A Majority of Scountrels - Don Berry Page 7

  There had been some hope—precampaign—that they could get back up the river before the fall season began. Now, as far as the trappers were concerned, the river was effectively closed as transportation to the field. They had no choice but to revert to the notion discussed when Henry came down from the Yellowstone: overland expeditions. And not into Blackfoot country either.

  The best idea seemed to be for Henry to close up the Yellowstone post completely, get out of the upriver country. Move down, say, to the Bighorn, in good, substantial Crow territory. Send a party over to the Snake, and see what could be found there. In any event, get moving immediately.

  All the supplies were downriver at Fort Kiowa, left off by the retreating Yellow Stone Packet. With those goods, and a few horses, one party could be gotten otf within a couple of weeks. This would be Henry, who could move up to the mouth of the Yellowstone, close out the post, and ascend the Yellowstone itself to the Bighom. In the meantime Ashley could be outfitting another party to proceed directly across toward the Snake. The two could get together in the mountains.

  So it was decided. They dropped back downriver to Fort Kiowa, picked up the supplies left there and a few horses, and sent Henry off. Outfitting an expedition for the mountains was not a simple process in the best of times, and to do it it on such short notice would have required herculean efforts. But Henry got off with·a small party early in September. He had too few horses, heavily burdened, and the men would simply have to walk. This they did, following the Missouri back up to the mouth of the Grand. There was no telling where the Rees had gone, but it was a safe bet they were in an ill humor and nobody wanted to risk meeting them. Henry left the Missouri and followed the Grand, heading almost due west across the barren plains of present South Dakota. The country was flat, stale, and unprofitable. Vegetation was scrubby and dwarfish, interspersed with tangled thickets of brushwood.

  Meat was a problem. Several hunters were kept constantly ahead of the party, combing for game and provision. One of these was a man known as Old Hugh Glass, a crotchety, querulous, insubordinate, completely independent hunter—in short, a mountain man. The epithet "old" in the mountains didn’t necessarily have anything to do with age; most of the men who carried it were under thirty. It was meant a man had been around long enough for people to get to know him. There’s some evidence, however, that Glass really was old by this time; but we know very little about him. He’d been with Ashley when the Aricaras snapped at him the first time and had been wounded there. But that was months ago, and Old Hugh was not the kind of man to let a little thing like a bullet slow him down. Watch Glass as he forages ahead of the party; he is about to become one of the legends of the trade.

  Thrashing and cursing his way through a brushwood thicket, he suddenly broke into a tiny clearing. The floor was covered with sandy soil and a grizzly bear; a she-bear with cubs. Before Glass could decide whether to shoot or go blind, grizzly had him. She grabbed him by the throat and smashed him to the ground. Ripping out a mouthful of flesh, she gave it to her cubs and started back to work the man over more thoroughly.

  The main party heard Glass scream and now broke into the thicket. The grizzly abandoned the inert form of Glass and chased two of the newcomers into the river. The repeated volleys of the hunters finally brought her down.

  They now returned to the thicket, where Glass was lying. The man was impossibly mangled, his throat torn open, his body claw-ripped, arms and legs lacerated. He was, somehow, still alive.

  Incredibly, he remained alive all through the afternoon and by evening Henry was faced with an ethical problem. Glass, obviously, could not be taken on. There was no doubt that he was about to die; no man could be so badly mangled and live. There was, of course, no medical care available. They were a week out from civilization, and it seemed dubious that he could survive even under a surgeon’s care.

  But the party could not wait. They still didn’t know where the Rees might be, they still had to get to the post, and certainly the whole expedition couldn’t be abandoned for the sake of one dying man. Henry asked for volunteers. They were to wait until Glass died, bury him, and come after the main party. (Or until Glass could travel, Henry added—Old Hugh was conscious.)

