Going to the Maul

One time, up in South Dakota, I got mauled by a grizzly bear. No, wait, that was Hugh Glass. I keep getting that mixed up, since I saw a grizzly bear once, which is pretty close to what happened to Hugh. It’s easy to see how I get the two stories confused.

For some reason, no one ever made a movie about me, but there have been at least two movies made about Hugh. One was called ‘A Man in the Wilderness’ because they were pretty bad at coming up with decent movie titles in 1971. That one had Richard Harris playing Hugh. More recently, Leonardo Decaffinato got the job in The Revenant. I wasn’t asked to be a consultant on either film, despite my extensive experience at watching movies.

In case you haven’t seen it, I’ll recap The Revenant for you. Hugh and a bunch of other guys were trapping beavers in South Dakota. Indians attacked them because they didn’t ask permission first, so the trappers who weren’t killed outright ran away. Well, they paddled away, in boats. Because everyone knows there’s no use running from Indians.

As they were making their way back to civilization, Hugh was out messing around alone in the forest when he was attacked by a mama grizzly bear, because Hugh got between her and her cubs. There was a lot of attacking going on back then. People were violent, not to mention mama grizzly bears. This is why you rarely see people around who were born prior to 1900.

Anyway, Hugh managed to kill the bear, but it nearly killed him, too. His buds found him almost dead, and they really didn’t think he would survive, but they made an effort. They poked some moss into his bigger wounds and hauled him along with them for a while, but that got to be a drag, and since they expected him to die anytime, they decided to leave a couple of guys with him, just to bury him when he expired, and the rest of them went on.

Well, two fellows sitting around in Indian country get bored pretty quick, especially once the batteries on their cell phones die, so they figured they’d go ahead and hold the funeral early and see if they couldn’t catch up with the others. I don’t want to tell you the whole story, because you should watch it yourself anyway. It’s a great show, even though it doesn’t stick with the truth very well. Hint: they didn’t have cell phones in the 1820s.

The facts about Hugh Glass are pretty vague, although the bear mauling and being left for dead parts are well documented. Hugh was hastily buried with a broken leg, his scalp almost torn off, and huge wounds all over, so bad his ribs showed and stuff. Most people probably would have died, but Hugh was a very tough guy. Plus, he got a pretty good mad on when John Fitzgerald and Jim Bridger buried him and left, and even took his gun and knife and all. That was just mean.

Besides, Hugh had a rough childhood. He left his home in Pennsylvania at an early age, about 1798, to go west and be captured by the famous pirate, Jean Lafitte, off the coast of Texas. This move proved vital to Glass’s career as a mountain man later on, since he managed to escape the pirates and then went to live with some Indians. At least that’s the story, but details are vague, since Al Gore hadn’t invented the internet yet, and Hugh’s Facebook page was deleted by Mark Zuckerberg because he posted pictures of his famous flintlock rifle.

That rifle was a doozy, possibly made by a famous Pennsylvania gunsmith named Henry Wolf, whom Glass briefly worked for before leaving to make his misfortune. It was what’s known as a ‘long rifle,’ primarily because it was pretty long. Otherwise it would have been called a ‘short rifle.’ Or maybe a ‘fairly longish medium length rifle.’ I don’t know.

Wolf’s work was well known, and there are some of his guns around still today. He was quite the craftsman, although he must have been cranky and difficult to work for. He posted rewards in the local paper pretty often, offering rewards for the return of apprentices who had run off. One of these featured the handsome sum of six pence for the return of Leonardo Decaffinato.

A mountain man’s rifle was the most important thing he had, and I think Hugh crawled a hundred miles, with a broken leg and festering wounds with maggots in them, and made a raft out of a dead tree to float back to civilization mainly to try to find the guys who took his gun. He finally got the rifle back, and he probably would have killed Bridger and Fitzgerald, except he forgave Bridger because he was just a kid, and he didn’t kill Fitzgerald because he had joined the army by the time Hugh caught up with him. At that time, if you killed someone in the army, the army killed you back.

Hugh lived another ten years before he and a couple of other guys were finally done in by Indians on a trapping trip. You’d think they’d have figured out that trapping was bad for your health. This is why there aren’t many professional trappers around today. That and the pay is lousy, and the hours are horrible.

The moral of the story - don’t get between a mama grizzly and her cubs. You don’t want to get mauled by a bear up in South Dakota, like I did one time . . .

Kendal Hemphill is an outdoor humor writer and public speaker who was once almost licked to death by a cocker spaniel. Really. Write to him at [email protected]