The pure craft of this film is undeniable. I want to print and frame every single shot, apologize to Roger Deakins for probably missing out on that Oscar again, and spend the rest of my days marveling at the breathtaking beauty of Emmanuel Lubezki’s work. The two sequences that open the movie–the Arikara attack and the bear attack–are astonishing in both their brutality and in the skill that obviously went into them. After that, the film doesn’t reach those types of highs again, but the opening still sets the stage for two and a half hours of intensity, suffering, and violence.
Here Lies Hugh Glass is the true account of the man behind The Revenant. In it, Jon T. Coleman excavates not just his subject, but also the myth of a nation he unwittingly helped to birth. The following is from his author’s note.
In Here Lies Hugh Glass, I tell a story about a man famous for nearly being killed by a grizzly bear in the Rocky Mountains in 1823. There’s not much left of this man. He contributed one letter to history. He spoke to people, but the writers who tracked him through twice-removed conversations only disfigured him further with their literary ambitions, calling him America’s Odysseus, a laughable honorific for a working-class guy whose major talent, accident proneness, made him more Homer Simpson than Homeric. Undocumented, the man disappeared into his surroundings. That’s why I picked him. I’m a historian of culture but also of nature, animals, landscapes, biomes, and habitats. Environments intrigue me as much as people.
The story of Hugh Glass and his environments calls into question the central conceit of biographies: that individual human lives tower above all else. Unlike Jesus, Attila the Hun, or Benjamin Franklin, Glass remains almost wholly lost in time. His predilections, his appearance, as well as his opinions are unknowable. His work as a hired hunter rendered him barely visible. Even his saving grace, the regional authors who seized upon the stories of western workers remade by nature to secure national fame, did so for their own purposes. Stripped of his past, his personality, and his individuality, Glass surrendered the lead role in his own drama. He shared the bill with the environments that claimed parts of him.
Glass arrived at the same end as most. Ordinary people tend to vanish. Birth certificates, parish records, and tombstones mark their existence, but the memories, the tastes, the passions, and the individual flourishes, all the hiccups in form, carriage, and delivery that separate one mortal pilgrim from another, erode quickly. Style may be the most perishable substance on earth. Hugh Glass was an ordinary man with exemplary style, and glimmers of his humor and his rebelliousness have withstood the ravages of grizzly bears, hard labor, and literary abduction. Yet the information that has survived evokes as much loss as satisfaction. Forever incomplete, he is a reminder of the deletions awaiting us all.
What follows is more a missing-person report than a biography. But instead of cursing the holes in his paperwork, I intend to plumb the absences surrounding Glass. The gaps in the record open onto his environs; they made him an American environmentalist of a sort. A vocalist rather than a writer, Glass didn’t produce a memorable tome—a Walden, A Sand County Almanac, or a Silent Spring—but he contributed to American environmental thought in his own way. Glass withstood a posse of consumers—the fauna, bosses, and literati out to swallow him—and his staying power leads the history of American environmentalism in new and unsettling directions.
Indeed, Hugh Glass reverses the emphasis and order of the phrase. Instead of highlighting individual thinkers contemplating the nation’s environmental practices and values, he shows how groups of Americans used the violently altered bodies of working-class hunters out West to define their nation. Instead of American environmentalism, Glass serves up environmental Americanism. By stressing the relationship between the environment and nationalism, his story underscores the links between marginal people laboring in far-off places and the rise of American exceptionalism. Americans looked to the outskirts of their society and their population centers to define their nation as unique and chosen for greatness, and Hugh Glass, a hunter physically transformed by nature on the country’s frontier, surfaced as a bit player in a nation-building drama. His ordeals rooted environmental history in the thick of early-nineteenth-century American history.
