Hugh Glass — 1823, the Crawl from the Grand River

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.