Hugh Glass - Museum of the Mountain Man

Information about Hugh Glass’s early life is scarce but recent research indicates a Scotch-Irish heritage and a Pennsylvania birthplace. It is known he broke homeland ties in 1795 at the age of twenty. Thus, when he signed on with a fur company in 1823, Glass would have been forty-eight years old. Since the life expectancy for frontiersmen of that era was the mid-50s, Hugh was often referred to as “Old Glass.”

_{Caught Off Guard, Image Courtesy of David Wright.}

The first mention of Hugh Glass in the contemporary historical record is found in William Ashley’s 1823 journal. Glass was a member of the Henry & Ashley Fur Company’s expedition in March of that year, bound for the mouth of the Yellowstone River. On June 2, 1823, the group was attacked by the Arikara Indians near the mouth of the Grand River. Ashley’s record of this fight lists fourteen men killed and ten wounded; Glass was listed among the injured.

One of the fatalities was John S. Gardiner, a young Virginian. His dying request was that Glass send a letter to his father explaining his fate. The letter Glass penned that day still exists and is held by the South Dakota State Historical Collections.

The 1823 events surrounding Glass’s endurance of a vicious grizzly attack has become a classic tale in the history of the Rocky Mountain fur trade. The men involved in leaving Glass for dead and his miraculous survival is legendary. Titled “The Missouri Trapper,” Glass’s story of betrayal and survival first appeared in The Port Folio, an 1825 Philadelphia publication, but soon spread to newspapers all over the nation. Evidently, people all over the United States were interested in the life and death struggles encountered by trappers in the Rockies.

Hugh Glass’s craving for revenge on the two men who stole his rifle, knife, and shooting bag, then left him for dead, motivated him to crawl, then hobble, and finally walk. Nourishment came from insects, snakes, plants and meat from a wolf-killed buffalo calf. Reaching the Missouri River, he obtained a hide boat from friendly Lakota Indians. Floating down river, Hugh Glass limped into Fort Kiowa on October 11, 1823, having covered 200 miles.

By the time he caught up to the two deserters, Glass had traveled 1,700 miles. His last stop was Fort Atkinson in June 1824, where he recovered his rifle and other gear. During this 8-month journey, he had survived three other random Arikara attacks in which nine other mountaineers had been killed.

In the fall of 1824, the Santa Fe trade was in full bloom, so Glass traveled to New Mexico. After a year of trapping and trading southwest of Santa Fe with only marginal success, Glass relocated to Taos. There, he met Etienne Provost who hired Glass to lead a trapping party into present southern Colorado.

An encounter with hostile Shoshones left one trapper dead and Glass with an arrowhead in his back. He endured the pain of the inflamed wound during the 700 miles back to Taos where the metal arrowhead was removed by a fellow trapper using only a straight razor. After several months recuperating, Glass joined a group of mountaineers headed for the Yellowstone and Snake River countries.

Phillip Covington, an employee with William Sublette’s Bear Lake Rendezvous supply caravan, met Hugh Glass at that 1828 rendezvous. Covington heard Glass relate the story of his run in with Ol’ Ephraim and “to prove the facts in the case, pulled off his shirt and showed the scars on his back and body.”

Feeling that Smith, Jackson & Sublette charged exorbitant prices for goods, free trappers at the 1828 rendezvous determined competition was needed. Hugh Glass, a free trapper himself, was delegated to meet with Kenneth McKenzie and request the American Fur Company (AFC) send supplies to the 1829 rendezvous. Glass traveled to Fort Floyd, on the upper Missouri River, and presented the request. The free trappers’ envoy may have influenced AFC management to send a trading caravan to attend the 1830 rendezvous.

Whatever the specific outcome of Glass’s representation of the freemen, it appears that he and McKenzie developed a mutually respectful relationship. By spring 1830, Glass was working for the AFC, based at the recently constructed Fort Union, located near the mouth of the Yellowstone. A comment

later penned by McKenzie indicates a high regard for Glass, saying “Mr. Glass merits more attention than the common men.” Naming a company keel boat the Old Glass was another indication of McKenzie’s admiration for the old trapper.

In the fall of 1832, AFC had constructed Fort Cass near the junction of the Big Horn and Yellowstone Rivers. Glass became a part of the cadre supplying meat to the new post. In early spring of the following year, Glass, accompanied by Colin Rose and Hilain Menard, departed Fort Cass taking dispatches to Fort Union. As the trappers were crossing the ice of a frozen river near the fort, they were ambushed by a party of Arikara. All three men were shot, scalped and plundered.

According to trapper Jim Beckworth, who claims to have found the bodies of the three slain men, Glass and his companions were buried on a hill just above Fort Cass. Mountain Man Hugh Glass, age fifty-eight, died as he had lived – fighting to survive.