(from George Ruxton, Adventures in Mexico and
the Rocky Mountains, 1847)
IN JANUARY 1803, Thomas Jefferson asked Congress for $2,500 to finance an expedition to explore up the Missouri River to its source in the Rocky Mountains, thence down the nearest westward-flowing waterway to the Pacific. Also in April of that year the great Louisiana Purchase was negotiated with France for $11,250,000. It included New Orleans, west Florida, and everything west of the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains and as far north as Montana. For fifty years after the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804–1806), the mountain men surfaced in western history. They were hunters, trappers, and traders with the Indians at annual rendezvous. Beavers were their principal quarry. The underfur of the beaver was used to make felt hats, as well as coats, muffs, and linings. However, fashions change. By 1850, silk hats had replaced felt hats, and overtrapping had exhausted the beaver supply.
Wild and independent, these wilderness trappers later served as guides to explorers, missionaries, and settlers, and as scouts for the army. They were the true “Openers of the West.”
Trapper Thomas Fitzpatrick was called “White Hair.” When he was only twenty-six, his hair turned white—the result of a harrowing, starving escape from Indians. He accompanied John Charles Frémont, and was a respected, peace-seeking Indian agent. “Old” Cabel Greenwood at age eighty-one led the first wagon train across the Sierra Nevada and, at eighty-four, with his son, helped rescue the stranded, snowbound Donner party. Jedediah Smith, once mauled by a grizzly bear, led the party that rediscovered the South Pass, the key to the central Overland Trail by which wagons could reach Oregon and California. He was the first American to cross the Southwest. The names roll on: William Ashley, who held the first rendezvous in 1825 and sailed down the dangerous Green River in buffalo-skin boats, and his partner, Andrew Henry. The Sublette brothers, James Clyman, Etienne Provost, and William Williams were among the first to see Yosemite Valley. Jim Bridger was the first white man to discover the Great Salt Lake. He tasted the waters there and proclaimed: “Hell, we are on the shores of the Pacific.”
There were wonderful tall tales about these mountain men. Typical was this description of Davy Crockett: “He took hail stones for “Life Pills”…picked his teeth with a pitchfork…fanned himself with a hurricane…could drink the Mississippi dry…and shoot six cords of bear in one day.”
From the 1847 book Adventures in Mexico and the Rocky Mountains by George Ruxton, here is the miracle story of John Glass, a man of “steel nerves and nine lives.”
THE GRIZZLY BEAR is the fiercest of the ferae naturae of the mountains. His great strength and wonderful tenacity of life render an encounter with him anything but desirable. Therefore it is a rule with the Indians and white hunters never to attack him unless backed by a strong party. Although, like every other wild animal, he usually flees from man, yet at certain seasons, when maddened by love or hunger, he not unfrequently charges at first sight of a foe. Then, unless killed dead, a hug at close quarters is anything but a pleasant embrace. His strong hooked claws will strip the flesh from the bones as easily as a cook peels an onion….
Some years ago a trapping party was on their way to the mountains, led, I believe, by old Sublette, a well-known captain of the West. Amongst the band was one John Glass, a trapper who had been all his life in the mountains, and had seen, probably, more exciting adventures, and had had more wonderful and hairbreadth escapes, than any of the rough and hardy fellows who make the West their home, and whose lives are spent in a succession of perils and privations.
On one of the streams running from the “Black Hills,” a range of mountains northward of the Platte, Glass and a companion were one day setting their traps. On passing through a cherry-thicket which skirted the stream, Glass, who was in advance, descried a large grizzly bear quietly turning up the turf with his nose, searching for yampa-roots or pig-nuts. Glass immediately called his companion. Both, proceeding cautiously, crept to the skirt of the thicket, and, taking steady aim at the animal, whose broadside was fairly exposed at the distance of twenty yards, discharged their rifles at the same instant, both balls taking effect, but not inflicting a mortal wound.
