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The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

THE SONG OF HUGH GLASS

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

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MACMILLAN & CO., Limited

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TORONTO

THE SONG OF HUGH GLASS

BY

JOHN G. NEIHARDT

WITH NOTES

BY

JULIUS T. HOUSE

Head of the Department of English at the State Normal School, Wayne, Nebraska

New York

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

1921

All rights reserved

Copyright, 1915, 1919,

By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1915.

Norwood Press

J. S. Cushing Co.—Berwick & Smith Co.

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

TO SIGURD, SCARCELY THREE

When you are old enough to know

The joys of kite and boat and bow

And other suchlike splendid things

That boyhood’s rounded decade brings,

I shall not give you tropes and rhymes;

But, rising to those rousing times,

I shall ply well the craft I know

Of shaping kite and boat and bow,

For you shall teach me once again

The goodly art of being ten.

Meanwhile, as on a rainy day

When ‘tis not possible to play,

The while you do your best to grow

I ply the other craft I know

And strive to build for you the mood

Of daring and of fortitude

With fitted word and shapen phrase,

Against those later wonder-days

When first you glimpse the world of men

Beyond the bleaker side of ten.

NOTE

The following narrative is based upon an episode taken from that much neglected portion of our history, the era of the American Fur Trade. My interest in that period may be said to have begun at the age of six when, clinging to the forefinger of my father, I discovered the Missouri River from a bluff top at Kansas City. It was flood time, and the impression I received was deep and lasting. Even now I cannot think of that stream without a thrill of awe and something of the reverence one feels for mighty things. It was for me what the sea must have been to the Greek boys of antiquity. And as those ancient boys must have been eager to hear of perils nobly encountered on the deep and in the lands adjacent, so was I eager to learn of the heroes who had travelled my river as an imperial road. Nor was I disappointed in what I learned of them; for they seemed to me in every way equal to the heroes of old. I came to think of them with a sense of personal ownership, for any one of many of them might have been my grandfather—and so a little of their purple fell on me. As I grew older and came to possess more of my inheritance, I began to see that what had enthralled me was, in fact, of the stuff of sagas, a genuine epic cycle in the rough. Furthermore, I realized that this raw material had been undergoing a process of digestion in my consciousness, corresponding in a way to the process of infinite repetition and fond elaboration which, as certain scholars tell us, foreran the heroic narratives of old time.

I decided that some day I would begin to tell these hero tales in verse; and in 1908, as a preparation for what I had in mind, I descended the Missouri in an open boat, and also ascended the Yellowstone for a considerable distance. On the upper river the country was practically unchanged; and for one familiar with what had taken place there, it was no difficult feat of the imagination to revive the details of that time—the men, the trails, the boats, the trading posts where veritable satraps once ruled under the sway of the American Fur Company.

The Hugh Glass episode is to be found in Chittenden’s “History of the American Fur Trade” where it is quoted from its three printed sources: the Missouri Intelligencer, Sage’s “Scenes in the Rocky Mountains,” and Cooke’s “Scenes in the United States Army.” The present narrative begins after that military fiasco known as the Leavenworth Campaign against the Aricaras, which took place at the mouth of the Grand River in what is now South Dakota.

J. G. N.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

If the average student of Western American History in our schools were asked to recall those names which loom large for him during the four decades from the purchase of the Louisiana Territory to the coming of the settlers, he would doubtless think of Lewis and Clark, Lieutenant Pike, Major Long, and General Frémont, with perhaps one or two others. That is to say, the average student of Western History is familiar with the names of official explorers; and but for their exploits, those forty wonderful years would seem to him little more than a lapse of empty time in a vast region waiting for the westering white man.

It is true that the deeds of those above named were important. The journey of Lewis and Clark from St. Louis to the mouth of the Columbia, and back again, has immense significance in the story of our national life, and it was truly a “magnificent adventure,” to use the phrase of Emerson Hough. Pike holds and deserves a high place for his explorations in the Southwest. Long’s contribution to the early knowledge of the West was considerable; and Frémont’s expeditions served, at least, to awaken the popular Eastern mind to the great possibilities of the Trans-Missouri region. Frémont’s reputation, however, is out of all proportion to his real accomplishment, for the trails he travelled were well known to white men long before he ventured into the wilderness. In this connection, Major Chittenden, one of the foremost authorities on the subject, tells us that “there never has been a time until very recently when the geography of the West was so thoroughly understood as it was by the trader and trapper from 1830 to 1840.”

When Lewis and Clark were descending the Missouri River in the summer of 1806 on their return from the mouth of the Columbia, they met bands of traders pushing on toward the country from whence the explorers had just come. These were the vanguard of the real history makers of the Early West. It was such men as these who, during the next generation, as Chittenden says, “first explored and established the routes of travel which are now and always will be the avenues of commerce in that region.” The period that followed the return of Lewis and Clark was one of the most enthralling in the entire story of the human race, and yet the very names of its principal heroes are practically unknown except to specialists in Western History. The stories of their exploits have not yet reached our schools, and are to be found, for the most part, hidden away in the collections of state historical societies and in contemporary journals and books of travel long since out of print. The Mormon Emigration, the Mexican War, the Gold Rush to California, and the Oregon Question filled the popular imagination during the early years of the West, and thus an important phase of our national development was overlooked and forgotten.