Americans, of course, were kidding themselves when they imagined that environments created exceptional nations. Neither born nor planted, nations rise and fall on the words, thoughts, and deeds of people. Families, homes, regions, religions, classes, genders, races, and ethnicities bolster and erode national identities. To placate crosshatched loyalties, nation-builders biologized and sanctified the nation, binding it together with myths that suggested the polity had both earthly and otherworldly origins. In 1839, John L. O’Sullivan, the writer, party activist, and coiner of the phrase “manifest destiny,” cobbled together these origin myths in his essay “The Great Nation of Futurity.” God, he wrote, had selected the United States to “smite unto death the tyranny of kings, oligarchs, hierarchs, and carry the glad tidings of peace and good.” O’Sullivan pleaded with American artists to turn away from Europe, ancient Greece, and Rome for instruction and inspiration. Writers especially should look at their own continent to find the “vigorous national heart of America.” The nexus of the nation thrummed in “the wilderness,” where “the great masses—the agricultural and mechanical populations”—worshipped at the “sacred altars of intellectual freedom.” This, O’Sullivan wrote, “was the seed that produced individual equality, and political liberty, as its natural fruits, and this is our true nationality.” God had entrusted America’s awesomeness to the grunts in the sticks.
Hugh Glass, who died six years before O’Sullivan published his essay, would have been surprised that he and his coworkers were founding a nation when they stripped the hides off beavers in the Rocky Mountains. No one mistook their camps for altars, and not all the laborers in them were equal, free, or American. A motley crew gathered in the camps: African American slaves, mulatto freemen, Indian men and women from many tribes, various white Americans from states like Missouri, Illinois, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, French-speaking contract workers (engagés) from St. Louis, Mexican nationals, Canadian voyageurs, and British fur company proles. Hunting in the West mingled races, genders, nations, cultures, and languages. It was an unlikely birthplace of American futurity. Yet, for some nationalists, the riffraff laboring on the political, geographic, and social fringes manifested America’s genius.
I will follow Glass—hunt him if you will—through three environments. But I warn you: Glass didn’t experience them neatly in a row, and neither will you. His cultural, social, and nonhuman environments washed over him as overlapping waves; his battered form will churn to the surface only every so often.
Books, authors, and readers made up Glass’s cultural environment. In 1825, James Hall, a semiprofessional regional author stationed in southern Illinois, latched on to Glass and published a story about his exploits in a Philadelphia literary magazine. A judge and lawyer, Hall resembled other aspiring writers in the towns along the Mississippi River and its tributaries. These men hoped to create a market for western American literature, a niche that would allow them to quit their day jobs as clergymen, missionaries, lawyers, bankers, clerks, and printers. They looked to the nation’s hinterlands to find distinctly American source material, and they wrote about the violence done to and committed by frontiersmen.
Bondage and rivers animated Glass’s social environment. Recruited on the wharfs of St. Louis, Glass belonged to a working population that moved up and down the Mississippi River and its feeder streams. Some of these workers sold their labor for wages, but only a minority. Most workers weren’t free. Black slaves, wives, children, apprentices, soldiers, servants, and prisoners received little or no remuneration for their work, and they faced state-sanctioned violence if they disobeyed their masters. Still, many did rebel. Advertisements in newspapers throughout the watershed offered bounties for returned runaways. Rivers connected masters to international markets. They made owning slaves and contracting servants profitable. But the waters transported disgruntled workers as readily as furs, whiskey, hemp, and salted pork. Rivers underpinned and undermined the labor system that mixed coerced and free labor, and as fur companies tried to move this system up the Missouri River and into the Rocky Mountains, bosses and workers constantly renegotiated the terms of their service.
Animals were the central players in Glass’s nonhuman environment. As a hunter, Glass followed, observed, and killed deer, elk, antelope, ducks, bears, raccoons, coyotes, and wolves. Bison robes and beaver pelts drew him west; horses and mules carried him there. The meat of all beasts, including horses and dogs, sustained him. His relationships with Native Americans, his employers, and his coworkers revolved around animal fur and flesh. He wore the skins of animals, ingested their tissue, and acquired their status. To many observers, western fur trappers looked, smelled, and were no better than animals. Hunting stories often transposed hunters and their quarry, and this reversal of identity underwrote the hunters’ nationalistic potential.
