Hugh Glass: The real story of "The Revenant" and why revenge failed

Leonardo DiCaprio got his long-awaited "Oscar", wheezing, drooling into his frozen beard, and spending the night inside a gutted horse. Hollywood loves drama. By the way, excellent acting. But the real Hugh Glass, if he were in a movie theater seat, would most likely just spit on the floor. His real story was dirtier, scarier, and—paradoxically—more lifelike than any Hollywood script.

We are used to sculpting monuments out of historical figures. Casting them in bronze, endowing them with noble motives. And Glass consisted of torn meat, autumn mud, animal stubbornness, and pure, unadulterated anger. And it was this anger, perhaps, that became the fuel on which he traveled his incredible three hundred-plus kilometers.

Wrong time, wrong place

Summer of 1823. General Ashley's expedition makes its way up the Missouri River. This is not a romantic walk with songs around the campfire. This is business. A brutal business of fur extraction in territories where local tribes—in particular, the Arikara—are not at all happy about uninvited guests with guns. A couple of months before that, the detachment had already been in a bloody meat grinder, losing a dozen and a half people.

Glass was a scout. A hunter who went ahead to get game for the squad. He was about forty years old—a deep old man by the standards of the frontier, where few lived to be thirty.

That morning he was making his way through the thickets near the Grand River. And he came across her. A grizzly with two cubs. No warning growl. No time to raise the Hoken rifle and aim. The bear was not protecting the territory. She was simply eliminating the threat. In one fell swoop.

When the rest of the squad, hearing the screams, came to the rescue, Glass was lying in a pool of his own blood, and a dead bear was breathing heavily nearby. Hugh had a broken leg. The ribs were sticking out. The skin from his head was torn off so that the scalp was dangling on the back of his head, exposing the skull. The wounds on his back were so deep that his comrades could see his lungs.

Betrayal that can be understood

Major Andrew Henry, who commanded the detachment, was a pragmatist. He understood: Glass is not a tenant. Carrying him on a stretcher across rough terrain, when the Arikara Indians are hot on their heels, meant killing everyone. But abandoning a dying comrade just like that is a stigma for life.

Henry offered money. A huge sum for those times of $80 to anyone who would stay with Glass, wait for his death (which no one doubted) and bury him in a Christian way. Two volunteered. John Fitzgerald is a seasoned, cynical trapper. And Jim Bridger is just a boy, barely nineteen years old.

They waited five days. Glass was breathing. He wheezed, blew bloody bubbles, but refused to die. And the Indians were getting closer. Fitzgerald was tired of playing nurse. He convinced young Bridger that their duty had been fulfilled. But the worst thing is that, as they left, they took Glass's rifle, his knife, flint and tinder. On the frontier, this meant one thing: murder. Leaving a person without a knife in the wild prairie is a sentence that cannot be appealed.

Three hundred kilometers on his stomach

Imagine this awakening. You can't get up. You are eaten by a fever. Flies lay eggs in your open wounds. You are alone. Unarmed. Around - the wild steppe of South Dakota, ahead - the impending winter.

This is where what makes the story of Glass great begins. He didn't start praying. He got angry. Rage is a great anesthetic.

Hugh set his leg himself. To stop gangrene on his back, he allowed fly larvae to eat his rotting flesh - a method that is disgusting, but effective, the dead tissue was leaving, leaving healthy tissue. And he crawled. First - a few meters a day. Direction - Fort Kiowa. It was about 320 kilometers to it.

What did he eat? Everything that couldn't run away. Roots. Berries. Once he was lucky: he found a bison cub that had been mauled by wolves and waited for the predators to leave to lick the raw bone marrow and finish eating the remains of the meat. Later, he caught a rattlesnake, crushed its head with a stone and ate it raw.

After a few weeks of this hell, Glass was able to stand on a crutch carved from a branch. He went to the Cheyenne River, built a raft from a fallen tree and sailed.

Bureaucracy is stronger than revenge

Two months after the bear attack, someone knocked on the gates of Fort Kiowa. What stood on the threshold resembled a living corpse. Dirty, overgrown, covered in scars skeleton. But his eyes were burning with a completely conscious desire to kill.

Glass didn't recover for long. He needed Fitzgerald. He needed his knife and his rifle.

First, he found Bridger. The guy was terrified to see the "ghost". But Hugh, looking at the frightened nineteen-year-old boy, suddenly realized that he was just scared. He followed the lead of the elder. Glass forgave him. Honestly, for a man of that era, this was an act of incredible nobility.

But with Fitzgerald, everything turned out to be more complicated. Glass had been on his trail for months. And I found it. In Fort Atkinson. But then the irony of fate intervened, which will not be shown in a heroic movie. Fitzgerald managed to enlist in the regular army of the United States. Killing a soldier meant immediate execution by hanging for Glass himself.

They stood opposite each other. A man who crawled through hell, and a traitor in a brand new military uniform. The commander of the fort, after listening to the story, ordered Fitzgerald to return the stolen rifle to Glass and paid compensation. That's it. No blood. No epic knife fight in the snow. Bureaucracy canceled revenge.

Life after death

What does a normal person do after this? Buys a farm, sits in a rocking chair and tells his grandchildren stories until the end of his days, showing scars. But Glass was not normal.

Taking his rifle, he turned around and went back to the prairie. He became a hunter again. He lived in tents again, froze in the snows, and drank ice water from streams. The Wild West was the only place where he knew how to breathe.

He lived for another ten years. And he died as a man of his profession should have died. In the winter of 1833, on the Yellowstone River, Glass and two of his partners were ambushed by the same Arikara Indians. This time there was no chance of survival. They say that his famous rifle then passed from hand to hand among the leaders of the tribe for a long time.

The story of Hugh Glass is not a parable about forgiveness or karma. Nature doesn't know such words. This is a story about the fact that the human body is able to withstand the unthinkable if the mind flatly refuses to give up. Sometimes, to survive, you don't need to be holy. It is enough to be too angry to die.