History's Toughest Heroes: Hugh Glass: The Real Story of The Revenant

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Speaker 2 Before we get going aheads up, this story contains some gory scenes. If you're squeamish, you might want to listen to another episode.

Speaker 2 Summer in 1825.

Speaker 2 A group of travelers set off along the Santa Fe Trail. The route from Missouri to New Mexico took them and their wagons across the high plains, through deserts and over mountains.

Speaker 2 There wasn't much going in the way of water and food.

Speaker 5 So they were bringing all different kinds of merchandise from St. Louis across the southern plains into Taos and Santa Fe.

Speaker 5 They had been out for a couple weeks and they encountered a group of fur trappers who had lost some of their mules and they needed new mounts.

Speaker 2 These men of the frontier knew how to survive and they knew how to hunt.

Speaker 2 For weeks they kept the company fed.

Speaker 5 When wagons were traveling across the plains they would go out during the day and hunt bison and antelope.

Speaker 2 At night these tough guys sat around a campfire. One of them caught the eye of a young doctor called Roland Willard.

Speaker 5 who he thought looked much older than his companions, though he was same age. His quote was he looked like he was 75.

Speaker 2 This guy named Hugh Glass was maybe in his early 40s but he'd had a hard life and it showed.

Speaker 5 Willich said he was wearing a kilt because he was a Scottish immigrant.

Speaker 2 The doctor was curious. He asked Glass to go on.

Speaker 2 He said He'd worked along the Missouri River, making a fortune trapped in furs.

Speaker 5 But he amassed nothing. The old man bobbed along on a current of alcohol.

Speaker 2 A couple of years before, in 1823, Glass had come to blows with the ultimate beast on the plains, a grizzly bear.

Speaker 5 When he told the story about getting mauled by the grizzly bear, he would lift up the kilt and take off his shirt.

Speaker 2 The doctor was shocked.

Speaker 5 There was a massive furrow along one of his arms, scars running down the side of his his body that show this

Speaker 5 action of a grizzly bear attack, which would be long,

Speaker 5 deep cuts as the bear ripped into the body and tried to drag it different places.

Speaker 2 Glass told the doctor he'd been abandoned after this attack.

Speaker 2 Then he crawled through the wilderness to find the scoundrels who'd left him behind.

Speaker 2 Those terrible scars haunted Dr. Willard and when he was an old man he wrote down the story.
By then the legend of Hugh Glass had already spread.

Speaker 2 A classic American tale of heroism, survival and endurance.

Speaker 5 Hugh Glass is completely exposed to the wilderness. He's left alone.

Speaker 5 His body is like literally bleeding into

Speaker 5 this landscape, which kind of allows the landscape to bleed into him.

Speaker 2 I'm Ray Winston, and for BBC Radio 4, this is history's toughest heroes.

Speaker 2 True stories of adventurers, rebels, and survivors who live life on the edge.

Speaker 2 Hugh Glass,

Speaker 2 Mountain Man.

Speaker 5 There is lots of people out there telling the Hugh Glass story,

Speaker 5 but almost every time you think you're getting close to Hugh Glass, you're actually pretty far away.

Speaker 2 John Coleman is a professor of history at the University of Notre Dame.

Speaker 2 He spent years studying the story of Hugh Glass.

Speaker 5 There's not a whole lot to go on.

Speaker 5 You know, you would love to find a birth record, a baptism record.

Speaker 2 Everything we know about Glass's early life comes third hand. But it's not as if these guys on the American frontier left much paperwork behind.
Now, these men, they moved around a lot.

Speaker 2 They lived off the land, forging trails across the country, hunting and trading.

Speaker 4 My name's Clay Landry.

Speaker 4 I grew up in a combination of Mississippi and Texas.

Speaker 2 Clay Landry was the wilderness technical advisor in the film about Hugh Glass. You might have heard of it.
The Revenant, starring Leonardo DiCaprio.

Speaker 2 To get Leonardo and the team ready for their roles, he took them into the world to live as the mountain men did.

Speaker 4 And then I taught him how to build fires with flint and steel, because there was no matches in those days. Taught him how to throw the tomahawk.
I'm a horseman. I'm a cowboy by nature.
Run a ranch.