  It was a lot to ask of them. They were in hostile country, and the vigil must have seemed nothing worth risking your own life for. But a purse was finally made up as inducement—some say $80—and two reluctant volunteers stepped forward, John Fitzgerald and a greenhorn on his first trip, name of Jim Bridger.

  The next morning Henry moved on. Glass was not the only casualty of the trip. Late in September, while camped for the night, Henry’s party was tired on by an unseen war party. Two men were killed and two wounded. Two of the precious horses were lost. The white party fired back blindly and scored, almost by accident. Not daring to leave their position, they remained alert all night, and when moming came the war party had disappeared, leaving behind one of their number. It was a Mandan. Roving very far from home, this war party, and it was uncomfortable knowledge. The Mandans were the friendliest of all tribes one the Missouri, traditionally hospitable, traditionally co-operative., Now—abruptly—this. Very uncomfortable knowledge.

  Henry continued, his party getting smaller. He made it to his fort at the Yellowstone without any further losses, only to find more when he arrived. Twenty-two of the horses he had left there were gone. Seven more were stolen after he arrived. Men, equipment, and animals were gradually being picked off; the incredibly consistent process of mountain and other "fixens," and come to the fort.

  A few days later Fitzgerald and Jim Bridger pulled in, to report Glass dead. He had lasted five full days and gone under at last. They had buried him, collected his gun, knife and other "fixens" and come to the fort.

  Local Crows brought the further heartening news that the Blackfeet were deliberately out to hunt down and destroy any trapping parties in their country. Henry quickly set about the business, of abandoning the fort. He made a cache for some of the goods and embarked the rest, with all the men, on the Yellowstone. They were able to make it up that river until they reached the Powder, where they had to go ashore because of the rapids. They were roughly 125 miles up the Yellowstone from the mouth, not quite halfway to their destination, the mouth of the Bighorn.

  Here, near the mouth of the Powder River, Henry had the first luck that had come his way all year, He met a band of friendly Crows, and secured forty-seven horses from them. With these he outfitted a trapping party and sent them on ahead to the Bighorn. They were to trap their way up that river as long as they could, and then winter where they had to. (Possibly some previous arrangement had been made to meet the party that was expected to depart from Fort Kiowa after Henry. But as yet he didn’t know if that party had been able to get off.

  The remainder of the men he would keep with him; he would need a fair-sized force to get a post readied before winter closed in.

  Here at Powder River he lost three more men, but not to Indians. Fitzgerald had been considerably shaken by the overland trip from Fort Kiowa. What with Hugh Glass and Indian attacks and the prospect of more in store, Fitzgerald decided he had had enough of the trapper's gay life to suit him. He wanted to go back to civilization and do something a little safer. (What he had in mind was joining the army, which he did.) He and two others took their leave from Henry’s party and started down the river in a canoe. With various mishaps along the way, the three finally arrived at Fort Atkinson on December 18 and there made a report of activities on the upper river to Colonel Leavenworth. A few months later Fitzgerald enlisted."

  After the departure of the three men, Henry moved on to the mouth of the Bighorn. He may have used the remnants of Manuel Lisa’s old Fort Lisa or built a new one himself. Probably he took over the abandoned post and rebuilt. By the end of December, just in time to welcome in the new and hopefully more prosperous year of 1824, he and his party were well installed. In spite of the late season, he had sent a small party off to trap the Yellows
tone tributaries.

  According to the tradition, the staff at the post was celebrating the new year. Whiskey was flowing, spirits and spirit content high. Spirits, in fact, were the order of the day, because Hugh Glass walked in and joined the celebration. He was looking for John Fitzgerald and James Bridger.

  II

  No one will ever know why Fitzgerald and Bridger abandoned Hugh Glass. Speculation is virtually useless, because the whole drama is something quite beyond our comprehension. It has been fictionalized in several ways and explained in several others. I have no theory. They did it, and there began an ordeal that remains one of the most incredible feats of the human animal ever recorded.

