In August 1823, old frontiersman Hugh Glass was scouting ahead for a fur trapping expedition in South Dakota when he surprised a grizzly bear mother with her two cubs. The bear charged him immediately, knocking his rifle away and mauling him badly. Glass drew his knife and fought the grizzly hand-to-hand (maybe I should say hand to paw?), stabbing it repeatedly as it clawed and bit him. Hearing his screams, two trapping partners soon arrived and found him laying unconscious on top of the bear in a ghastly mess of human and animal blood. They finished off the dying bear with a rifle shot to the head, then took Glass with them back to their camp. Expedition leader Andrew Henry took a good look at the mangled mess of a man and announced that he would soon die of his injuries. Henry asked two trappers to stay with Glass until he died, give him a good burial, and then rejoin the group.
Jim Bridger and John Fitzgerald volunteered to stay behind with Glass and began to dig his grave. What happened next is uncertain. The two men later claimed that they fled for their lives after hostile Arikaree Indians discovered them, but there is no evidence of that. They soon caught up to the rest of the group heading to Yellowstone and reported that Hugh Glass was dead. However, the old mountain man did not die—after an unknown period of time he woke up in his shallow grave, under a thin layer of dirt and leaves. All his weapons, equipment, and protective clothing were gone, taken by the two men responsible for his burial. His leg was broken, and the rest of him was hardly better off. The bear attack had cut him so badly it exposed rib bones on his backside. He had lost a lot of blood, and his wounds were festering. Alone and defenseless, he was more than 200 miles away from the nearest settlement, Fort Kiowa. He set his own broken leg, wrapped himself in the bear hide that had covered him in the grave, and started crawling.
It took Glass six weeks of crawling on his hands and knees to reach the Cheyenne River, 100 miles away from his grave. The bear had nearly torn off his scalp. He suffered from fever and advanced stages of infection. To prevent gangrene from progressing in his wounds he lay back on rotting logs and let the maggots eat his dead flesh away. Too weak to hunt or fish, he survived mostly on wild berries, roots, and other edible plants. Once he was able to scare a couple of wolves away from a bison they had killed. He ate some of the bison’s raw meat himself, still alone, dragging his broken leg along with him. When he finally reached the Cheyenne river, he built a raft from a large fallen tree and floated down the river. Along the way he encountered friendly Sioux who fed him and helped tend his wounds. Eventually he succeeded in floating in his dead tree all the way to Fort Kiowa.
Hugh Glass later admitted that he was motivated to survive only by revenge. After months of recovery at Fort Kiowa, he set out to kill the two men who had abandoned him. Glass found Jim Bridger at a trading post on the Yellowstone river. Bridger was only 19 years old at the time, and his youth saved him—Glass couldn’t bring himself to kill the terrified youngster. He set out to find the second man, and nearly a year after the fight with the grizzly he did find John Fitzgerald, confronting him in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin. Fitzgerald had joined the US Army, and although Glass demanded his head, the military would not allow a civilian to execute a soldier. Knowing that the punishment for murdering a soldier was death, Glass gave up on his mission of vengeance and spared Fitzgerald’s life as well. He accepted a purse of money collected by soldiers who sympathized with his story, snatched his rifle back from the man who had left him to die, and walked away. Glass lived for another decade as a trapper, fur trader, and professional hunter. When he was finally killed in an Indian attack in 1833, he was still carrying the same rifle that the bear had knocked away from him up in South Dakota.
His ordeal would have been much less arduous if only he had a piece of rope and knew how to cut it, but one look at that picture explains exactly how he survived.
Tall tales were a big part of the American West, to the everlasting frustration of the region's historians.
In the summer of 1823, according to newspaper accounts, a female grizzly bear sprang from the bushes along a tributary of the Yellowstone River and tore into a trapper and fur trader named Hugh Glass. She slashed his face, munched his scalp and removed a fist-sized hunk from his posterior. Members of Glass' expedition ran to his aid and killed the animal, but his prognosis looked grim. Two men were posted to stay behind and bury him when he succumbed to the inevitable. After six days, the duo abandoned him, still comatose and gurgling. They took his gun, knife and ammunition.
But Glass didn't die. When he came to his senses and realized he was alone, he began to crawl and then limp the 150 miles to the nearest trading post to get his revenge on the men who left him.
That, in essence, was the story printed first in a Philadelphia journal in 1825 and then picked up by newspapers across the country. In the century and a half since he was first written about, Glass has appeared in memoirs, poems, novels and even in a 1975 major motion picture, "Man in the Wilderness."
But the story, like Glass, is full of holes. I have now read every scrap of evidence surrounding Hugh Glass and his ordeal and have come to the conclusion that he existed mostly as a figment of American imaginations. There is almost no historical record of Glass, much less of his Lazarus-like reappearance after a grizzly attack. Only one of his letters has survived, and it makes no mention of the story. None who witnessed his mauling wrote about the incident.
Instead, the tale that persisted through generations was drawn entirely from second-, third- and fourth-hand reports. Compared to the leading figures of the Western fur trade — mountain men like Jedediah Smith and Jim Bridger — Glass barely registered. He left so little evidence that separating fact and fiction is virtually impossible.
But I do not see this as a problem.
Tall tales were a big part of the American West, to the everlasting frustration of the region's historians, who must try to sort out fiction from fact. It often turns out that our most cherished historical beliefs can't take scrutiny. For example, historians have long noted that the West, far from being a playground of rugged individualists, depended heavily on aid from the federal government. But myth sometimes creates a reality sturdier than fact.
The persistence of the mythic frontier exposes the limits of the academic sport of deconstruction. We can reveal how people gathered material, concocted story lines and spread fantasies through newspapers, dime novels and movies. We can show in great detail how Americans crafted frontier myths for entertainment, glory and masculine rejuvenation. But even showing that the ideas were largely fiction has not unmade those ideas. Unlike mold spores and vampires, myths tolerate sunlight. That is the power of frontier whoppers.
So what explains the longevity of Hugh Glass? He survived a brutal bear attack and lived to get his revenge because that is what we wanted him to do. Nationalism fueled our desire. Americans built their nation on the margins, and they looked to the geographic and social fringes for stories demonstrating the nation's grit and superiority. Glass lingered in popular culture because the story that grew up around him exemplified something America liked in itself. The fact that he was really a loser by most measures, having neither domestic bliss nor financial success, didn't matter. Nor did it matter that he was, as acquaintances described him, a cranky old man.
The mythmakers used Glass to illustrate a particular version of Western nature. Through his ordeal, they traced the origins of their nation to a place beyond history, a mythic space outside the normal flow of time. The terrain that Glass traversed during his ordeal was a wilderness wiped clean. Indians, rival European powers, mixed fur trade families might not have existed. Through Glass' story, Americans could imagine a continent free for the taking. And, since he left no record, there was nothing to contradict that view.
All of which makes the ending of Glass' story something of a puzzle. After being robbed and left for dead, after struggling to get back to civilization, the story goes, Glass found his betrayers. And what did he do? Did he shoot them or gut them with a Bowie knife? No, he lectured them. Talk was his revenge, an odd turn of events considering how most mythic Westerns end in brutal action. After telling people what he went through and what he thought of them, he walked away satisfied.
We will never know what Glass said, if he said anything at all. Still, I see hope in the symbolism of his verbal revenge. Glass served the nation, but he was a famously defiant underling. He fought bosses along with bears. Claiming the last word fit his cheeky reputation more than the script of the mythic West.
The myths that came out of the American West may thwart intellectual deconstruction, but they can always tell us more about the people — all the people — who created them.
