Lord Grizzly, Second Edition (2 page)

I also learned from the story of Hugh Glass, and from my father, that I might be able to weather human predicaments and challenges and survive hard times if I “cultivate my dreams and nightmares” and remain thankful for whatever fortitude and heart I find in myself. I learned that a writer is a mixture of thinker and feeler, natural scientist and reporter, psychologist and philosopher, child and grown-up, dreamer and doer, and that the writer's goal is just as Dad said it was when he wrote of Charles Montague Doughty, a writer he admired as much as Shakespeare: “When a man can so write about an experience that you, the reader, feel lonesome for his life, like a grown-up longing for the good old days of youth, that sir is writing.” Not to mention, as Dad wrote in his last journal entry on March 30, 1994, that for a writer, as well as for a mountain man crawling two hundred miles across enemy territory: “Patience and brilliance is all.”

Foreword

by John R. Milton

With the publication of
Lord Grizzly
in 1954, Frederick Manfred used his new name for the first time, made the best-seller list for the first and only time (
Grizzly
was on the list for six weeks), and revealed an interest in historical subjects as the material of fiction. (As a practical matter, he also got out of debt for a while.) His seven earlier novels were published under the pen name Feike Feikema, the name of his forefathers, although he had been baptized Frederick Feikema. These novels were so closely based upon personal experience and incidents, although in varying emphases, that many readers recognized them as autobiography in fictional form. Manfred protested this label, just as the public seemed to have objected to his pen name—or could not remember it or pronounce it correctly. For these reasons, some observers saw the change of name and the choice of new and distanced subject matter as deliberate rather than coincidental.

For the name change, Manfred (as Feikema) took a poll on the streets of Minneapolis and among friends, and he also discovered that the Frisian “Feikema” translated into the English “Fredman.” He then made a legal name change to Frederick Feikema Manfred, dropping the middle name or using only the initial on all of his books from then on.

The choice of subject and theme for his first historically oriented novel is not as easy to explain, but it was an opportune decision. The story of Hugh Glass, mountain man, grew to legend in the nineteenth century, and twentieth-century research has confirmed more of the legend than it has corrected. Glass, of course, was not the only trapper, trader, hunter, or scout in the West who performed what seemed to be a miraculous deed. Survival in the Rocky Mountains and on the western plains in the first half of the nineteenth century often depended on miracles. Jedediah Smith, William and Milton Sublette, Kit Carson, James Beckwourth, Thomas Fitzpatrick, Jim Bridger, Etienne Provost, John Colter, and John (“Liver-Eating”) Johnson, among others, were as well known and redoubtable as Glass. Mountain men, often associated with a fur company, were a special breed.

Parties of fur traders went into the western wilderness before Lewis and Clark finished making reports on their 1804–1806 expedition. For approximately forty years hundreds of trappers, traders, hunters, and scouts roamed the Rocky Mountain area. They came from Canada, Missouri, Kentucky, Virginia, and from settlements elsewhere, too adventurous to remain a part of eastern civilization, too disgruntled to abide wives or restrictive schoolteachers, and sometimes fleeing from the law. They were individuals rather than group members, and yet in the mountains they considered themselves a brotherhood, lived by a code of their own, and often began new families with Indian wives. Their behavior was a curious mixture of recklessness and caution, leading to acts of bravery and endurance, but also to long lives. (Of an identifiable 292 mountain men, the average age at death was sixty-four years, far above the life expectancy at that time.) As restless nomads and trailblazers, they crossed the continent far in advance of civilization's encroachment on the wilderness, adapting to the ways of the Indians to whom they then brought guns, whiskey, and white man's diseases.

The mountain men were not saints, but their sins were forgiven by the mythmakers, who soon expanded upon the stories of these American heroes that roamed the wilderness, conquered the Indians or made daring escapes from them, slew wild beasts or (like Hugh Glass) survived hand-to-claw fights with them, and in general led a life of peril. This was the stuff of legend, and the mountain man became the first western American hero, to be replaced later by the cowboy. Furthermore, the freedom of the trapper, unhampered by society, has come to symbolize the American freedom that is highly touted (although not always deservedly) as the major characteristic of a democratic nation. Finally, because the search for beaver took the trappers up almost every stream in the West, they were the pathfinders preceding the westward movement. Later official expeditions of a geological or military nature did not discover as much as they rediscovered what the trappers knew almost fifty years earlier. The main routes in the mountains, the so-called avenues of commerce that are still used, were established by the mountain men.