  They left him alone, without a ride, without knife, without even the fixens from his possible sack. He woke, still in the brushwood thicker where the bear had mangled him. Unable to walk, he somehow dragged himself to a spring that was close; even this much must have cost him almost everything.

  But he reached it. There were berries by the spring, ‘wild cherries and buffalo berries in the thicket. Glass lay beside the spring, keeping himself barely alive for ten days.

  At the end of that time Glass decided he’d better be moving on. How he had strength enough to stand, let alone walk, is simply one of the many questions that can never be answered. He started to walk back to civilization; the nearest post, Fort Kiowa, was over a hundred miles away, across the desolate Dakota plains. There was nothing he could do about his wounds. Many of them he couldn’t even reach. They must have broken open frequently when he tried to move, and the consistent loss of blood would have been enough to kill a lesser man.

  Before he had gone far he had a piece of luck. A pack of wolves had cut down a buffalo calf. Waiting until they had fed enough to make them less irritable, Glass moved forward and scared them away from the carcass. The decaying buffalo corpse was his home for the next few days. He lay in the lee of it—the fall nights were cold, and certainly the smell would have been better than the wind—and ate. Meat’s meat, in the mountain saying, and in the circumstances it would matter very little that he had no knife to cut it or fire to cook it. He ate as much as he could, for as long as he thought he dared to stay in the same place. Then he moved on again, stumbling across the arid plains, living on what berries he might find, what scraps of meat the wolves and buzzards left when he came up—anything.

  The details of this crawl across South Dakota are impossible to determine. Somehow he did it, but there is an uncertainty about where he ended; several reports say he actually made. it to Fort Kiowa. Beause of the dates and time span involved, this does not seem likely. He was abandoned in September; and even allowing for early September, it is improbable that he could have made it to Fort Kiowa by October 10. On that date, or near it, a six-man party left Kiowa on their way upriver. By the time they reached the Mandan villages the party numbered seven, and one of them was Hugh Glass. It is most likely that Glass made his way to the Missouri in the vicinity of the Bad River. This is a much shorter distance from the place he was left, and allows five more days for him to make it. On October 15 the small party was about thirty miles below the mouth of the Teton. (This is the only date we are certain of in the whole story; one of the trappers, apparently none too optimistic about approaching the Aricara country, felt called upon to make out his will on that date.)

  This party, under one Langevin, plodded upriver, taking about six weeks to reach the Mandans. During this time Glass must have been recuperating from his ordeal at an unbelievable rate. When they reached a point ten miles below the Mandans, Glass was put ashore. He was already hunting for the other members. While their boat worked its tedious way around a bend of the river, Glass was to hunt on the point, going straight across and meeting them on the other side.

  He stumbled on a Ree war party, who immediately started after him. The Aricaras had purchased a dirt village from the Mandans after their own had been burned and some of the tribe was living there. It was from this new settlement the war party came. Running for his life, without one chance in, ten thousand of winning, Glass suddenly encountered a Mandan brave on a horse. For some reason the Mandan saved him, swinging him up on the horse and galloping away from the infuriated party of Aricaras, now cheated of one slightly shopworn scalp.

  The Mandan took Glass to his own village, where there was a temporary post of the Columbia Fur Company1 So far this company had maintained an uneasy peace with the Mandans, though shortly after this the Rees killed the trader and the post was abandoned.

  As it turned out, there was no use in Glass’s waiting for the Langevin party. The angry Ree warriors had found and massacred them all. Once more Glass had escaped by the narrowest of margins. He set out again the next day, headed for the mouth of the Yellowstone and Henry’s fort there. He walked. He took the east bank of the Missouri and walked from the Mandan villages to the Yellowstone in two weeks, meeting not one human being.

  It is not possible, to explain the drive that kept him going. By any sane standard, he was going in the wrong direction. He should have been heading toward civilization and help, instead of which he was walking straight back to the mountains, all alone.