The physical transformation of laboring bodies promised the emergence of a national body. Environmental Americanism brought a measure of fame to an obscure hunter and his environments. Environmental Americanism taught a nation to take pride and pleasure in catastrophic workplace injuries. Environmental Americanism valorized white male survivalists, editing women and people of color out of the nation’s origin stories. Environmental Americanism converted multicultural, multiracial (including multiple versions of blackness and whiteness), multigendered, and multinational fur hunting expeditions into the seedbeds of a unified white male American identity.
Then again, perhaps the missing parts of Hugh Glass can help me salvage an alternative past, one that blends humor and rambunctiousness to upend expectations rather than certify destinies. We’ll see. Glass rose from the grave once; he might have another round in him.
Jon T. Coleman is a professor of American history at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of Here Lies Hugh Glass: A Mountain Man, a Bear, and the Rise of the American Nation and Vicious: Wolves and Men in America, which won the W. Turrentine Jackson Prize and the John H. Dunning Prize. Coleman lives in South Bend, Indiana.
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Easy read. Blissfully. short, and quite informative.I felt I got an accurate account of thrOugh Glass story. There are probably more detailed descriptions, but this was adequate
It was not detailed enough. There was too much time skipped over. I would have been willing to spend more time in order to learn more about him.
Simple and to the point, not exactly a barn burner just an easy narrative to wet your appetite for more information.
Having just seen the movie it was great to hear the real story. It was shorter than I hoped but still very interesting.
It was a quick read. Nice little history lesson. I enjoyed it. Glass is an amazing survivor. I would recommend it.
Far too short if had known this short would not have purchased !!!! Not worth the money. Do not buy !!!
I enjoyed this short story, it was an easy read of only facts found about this mans life and I wanted a short summary.
Great summary of Hugh Glass' life, but not the best for if you are looking for a very detailed biography.
I a, being forced t wrote this review before they will let me finish the book so here are 20 words
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By now, many of us have at least seen the trailer for The Revenant, with Leonardo DiCaprio cast as Hugh Glass, a fur trapper and hunter who embarks on a mission for vengeance after being left for dead by his cohorts in the wake of a bear attack. As it turns out, Hugh Glass was a real guy who had a pivotal role in the westward expansion of the fur trade, and by extension, America. And he was even more of a badass than we see in the movie—though not for the reasons you might expect.
The lucrative fur trade was a driving force behind American exploration, as Eric Jay Dolin explains in his chronicle, Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America. When Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark on their 1804 expedition to explore the land he acquired in the Louisiana Purchase, two of his objectives were to discover 1) what items Native Americans may accept in trade for pelts, and 2) whether a navigable, all-water route might connect the Pacific to the fur posts of the Missouri River.
Mountain men
Lewis and Clark did not find such a route. Instead, they found the Rocky Mountains, which gave rise to a new class of fur trader: the mountain man.
Dolin estimates only a few thousand men pursued this risky path. It was a wild, violent existence that required rugged self-reliance, but had its romance as well. Mountain men spent autumns and springs trapping, and winters camping—often in groups together with their wives and families—and summers selling at rendezvous, where they’d often drink and gamble away their earnings. (While in the wild they subsisted on what today we might call an intense paleo diet, sometimes consuming upwards of 10 pounds of meat per day, and replacing bread with dépouille, smoked straps of fat taken from either side of a buffalo’s spine.)
Among the toughest of the mountain men were the free trappers. Rather than contracting with a fur company to provide supplies and salary in exchange for all their pelts, these traders struck out on their own. They assumed all the risk for their journey, using their own horses, guns, and gear, and selling their furs to the highest bidder. According to mountain man Joseph Meek, the free trader “took what route he thought fit, hunted and trapped when and where he chose; traded with the Indians … dressed flauntingly, and generally had an Indian wife and half-breed children.”
