat and the enticing Wall Drug signs. Major Henry ordered the men to use no unnecessary gunfire, so as to avoid alerting native tribes of their presence. He designated two hunters to supply the expedition with food and told the rest of the group to stick close together and remain quiet.
But Hugh Glass was kind of a loner, and he sometimes did as he pleased. One day in early August, he disobeyed orders and meandered off on his own and strayed up an embankment to look for ripe plums. Upon cresting the embankment, he startled a mama grizzly bear and her two cubs. “Old Ephraim,” as grizzlies were sometimes called in those days, snatched Glass up and shook him like Charlie Sheen on Sunday morning. His fellow men heard his screams and ran up to save him, emptying their weapons into the she-grizzly and, sadly, her two cubs as well. Glass was a bloody mess, suffering lacerations and mauling on his scalp, face, shoulders, arms, and back. He had a deep cut in his neck, through which his breaths were wheezing with every lung full of air. The men did their best to patch him up with makeshift dressings and tourniquets, but they soon realized it was a lost cause. They were all pretty pissed off at him for getting into such a mess and causing them to have to discharge their weapons, possibly giving away their position to nearby Indians. But nonetheless, they knew that they had to do the right thing and give him a proper burial. So they waited and waited, but the unconscious Glass just wouldn’t kick the can.
With winter just around the bend, Major Henry and his men knew they had to keep marching onward toward Fort Henry on the Yellowstone River, so that they wouldn’t be caught in the open when frigid weather hit. So Henry offered bonus pay to two of his men, Jim Bridger and John Fitzgerald, if they would stay with Glass until he succumbed to his injuries. They reluctantly agreed and stayed behind while the rest of the party forged on.
While the two men waited for Glass to die, they dug his grave and covered him with the dead grizzly’s hide. They waited and waited and waited some more, sleeping with Glass in-between them to avoid any Brokeback Mountain rumors on the Western Frontier. After 5 days of waiting, Bridger and Fitzgerald grew fearful that they wouldn’t make it to Fort Henry in time for winter, and so they made the decision that they would have to let Glass die on his own rather than risk their lives any longer. But they did more than just leave Hugh Glass behind. They figured a dead man wouldn’t need supplies, so they took his prized rifle, his knife, his flint & steel, and all of his other equipment, and they disembarked toward Fort Henry, leaving Glass to that great beaver playground in the sky.
Hugh Glass regained full consciousness shortly afterward, a shredded mess of a man. He had had short intervals of consciousness in the previous 5 days, and he knew that Bridger and Fitzgerald had been ordered to stay with him. But now they were gone, and so were all of his supplies. What little energy he had left inside him quickly turned to rage and an overwhelming desire for revenge. He had one good arm and one good leg, and he was able to crawl his way over to a nearby creek, where he planted his face in the water and gulped it down. He was then able to reach a handful of buffalo berries and got enough strength to forage for more food. He crawled along the ground eating grubs and worms and insects. As he rested and healed and faded in and out of sleep, he awoke once to see a lethargic rattlesnake not far away from him, which was probably resting while it digested a meal. He killed it and skinned it with a sharp rock. He then shredded the meat and was able to get it down his badly damaged throat with the help of water from the stream. The rattlesnake meat began to revitalize him. He soon realized that he wouldn’t be able to make it to Fort Henry where the other party members were headed, and he knew the closest place of safety would be Fort Kiowa, which was 250 miles back the way they’d come from.
Glass began the long journey downriver, foot by foot, yard by yard. Lady luck smiled upon him when he came across two wolves feasting on a buffalo calf. The writings don’t really say how, but he somehow got the wolves away from the carcass so that he could do a little feasting of his own. From what would have been available to him at the time, we can infer that he probably scared the wolves off with a President Bush routine. However he did it, he bought himself the opportunity to hang out and rest and eat off of the carcass for a couple of days while he further regained his strength. He also rubbed his horribly wounded back against a rotting log to contract maggots in his festering wounds, which allowed the bugs to eat away the decaying parts and slow the infection. Awesome.
As he healed and gained strength, he began to walk again on his own two feet. His ability to heal and his capacity for revenge were all that seemed to be keeping him going. He was exploring an abandoned cornfield for food one day, where he was found and picked up by a wandering band of friendly Sioux. They nursed his wounded back and got him as close to 100% as he could get. They then helped him fashion a raft and gave him some supplies, and soon he was on his way downriver toward Fort Kiowa.
Fort Kiowa was manned by French fur traders, who were blown away by the story that Glass told them of his daunting escape from death. He told them about his wishes to find the two men who had abandoned him, and they were more than willing to help in any way they could. They gave him new clothes, new supplies, and a new rifle, and they offered him a ride back upriver with one of their fur trading expeditions. He hitched a ride on one of their canoes with 6 other guys,and they all knew they were heading back into dangerous Indian territory. The captain of the group even wrote his last will and testament. Well, sure enough they ran into a buttload of Arikara Indians, and only 2 of the 7 men survived the attack, one of which was Hugh Glass who just happened to be on shore hunting at the time. He ran away from the attackers with several of them in pursuit. But just then, Lady Luck extended her bosoms of fortune once again when some Indians from the opposing Mandan tribe came by on horseback and swooped him up, carrying him back to one of their villages. After several days, they delivered his white ass to nearby Fort Tilton.
