![]() Near the forks of the Grand River (in present-day South Dakota), the trappers reached a grove of trees that sheltered a spring-fed stream, and Henry faced facts. Whatever distance, it was too little, too painful and it took too long. Yount recorded in his memoirs that he talked with Glass directly, as well as with a trapper named Allen (Hiram Allen was one of Major Henry’s 1823 brigade) and a later Glass cohort of record named Dutton.Īllen recalled that Major Henry ordered branches cut for a litter and that they carried the groaning, blood-wrapped man two days or more. The saga of Hugh Glass must be pieced together from accounts written by several of his contemporaries, each with varying details. When the sun woke them, though, he still breathed. They tore strips from shirts and bound up his wounds as best they could, sure he’d be dead by morning. Smith a young man of our company made a powerful prayer wh moved us all greatly and I am persuaded John died in peace….’īut the scribe himself would not oblige and follow. We brought him to the ship where he soon died. ![]() ‘He lived a short while after he was shot and asked me to inform you of his sad fate. ‘My painful duty it is to tell you of the deth of yr son…,’ Glass wrote the young man’s father. He had proved more than equal to this sensitive task. Somewhere in his shadowy past, Glass had gained enough education to express himself clearly and gracefully in writing. Knowing he was dying, Gardner had entrusted Glass with his last message to his family back in Virginia. ![]() Afterward, he’d nursed the wounded, especially young John Gardner. Others, watching, remembered Glass’ quick and effective response to the Arikara guns. They had to get their 18th fatality underground and move. The gunshots needed to finish the grizzly and her two yearlings echoed through the gully. When the attacking warriors proved to be usually friendly Mandans, the trappers knew the Ree contempt was spreading–Assiniboines, Sioux and Hidatsas could well emulate the Blackfeet, who already considered any white man fair game. Yet even with those precautions, they’d lost two more men in a recent night attack. He allowed only two designated hunters and wanted no unnecessary gunfire. Henry had ordered his small crew to stick close together as they hurried cross-country toward his fur post on the Yellowstone River. If a couple of frustrated trappers hadn’t torched the Arikara village on their own, the Rees could have laughed in their faces. Army had made a sham of punishing the Arikara village for the devastating June attack. One or two of the somber group that ringed his dying ground thought Glass deserved to lose this battle. Tall and powerfully built, he wasn’t a man to run from a fight. But his skill and courage had served them all well. His willful foray up the draw for ripe plums, which had ended in ‘Old Ephraim’s’ embrace, was typical. He was a loner, who often insisted on going his own way. But they called him ‘old’ with a measure of affection and respect. Nearing or in his early 40s, Glass was old enough to be the father of young men like Jim Bridger, who was beginning his second year as a trapper. He was old compared to most of his fellow mountain men. That hadn’t stopped him, but the grizzly had finally done him in. ![]() August was two-thirds gone, yet several of them still nursed scars from that battle, including Old Glass, who’d taken a ball in his thigh. ![]() Arikara (also known as Ree) Indians had killed 15 in a June 2 attack that forced them off their Missouri River keelboats and–that route to the mountains closed–set them trudging west up the Grand River valley. Hostile natives had already finished off 17 of their brigade. The notion that Hugh Glass was about to crawl into American legend, to become an epic hero of story and poem, would have made them laugh. That some men would call him a liar and accuse him of slandering a gallant comrade might have puzzled them. That he would become the subject of controversy would not have surprised them. Tough as they’d found the old coon (a term mountain men used to describe themselves) to be that summer of 1823 as they challenged the Upper Missouri tribes to reach the beaver streams, Major Andrew Henry and his nine trappers would have been incredulous if they’d known how indestructible Glass and his story have proved to be. What astonished them was that he breathed at all. They had only to listen to the blood bubble from the rip in his throat with his every breath. To see how she’d chewed into his shoulder and back. To look at his shredded scalp…face…chest…arm…hand. At least what they could make out through the blood, which was everywhere. Hugh Glass: The Truth Behind the Revenant Legend CloseĮvery man there knew Hugh Glass was a gone ‘coon.’ They had only to look at what little the she-grizzly’s 3-inch claws had left of the old trapper. ![]()
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