Nevertheless, it remains true that the story of the West during the first four decades of the nineteenth century is the story of the wandering bands of trappers and traders who explored the wilderness in search of furs from the British boundary to Mexico and from the Missouri to the Pacific. History, as written in the past, has been too much a chronological record of official governmental acts, too little an intimate account of the lives of the people themselves. Doubtless, the democratic spirit that now seems to be sweeping the world will, if it continues to spread, revolutionize our whole conception of history, bringing us to realize that the glory of the race is not the glory of a chosen few, but that it radiates from the precious heroic stuff of common human lives. And that view, I am proud to say, is quite in keeping with our dearest national traditions.

Now the fur trade on the Missouri River dates well back into the eighteenth century, and at the time of the Revolutionary War, parties of trappers had already ascended as far north as the Big Bend in the present state of South Dakota. But it was not until after the return of Lewis and Clark from the Northwest, and of Lieutenant Pike from the Southwest, that the great era of the fur trade began. In 1807 the Spanish trader, Manuel Lisa, ascended the Missouri and the Yellowstone to the mouth of the Big Horn, where he erected a trading post. Returning to St. Louis the next year, he became the leading spirit in the “St. Louis Missouri Fur Company,” the troubled career of which, during the succeeding fifteen years, was rich in the stuff of which epics are made. Major Andrew Henry, who appears in “The Song of Hugh Glass” as leader of the westbound expedition from the mouth of the Grand River, was a member of that company, ascending the Missouri to the Three Forks in the summer of 1809. Driven thence by the Blackfeet, he crossed the Great Divide and built a post on what has since been called Henry’s fork of the Snake River, thus being the first American trader to operate on the Pacific side of the Rockies.

In the spring of 1811, the Overland Astorians, under the command of W. P. Hunt, left St. Louis, bound for the mouth of the Columbia where they expected to join forces with a sea expedition that had set sail from New York during the previous autumn for the long and hazardous voyage around Cape Horn. This is the only widely known expedition in the whole history of the Trans-Missouri fur trade, thanks to Washington Irving, whose account of it is an American classic.

During the War of 1812 the fur trade on the Missouri declined; and though in the year 1819 five companies of some importance were operating from St. Louis, none of these was doing a profitable business. The revival of the trade, which ushered in the great epic period of our national development, may be dated from March 20th, 1822, when the following advertisement appeared in the Missouri Republican of St. Louis:

To Enterprising Young Men:

The subscriber wishes to engage one hundred young men to ascend the Missouri River to its source, there to be employed for one, two or three years. For particulars enquire of Major Andrew Henry, near the lead mines in the County of Washington, who will ascend with and command the party; or of the subscriber near St. Louis.

(Signed) William H. Ashley.

Major Henry has already been mentioned as a veteran trader of the upper country. Ashley, who was at that time General of the Missouri Militia and Lieutenant Governor of the recently admitted state, was about to make his first trip into the wilderness.

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, like a thunder-squall, recked not its path,

But raged upon what happened in its way.

Some called him brave who saw him on that day

When Ashley stormed a bluff town of the Ree,

And all save beardless Jamie turned to flee

For shelter from that steep, lead-harrowed slope.

Yet, hardly courage, but blind rage agrope

Inspired the foolish deed.

‘Twas then old Hugh

Tore off the gray mask, and the heart shone through.

For, halting in a dry, flood-guttered draw,

The trappers rallied, looked aloft and saw

That travesty of war against the sky.

Out of a breathless hush, the old man’s cry

Leaped shivering, an anguished cry and wild

As of some mother fearing for her child,

And up the steep he went with mighty bounds.

Long afterward the story went the rounds,

How old Glass fought that day. With gun for club,

Grim as a grizzly fighting for a cub,

He laid about him, cleared the way, and so,

Supported by the firing from below,

Brought Jamie back. And when the deed was done,

Taking the lad upon his knee: “My Son,

Brave men are not ashamed to fear,” said Hugh,

“And I’ve a mind to make a man of you;

So here’s your first acquaintance with the law!”

Whereat he spanked the lad with vigorous paw

And, having done so, limped away to bed;

For, wounded in the hip, the old man bled.

It was a month before he hobbled out,

And Jamie, like a fond son, hung about

The old man’s tent and waited upon him.

And often would the deep gray eyes grow dim

With gazing on the boy; and there would go—

As though Spring-fire should waken out of snow—

A wistful light across that mask of gray.

And once Hugh smiled his enigmatic way,

While poring long on Jamie’s face, and said:

“So with their sons are women brought to bed,

Sore wounded!”

