The Wrestle - Part One

If Hugh Glass had never encountered an angry bruin in the prairies of South Dakota, his life would still have had the elements of Wild West legend. As mentioned in an earlier post, Hugh had a past which included life as a mariner, a pirate, and an adopted member of a Pawnee tribe.

However, the aim of these posts is to compare Manfred's Lord Grizzly to the best factual accounts of the Hugh Glass Grizzly Bear saga.  Lord Grizzly is separated into three elements: the wrestle, the crawl, and the showdown. The wrestle is also where this comparison will begin.

According to both fact and fiction, Hugh Glass was not the typical mountain man. When he signed on with the fur company of General William Ashley in 1823 he was considerably older than his fellow trappers. John Myers in The Saga of Hugh Glass places Hugh in his forties while Frederick Manfred imagines him to be in his late fifties. Most of the othe trappers were men in their twenties while one, the legendary Jim Bridger, might have been as young as seventeen. Old Hugh had some education as well. The only example we have of Hugh's own voice is in a letter he wrote to the family of a young trapper named Johnny Gardner who was killed in a raid by the Arikara tribe. Hugh wrote:

Dr Sr:

My painful duty it is to tell you of the deth of yr son wh befell at the hands of the indians 2n June in the early morning.  He lived a little while after he was shot and asked me to inform you of his sad fate. We brought him to the ship where he soon died. Mr Smith a young man of our company made a powerful prayer wh moved us all greatly and I am persuaded John died in peace.  His body we buried with others near this camp and marked the grave with a log.  His things we will send to you. The savages are greatly treacherous. We traded with them as friends but after a great storm of rain and thunder they came at us before light and many were hurt. I myself was shot in the leg. Master Ashley is bound to stay in these parts till the traitors are rightly punished.

                                                                                                                                    yr obt svt
                                                                                                                                     Hugh Glass


This letter appears in both Lord Grizzly and The Saga of Hugh Glass. The ship Hugh mentions would have been one of the keelboats used by the the expedition to navigate the Missouri River. Mr. Smith was Jedediah Smith, a mountain man who would later have an adventure of his own that would rival that of Hugh Glass.

Finally, Hugh was known as a loner and not the sort to take orders very well. In late August of 1823 while Hugh was travelling with a party of trappers led by Major Andrew Henry in what is now northwest South Dakota near the current town of Lemmon, Hugh decided to wander off by himself. Frederick Manfred describes the scene where Hugh, after being slighted by Major Henry and left off a hunting detail, decides to get away from his camp to settle himself down:

It was sport to be out on one's own again, alone.  The new, the

old new, just around the turn ahead, was the only remedy

for hot blood.  Ahead was always either gold or the grave. The

gamble of it freshened the blood at the same time that it cleared

the eye. What could beat galloping up alone over the brow of

a new bluff for that first look beyond?

Old Hugh's motivation according to John Myers in The Saga of Hugh Glass was simply to see new country without being burdened by his younger mates.  In any case, Hugh Glass' desire to be alone for a short time led to his chance encounter with the incredible killing machine known by the mountain men as Old Ephraim, the silver tipped Grizzly Bear.