Speaker 4 Have run a ranch. Don't know more.
I'm old and broke down.

Speaker 2 Now you've got to be tough to survive out there. And you need to know the land.

Speaker 4 When you're in the wilderness, it treats you, they don't care who your mom and daddy was, how much money they had. We're all going to get treated equal.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 4 you're going to be cold, you're going to be hot, you're going to be hungry. You're going to have to learn to deal with it on your own terms.

Speaker 2 Hugh Glass didn't write a book or leave a diary, but other people did remember him.

Speaker 4 They said he was about five foot nine,

Speaker 4 dark complexed,

Speaker 4 had pox scars on his cheeks,

Speaker 4 and

Speaker 4 jet black hair, and stocky built.

Speaker 2 The story goes that Glass was originally a sailor.

Speaker 4 And one of the ships he worked on got captured by Jean-Lafitte and his pirates.

Speaker 4 And Lafitte told the men on the ship, you come be a pirate or you walk the plank.

Speaker 4 So Hugh took the decision to become a pirate.

Speaker 2 Jean-Lafitte was notorious, a smuggler, spy, a privateer.

Speaker 2 He sailed the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean. For a while, glass sailed with him.

Speaker 5 One of the nightmares of being on a ship at this time was if you were in these contested waters you might be taken by a foreign power and impressed.

Speaker 5 You were basically made to serve on an enemy vessel which was in a lot of American eyes like a form of enslavement.

Speaker 2 But Glass didn't want to be a pirate.

Speaker 5 He refused to go on raids to shoreline communities and engage in raping and pillaging.

Speaker 2 Lafitte and his men could have murdered Glass for holding back. So he and a friend decided to escape.

Speaker 4 In the middle of the night, they snuck off the ship and swam across Gowaston Bay and made their way a thousand miles up into the prairie country.

Speaker 2 They forged their own path north through the wilderness.

Speaker 2 They were steering clear of the local native tribes who weren't friendly to outsiders.

Speaker 4 I guess it was a very rough trip, but by the time they got to the prairie, they were getting at least getting buffalo to eat and that kind of stuff.

Speaker 4 And by God, they got captured by the Pawnee Indians.

Speaker 2 The Pawnee were a people of the Great Plains.

Speaker 4 This particular band of Pawnees had a

Speaker 4 religious rite

Speaker 4 that involved burning people at the stake.

Speaker 4 And so

Speaker 4 Glass's companion was the first they grabbed to do this ceremony.

Speaker 2 The story went that they tied Glass's friend to a stake and built a fire around him. Glass was up next,

Speaker 2 but he had one more card to play.

Speaker 4 He took out a piece of vermilion and he gifted it to the chief.

Speaker 4 And he said,

Speaker 4 I'm going to die. It's fine.
Here's a gift to you.

Speaker 4 And that impressed the chief so much. In fact, the chief adopted him as a son.

Speaker 2 The Pawnee taught him to navigate the seagrasses, riversides, woodland, and low scrub of the Great Plains.

Speaker 5 Hugh Glass being captured by pirates and being taken captive by the Pawnee is kind of like a hat on a hat.

Speaker 5 It's an embellishment of this story to a level that just kind of makes it absurd. But if you think about the labor and social context, it almost makes sense.

Speaker 2 He learnt a lot from the Pawnee, and when he left them, he became a trapper. Europeans wanted beaver pelts for their fancy hats.
It was all the rage,

Speaker 2 and enterprising Americans could make a fortune from them. One of those men was William Ashley.

Speaker 2 In 1823, he'd advertised for 100 men, hunters willing to go up the Missouri River into the Rocky Mountains. He offered a salary of $200 a year.

Speaker 5 Animal furs, especially beaver pelts, had been one of the longest running ways to make money in North America. Specifically, these pelts had tremendous value in Europe.

Speaker 2 Now the Astor family had made a fortune on furs and St. Louis was at the heart of that trade.

Speaker 5 So you could get on boats in St. Louis and pole up the Missouri River and get to these headwaters that are brimming with rodents,

Speaker 5 with beavers.

Speaker 2 William Ashley went into partnership with Andrew Henry. Their company was called Rocky Mountain Fur.