The bear, giving a groan of pain, jumped with all four legs from the ground, and, seeing the wreaths of smoke hanging at the edge of the brush, charged at once in that direction, snorting with pain and fury. About a hundred yards from the thicket was a steep bluff, and between these points was a level piece of prairie; Glass saw that his only chance was to reach this bluff, and, shouting to his companion to make for it, they both broke from the cover and flew like lightning across the open space. When more than half way across, the bear being about fifty yards behind them, Glass, in the lead, tripped over a stone, and fell to the ground. Just as he rose to his feet, the beast, rising on his hind feet, confronted him. As he closed, Glass, never losing his presence of mind, cried to his companion to load up quickly, and Glass discharged his pistol full into the body of the animal. At the same moment the bear, with blood streaming from its nose and mouth, knocked the pistol from his hand with one blow of its paw and, fixing his claws deep into his flesh, rolled with him to the ground. The hunter, notwithstanding his hopeless situation, struggled manfully, drawing his knife and plunging it several times into the body of the beast, which, furious with pain, tore with tooth and claw the body of the wretched victim, actually baring the ribs of the flesh and exposing the very bones.
Weak with loss of blood, and with eyes blinded with the blood that streamed from his lacerated scalp, the knife at length fell from his hand, and Glass sank down insensible, and to all appearance dead. His companion, who, up to this moment, had watched the conflict, which, however, lasted but a few seconds, thinking that his turn would come next, and not having had presence of mind even to load his rifle, fled with might and main back to camp, where he narrated the miserable fate of poor Glass. The captain of the band of trappers, however, dispatched the man with a companion back to the spot where he lay, with instructions to remain by him if still alive, or to bury him if, as all supposed, he was defunct, promising them at the same time a sum of money for so doing.
On reaching the spot, which was red with blood, they found Glass still breathing, and the bear, dead and stiff, actually lying upon his body. Poor Glass presented a horrifying spectacle; the flesh was torn in strips from his chest and limbs, and large flaps strewed the ground; his scalp hung bleeding over his face, which was also lacerated in a shocking manner. The bear, besides the three bullets which had pierced its body, bore the marks of the fierce nature of Glass’s final struggle, no less than twenty gaping wounds in the breast and belly testifying to the gallant defense of the mountaineer.
Imagining that, if not already dead, the poor fellow could not possibly survive more than a few moments, the men collected his arms, stripped him even of his hunting shirt and moccasins, and, merely pulling the dead bear off the body, mounted their horses, and slowly followed the remainder of the party, saying, when they reached it, that Glass was dead as probably they thought, and that they had buried him. In a few days the gloom which pervaded the trappers’ camp, occasioned by the loss of a favorite companion, disappeared, and Glass’s misfortune, although frequently mentioned over the camp-fire, at length was almost entirely forgotten in the excitement of the hunt and Indian perils which surrounded them.
Months elapsed, the hunt was over, and the party of trappers were on their way to the trading-fort with their packs of beaver. It was nearly sundown, and the round adobe bastions of the mud-built fort were just in sight, when a horseman was seen slowly approaching them along the banks of the river. When near enough to discern his figure, they saw a lank cadaverous form with a face so scarred and disfigured that scarcely a feature was discernible.
Approaching the leading horsemen, one of who happened to be the companion of the defunct Glass in his memorable bear scrape, the stranger, in a hollow voice, reining in his horse before them, exclaimed, “Hurraw, Bill, my boy! you thought I was ‘gone under’ that time, did you? but hand me over my horse and gun, my lad; I ain’t dead yet by a damn sight!”
What was the astonishment of the whole party, and the genuine horror of Bill and his worthy companion in the burial story, to hear the well-known, though now much altered, voice of John Glass, who had been killed by a grizzly bear months before, and comfortably interred, as the two men had reported, and all had believed! There he was, however, and no mistake about it; and all crowded round to hear from his lips, how, after the lapse of he knew not how long, he had gradually recovered, and being without arms, or even a butcher’s knife, he had fed upon the almost putrid carcass of the bear for several days, until he had regained sufficient strength to crawl, when, tearing off as much of the bear’s-meat as he could carry in his enfeebled state, he crept down the river; and suffering excessive torture from his wounds, and hunger, and cold, he made the best of his way to the fort, which was some eighty or ninety miles from the place of his encounter with the bear, and, living the greater part of the way upon roots and berries, he after many, many days, arrived in a pitiable state, from which he had now recovered, and was, to use his own expression, “as slick as a peeled onion.”