News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
Hugh Glass was one tough hombre.
Even among Mountain Men, the legendary fur trappers and explorers who blazed America's trail across the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, Glass's adventures were extraordinary. "The Revenant," which premiers at Sisters Movie House on Friday, January 8, was inspired by his incredible story of survival in the face of deadly attacks by man and beast.
The era of the Mountain Men spanned scarcely two decades, from about 1820 to 1840. It was only a brief moment in the centuries-spanning saga of the fur trade in North America. From the very first European ventures into the continent, men had traded for furs, especially prime beaver pelts. Then, as now, beaver fur made the finest felt for hats. (As Sisters' custom hatmaker Gene Baldwin can tell you, a 100-percent beaver-felt hat is light, durable, and water resistant - the class of the field).
Through most of the fur trade, the business relied on the native peoples to trap and kill the beaver, trading pelts for firearms, blankets, kettles, paint and beads, and - ruinously - whiskey or rum.
In the early 1820s, William Ashley and Andrew Henry introduced an innovation: Instead of relying on trade, they would lead American trappers into the beaver streams to trap the beaver directly. The Rocky Mountain Fur Company would supply them out of remote trading posts and by caravans that would trek to a designated destination in the mountains for a trade fair that would become the storied Mountain Man Rendezvous.
Hugh Glass was one of the men who answered Ashley's call in 1822, and headed up the Missouri River by keelboat, while Henry led another party overland. He was older than most of his companions - perhaps 40 - and hired on primarily as a meat hunter.
Ashley got word that Henry's party needed horses - theirs having been run off and stolen by Assiniboin. So Ashley's party stopped at a major Arikara village along the Missouri River in what is now South Dakota. The Arikara lived by a mix of buffalo hunting and agriculture, and their position along the river gave them a significant advantage in trade. Unfortunately for Ashley's men, the Arikara were angered by killings of their people by another American trading enterprise. Though Ashley assured them that his party was unrelated to the perpetrators, it seems that the Arikara were not much in the mood for making distinctions.
After a trading session on June 1, 1823, which seemed successful, the Arikara attacked Ashley's party encamped on the sandy shores of the Missouri. In a 15-minute flurry of arrow-and-musket fire, 14 trappers were killed and another 11 were wounded. One of them was Hugh Glass.
After recovering from the leg wound he suffered in the Arikara attack, Glass resumed his hunting duties, as he accompanied Andrew Henry's men overland in August 1823. He was some distance in front of his party, hunting in heavy cover along Grand River when he surprised a sow grizzly with a pair of cubs. As any backpacker knows, this is about as dangerous a situation as a person can encounter in the wild.
The grizzly charged Glass and subjected him to a mauling that his companions -who responded to his screams, burst through the brush, and killed the bear - immediately assessed as fatal.
But Glass didn't die right away. Carrying him on a litter proved too slow, and a slow pace could endanger the whole party, who were under constant threat from Indian attack. Two men - John Fitzgerald and a young Jim Bridger - agreed to stay put and wait for Glass' inevitable demise. They received an $80 bonus for stepping up.
They waited. Five days. And Glass did not die. Fearing being left impossibly far behind their trapping party, Fitzgerald and Bridger gathered Glass' rifle, knife and firemaking tools, and left him to breathe out his last on the prairie.
But Glass did not die. Incredibly, he survived his wounds, roused himself, and began to crawl. He would crawl and stagger more than 200 miles south and east to the trading outpost of Fort Kiowa on the Missouri, living on insects, somewhat-edible plants, a rattlesnake he managed to crush with a rock, and the carcasses of buffalo found on the prairie.
Glass was fired with the desire for revenge against the men who had abandoned him. But when he healed up enough to track Bridger down, he felt sorry for the kid, who had been influenced by his older, more experienced companion. So he headed downriver looking for Fitzgerald. He found him, too, but the man had enlisted in the army, and Glass couldn't touch him without hanging for it. So he gave up on revenge. He did get his rifle back, though, and he eventually went back to hunting for a living.
He went south for a spell, and got into a run-in with Shoshone Indians in Colorado. Took an arrow in the back. A fellow trapper sliced the arrowhead out of his back muscles with a straight razor and he spent some time in Taos, New Mexico, recuperating from that latest insult to his ravaged and battered body.
By 1830, he was operating out of Fort Union, an American Fur Company outpost on the Upper Missouri (on the border of modern-day North Dakota and Montana). Hunting for a trading post was an easier life than wading in freezing streams to trap beaver. Safer, too, or so you'd think.
In 1833, Glass relocated to Fort Cass, near the confluence of the Big Horn and Yellowstone rivers in what is now Montana. Leaving the fort with two companions in the spring of the year, Glass was ambushed by his old nemesis, the Arikara. This time, he didn't make it. He was shot and scalped. Old Glass, the ultimate survivor, had "gone under."
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"The Revenant" is a fictional - even mythic - tale inspired by the Hugh Glass epic. In place of the rolling, grassy plains and brush-choked riverbanks of the Dakotas visionary director Alejandro González Iñárritu set his story in suitably epic, iconic terrain - in dense forest and among high mountain crags. The plot revolves around enmity between Glass and Fitzgerald and the quest for vengeance fires the story, where it fizzled in fact.
Yet for all its fictionalizations, the production team went to considerable lengths to pursue authenticity in material culture and in the native languages spoken in the film, in an effort to bring verisimilitude to the story.
"The Revenant" might best be seen as legend and folklore. And that's appropriate enough - for Hugh Glass was a campfire story among his fellow mountain men even before his scalp adorned the lodge of an Arikara
warrior.
For more information, visit the Museum of the Mountain Man's extensive Hugh Glass website at http://www.hughglass.org. For more information on "The Revenant," visit www. sistersmoviehouse.com.
Jim Cornelius is editor in chief of The Nugget and author of “Warriors of the Wildlands: True Tales of the Frontier Partisans.” A history buff, he explores frontier history across three centuries and several continents on his podcast, The Frontier Partisans. For more information visit www.frontierpartisans.com.
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