The traders at Fort Tilton were also astounded by Glass’ crazy story, but because of the nearby Indian threat, they couldn’t offer him much help in reaching Fort Henry to exact his revenge. All they could do was ferry him to the east side of the Missouri River where the Indian threat was less intense and give him a good luck slap on the ass. It was November 20, 1823 when Glass set out on his own from Fort Tilton on the 250 mile trek to the mouth of the Yellowstone River, where Fort Henry housed his abandoners. He walked for almost a month through arctic winds and frozen expanses, foraging food from he land and barely clinging to life. He traipsed through river bottoms and crossed over mountains, eager to confront those who had left whimper dead and stolen his prized rifle. In late December, Fort Henry finally came into view, and he built a raft out of logs and crossed back over the Missouri River toward it. But to his surprise, the fort was completely empty. He was, however, able to put it together that Major Henry’s party and moved onward to another stockade at the mouth of the Bighorn River. So off he went again.
When at long last he reached Henry and his men in their newly built stockade on the Bighorn River, the sequence of events got a little anticlimactic, so I’m sure The Revenant deviates from the real story significantly at this point. As Glass walked up, the men thought they were looking at a ghost. At first they were overcome with fear and dismay, but after talking with Glass for awhile and passing around some New Year’s cheer, everyone calmed down to listen to his unbelievable tale of how he had survived. By this point, he had traveled over 1,000 miles with vengeance in his heart as his primary inspiration. Jim Bridger was among the men at the stockade, but John Fitzgerald had left the expedition to join the Army and was stationed at Fort Atkinson in present-day Nebraska. After hearing Glass tell his story, the young Jim Bridger was so overcome with guilt, fear, and remorse that Glass decided not to kill him and instead forgave him fully. The months and miles had done much to calm his rage, and it seemed that Bridger’s own conscience was going to punish him enough. There was still the matter of Fitzgerald though, who Glass felt was the driving force behind the initial abandonment, and who also still had his prized rifle. He would stay a couple of months at the stockade to recover and then be on his way again toward Fort Atkinson.
On February 28, 1824, Glass set off with several other trappers on their way back down the Missouri River toward Fort Atkinson. They, of course, had another obligatory run-in with the Arikara Indians, and Glass again got separated from the rest of the surviving men. Sometime in May, when the fur traders made it to Fort Atkinson, they reported to the soldiers that Glass had died along with several other men on the trip down. Meanwhile, Glass had actually made it a couple hundred miles back to Fort Kiowa by himself, and in early June he surprised everyone yet again when he came strolling on up to Fort Atkinson asking for Fitzgerald’s head and his prized rifle back. Because Fitzgerald was an enlisted man, he was afforded certain protections against such a thing, and Glass didn’t want to deal with the repercussions of killing him. He did, however, shame Fitzgerald in front of the whole fort, and boy-oh-boy he also got his prized rifle back. Feeling sorry for Glass, the soldiers of the fort pooled together what money they could for him and sent him on his way.
Hugh Glass lived for 9 more years, free and on his own, hunting and trapping all over the western regions of the US. He even returned to the good old Arikara-Indian-infested Missouri River regions that he’d had so many problems with throughout his entire story and got himself killed by Arikara Indians, who rode off into the sunset with his prized rifle. He was a true bad ass of a mountain man.
Sources:
–http://www.historynet.com/hugh-glass-the-truth-behind-the-revenant-legend.htm#prettyPhoto/1/
–https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Glass
I’m not sure when it became commonplace to measure one’s worth, or more precisely, one’s cultural group s/he represents, by the atrocities we’ve encountered. The rationale of debating who’s most worthy of sympathetic reparations (whether tangible or intangible) due to the horrors suffered seems pointless. Why do we focus on how we’ve been put down; forever reliving those horrors and not allowing ourselves to turn those experiences into empowerment, rather, relinquishing our force to those barbarous acts that befall us and their perpetrators (yet, again)? Instead, the appropriate focus should be on what is commonly shared amongst the intimately oppressed … perseverance! The ability to come through said horrors to be empowered on the other side. Then what is shared is the triumph, not the tragedy. Allowing for the target to take the power back, by determining how events influence, not only us but also the rest of our people, ALL OF US. I tend to think that we are getting closer to that point of realizing the very dreams of those who dared to view themselves virtuous (though vicious acts of violence were their reward) manifested through the actions and ideals of newer generations.
experienced the same transgressions) to direct our vengeance towards each other. Continuing to rate our collective worth by segregating our experiences, and view humanity through the oxymoronic perception of being an efficient victim, we will ensure only one thing … the perpetuation of a dying paradigm. So, let die. Don’t go giving your power and loyalty to a corpse.
rallyshoplocal 