A Terrible Attack
By the summer of 1823, Hugh Glass was a guide for Capt. Andrew Henry’s Rocky Mountain Fur Company, which was attempting to establish fur trading outposts in the northwest region of what was then Louisiana Territory but what is now the Dakotas, northern Wyoming, and southeastern Montana. Before taking up the life of a beaver trapper, Glass had been a sailor, a reluctant pirate under the infamous captain Jean Lafitte, and an adopted member of the Pawnee Nation. In August 1823, he was around 40 years old and had a reputation as a formidable hunter and tracker.While stalking game far ahead of Capt. Henry and the rest of his trappers, Glass had the misfortune to encounter two grizzly bear cubs along the banks of the Grand River in what would become northwestern South Dakota. As any experienced frontiersman knew, where there were cubs, the mother was certain to be nearby. Sure enough, an enraged female grizzly charged from the underbrush along the riverbank. Glass got off one shot from his Kentucky long rifle before the bear piled into him, knocking him to the ground and ferociously mauling his upper body.
Glass managed to get his hunting knife free and stab the bear to death, but not before he had suffered catastrophically severe injuries. Captains Henry and Glass’s fellow trappers soon arrived, and the situation was correctly judged to be extremely dire; Glass could not walk on his own and appeared to be near death. Capt. Henry himself doctored Glass’s wounds as best he could, but the man was still badly torn up. None of the men wanted to leave him behind, so for several days following the grizzly attack, the trappers took turns carrying their wounded comrade on a litter. Every morning, they awoke expecting to find Glass dead, but the plainsman stubbornly clung to life.
Eventually, Capt. Henry realized that he could not continue delaying the expedition by tending to Glass. He asked for two volunteers to stay behind and sit with the severely mauled trapper while the rest of the party continued up the banks of the Missouri River. Two young men stepped forward: John Fitzgerald and Jim Bridger, who was then only 19 years old and just beginning his career as a mountain man. Fitzgerald and Bridger were charged with remaining by Glass until he died, at which point they would give him a proper burial and journey up the Missouri to rejoin the expedition. Capt. Henry and the other trappers continued their journey.
Five days later, however, Glass was still alive, and Fitzgerald had become concerned about hostile Indians. The Arikara Nation had harassed the Rocky Mountain Fur Company throughout that summer, and the trappers had suffered severe casualties. The older, more experienced Fitzgerald convinced Bridger that they had already gone above and beyond what was asked of them, and that to remain with the surely dying Glass any longer would be a death sentence. Reluctantly, Bridger agreed to abandon Glass. Believing that he would soon no longer need them, the two trappers set off with Glass’s rifle and the rest of his supplies, confident in their assumption that Glass was as good as dead.
A Nearly Unbelievable Story
But Glass did not die. Instead, mere hours after Bridger and Fitzgerald’s departure, Glass awoke and realized that he was alone in the middle of a hostile wilderness. He knew the closest outpost was about 250 miles away at Fort Kiowa. Because Glass was still too injured to walk, he would have to crawl. Which is exactly what he did.For the next six weeks, Hugh Glass crawled down the banks of the Grand River, surviving on insects, roots, berries, and whatever small animals he could catch by hand. Slowly but surely, Glass’s wounds miraculously healed. Eventually, he gained enough mobility that he was able to fashion himself a crutch out of a tree-branch, which he used to hobble across the baking hot prairie. Over a week into his odyssey, Glass came across a buffalo calf which had been killed by a wolf pack. Summoning what little strength he had, he chased off the wolves and spent several days by the carcass, feasting on the meat and bone marrow of the fresh kill until he had gained enough energy to resume his trek.
In mid-October, nearly two months after the grizzly attack on the Grand River, Hugh Glass staggered into Fort Kiowa, bedraggled, weakened, but alive, his extensive wounds all but fully healed. After an extended convalescence, Glass vowed to track Bridger and Fitzgerald down and demand an explanation for their abandonment. It is unclear whether Glass ever did, although legend has it that a confrontation between at least Bridger and Glass did take place, and that Glass decided to take mercy upon the young trapper after hearing his side of the story.
depicts a buckskin-clad trapper descending a precarious mountain. (Public Domain)
The Stuff of Legends
Over the years, this and other aspects of Glass’s story have been heavily debated by historians of the American West. Some insist that the legend of Hugh Glass is a campfire story and nothing more. However, this hardly matters. Glass’s story highlights the traits of fortitude, determination, and resilience which can be found in multiple mountain man stories. These stories have helped Americans establish a national identity as individuals who do not give up in the face of adversity, who can overcome any obstacle regardless of the pain they have endured.If Hugh Glass, a mortal man without any preternatural abilities, could survive his ordeal, then anyone can survive anything. This message is far more important than any academic dissection performed on the legend itself. The story of Hugh Glass endures because of what it proves about the strength of the human condition, and this is why it remains vital to the history of the American West and to anyone who takes inspiration from it.
