Frederick Manfred (1912–1994)

“I’m Hugh Glass, deserter, buccaneer, keelboatman, trapper, hunter, and one-bite cannibal.”

Before the 2015 film The Revenant, this was the most popular version of the Glass story, a bestseller at the time.

Of course, the prime element of Glass’ story is here.

In September 1823, Hugh Glass, part of Major Ashley’s overland expedition to the rich trapping areas along the Yellowstone River in Montana, was mauled by a grizzly bear north of what’s now Chamberlain, South Dakota. His back show more was ripped up and right leg broken, his scalp torn and neck punctured.

When he fully regained his senses, he was laying on the skin of that bear. Gone were his knife, his tinder, his powder, his shot, and his beloved rifle, Old Bullthrower. Beside him was an open and shallow grave.

And crawling 200 miles over three months to Fort Kiowa over the next three months, eating anything – insects, rotten meat, fish, snakes, fruit – he can reach, he has plenty of time to think about what he’s going to do to the men who left him to die: Jim Bridger and John Fitzgerald.

But that’s only the second part, “The Crawl”, of a three-part novel. Manfred’s book isn’t just a tale of wilderness survival. It’s a story about guilt and forgiveness, about Glass confronting his own past as much as the men who abandoned him.

The novel opens with “The Wrestle”, and we learn something about Hugh and his past – though not the cannibal bit. Old Hugh is a bear of a man. He’s old for a mountain man, in his fifties. He doesn’t like to trap but joins trapping expeditions to serve as a hunter. He took part in the 1822 expedition of Ashley to go up the Missouri. It was famously set upon by the Arickara in a surprise night attack after a day of trade negotiations and the traders “womaning” with the Arickara. Here the attack is motivated by revenge as well as the Arikara being keen to stop trade further up river with their enemies the Sioux.

Glass is back with Ashley the next year and with trapping newbies Bridger and Fitzgerald – “Fitz”. He likes the cheerful, teenaged Jim. Fitz is too cautious, too practical, has too much book learning, and is too calculating for Old Hugh. And Irish too. But they remind this Esau of the wilderness of the sons he abandoned back home in Pennsylvania along with his birthright and his wife to take up a life on the sea.

He also encounters Bending Reed, a Sioux woman he took up with when they were both captives of the Pawnee and whom he left when he escaped.

Glass takes Jim and Fitz under his wing as they ride out hunting on the journey. He saves them both from an Arickara ambush he warned about. Jim ignored that warning. Old Hugh’s eyes aren’t as good as his. His eyes may not be as good, says Glass, but he’s got years of experience dealing with Indians.

And Glass saves Jim and Fitz again when the Arickara launch a night attack on Ashley’s party. Hugh’s sixth sense tells him something is up, and he rouses the two young men – who are supposed to be on sentry duty – from their sleep. He even lies to Ashley about their dereliction of duty though Ashley doesn’t really believe him.

One night, the trappers’ talk turn to grizzlies, the most fearsome beast they can encounter in the wilderness, and their cunning and curiosity. Ashley even recounts a tale of Indians worshipping a grizzly before sacrificing it for their sins, perhaps, he suggests, a better practice than Christians who sacrificed a man. Hugh isn’t impressed by any talk of Indian piety or mercifulness. His companion was tortured to death by the Pawnee when they were captured.

And, with the best novelistic practice, Glass has his encounter with the grizzly the next day when he rides out alone. Ashley has relieved Glass of his hunting duties until he complies with the request to cut his beard off. Indians don’t like beards, and they create tensions with them.

In his crawl back to Kiowa, Glass has a strange and fateful encounter with an Indian woman who has went off to die alone. He’ll also find, at the fort, Bending Reed who is quite happy when he presents her with the claws of the bear that mauled him, and, it turns out, he dispatched with just a knife.

But he doesn’t stay long. He has vengeance to deal out. The grizzly in this section is Hugh himself, the man Indians call White Grizzly.

Since this is not my first encounter with the Glass story, I found the novel’s third part, “The Showdown”, the most interesting.

Glass makes a winter trip up the Missouri to confront Jim. Along the way, he escapes another Indian attack which only further convinces him that God has sanctioned his quest of vengeance.

But the Bridger he finally meets at Henry’s Fort isn’t the Bridger he last saw, and Jim has his own story to tell about what happened and what Glass revealed of his life in his delirious state.
A knowledgeable reader knows very well Glass isn’t going to do anything to Jim. After all, Bridger went on to a storied career. But what about Fitz? (Not to be confused with the famous fur trader and Indian agent Thomas “Broken Hand” Fitzpatrick.)

