Soldier of Fortune Magazine The Journal of Professional Adventurers
Ripped open by a grizzly and abandoned alongside a shallow grave, Glass dragged himself more than 200 miles unarmed through the 1820’s wilderness.
by Jose Campos
In the late summer of 1823, deep in the unmapped badlands of the Northern Plains, mountain man Hugh Glass was brutally mauled by a grizzly bear. That was only the start of his ordeal.
Glass was riding with a fur-trading expedition organized by William Henry Ashley and Andrew Henry, a rough team of mountain men hunting the Upper Missouri watershed in search of beaver pelts. The territory was untamed, long before it became South Dakota.
While scouting near the forks of the Grand River, Glass walked straight into a mother grizzly with two cubs.
The bear hit him with crushing speed and finality. She slammed him to the ground, tearing open his back, breaking bones and ripping the flesh. Companions fired until the animal dropped, but Glass was in bad shape. His leg was broken. His throat was punctured. His body was shredded so badly the men could see bone beneath the meat.
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The men carried Glass for two days on a makeshift litter. Every mile slowed the column and invited death. Ashley offered payment to anyone willing to stay behind, tend Glass, and bury him once he died. Two men accepted. They were John Fitzgerald, a woodsman with a reputation for hardness; and another man, barely 19.
After five days, with Glass still alive, his two companions made a choice. They dug a shallow grave. They took his rifle, knife, and flint – the holy trinity of survival – and left him to die.
Glass did not die.
He woke alone, unarmed, feverish, and furious. He could have folded quietly into the dirt. Instead, Glass reset his own broken leg, wrapped himself in the bear hide meant to be his burial shroud, and began crawling. He headed south toward the Missouri River, more than 200 miles away. He navigated by landmarks like Thunder Butte, dragging his ruined body across open plains, badlands, and river breaks.
(Illustrations created for Soldier of Fortune)
Glass survived on berries, roots, insects, and the scraps of buffalo meat the wolves left behind. When maggots infested his wounds, he let them feed. He allowed nature’s scavengers to clean flesh that would otherwise rot and kill him.
For nearly six weeks, Glass crawled through the forbidding terrain. When he reached the Cheyenne River, he somehow made or obtained a crude boat out of hide. He crawled into the boat, and floated downstream toward Fort Kiowa.
By mid-October 1823, Hugh Glass arrived alive. No ceremony. No applause. Just a man who refused to die on anyone else’s timetable.
After he recovered enough to travel, Glass went looking for John Fitzgerald and the young trapper he called “Bridges.” Glass traveled to Fort Henry on the Yellowstone River, only to find it deserted. A note left behind indicated that the company had relocated to a new camp at the mouth of the Bighorn River. Glass followed the trail there and found Bridges. Accounts indicate Glass forgave the young man because of his age and then re-enlisted with Ashley’s company, returning to the same trade that had nearly finished him.
Fitzgerald proved harder to reach. Glass later learned he had joined the U.S. Army. He tracked him to Fort Atkinson, where the captain ordered Fitzgerald to return the stolen rifle. Before leaving, Glass told Fitzgerald that if he ever left the protection of the Army, Glass would kill him.
Glass continued trapping until around 1833, when he and two companions were killed during a clash with the Arikara. By then, his crawl into legend was complete. His story hardened into survival folklore, retold in campfires, books, and eventually films like The Revenant.
A monument to Hugh Glass now stands near the site of where he was mauled, on the southern shore of the Shadehill Reservoir in Perkins County.
Jose Campos writes frequently for Soldier of Fortune.