Speaker 5 So what Ashley is doing, him and Henry had this idea of, man, we can strike it rich right now if we equip a group of men and go up this river and grab these furs

Speaker 2 for men like Hugh Glass this could be good work if they survived

Speaker 5 Ashley sent recruiters into grog shops and other shitholes looking for men by and large they were young people that were out for an adventure but they were also out to raise their status within society.

Speaker 2 Life as a trapper was rugged, independent, and free.

Speaker 5 From the American point of view, the frontier is the space where civilization gives way to the wilderness.

Speaker 2 But the stories of discovery and new frontiers ignored one major thing.

Speaker 5 The American story conveniently leaves out that these places were claimed by other people.

Speaker 2 The Missouri Basin was already home to a number of tribes that lived along the river for generations.

Speaker 5 Indigenous men did the hunting and gathered the furs. Indigenous women prepared those furs and European fur traders collected the furs.

Speaker 5 And what Ashley was doing was basically cutting out a lot of the indigenous middlemen.

Speaker 2 Ashley's men traveled together at first by river then they split into smaller groups Some would stay with a boat, others would get horses and travel on land.

Speaker 5 Venturing into these settings was dangerous on many, many different levels, and you really rolled the dice each time you did it.

Speaker 2 As they traveled up the Missouri River, the boats passed native encampments.

Speaker 5 These American hunters were trying to literally sail past them, sail past their village, and cut them out of the profits.

Speaker 2 The party stopped to trade with the Arikara village, exchanging gunpowder for horses.

Speaker 2 Once the deal was done, the hunters relaxed and made camp on the beach.

Speaker 2 But in no time, under the cover of heavy rain, the tribe launched a surprise attack on the whole party. Some hunters refused to leave the beach and they fought back.

Speaker 2 But by the time they realized how much danger they were in, it was too late.

Speaker 2 Their boats had already retreated and a lot of men drowned trying to reach them.

Speaker 4 And the Ricker attacked them at the crack of dawn and killed off

Speaker 4 15 men and wounded 14.

Speaker 5 One of those men was this guy named Gardner and it's the only written source that we have from Hugh Glass.

Speaker 5 He wrote to Gardner's parents and in that letter he describes how he was wounded himself during the attack.

Speaker 2 Now, in this letter, Hugh Glass tried to be comforting. He wrote that he felt John Gardiner had died at peace and that Ashley would make sure that the tribe were punished.

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Speaker 2 By August, the rest of the men had split up, leaving the boats behind, Henry headed west up the Grand River in what's now South Dakota. They moved slowly through the grasslands along the river.

Speaker 2 The prairie was dotted with green ash and elm. Now hostile tribes were not the only dangers.

Speaker 5 So grizzly bears were one of those western creatures that symbolized American-ness

Speaker 5 because they were so different from black bears and so aggressive.

Speaker 4 The grizzly was about the only thing that was higher on the predator list than you, unless you were armed. A man without a gun and a grizzly is not much of a fight.

Speaker 2 The bears spent the summer feeding up on the berries of fish and rearing their young.

Speaker 5 They were literally walking on these trails along rivers, and they often ran into grizzly bears. I mean, there are stories of men who had holes poked in their skulls who survived days after.

Speaker 2 Henry sent out a couple of men to scout ahead of the main party. Hugh Glass went with them.

Speaker 4 He followed the normal thing that most hunters did. He went out with a couple guys, but they were distances apart.

Speaker 2 Glass picked his way through the trees and scrub looking for game.

Speaker 5 Mostly bears would leave human beings alone. The two kind of settings that led to the most bear attacks were surprising a bear on a path.

Speaker 5 The second and probably even worse situation to get yourself into

Speaker 5 is to step between a mother grizzly bear and her cubs.

Speaker 2 A mother grizzly would defend her young against any threat by being incredibly aggressive. Glass

Speaker 2 made a fatal mistake. His path had put him between the bear and her cubs.

Speaker 2 The bear charged. He shot and hit her, but it hardly slowed her down.

Speaker 2 100 kilos of muscle and fat slammed right into him. Her long claws slashed.
With her crushing jaws, she bit down on his head and neck.

