Setting out in the spring of 1822, Major Henry, with his one hundred “enterprising young men” (some of whom were young only in spirit), ascended to the mouth of the Yellowstone. This was before the era of the Missouri River steamboat, and the two keelboats, that bore the trading stock and supplies of the party, were “cordelled,” that is to say, pulled by tow-line. General Ashley accompanied the expedition, returning to St. Louis in the fall. Early in the spring of 1823 he started north again with a second band of one hundred men. Stopping to trade for horses at the Ree villages near the mouth of the Grand, he was attacked by that most treacherous of the Missouri River tribes, received a sound drubbing, lost most of his horses, and was compelled to drop down stream to await reënforcements. It was in this battle that old Hugh Glass received his hip wound.
Jedediah Smith, who was a member of the defeated party, and who had fought with conspicuous bravery, volunteered to carry the news of disaster to Henry at the mouth of the Yellowstone. He was then but twenty-four years old; yet during the next six years he was destined to discover and explore the central and southwestern routes to the Pacific—an achievement of equal importance with that of Lewis and Clark, and performed under much greater difficulties. Immediately upon the arrival of Smith at the mouth of the Yellowstone, Henry, with most of his band, started south to the relief of Ashley.
In the meanwhile, Ashley had apprised the Indian Agent and military authorities at Fort Atkinson of his rough treatment; and Colonel Leavenworth started north with 220 men, intent upon chastising the Rees and making the Missouri River safe for American traders. The campaign that followed, in which the Whites were aided by a band of Sioux, was in some important respects a fiasco, as the opening lines of the poem suggest. But that does not greatly matter here.
What does matter, is the fact that the muster roll of the two parties of Ashley and Henry, then united at the mouth of the Grand, contained nearly all of the great names in the history of the West from the time of Lewis and Clark to the coming of the settlers. Harrison Clifford Dale, whose “Ashley-Smith Explorations to the Pacific” easily ranks him as the supreme authority on this particular period, has the following to say regarding the Ashley-Henry men: “The wanderings of this group during the next ten or fifteen years cover the entire West. … It was the most significant group of continental explorers ever brought together.”
After the Leavenworth campaign against the Rees, Major Henry, with eighty men, set out for the mouth of the Big Horn by way of the Grand River valley. Hugh Glass acted as hunter for the westbound party, and it is at this point that the following narrative begins. Old Glass was not himself an explorer, yet his adventures serve to illustrate the heroic temper of the men who explored the West, as well as the nature of the difficulties they encountered.
In building the epic cycle, of which “The Song of Hugh Glass” and “The Song of Three Friends” are parts (each, however, being complete in itself), I am concerned with the wanderings of that group of men who were assembled for the last time at the mouth of the Grand. Long ago, when I was younger than most of you who are now about to study the poem here presented, I dreamed of making those men live again for the young men and women of my country. The tremendous mood of heroism that was developed in our American West during that period is properly a part of your racial inheritance; and certainly no less important a part than the memory of ancient heroes. Indeed, it can be shown that those men—Kentuckians, Virginians, Pennsylvanians, Ohioans—were direct descendants, in the epic line, of all the heroes of our Aryan race that have been celebrated by the poets of the Past; descendants of Achilles and Hector, of Æneas, of Roland, of Sigurd, and of the knights of Arthur’s court. They went as torch-bearers in the van of our westering civilization. Your Present is, in a great measure, a heritage from their Past.
And their blood is in your veins!
John G. Neihardt.
THE SONG OF HUGH GLASS
I
GRAYBEARD AND GOLDHAIR
The year was eighteen hundred twenty three.
’Twas when the guns that blustered at the Ree
Had ceased to brag, and ten score martial clowns
Turned from the unwhipped Aricara towns,
Earning the scornful laughter of the Sioux.
A withering blast the arid South still blew,
And creeks ran thin beneath the glaring sky;
For ’twas a month ere honking geese would fly
Southward before the Great White Hunter’s face:
And many generations of their race,
As bow-flung arrows, now have fallen spent.
It happened then that Major Henry went
With eighty trappers up the dwindling Grand,
Bound through the weird, unfriending barren-land
For where the Big Horn meets the Yellowstone;
And old Hugh Glass went with them.
Large of bone,
Deep-chested, that his great heart might have play,
Gray-bearded, gray of eye and crowned with gray
Was Glass. It seemed he never had been young;
And, for the grudging habit of his tongue,
None knew the place or season of his birth.
Slowly he ‘woke to anger or to mirth;
Yet none laughed louder when the rare mood fell,
And hate in him was like a still, white hell,
A thing of doom not lightly reconciled.
What memory he kept of wife or child
Was never told; for when his comrades sat
About the evening fire with pipe and chat,
Exchanging talk of home and gentler days,
Old Hugh stared long upon the pictured blaze,
And what he saw went upward in the smoke.
But once, as with an inner lightning stroke,
The veil was rent, and briefly men discerned
What pent-up fires of selfless passion burned
Beneath the still gray smoldering of him.
There was a rakehell lad, called Little Jim,
Jamie or Petit Jacques; for scarce began
The downy beard to mark him for a man.
Blue-eyed was he and femininely fair.
A maiden might have coveted his hair
That trapped the sunlight in its tangled skein:
So, tardily, outflowered the wild blond strain
That gutted Rome grown overfat in sloth.
A Ganymedes haunted by a Goth
Was Jamie. When the restive ghost was laid,
He seemed some fancy-ridden child who played
At manliness ‘mid all those bearded men.
The sternest heart was drawn to Jamie then.
But his one mood ne’er linked two hours together.
To schedule Jamie’s way, as prairie weather,
Was to get fact by wedding doubt and whim;
For very lightly slept that ghost in him.
No cloudy brooding went before his wrath
That,