Glass sets off in March, south through the lands of Wyoming and across Nebraska. He’ll be captured again by Indians and again faces a grueling journey of survival to Fort Atkinson near what’s now Council Bluffs, Iowa. (The book has a pretty good map depicting Glass’ travels.)
There he’ll wait for Fitz to show up.

But Fitz isn’t the boy he remembers either and has his own version of events.

Manfred, in vivid prose, with some unusual turns of phrase and words, gives us a man forced to place his rage against his own past sins and to recount the impetuousness and mistakes of his youth when thinking of Jim’s and Fitz’s.

This edition has an introduction by Manfred’s daughter Freya. She recounts how, in researching the novel, Manfred bound his own leg as Glass did and crawled across some of the same ground and some of the same food.

Manfred’s account seems, given what I know of the history of the time, historically accurate with the parameters of poetic license afforded by what we know of Glass’s life. (However, some do claim that the “Bridges” mentioned in records about Glass’ story is not Jim Bridger.) It would serve as a good introduction to the Glass legend. show less

Lord Grizzly by Frederick Manfred is a mythical survivor story based on fact. Hugh Glass was part of a fur-trapping brigade travelling up the Missouri River in September of 1822. While out hunting, Glass surprised a mother Grizzly bear with two cubs. Before he could react, the bear was on him. The bear did tremendous damage, but when he regained consciousness and discovered that he had been tended to and then left to die fuelled his rage to the point that he was able to drag himself over 200 show more miles back to Fort Kiowa. He then embarked on a trail of vengeance against his best friends that had left him to die alone and weaponless in the wild.

An amazing story and in the capable hands of author Frederick Manfred the legend and the facts are blended into one almost unsurpassable adventure story. His descriptions are spot on, whether he’s writing of hostile Indians, the natural wildlife, or the scope and vistas of the American west, he paints a rich yet real picture of this wilderness.

Lord Grizzly is a book I would recommend to anyone with an interest in the American West. The author writes of an incredible event and manages to do so without placing the main character on a pedestal. Hugh Glass is portrayed as a real human with many flaws, and like many men that migrated to the west in those days, one that had both selfish and slightly shady reasons for doing so. The author makes no excuses for this character but simply tells the story and leaves it’s moral quandaries in the reader’s hands. show less

The most compelling aspect of 'Conquering Horse' is that similar to Welch's 'Fools Crow' it offers a comprehensive insight into Native American esoterisms as well as psyche and worldview prior to the advent of Europeanisation. But whereas Welch's treatments often have a labored dimension about them (given he deals with cross-cultural interactions in the mould of alien vs. native), Manfred avoids all such pitfalls to render a simplistic motif of an uninterrupted and flowing life untouched by show more New World paradigms.

'Conquering Horse' is a relation of a quest. A quest undertaken by the lusty warrior No Name who is the second son of the great chief Redbird and is to prove his mettle to the Yankton nation he has been born in. We witness his sexual foibles with the maiden Leaf, her mysterious vanishing, his vision of a quest and his rescue of Leaf and realization of his vision.

This book, it must be remembered, was first written in 1959 ergo Manfred's antiquated prose in some parts. But the entire narrative structure holds up to the test of time with imagery being the most engrossing bait which lures in the reader.

'Conquering Horse' avoids the otherwise cliched trivialization of the white man vs. the Indian or the eco-friendly woke Native relations we find in similar novels. There is only one reference to the white man in No Name's world and that is the first and final say on the matter.

Ultimately, one is imparted a profound lesson by this entire fable; life is simple, life flows and it will continue to flow and be simple long after we are gone. Make sure you have enough time on your hands after reading this book because it will leave you musing on existentiality. show less

Very interesting book -- I had no idea why the attack happened at the beginning of the movie or after reading a different account of the story -- but this book tells all. It is recommended by the South Dakota travel site. It was published in 1954. Now I have an entirely different opinion of the movie and Hugh Glass.

The author, Frederick Manfred, spent 10 years researching the story and even crawling areas with his leg tied up with sticks and vines. He went to South Dakota to gather gravel, show more plants, and other natural things along the path Hugh Glass traveled. He crawled through his yard in Bloomington, MN, as well, as his family watched. He ate ants and grubs.

Really interesting account and I feel like I understood little of the real story before reading this book. show less