Cheating Death
Revenants of the Old West
Revenge is a powerful motivator. -Marcus Luttrell
A version of this post originally appeared in 2018.
Be still, my historian heart! When I learned the movie The Revenant was based on the life of Hugh Glass, I was beside myself with glee. Colorful characters like Glass are the reason I converted to full-on history nerd. I can't argue with those who say history is boring. It can be very tedious if one is bombarded with nothing but names and dates and memorization. But people love a good story, and history is full of good stories.
When I was getting my Masters in history back in the day, I focused on American history prior to 1900. Exploration of both the New World and the American West were my favorite topics. There was just something about the bravery and drive of individuals who were willing to forge ahead into unknown lands that captivated me. So when I heard about this movie, I dug out my old handwritten notes (transcribed while spending endless afternoons at the university library, which, thanks to some lingering pack rat tendencies, were still carefully preserved in a few yellowing folders). This method of acquiring knowledge is now laughably quaint. I can now find ten times the amount of information in one tenth the time, thanks to Google.
And thanks to The Revenant film, there are many articles online about Mr. Glass and his amazing life. I'll give you the broad details.
Much of what we know about Hugh Glass is from word of mouth from himself and others; hearsay, tall tales bordering on mythology. Who knows how much of this really happened? Mountain men not only lived adventurous lives; they were known for their propensity for spinning yarns, especially when regaling greenhorns like newspaper reporters and dime novelists. Indeed, at the annual trapper 'rendezvous'—think Sturgis without the motorcycles—a liar's contest was featured, along with games, gambling, and drinking.
Mr. Glass is most well known for surviving being left for dead after a grizzly bear attack while on a scouting expedition in South Dakota in 1823. His will to survive (plus IMO his thirst for revenge on the two comrades who abandoned him to his fate) drove him to drag himself 100 miles back to the nearest outpost, Fort Kiowa. Single-minded doesn’t even begin to cover it. Prior to his frontier days, Glass was rumored to have escaped impressment into the crew of pirate Jean Lafitte by jumping ship and swimming two miles to the Texas coast.
Amazingly, Glass is hardly the lone example of mountain men for whom cheating death was part of the job description. I've put together a chart to summarize a few other mountain men to demonstrate the similarities. And by no means is this list conclusive. These nuts were as plentiful as the acorns on the oak in my back yard.
Less well-known, but equally colorful:
Mike Fink, the Ndamukong Suh of mountain men. He reputedly bit off the nose of a fellow mountain man during a fight, and killed another during a drunken game of William Tell.
Jim Clyman, who became separated from his companions and survived a two month hike to Fort Atkinson by employing such survival skills as killing his dinner with leg bones scavenged from a wild horse skeleton.
"Old Bill" Williams, a former Methodist minister known for his eccentric ways (and to be thought eccentric by mountain men should tell you something about his personal habits). While setting beaver traps, he was beset by three Blackfoot Indians, who shot him twice with arrows and made off with his rifle, Old Fetchem. Guns being the frontier equivalent of gold bars, Old Bill was not satisfied to escape with his life. He meant to recover his rifle. He dug out the arrowheads, tracked the Blackfeet, and killed two of them as they slept off a big dinner of fresh buffalo. The third he scalped, but allowed to escape so as to spread the word he was not a trapper to be trifled with.
The route of the Corps of Discovery (aka Lewis and Clark). Source: USHistory.org.
You might be wondering why in the world anyone would want to embrace a lifestyle in which run-ins with grizzly bears and hostile natives was fairly common. Then, as now, it was partly due to opportunity. After Thomas Jefferson bought the Louisiana from France in 1803 and the Lewis and Clark expedition explored over 800,000 square miles of land and found it exceeded expectations, opportunists of every stripe headed west. These were the entrepreneurs of their era, unwilling or unable to fit into society's existing employment structure: craftsmen, teachers, farmers, the military. The requirements for having a go at the frontier life were simple. Can you hunt? Can you fight? You're hired. Many were also attracted to, in the words of author John Myers Myers, "the way of life in a region so remote from all fountainheads of law and decorum". Wild West, indeed.
It's gratifying that at least one person other than me (the author of the book The Revenant is based on, for one) finds this stuff so interesting. All of these other characters deserve a book and a movie and a television series of their own. History nerds: keep cranking out content! Maybe one day one of our names will appear in the credits of a film starring an impossibly handsome actor made impossibly grubby thanks to some makeup artist's fine skills. You'll have to wait until the final credits, but it'll be worth it to see: 'based on the book by [insert your name here]'.
Recommended reading:
Bravos of the West by John Myers Myers
A Life Wild and Perilous by Robert M. Utley
I will leave you with three things:
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Masters in History. I am so impressed, Lissa. Actually kind of jealous. I went to college too soon. Never truly appreciated the challenge and opportunity I had. I did major in History. So score one for the party-on Sig Ep. Having seen and purchased on DVD, what is your take on the TV series 1883?
Fascinating! I love historical overviews of overlooked souls. I write about MX and Maya - Yucatan archeologists and explorers and just dive in to their exciting exploits and adventures. Never studied history in an academic setting but I'm a research nerd and former journalist. I recently wrote a post on Indigenous cowboys of the American West and can DM it to you if you like.