Speaker 5 The mother grizzly bear attacked him, knocked him down, grabbed his head, shook him, causing scars throughout his scalp. Some say he almost removed his scalp.

Speaker 5 Then she let him go and then came back and chomped on the side of his torso, shook him several times.

Speaker 4 He got bitten in the neck and part of his neck was open. One of his arms were fairly useless and one of his legs was a big trouble.

Speaker 2 The others heard screams and run towards him. Then they lifted their rifles and fired.
The grizzly grizzly collapsed on her victim. The attack was now over.

Speaker 2 Glass,

Speaker 2 he wasn't screaming anymore. The hunters rolled the great beast off of him, expecting to find him dead, but Glass was conscious.
His eyes were glazed with shock.

Speaker 5 His trachea was punctured, and he was barely breathing, and they thought he was dead for sure.

Speaker 2 The bear had torn flesh from his back and side, ripped his abdomen with its claws, torn his head and his throat open. A bubble of blood at Glass's throat showed he was still breathing.

Speaker 2 Now the party made camp and tried to bind his wounds. They counted 15.

Speaker 2 Any one of them was enough to kill him.

Speaker 2 They were hundreds of miles from anywhere and and all they could do was listen to each ragged breath and wait for him to die.

Speaker 2 For a day or two, they carried glass on a makeshift stretcher. It was torture for the dying man.
They camped by a spring and Henry made a decision.

Speaker 2 Someone had to stay put with glass till he died and then give him a decent burial.

Speaker 2 Well, it was only right.

Speaker 2 Henry offered a bonus to whoever was willing to do it.

Speaker 2 Two men agreed to stay, a young guy called Jim Bridger and a veteran of the world, John Fitzgerald.

Speaker 2 The others, well, they went on their way.

Speaker 5 So they sat around and waited for him to die and then started to get worried that the Auricara who were around might attack them.

Speaker 2 But Glass

Speaker 2 still did not die.

Speaker 4 He could breathe, but he couldn't talk. And he would come in and out of consciousness.
So the older man, Fitzgerald, convinced the younger man, let's just go.

Speaker 2 See, the idea was they'd rejoin the party and claim their reward.

Speaker 2 Acting as if Glass was already dead, that meant taking his kit with them.

Speaker 4 Everything he needed to survive. His knife, his flint and steel,

Speaker 4 his gun,

Speaker 4 you know, and left him nothing. Not even a knife.

Speaker 2 Now half dead, Glass heard Bridger and Fitzgerald making their plans.

Speaker 2 He watched them gather up all his kit, his vital tools,

Speaker 2 and leave.

Speaker 2 He was alone.

Speaker 4 He had a strong will to live, and he's laying there and figured out these guys done left him.

Speaker 4 First thing on his agenda was water. So that started him crawling.

Speaker 2 In agony, he crept inch by inch towards the spring. He managed to drink a little before passing out again.

Speaker 4 Then he'd be interested in something to eat. Some protein or whatever.

Speaker 2 He found some sour red buffalo berries. He could just reach them.
He mashed them up with water to make a paste he could get down his injured throat. Now days passed.

Speaker 2 Once, he woke to find a rattlesnake close by, all bloated with with its latest meal.

Speaker 2 Now, a sharp stone was enough to kill it. Then glass ground up the flesh and ate it raw.

Speaker 2 But he couldn't just stay there and wait for the weather or starvation to kill him. The nearest fort was over 200 miles away, back down the Missouri River.

Speaker 2 He began his journey the only way he could.

Speaker 5 Well, the story is that he crawled on his hands and knees and ate plants, whatever he could grab. And over time, he came upon wolves that were eating bison calf.

Speaker 4 And he bluffed them off of it and got some of that meat, but it was still protein.

Speaker 2 They made camp by the carcass, tearing off chunks of raw meat and eating as much as he could stomach.

Speaker 2 It helped.

Speaker 4 He had a whale of an injury on on his back because the grizzly she bit him there twice.

Speaker 4 They say it got so putrefied that the flies laid their eggs on his back and the larva ate the flesh that was no good anymore. They basically cleaned his wound for him.

Speaker 2 Now he could stagger a bit as well as crawl.