For all practical purposes the era of fur trapping and trading, the era of the mountain man, ended about 1843, when Jim Bridger built a post in southwestern Wyoming to furnish supplies to emigrants. Wagon trains increased in number at that time on the Oregon and California trails, gold was discovered in California a few years later, and the rush of miners, farmers, storekeepers, gamblers, and adventurers coincided with the collapse of the European beaver pelt market to end one colorful period of American history and begin another.

Several factors contribute to the attraction of the Hugh Glass story, although he is not the only mountain man to have appeared in fiction. Much of his background remains a mystery. He may have served unwillingly under the pirate Jean Lafitte and, upon escaping, lived with the Pawnees until they made a tribal journey to St. Louis. Here Glass joined the second expedition up the Missouri led by General William Ashley of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. A year earlier, in 1822, Ashley had placed an announcement in the
Missouri Republican
(March 20) asking for “one hundred young men to ascend the Missouri river to its source, there to be employed for one, two, or three years.” The expedition was commanded by Major Andrew Henry. On January 16, 1823, another advertisement in the
Missouri Republican
appealed for “One Hundred Men, to ascend the Missouri to the Rocky Mountains.” This time General Ashley led the expedition, among whose members was Hugh Glass.

What was to have been a routine trip upriver turned into a disaster. In response to a courier sent by Major Henry seeking reinforcements, Ashley stopped at an Arikara village to obtain horses. During the night the Indians attacked Ashley's camp, killing eleven men and wounding thirteen, including Hugh Glass. Colonel Henry Leavenworth, commander of Fort Leavenworth, down the Missouri, then asked for men to assist in a campaign against the Arikaras (a futile campaign), leaving Ashley with only thirty men. Sending a portion of his party up the river with a supply boat, Ashley set out overland with thirteen men to meet Major Henry. Hugh Glass was with this group when, shortly after the middle of August, near the fork of the Grand River in South Dakota, he wandered off and was attacked by a grizzly bear. Apparently he was so badly mauled and chewed that death was certain; two men were left with him, to bury him when he died, and the others proceeded on their way.

From here on, until the actual death of Glass about ten years later, the story is vague, allowing the imagination of the novelist full play within the framework of a few facts. Because no one was with Glass for many weeks after the attack by the grizzly—the two men having abandoned him prematurely, thinking he was surely dead—we can only imagine what he went through. Nevertheless, accounts of his experience, presumably based upon the story Glass himself told when he reached Fort Kiowa, soon made their way into print and into legend. The first was by James Hall, in
Port Folio
in Philadelphia in March 1825. The second, by Philip St. George Cooke, was published under the pseudonym “Borderer” in the
St. Louis Beacon
, December 2 and 9, 1830. “Adventures at the Headwaters of the Missouri,” by Edmund Flagg, appeared in the Louisville
Literary News-Letter
on September 7, 1839. Many years later, additional—or confirming—information was located in the memoirs of George C. Young and James Clyman, mountain men. Not until 1963, with John Myers Myers's
Pirate, Pawnee and Mountain Man: The Saga of Hugh Glass
, was all the available information collected and analyzed in a biography.

Despite these accounts and the admirable work of Myers nine years after the publication of
Lord Grizzly
, the novelist still has enough mystery and disagreement to allow room for the imagination—in addition to the task of bringing a historical character to life through emotion and inner conflict. What was it like, being left for dead? How did Hugh Glass feel about the two men who left him? How did he manage to survive, alone in the wilderness? Why did he not get revenge on his deserters? What motivated him during each phase of his life in the West?