Eventually, Glass became a representative of free traders. In the late 1820s, the New York-based John Jacob Astor—arguably the world’s most powerful fur trader—had an eye on western expansion. It was Glass who convinced his emissary, Kenneth McKenzie, that there were mountain men in the Rockies eager to do business with Astor’s company.
“This was all the coaxing McKenzie needed,” Dolin wrote. “In 1829 the American Fur Company, at McKenzie’s urging, sent a party of trappers and goods into the mountains. Astor had finally entered the Rocky Mountain Trade.”
But before Glass could make his mark on history as a spokesman for free traders, he had to become a legendary mountain man—which is what we see dramatized in The Revenant.
A grizzly ordeal
As Dolin wrote, mountain men were “forced to confront a lawless world where violence lurked at every bend.” It’s hard to imagine anything making them shake in their boots—except, perhaps, for a grizzly bear. Similar to the way surfers today call sharks “the man in a gray suit,” trappers referred to grizzly bears “Old Ephraim.”
In 1823, Glass met Old Ephraim, in an encounter that made him one of the most famous of mountain men. He had already had a rough trip, having been shot in a battle with the Arikara tribe—called “Rees,” as those who have seen the movie may remember—on the shores of the Missouri River.
The losses in battle caused Glass’s trapping party to split up, and Glass to join a team of men and horses heading west over land. Glass ventured hunting ahead of his group, in the Grand River Valley of present-day South Dakota. There, he encountered a female grizzly with her cubs. According to Dolin, before Glass could prepare his rifle, the bear reared up, grabbed him by his throat and shoulder, slammed him on the ground, and “bit off a chunk of his flesh, and turned to feed it to her cubs.”
Glass’s cohorts arrived in time to kill the bear, but not before Glass was beaten, bruised, and bleeding profusely. The group’s leader, Rocky Mountain Fur Company founder Andrew Henry, determined moving Glass was not an option. He offered a reward to two men—veteran woodsman John Fitzgerald and, accounts suggest, a 19-year-old named James Bridger—to keep vigil over the hunter until he passed away, and give him a proper burial.
Left for dead
But Hugh Glass wouldn’t die. After five days, the men abandoned him, and took Glass’s tomahawk, knife, flint, and beloved hunting rifle with them—essentially sabotaging any hope for survival. They returned to their party and lied, saying Glass was dead and had a proper burial.
Glass, meanwhile, began to recover his strength. He foraged for berries and insects and drank spring water for at least 10 days, until he found a pack of wolves eating a buffalo calf, and scared them away (as you do). Fueled by buffalo protein and the promise of vengeance, Glass made it to the nearest trading post—some 350 miles from where he had been left—and kept moving in pursuit of his abandoners.
Spoiler ahead
After several more Arikara attacks, Glass finally found Fitzgerald, one of the men who had left him for dead, by then was enlisted in the army. Glass knew punishment would be swift if he murdered a soldier, so he reasoned with Fitzgerald’s commanding officer, recovered his stolen rifle, and moved on.
Some would say that Glass’s greatest legacy was one that The Revenant didn’t respect.
“Not only had Hugh done a great thing in crawling back to safety after he was almost killed, but after he had figured out who had deserted him, he chased them down, caught them, and then … let them go,” Frederick Manfred, the late author of the 1954 biographical novel Lord Grizzly, said in a South Dakota Historical Society account. “That was an act that put him above Achilles. In fact, Hugh Glass had performed his heroics while completely alone. Achilles always had a contingent of Greek warriors nearby.”
Hugh Glass – Based on a True Story
by Rory Paul Tyler
In August 1823 twelve trappers tramped by the river side,
Up the Grand from the Missouri in search of the beaver’s hide.
Led by Major Henry, the winter they would pass
In the far off Rocky Mountains. Among them was Hugh Glass.
Old Glass, he was called by the younger men
Or Graybeard, for his grizzled mane.
He’d seen twice the years of most of them,
Twice the danger, twice the pain.
With his Daddy’s rifle he’d fled as a youth
Down the Ohio and out to sea,
Been captured by old Jean Laffitte
And forced to a life of piracy.