Speaker 4 Any kind of injury in that situation is magnified. It's totally magnified.
And that's where you really need some good buddies.

Speaker 2 Days turned into weeks. Staying close to the water and scavenging, Hugh Glass kept going.
Finally, he met some Lakota people. They helped dress his wounds.
He was covering more ground each day.

Speaker 2 In early October, Hugh Glass stumbled up to the gates of Fort Kiowa. It was over 200 miles from the spot he'd been left for dead.

Speaker 5 His survival was kind of this miraculous, almost kind of Lazarus-like coming back from from the dead. A lot of the mystery is: well, how could anybody not give up?

Speaker 5 Why did he stick with it? And this is where the revenge part comes crucial to the story.

Speaker 2 Glass wanted to confront the men who'd left him, and he wanted his rifle back.

Speaker 4 Once he recoups there for a week or so, he's heading back up the Missouri cross-country.

Speaker 4 to get to the mouth of the Yellowstone to start wreaking vengeance on those two Yahoos that left him out there to die.

Speaker 2 That winter, Glass reached Fort Henry. The story goes, Jim Bridger was celebrating the new year when he turned around and saw the man he had betrayed back from the dead.

Speaker 2 Bridger, still a teenager, was filled with shame and horror. He admitted straight away that he'd lied about seeing Glass dead and buried.

Speaker 2 Now no one had a clue what Hugh Glass would do next.

Speaker 4 He took mercy on the young fella, said it's not your fault. I know that older scoundrel was the one convinced you had to do this.
So you learn from this, and I'm not going to do anything.

Speaker 2 Glass was still after Fitzgerald and his rifle. He finally caught up with him at Fort Atkinson after months of tracking him down.
But he discovered his betrayer had protection, an army uniform.

Speaker 5 And the kicker is that when he confronted the men who left him, instead of killing them, he left him alive.

Speaker 2 Now, if he killed Fitzgerald, he'd be dead too. So he just asked for his rifle back.
The commanding officer of the garrison ordered Fitzgerald to turn it over.

Speaker 2 The fact Glass forgave these men rather than killing them only added to his legend. But it also meant he left no trace for historians like John Carlman.

Speaker 5 Part of me is just like, oh, well, if he committed murder in an army post, you know, he might go on trial. He might enter a legal system.
A newspaper reporter might talk about it.

Speaker 5 We could have Jim Bridger's funeral records. So, in a way, you know, as someone who is chained to the paper trail, as a researcher, a murder would have been helpful.

Speaker 2 Instead, the story spread from campfire to campfire.

Speaker 4 There you are at a military post. He has told the guy the whole story.
So that guy tells another guy, and that guy goes down to the next fort and he tells him.

Speaker 5 This guy named James Hall, who's a judge and a lawyer in Illinois, runs into this story within a year or two after the bear attack. So that story

Speaker 5 made its way back to St. Louis and started making the rounds,

Speaker 5 which is pretty amazing, right?

Speaker 5 That you would have something that is kind of within oral storytelling traditions and then to be grabbed by this guy and translated into what would have been kind of highfalutin literary circles.

Speaker 2 Glass became part of the folklore of the Great Plains.

Speaker 4 I don't know.

Speaker 4 That's pretty legendary when you can take an old mountain man and turn him into a billion-dollar movie, I think.

Speaker 2 Hugh Glass remained in the wild places. In 1833, eight years after meeting the young doctor on the Santa Fe Trail, he was killed by the Arikara on the Yellowstone River.
His burial site is lost.

Speaker 5 Hugh Glass is one of the most famous Americans that we know very little about.

Speaker 5 One of the things that he is about is enduring, And the story itself becomes this amazing story of an iconic figure that won't go away.

Speaker 5 Like Hugh Glass is always crawling back into the picture, which for me is like this amazing, almost working-class history.

Speaker 5 That there are people that could be appropriated by all different kinds of groups of people that don't really have their best interest at heart. But in doing that, he also survives.

Speaker 2 Next time, on history's toughest heroes. How did one man from the American South fight off an entire German party in World War One?

Speaker 5 It would have been very easy to have surrendered, but it didn't seem to be in his DNA.

Speaker 2 Henry Johnson, Hellfighter.

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