The following narrative is based upon an episode taken from that much
neglected portion of our history, the era of the American Fur Trade. My
interest in that period may be said to have begun at the age of six
when, clinging to the forefinger of my father, I discovered the Missouri
River from a bluff top at Kansas City. It was flood time, and the
impression I received was deep and lasting. Even now I cannot think of
that stream without a thrill of awe and something of the reverence one
feels for mighty things. It was for me what the sea must have been to
the Greek boys of antiquity. And as those ancient boys must have been
eager to hear of perils nobly encountered on the deep and in the lands
adjacent, so was I eager to learn of the heroes who had travelled my
river as an imperial road. Nor was I disappointed in what I learned of
them; for they seemed to me in every way equal to the heroes of old. I
came to think of them with a sense of personal ownership, for any one of
many of them might have been my grandfather—and so a little of their
purple fell on me. As I grew older and came to possess more of my
inheritance, I began to see that what had enthralled me was, in fact, of
the stuff of sagas, a genuine epic cycle in the rough. Furthermore, I
realized that this raw material had been undergoing a process of
digestion in my consciousness, corresponding in a way to the process of
infinite repetition and fond elaboration which, as certain scholars tell
us, foreran the heroic narratives of old time.
I decided that some day I would begin to tell these hero tales in verse;
and in 1908, as a preparation for what I had in mind, I descended the
Missouri in an open boat, and also ascended the Yellowstone for a
considerable distance. On the upper river the country was practically
unchanged; and for one familiar with what had taken place there, it was
no difficult feat of the imagination to revive the details of that
time—the men, the trails, the boats, the trading posts where veritable
satraps once ruled under the sway of the American Fur Company.
The Hugh Glass episode is to be found in Chittenden’s “History of the
American Fur Trade” where it is quoted from its three printed sources:
the _Missouri Intelligencer_, Sage’s “Scenes in the Rocky Mountains,”
and Cooke’s “Scenes in the United States Army.” The present narrative
begins after that military fiasco known as the Leavenworth Campaign
against the Aricaras, which took place at the mouth of the Grand River
in what is now South Dakota.