  When he reached the Yellowstone fort, it had been abandoned. So he walked down the Yellowstone itself, headed for the Bighorn and Henry’s new fort. The dramatic version of Glass’s story says he was motivated by the unquenchable desire to find and kill Fitzgerald and Bridger. It may be. Whatever drove him, when he reached the Bighorn in time for the New Year celebration he didn’t kill anybody.

  Bridger was still there, and the boy must have been paralyzed with fear. Even after it had been demonstrated that Glass was a living human being, they found it difficult to persuade Bridger to come near him.

  Glass—this again has been explained in various ways—did apparently forgive Bridger.2 One version of the story records the following unlikely monologue from Glass:

  I swore an oath that I would be revenged on you, and the wretch who was with you, and I ever thought to have kept it. For this meeting I have braved the dangers of a long journey. . . . But I cannot take your life . . . you have nothing to fear from me; go,—you are free;—for your youth I forgive you.

  III

  Having spared Bridger for indeterminate reasons, Glass still had a notion to see Fitzgerald. The opportunity came up in February, 1824. Major Henry had a dispatch of considerable importance to go downriver to General Ashley. What this was we don‘t know in detail; he had enough news, certainly. The loss of the additional horses—another $2,000 worth—the establishment of the Bighorn post, the dispatching of trapping parties. By this time, too, he may have had the news of Jedediah Smith’s arrival in the mountains (see Chapter 5), which Ashley would be glad to hear. In view of later events, it seems likely that Henry also had some news to impart which the general would distinctly not be glad to hear: that Henry was quitting the mountains, leaving Ashley without leadership for the field end of the business.

  Whatever the content of the express, Henry thought it important enough to detail five men for the delivery, reducing his effective trapping force by that much more. Hugh Glass was one of these; the names of the others were Dutton, Marsh, Chapman, and More. The initial stage of their journey (up the Yellowstone, Powder, and overland to the headwaters of the Platte) was made without recorded incident or difficulty.

  Soon after they reached the Platte the river ice loosened and broke. The trappers decided to try their luck with a bullboat. The bullboat was a kind of coracle of the western rivers. It was simply made, nondurable, virtually uncontrollable, and could carry a truly fantastic amount of freight—with a 2 1/2-ton load, the draft was about six inches. It was simply a framework of willows, covered with buffalo hides sewed and tallowed at the seams with varying success. It ranged in form from nearly circular, five feet in, diameter, to a roughly boat-shaped version which might be as long as thirty feet and as wide as twelve. It was propelled with a short paddle with which the rower reached out as far as he coul
d, then pulled directly in toward the boat; otherwise it simply rotated downstream. When a nearly-round bullboat took to spinning in the current, it was hard to stop. The sight of Indian families (horse Indians used them constantly for ferrying purposes) whirling in the impromptu merry-go-round of a bullboat was one that afforded a good deal of merriment in the mountains. A bullboat was a craft entirely born of expediency; thrown together for short trips down-stream, then abandoned without regret. Boats of the same type are still used in Tibet, and a reed-woven version in present-day Iraq.

  In this most primitive of boats Glass and his four companions embarked on the spring floodwaters of the North Platte. The current swept them down to the mouth of the Laramie (about fifty miles upstream from present Scottsbluff, Nebraska). There they found a Pawnee village of almost forty lodges; were cordially hailed and invited to a feast. The trappers accepted the invitation happily and disembarked; untrapperlike, all but Dutton left their guns in the boat. In the midst of the upleasantries, according to Chittenden‘s version, Glass perceived that the squaws were "carrying away their effects."

  As it turned out, the band of friendly Pawnees were neither friendly nor Pawnee. They were Rees, drifted all the way from the Missouri River into Wyoming after the burning of their towns. The band was led by Elk Tongue (Langue de Biche), second warrior in the tribe after the dead Gray Eyes. The other group of displaced Rees, near the Mandan villages, were probably a thousand miles away by any travelable route; Hugh Glass had run into both bunches within six months. This kind of coincidence begins to wear a man down.