The pirate’s life did not suit Hugh,
The violence and depravity.
He jumped ship off the Texas coast
And was captured in Kansas by the Pawnee.
He watched while his old-time partner, Luke,
was tortured, then burned to death.
When it came his time he turned to the chief
And with his dying breath,
Offered a sack of vermillion paint,
Saying “I’ve no use for this anymore.
Here, take it … and be damned to thee!”
He was brave right to the core.
The chief was impressed by this white man’s aplomb
And stayed the Reaper’s bony hand,
Made Hugh his own blood brother
And a member of the band.
For years Hugh lived as an Indian,
A hunter and warrior of the Pawneee.
Then he went with the chief on a mission of peace
To St. Looey in 1823.
It was there he decided to throw in his lot
With the trappers heading west.
Now, hunting on the banks of the Grand
He would meet his greatest test.
He hears a rustling in the brush.
What sort of creature there?
A pronghorn, mule deer?
Perhaps an elk. My god, a grizzly bear!
For a suspense filled moment the bear stands froze,
Then he sees her hackles rise.
Behind her are two bruin cubs,
A bad group to surprise.
The mama grizzly makes a charge,
Rares up and bares her fangs!
He paw swipes Hugh along the side
Just as his rifle bangs.
But the bear keeps coming! He pulls his knife!
She’s chewing on his neck and head!
His knife starts in a slashing,
Iron and fangs shimmering red!
She rakes him with her talons
And tears a great hole in his back.
He knife keeps on a-flashin’,
In his own desperate attack.
Drawn by the shot and the howls and the growls
Hugh’s partners come like birds in flight.
They shoot the blood-crazed grizzly cubs
And examine Old Glass’s plight.
Draped across his shredded frame
Is the bloody grizzly sow,
Six hundred pounds of hellfire,
The spark gone from her now.
They roll her carcass from the hunter’s corpse.
“Poor, Glass. Ye were always good in a fight,
But the b’ar, she were too much for ye,
So, Companero, it’s goodnight.”
But then, to their amazement,
Hugh’s eyes open wide.
A sound bubbles out his mangled throat.
“Good Lord! He’s still alive!”
Major Henry tends to the dreadful wounds.
“We can’t just walk away.
We’ll make our campsite here tonight
And bury Hugh at break of day.”
But when the morning sun comes up
Hugh is still alive.
Though he can hardly draw a breath,
He will not take the dive.
“We can’t all stay here,” the Major says,
“For this is the land of the Ree,
And we must move on before we’re found
And scalped in this wild country.”
“Nor can we leave Old Glass like this,
And though it will put them in a bind,
I’m asking for two volunteers,
Brave men to stay behind.”
Now Hugh had saved Jim Bridger’s life
In a battle with the Ree.
The youth of nineteen years steps up.
“He were good to me!”
After some hesitation,
Then promise of reward,
Another trapper ‘volunteers’.
It’s John Fitzgerald who come forward.
In less than hour the camp is broke,
The Major’s party on its way.
Fitzgerald turns to Bridger,
“We’ll be up forty bucks in another day.””
But, comes the dawn, Hugh lingers on,
And another day, to boot.
Fitzgerald’s nerves are getting frayed.
He fears the Ree and craves the loot.
Checking around the campfire
on the morning of day of three
Fitzgerald finds what he fears most,
Fresh sign of the Ree.
He turns to Jim, “It’s time we’re goin’
For Hugh can hardly draw a breath,
Nor eat, nor drink, he wouldn’t want
To be agent of our death.”
But Bridger, he just shakes his head
And denies Fitzgerald’s plea.
“We said we’d stay until he died,
And he were good to me.”
Now, on day four they dig a grave,
Though Hugh still hangs there by a thread.
Fitzgerald turns to Bridger,
“If we stay here, we’ll all be dead.”
But Jim stands fast. “ I aint a-goin’.
Old Glass’s spark is still aglow.
We said we’d stay until he died.
It’d be sin to leave him so.”
