In the late summer of 1823, a veteran fur trapper named Hugh Glass was scouting ahead of a Rocky Mountain Fur Company brigade in present-day South Dakota when he surprised a grizzly bear and her cubs. The bear mauled him so badly — tearing his scalp, throat, back, and leg to the bone — that his companions were certain he would die within hours. He did not. Over the following weeks Glass dragged and crawled himself something on the order of 200 miles back to the nearest fort, and his ordeal became the most famous survival story of the American fur trade.
The story turns on a betrayal. The brigade’s commander, Andrew Henry, left two men behind to stay with the dying Glass and bury him when the end came. Instead — by the version Glass himself told — the pair, one of them the young Jim Bridger, eventually took his rifle, knife, and equipment and rode off, reporting him dead. Glass woke abandoned, weaponless, with a festering back and a broken leg, hundreds of miles from help in country full of hostile parties and predators.
What followed is the stuff of legend, but the core is real and documented in fur-trade letters and reminiscences. Glass set his own leg, let maggots clean the dead flesh from his back to stave off gangrene, and began crawling east toward the Cheyenne River, living on wild berries, roots, and the carcasses that wolves left behind. He reached Fort Kiowa after roughly six weeks, then pressed on to find the men who had abandoned him.
He got his revenge in the most anticlimactic way possible: he forgave them. Confronting Bridger, he reportedly spared the young man on account of his youth; the other man had joined the army, where Glass could not touch him. Glass went back to trapping and was killed by a Native party on the Yellowstone a few years later — but his crawl had already passed into the permanent mythology of the West, retold for two centuries and, much later, filmed as The Revenant.
In the late summer of 1826 a young, devout, teetotal trapper named Jedediah Strong Smith led a small fur brigade south and west from the Great Salt Lake into country no American had crossed before, leaving the Bear River on August 7, 1826, with fifteen men. By the time his desert journeys were over he had made the first documented overland crossing into Mexican California across the Mojave Desert, the first known east-to-west traverse of the Sierra Nevada, and the first crossing of the central Great Basin — a string of firsts paid for in men’s lives and his own near-death from thirst.
The outbound trip took Smith and his men down to the Colorado River near present-day Needles, to the villages of the Mohave people, who fed the strangers, let them and their horses recover for some two weeks, and gave them guides across the desert westward to the missions of Alta California. They reached Mission San Gabriel in November 1826. There the Mexican governor, José María Echeandía, found an armed band of Americans deep inside his territory alarming, and detained Smith before letting him go on condition he leave the way he had come. Smith instead pushed north to trap, and when spring came he faced the problem of getting home across the mountains and deserts that had nearly stopped him on the way in.
The return in 1827 is the heart of the survival story. Leaving most of his brigade camped in California, Smith and two companions — Robert Evans and Silas Gobel — forced a crossing of the snowbound Sierra Nevada in late May and then struck east across the central Great Basin into a furnace of salt flats and waterless ranges. Smith called it a land where ‘high rocky hills afford the only relief to the desolate waste,’ the intervals between them ‘sand barren Plains.’ Their horses died, then nearly the men: Evans collapsed from thirst, and Smith and Gobel left him in the only shade they could find, pushed on, found water some miles ahead, and carried it back to revive him. They reached the Bear Lake rendezvous on July 3, 1827, as walking skeletons.
Smith’s luck on the desert routes finally broke the next year. In 1828, leading a second party back down the same southwestern road, he reached the Colorado crossing to find the Mohave’s goodwill gone, soured by violence with other American trappers in the interim. The Mohave attacked, killing ten of his men — Silas Gobel among them. Smith and the handful of survivors crossed the Mojave a second time on foot and reached California again. He was killed in 1831 by a Comanche party on the dry Cimarron crossing of the Santa Fe Trail. His crossings, recorded in his own journals and his clerk’s, opened the southwestern routes later emigrants would follow.