The Fate of the Corps by Larry E. Morris

Author:Larry E. Morris [Morris, Larry E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-300-13024-9
Publisher: Yale University Press (Ignition)
Published: 2004-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

The retreat of the Arikara had an immediate impact on Toussaint Charbonneau. Within weeks he had taken employment with a French company of fur traders at Fort Kiowa (approximately sixty miles southeast of modern-day Pierre, South Dakota), a few days’ travel downriver from the ruins of the Arikara villages. Many of Ashley’s trappers arrived at the fort about the same time. With the whereabouts of several hundred well-armed Arikara warriors still unknown, no one wanted to travel upriver to Mandan country. In September, Ashley’s partner Andrew Henry took a company of men, including Hugh Glass, and departed the fort, still trying to reach the Yellowstone River and trap there (Ashley’s original objective when he had been attacked in June). Rather than going north on the Missouri, Henry went only to the Grand River (which flows into the Missouri near present-day Mobridge, South Dakota) and then headed west with pack horses.

A few weeks after Henry left, the French trader Joseph Brazeau asked Charbonneau to accompany five other men in a pirogue on a trading mission to the Mandan. They would be the first traders to attempt going up the Missouri since the Leavenworth debacle. According to a trader who talked to Charbonneau a few months later (and reported details in a letter apparently written to William Clark), he “was confident, and told [Brazeau], that his men would be killed by the Arickaras.”26 Just how Brazeau, who was not going himself, persuaded the cautious Charbonneau to join this group is unknown.

Early in October 1823, when the six men were making final preparations to leave, a lone figure limped into the fort: Hugh Glass. Known as a good hunter, Glass had been slightly ahead of the rest of Henry’s men hunting for game when, in the words of James Hall (who published the first account of this episode two years after it occurred), “a white [grizzly] bear that had imbedded herself in the sand, arose within three yards of him, and before he could ‘set his triggers,’ or turn to retreat, he was seized by the throat, and raised from the ground. Casting him again upon the earth, his grim adversary tore out a mouthful of the cannibal food which had excited her appetite.”

Despite his wounds, Glass attempted to escape; this time the bear “seized him again at the shoulder; she also lacerated his left arm very much, and inflicted a severe wound on the back of his head.” In the meantime, the main body of trappers had run to Glass’s rescue—seven or eight of them fired their muskets, “despatching the bear as she stood over her victim.”

“Glass … had received several dangerous wounds, his whole body was bruised and mangled, and he lay weltering in his blood, in exquisite torment.” With Glass’s death considered a foregone conclusion—and with the hostile Arikara in the area—Henry offered two trappers a reward if they would stay with him until he died. A man named Fitzgerald and a nineteen-year-old greenhorn trapper by the name of Jim Bridger took the offer.

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