On day five Fitz pushes his case
With a forceful, violent threat.
“Major Henry put me in charge.
Now get your things and get!”
“The Ree will slowly torture us.
I say it’s time we’re goin’!
There aint nothin’ but a prayer for Glass.
We’re headin’ for the Yellowstone!”
Bridger finally succumbs.
“Fitz, I know that it aint right, nohow.
And though I feel like a lowdown skunk,
I’ll leave with ye right now.”
Fitzgerald packs up all his things,
Then starts in packing Hugh’s.
“Ye don’t leave a dead man’s gun nor knife,
Nor nothing the living can use.”
Then the leave him, in his death-like trance.
No telling how long he lay there
With burning fever and the dreadful pain
And the nightmares of a bear.
But at last, in time, Hugh awakes,
sick and pale as a ghost,
Abandoned in the wilderness
Five hundred miles from the nearest post.
He drags himself to the nearby stream
And slakes his burning thirst.
He’s been in some nasty scrapes before
But this surely is the worst.
For days he lay just half alive,
Living on berries and wild plums
And a raw rattlesnake that he’d killed with a rock
For those skunks had taken the guns.
And as he lay there gathering strength,
But no more than a sickly child,
He thinks of the bear and Bridger and Fitz
And how they’d left him to die in the wild.
A black rage swells up in his breast
And he pounds his fist on the ground.
“An eye for an eye! Vengeance is mine!
I’ll track them varmints down.”
As God is my witness,
A tooth for a tooth!
They’ll pay for their cowardly ways.
I’ll lower them into their loathsome graves if takes a thousand days!”
He tries to stand and start on his quest,
But one leg won’t hold at all.
“I guess there’s nothin’ fer it,” he says,
“If I can’t walk, I’ll crawl.”
And so he does, out across the plain,
Hugh Glass Biography
After a week he’ lost all track of time,
But that bitter thought drives him on and on,
“Revenge!. Revenge is mine!”
Living on berries and roots and bugs,
Crawling from waterhole to hole,
The days grow short and the nights grow cool,
Fort Kiowa his goal.
New skin begins on his neck and head,
But the hole in his back, that’s still raw meat.
He hears the flies buzz in and out
As they come for something to eat.
One day he chance on a pack of wolves
Devouring a buffalo.
“I’ve got to have some meat,” he says.
“Them wolves will have to go.”
He waits until they’ve eaten their fill
Then tries to drive them from the remains,
But a sickly man on hands and knees
Is a sight any wolf disdains.
So, gathering all the strength he’s got,
He totters to his feet,
And the greatest joy he’s ever felt
Is to see those wolves retreat.
He eats red meat ‘til he can eat no more,
Then tears off all he can carry.
Feels the strength come back to his bones
And goes to sleep feeling almost merry.
In the morning he fashions a cottonwood crutch,
Knowing now that he can stand
And hobbles along on a leg and a stick
Across that broken land.
Over Fox Ridge, past Rattlesnake Butte,
Down to the Cheyenne River slough.
It’s there that Hugh is come upon
By a band of friendly Sioux.
By means of common words and sign
His adventure and quest are told.
The Indians are glad to help
A man so brave and bold.
They shelter him and cloth him
And tend to his festering wound,
Then take him by boat to Fort Kiowa
‘Neath a full October moon.
Now the headman at Fort Kiowa,
One Joseph Brasseau by name,
Tries to get Old Glass to stay
For he’s still quite weak and lame.
“Waugh!” snorts Hugh. “My stick’s got to float.
There’s something must be done.
Just give me some moccersins, tabaccy, a coat,
Powder, balls, and a gun.”
In two days time he’s on his way
Up the Missouri with some traders,
Heading for the Yellowstone
To take his vengeance on those traitors.
For that one idea had got him strong,
How could the men he once called “Friend”
Abandon him in the wilderness
To meet his sorry end?
He’d have it out! And all would know,
Whatever come to pass,
Ye were signing your own death warrant
If ye double-crossed Hugh Glass!
