Lord Grizzly, Second Edition Read Free

your ideas.”
    I also learned from the story of Hugh Glass, and from my father, that I might be able to weather human predicaments and challenges and survive hard times if I “cultivate my dreams and nightmares” and remain thankful for whatever fortitude and heart I find in myself. I learned that a writer is a mixture of thinker and feeler, natural scientist and reporter, psychologist and philosopher, child and grown-up, dreamer and doer, and that the writer’s goal is just as Dad said it was when he wrote of Charles Montague Doughty, a writer he admired as much as Shakespeare: “When a man can so write about an experience that you, the reader, feel lonesome for his life, like a grown-up longing for the good old days of youth, that sir is writing.” Not to mention, as Dad wrote in his last journal entry on March 30, 1994, that for a writer, as well as for a mountain man crawling two hundred miles across enemy territory: “Patience and brilliance is all.”

Foreword
    by John R. Milton
    With the publication of
Lord Grizzly
in 1954, Frederick Manfred used his new name for the first time, made the best-seller list for the first and only time (
Grizzly
was on the list for six weeks), and revealed an interest in historical subjects as the material of fiction. (As a practical matter, he also got out of debt for a while.) His seven earlier novels were published under the pen name Feike Feikema, the name of his forefathers, although he had been baptized Frederick Feikema. These novels were so closely based upon personal experience and incidents, although in varying emphases, that many readers recognized them as autobiography in fictional form. Manfred protested this label, just as the public seemed to have objected to his pen name—or could not remember it or pronounce it correctly. For these reasons, some observers saw the change of name and the choice of new and distanced subject matter as deliberate rather than coincidental.
    For the name change, Manfred (as Feikema) took a poll on the streets of Minneapolis and among friends, and he also discovered that the Frisian “Feikema” translated into the English “Fredman.” He then made a legal name change to Frederick Feikema Manfred, dropping the middle name or using only the initial on all of his books from then on.
    The choice of subject and theme for his first historically oriented novel is not as easy to explain, but it was an opportune decision. The story of Hugh Glass, mountain man, grew to legend in the nineteenth century, and twentieth-century research has confirmed more of the legend than it has corrected. Glass, of course, was not the only trapper, trader, hunter, or scout in the West who performed what seemed to be a miraculous deed. Survival in the Rocky Mountains and on the western plains in the first half of the nineteenth century often depended on miracles. Jedediah Smith, William and Milton Sublette, Kit Carson, James Beckwourth, Thomas Fitzpatrick, Jim Bridger, Etienne Provost, John Colter, and John (“Liver-Eating”) Johnson, among others, were as well known and redoubtable as Glass. Mountain men, often associated with a fur company, were a special breed.
    Parties of fur traders went into the western wilderness before Lewis and Clark finished making reports on their 1804–1806 expedition. For approximately forty years hundreds of trappers, traders, hunters, and scouts roamed the Rocky Mountain area. They came from Canada, Missouri, Kentucky, Virginia, and from settlements elsewhere, too adventurous to remain a part of eastern civilization, too disgruntled to abide wives or restrictive schoolteachers, and sometimes fleeing from the law. They were individuals rather than group members, and yet in the mountains they considered themselves a brotherhood, lived by a code of their own, and often began new families with Indian wives. Their behavior was a curious mixture of recklessness and caution, leading to