Hugh Glass

[Rev]

By Jon T. Coleman
August 19, 2012
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.
Jon T. Coleman is a professor of history at the University of Notre Dame and the author of "Here Lies Hugh Glass: A Mountain Man, a Bear, and the Rise of the American Nation."

[texasranger]

Thanks Rev very interesting and a lot of food for thought.

[Watauga]

On our trip to Philmont Scout Ranch near Cimarron NM.
Our troop went on the Southwest Chief Amtrak train from Chicago to Raton NM.
(It follows part the route of the old Santa Fe trail)
During the trip I greatly enjoyed the book, Give your heart to the Hawks!By Win Blevins.
I told some of the Story's to the scouts by the campfires during our 65 mile 11 day Backpacking Trek.
In the Sangre de Cristo range of the Rocky Mountains!
Jim Bridger,Kit Carson and Hugh Glass added a lot of background and entertainment to an already Awesome Adventure!
So Yep Rev those story's are still teaching and entertaining both young and old if they take time to listen or read about them

[mongrel]

Perhaps the detail of Glass simply scolding the men who left him to die was something else America wanted to see in itself -- same as the mythic gunfighter who always gives his opponent the first move, or in many a B-western was satisfied to shoot the sixgun from his enemy's hand. Perhaps it was meant to convey the idea that the better man (as we all envision ourselves being) only kills when forced to, and given the opportunity will be merciful and set an example to be followed by the lesser men who've wronged him.

I've also read the explanation that Glass was forced to hold off killing the older of the two men who allegedly deserted him, because the man was a scout in the service of the Army when Glass caught up to him and the commander of the post to which the man was assigned made it clear that Glass would be hanged if he followed through on his intention; and that he spared Jim Bridger because he recognized that a boy was entitled to a second chance.

All moot points if in fact none of the alleged tale actually happened. One might wonder why Jim Bridger never contradicted it, seeing as how he came off looking pretty bad, but Bridger was a lover of tall tales and a mountain man himself and I can easily imagine him accepting a fabrication about something he allegedly did wrong, at 17, if it were a part of a larger tale that was highly entertaining and proved how rough and tough a critter a mountain man was.

[Red Badger]

Have to agree with Mongrels assesment...

[beowulf]

personally , I think old hugh was the real thing ! never seen any reason to think otherwise ! I look at this the same way I look at the idea that shakespear was`nt a real person , or the idea that lincoln was gay !  just dont buy it !

[mongrel]

Well, getting back to Jim Bridger, and the elder man, John Fitzgerald, who allegedly left him to die after the alleged incident -- just for the sake of discussion, maybe Fitzgerald was a totally or largely fictitious character, invented or based on some unknown real person of that name solely to flesh out the second character who was supposed to have bailed on Glass. Even accepting that, though, and even taking into consideration what I said before about Bridger maybe letting the story stand as told because it was quite simply a good one for nights 'round the fire -- even so, Jim Bridger was very definitely real, well-documented, and as well-known and oft-told as the Glass saga was you would think that at some point Bridger might have politely mentioned that, mmm, well, in all truth no such thing ever happened, that he could recollect anyhow.

So far as the actual story's truth (or lack thereof) goes, this is my major problem with the requirement many have for indisputable documentation before ANYTHING can be accepted as really having existed or happened. It was a hit-and-miss era so far as documentation goes. A great many people were not only literate, but wrote prolifically of all things they saw, heard, experienced, or otherwise learned of; but much went unreported and a great many of the men who would have been in a position to give the final word on a given subject happened to be completely illiterate, or considered to be of insufficient importance to be listened to, or too busy simply living to record the whys and wherefores of the process. Meanwhile there may well be a certain, sometimes huge, amount of circumstantial evidence to speak for what was true, but this is outright rejected or at the least downplayed as "inconclusive" because no one wrote the hard evidence down in triplicate and had the copies notarized at the time the alleged incident occured or the alleged artifact was in use.

Before this progresses into a discussion of what constitutes reliable history as opposed to hearsay, legend, myth, and outright lies, and lest anyone think that I at least am being critical of the post Rev presented us with -- the point to it really had nothing to do with whether or not Hugh Glass was a real person, or if he was a real person then whether or not he was mauled by a grizzly bear and left for dead by John Fitzgerald and Jim Bridger. It's about the role of myth and a national self-perception in the telling and recording of history, of how a nation viewed itself once upon a time. It's about how, in a certain context, the exact truth doesn't really matter, and that if actually a lie was told then what the intent was in the telling -- not to deceive, but to tell us something of ourselves that we wanted or needed to hear and that reality hadn't been quite so cooperative as to provide.

[beowulf]

yep !

[beowulf]

something interesting ! http://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/10513  the hugh glass monument in shadehill south dakota   never knew this existed !

[Bulldog lady]

Well said gentlemen, good food for thought,  where would we be (for those of us who are old enought) with out folklore?  Paul Bunyon, Pecos Bill, Uncle Remus - all stories to  make us think and built fantasies,  adventures,  give us food for thought.  Life would be so dull and boreing without them.  Me  I never want to grow up - the older part I can't control

[Rev]

Got a CD with the Uncle Remus stories. Ten Bucks. Totally non PC... (politically correct...)

[Swede]

I agree with Mongrel:
" It's about the role of myth and a national self-perception in the telling and recording of history, of how a nation viewed itself once upon a time. It's about how, in a certain context, the exact truth doesn't really matter, and that if actually a lie was told then what the intent was in the telling -- not to deceive"

If it ain't the truth, it oughta been.

[KHickam]

I don't know whether it is true or not - I suspect it is based on fact - but I do know that it inspired me to survive a near fatal horse wreck on the same drainage.

[Patocazador]

If it weren't true, Leonardo DiCaprio would have nothing to do with it.   

[mtnmike]

The Hugh Glass story has always held a special place in my travels.l