John G. Neihardt was the first writer to recognize the literary potential of these questions. His response was an epic poem,
The Song of Hugh Glass
(1915). Manfred was the first novelist to become seriously interested, probably first learning of the incident of the grizzly in the South Dakota state guide compiled under the auspices of the WPA in the 1930s. His preparation for the writing of
Lord Grizzly
included extensive research (he has said that he read upwards of sixty books on mountain men and Indians), but just as important was a personal trek over the landscape of South Dakota from the Grand River site to Chamberlain, near which Fort Kiowa once stood. Not yet satisfied, Manfred attempted to recreate the crawl of Glass by fastening a board to one leg and squirming along the ground of the Minnesota River bluffs, observing the creatures and insects as Hugh would have seen them, tasting those within reach (as Hugh had to in order to eat enough to manufacture new blood), and thereby getting as close to Hugh's consciousness and perceptions as possible. Partly because of this experience, Manfred was able in
Lord Grizzly
to project the story through the mind of his main character, in most cases keeping himself as writer out of the story. This method assists in the process of identification with the character, providing a point of view that puts the reader into the scenes with Hugh Glass, observing exactly the same things that Hugh sees, no more and no less. The scenes are therefore vivid with a strong feeling of immediacy and reality.

Technically, the novel is built on two contrasting rhythms, the one an ebb and flow and the other a more linear progression. The interweaving of the two establishes a subtle tension that is important both to the theme of the novel and to the psychological reaction of the reader, yet each is significant in itself. The first is based on systematic repetitions of phrasing in groups of three, but operates in several ways. Early in the novel, during a battle with the Arikaras, as some of the mountain men died they “looked inward, then outward at the red dawn and their comrades, then inward again.” Here is the ebb and flow of the relationship between man and nature and between the individual and the group or his society. Man is not alone, not even a mountain man, but his ultimate understanding or concern is personal. (In the quoted passage, each dying man looks outward once and inward twice.) Later it is Hugh's personal concern with himself—aggravated, of course, by outside conditions—that allows him to wander away from the group and encounter the grizzly. Still later, it is his growing understanding of himself—again influenced by environmental and group factors—that makes it possible for him to forgive his deserters.

Repetition and parallelism also establish the poetic quality of Manfred's style, as in this descriptive passage:

These groups of threes dominate theme, structure, and style in
Lord Grizzly
. The overall organization is based on three parts—“The Wrestle,” “The Crawl,” and “The Showdown.” The bear exists in three forms, including Hugh (named White Grizzly by Bending Reed), the animal that nearly kills him, and the vision-bear that follows him through the Badlands (perhaps a real bear, but perhaps a symbol of Hugh's conscience). While Hugh is still determined to gain revenge, to punish the men who deserted him, three other mountain men return from the wilderness, one at a time, having survived similar ordeals. Behind these patterns of threes lies the uppermost triad, that of man as animal, as human being, and as spirit. During the crawl, Hugh is like an animal intent only on survival. Yet, as he allows revenge to become the driving force in his attempt to stay alive, he shows a human quality that is reinforced physically when he is at last able to rise from the ground and stand on two legs. When he looks up into the sky, and later when he finds it possible to forgive his deserters, he is in brief touch, symbolically and actually, with a spiritual self that represents a higher achievement but which Hugh (like all men) has not yet reached fully.

Because man has not achieved his potential and is still lacking in those spiritual qualities that will remove him even further from his animalistic traits, the act of forgiveness is neither easy nor pure. Hugh must be reminded in various ways that he too has faults, that he has companions who have also suffered, and that he does not have the right to judge his fellow men unless he can judge himself accordingly. He grants forgiveness tentatively, awkwardly, almost confused by what he does. Somehow, though, he has taken a step toward understanding his relationship with himself as well as with others of his kind.

Lord Grizzly
is a remarkable fusion of style and theme, of rhythm and form, of biblical allusions and mountain man history, and of myth-symbolism and down-to-earth realism. As a portrait of Western Man it has been filled out by four additional novels, all set in the region once inhabited by the Sioux, a region Manfred calls “Siouxland.”
Conquering Horse
(1959) portrays the Sioux in the eighteenth century, before the arrival of the white man. By historical chronology,
Lord Grizzly
, set in the early 1800s, comes next, followed by
Scarlet Plume
(1964), action taking place in the 1860s,
King of Spades
(1966), and
Riders of Judgment
(1957), bringing the larger story almost to the twentieth century. Often referred to as the “Buckskin Man” series, these five novels, each with a historical element, give shape and meaning to the land, its people, and its spirit.