Lord Grizzly, Second Edition Read Free Page A

acts of bravery and endurance, but also to long lives. (Of an identifiable 292 mountain men, the average age at death was sixty-four years, far above the life expectancy at that time.) As restless nomads and trailblazers, they crossed the continent far in advance of civilization’s encroachment on the wilderness, adapting to the ways of the Indians to whom they then brought guns, whiskey, and white man’s diseases.
    The mountain men were not saints, but their sins were forgiven by the mythmakers, who soon expanded upon the stories of these American heroes that roamed the wilderness, conquered the Indians or made daring escapes from them, slew wild beasts or (like Hugh Glass) survived hand-to-claw fights with them, and in general led a life of peril. This was the stuff of legend, and the mountain man became the first western American hero, to be replaced later by the cowboy. Furthermore, the freedom of the trapper, unhampered by society, has come to symbolize the American freedom that is highly touted (although not always deservedly) as the major characteristic of a democratic nation. Finally, because the search for beaver took the trappers up almost every stream in the West, they were the pathfinders preceding the westward movement. Later official expeditions of a geological or military nature did not discover as much as they rediscovered what the trappers knew almost fifty years earlier. The main routes in the mountains, the so-called avenues of commerce that are still used, were established by the mountain men.
    For all practical purposes the era of fur trapping and trading, the era of the mountain man, ended about 1843, when Jim Bridger built a post in southwestern Wyoming to furnish supplies to emigrants. Wagon trains increased in number at that time on the Oregon and California trails, gold was discovered in California a few years later, and the rush of miners, farmers, storekeepers, gamblers, and adventurers coincided with the collapse of the European beaver pelt market to end one colorful period of American history and begin another.
    Several factors contribute to the attraction of the Hugh Glass story, although he is not the only mountain man to have appeared in fiction. Much of his background remains a mystery. He may have served unwillingly under the pirate Jean Lafitte and, upon escaping, lived with the Pawnees until they made a tribal journey to St. Louis. Here Glass joined the second expedition up the Missouri led by General William Ashley of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. A year earlier, in 1822, Ashley had placed an announcement in the
Missouri Republican
(March 20) asking for “one hundred young men to ascend the Missouri river to its source, there to be employed for one, two, or three years.” The expedition was commanded by Major Andrew Henry. On January 16, 1823, another advertisement in the
Missouri Republican
appealed for “One Hundred Men, to ascend the Missouri to the Rocky Mountains.” This time General Ashley led the expedition, among whose members was Hugh Glass.
    What was to have been a routine trip upriver turned into a disaster. In response to a courier sent by Major Henry seeking reinforcements, Ashley stopped at an Arikara village to obtain horses. During the night the Indians attacked Ashley’s camp, killing eleven men and wounding thirteen, including Hugh Glass. Colonel Henry Leavenworth, commander of Fort Leavenworth, down the Missouri, then asked for men to assist in a campaign against the Arikaras (a futile campaign), leaving Ashley with only thirty men. Sending a portion of his party up the river with a supply boat, Ashley set out overland with thirteen men to meet Major Henry. Hugh Glass was with this group when, shortly after the middle of August, near the fork of the Grand River in South Dakota, he wandered off and was attacked by a grizzly bear. Apparently he was so badly mauled and chewed that death was certain; two men were left with him, to bury him when