On This Day in History: August 25

Hugh Glass survives against the odds

Subscribers can listen to the audio of this post here.

Hugh Glass wasn’t that breakable. DiCaprio won an Oscar for portraying him in The Revenant, but the original story of man vs. bear vs. dudes who abandoned him is a bit different. And by “different” I mean surprise ending!

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: August 25, 1823--

I wrote “original” story rather than “real” because we’re talking a backwoods tale from two centuries past, so who the fuck knows what really went down. Anyway, if you weren’t aware and want to expand your vocabulary a bit, “revenant” means to return from the dead, and that part of the tale is the same.

In 1823, Glass was a fur trader along the Missouri River. In June of that year his party was attacked by a tribe of Native American warriors called the Arikara. Glass was shot in the leg during the battle, which was his first ouch, and the traders retreated downriver. They made it to Fort Kiowa, regrouped, and headed overland to the Yellowstone River. During that trip, on August 25, 1823, Glass was hunting game and surprised a grizzly with two cubs, and she went mama bear on his ass.

Glass and other members of the party managed to kill the bear, but not before she fucked his shit up but good. He was horribly mauled and was expected to die. The party built him a litter and dragged him behind them for two days, but he slowed their progress. The leader of the party asked for two volunteers to stay with Glass until he died and then bury him. John Fitzgerald and a man known as “Bridges” agreed.

Glass wasn’t dying fast enough for them, so they said fuck it and left him, taking all the supplies and weapons. They returned to their party and said, “Oh, yeah. He totally died.” But he was like a goddamn Terminator.

Glass woke up, set his own leg, let the maggots eat his ruined flesh so he wouldn’t get gangrene, and fucking crawled to the Cheyenne River, surviving on berries and roots. There he built a raft and floated down to Fort Kiowa. The whole trip took him six weeks.

He recovered, then went in search of the two men who abandoned him to die, bent on murder. This is where the story departs from the movie. He found them, but didn’t kill them. He found Bridges and decided not to kill him because he was so young. Then he found Fitzgerald, who had enlisted in the U.S. Army, and didn’t kill him because the Army would execute Glass for wasting one of its soldiers. Glass told Fitzgerald, “Better stay in that fucking army, bro, or I’ll ghost your ass.”

But it was the aforementioned Arikara warriors who did the ghosting. A decade after they first shot him in the leg, they finished the job when they attacked his trapping party along the Yellowstone River in 1833.

Subscribe for access to cool shit:

Get the book ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY SH!T WENT DOWN