Through Indian raids and blizzards,
Hugh Glass True Story Wikipedia
And through the devilish cold,
Hugh tramps a thousand miles
So this story can be told.
He follows the river, walks on the trails,
Sees each subtle sign,
And comes to the fort one wintry eve,
Where they’re singing Auld Lang Syne.
“Should old acquaintance be forgot
And never brought to mind.”
“I’ll give them words new meaning,” he growls.
“Revenge. Revenge is mine.”
“Open up in there!” he bellows,
Pounding loudly at the gate.
“It’s me, Old Glass, back from the dead!
Prepare to meet your Fate!”
The men are most astonished,
interrupted in mid-toast.
They look at him with trembling fear.
They think he is a ghost.
“I aint no ghost!” Glass decares,
“Though left for dead down on the Grand
By Jim and Fitz. Them cowards!
Before ye now I stand
To take what’s mine. Revenge is sweet!
Tell them to say their last farewell.
Then bring them here before me
‘Cuz I’m sending them to Hell!”
Major Henry now steps forward.
He’s seldom at a loss.
He speaks to Hugh quite firmly.
“Simmer down, Old Hoss!”
“Fitzgerald left six weeks ago
And forsook the trapper’s trade.
Bridger’s out a-huntin’
South of the stockade.”
“There’ll be no killing for the moment,
Nor anything so gory,
Until ye’ve had a drink with me
And, by God, told me you’re story.”
But at that moment, Jim returns
With a freshly killed mule deer.
His face registers astonishment,
Then joy, then awe, then fear.
“Hugh! Hugh Glass. Yer still alive!”
Comes the cry he cannot stifle.
“No thanks to ye,” Hugh snarls,
Then begins to raise his rifle.
But Major Henry steps between.
“There’ll be no shooting, I declare!
‘Til I’ve heard both your stories.”
And gives Hugh an icy stare.
They retire to the Major’s digs.
Jim’s all guilt and misery.
“I done ye wrong, Hugh,” he admits,
“And ye were good to me.”
“By Jove, I’m glad to see ye.
Yea, I had a failure of the nerve.
And I’m neither blaming it on Fitz.
I’ll take what I deserve.
“Though the Ree was all around us,
And ye appeared to be a loss,
I should not have left my Companero.
If ye must, then shoot, Old Hoss.”
“Sounds right to me,” Hugh smiles,
And begins to raise his gun,
But the Major shoves the barrel down.
“Bridger’s tale aint done!”
“What I done were wrong!” says Jim.
Hugh Glass True Story Wikipedia
“I knowed it then. I always shall.
And I’m neither blaming it on Fitz.
It’s a skunk deserts his pal.”
“Though we could not tell from time to time
If Hugh were still alive,
I should have stuck to the bitter end,
Though none of us survived.”
Hugh glares at the youth before him,
Repentant and resigned.
“I guess that I’ll forgive ye, lad,
Perhaps for Auld Land Syne.”
“Yer made of better stuff than most.
Grit and wit and plenty sand.
But remember what ye done to me!
Never do that to another man.”
The Major breathes a sigh of relief.
“Ye done right, Hugh, that’s what I think.
Bridger, ye can leave us now.
Hugh, how ‘bout that drink?”
Through all that winter Hugh hunts and traps
With his customary mettle,
But comes the spring, he’s headed east.
He still has a score to settle,
For Bridger had refreshed his mind
And filled in the missing bits
He’d lost in his delirium.
He means to bury Fitz.
He tracks him to Fort Atkinson
But, once more, stays his hand.
Just retrieves his Pappy’s rifle
And returns to the wild land.
We know nothing of Fitzgerald’s end
But Jim’s a famous mountain man
Who always could be counted on
To lend a helping hand.
And Hugh? Well Hugh, he met his fate
Up on the Yellowstone.
Shot by the Shoshone
And scalped right to the bone.
But of all the western pioneers
Of courage and of fame
If there’s one more brave and true than Glass
I have not heard his name.
Rory Paul Tyler.