Thus united were the two:

And some would dub the old man ‘Mother Hugh’;

While those in whom all living waters sank

To some dull inner pool that teemed and stank

With formless evil, into that morass

Gazed, and saw darkly there, as in a glass,

The foul shape of some weakly envied sin.

For each man builds a world and dwells therein.

Nor could these know what mocking ghost of Spring

Stirred Hugh’s gray world with dreams of blossoming

That wooed no seed to swell or bird to sing.

So might a dawn-struck digit of the moon

Dream back the rain of some old lunar June

And ache through all its craters to be green.

Little they know what life’s one love can mean,

Who shrine it in a bower of peace and bliss:

Pang dwelling in a puckered cicatrice

More truly figures this belated love.

Yet very precious was the hurt thereof,

Grievous to bear, too dear to cast away.

Now Jamie went with Hugh; but who shall say

If ‘twas a warm heart or a wind of whim,

Love, or the rover’s teasing itch in him,

Moved Jamie? Howsoe’er, ‘twas good to see

Graybeard and Goldhair riding knee to knee,

One age in young adventure. One who saw

Has likened to a February thaw

Hugh’s mellow mood those days; and truly so,

For when the tempering Southwest wakes to blow

A phantom April over melting snow,

Deep in the North some new white wrath is brewed.

Out of a dim-trailed inner solitude

The old man summoned many a stirring story,

Lived grimly once, but now shot through with glory

Caught from the wondering eyes of him who heard—

Tales jaggéd with the bleak unstudied word,

Stark saga-stuff. “A fellow that I knew,”

So nameless went the hero that was Hugh—

A mere pelt merchant, as it seemed to him;

Yet trailing epic thunders through the dim,

Whist world of Jamie’s awe.

And so they went,

One heart, it seemed, and that heart well content

With tale and snatch of song and careless laughter.

Never before, and surely never after,

The gray old man seemed nearer to his youth—

That myth that somehow had to be the truth,

Yet could not be convincing any more.

Now when the days of travel numbered four

And nearer drew the barrens with their need,

On Glass, the hunter, fell the task to feed

Those four score hungers when the game should fail.

For no young eye could trace so dim a trail,

Or line the rifle sights with speed so true.

Nor might the wistful Jamie go with Hugh;

“For,” so Hugh chaffed, “my trick of getting game

Might teach young eyes to put old eyes to shame.

An old dog never risks his only bone.”

‘Wolves prey in packs, the lion hunts alone’

Is somewhat nearer what he should have meant.

And so with merry jest the old man went;

And so they parted at an unseen gate

That even then some gust of moody fate

Clanged to betwixt them; each a tale to spell—

One in the nightmare scrawl of dreams from hell,

One in the blistering trail of days a-crawl,

Venomous footed. Nor might it ere befall

These two should meet in after days and be

Graybeard and Goldhair riding knee to knee,

Recounting with a bluff, heroic scorn

The haps of either tale.

‘Twas early morn

When Hugh went forth, and all day Jamie rode

With Henry’s men, while more and more the goad

Of eager youth sore fretted him, and made

The dusty progress of the cavalcade

The journey of a snail flock to the moon;

Until the shadow-weaving afternoon

Turned many fingers nightward—then he fled,

Pricking his horse, nor deigned to turn his head

At any dwindling voice of reprimand;

For somewhere in the breaks along the Grand

Surely Hugh waited with a goodly kill.

Hoofbeats of ghostly steeds on every hill,

Mysterious, muffled hoofs on every bluff!

Spurred echo horses clattering up the rough

Confluent draws! These flying Jamie heard.

The lagging air droned like the drowsy word

Of one who tells weird stories late at night.

Half headlong joy and half delicious fright,

His day-dream’s pace outstripped the plunging steed’s.

Lean galloper in a wind of splendid deeds,

Like Hugh’s, he seemed unto himself, until,

Snorting, a-haunch above a breakneck hill,

The horse stopped short—then Jamie was aware

Of lonesome flatlands fading skyward there

Beneath him, and, zigzag on either hand,

A purple haze denoted how the Grand

Forked wide ‘twixt sunset and the polar star.

A-tiptoe in the stirrups, gazing far,

He saw no Hugh nor any moving thing,

Save for a welter of cawing crows, a-wing

About some banquet in the further hush.

One faint star, set above the fading blush

Of sunset, saw the coming night, and grew.

With hand for trumpet, Jamie gave halloo;

And once again. For answer, the horse neighed.

Some vague mistrust now made him half afraid—

Some formless dread that stirred beneath the will

As far as sleep from waking.

Down the hill,

Close-footed in the skitter of the shale,

The spurred horse floundered to the solid vale

And galloped to the northwest, whinnying.

The outstripped air moaned like a wounded thing;

But Jamie gave the lie unto his dread.

“The old man’s camping out to-night,” he said,

“Somewhere about the forks, as like as not;

And there’ll be hunks of fresh meat steaming hot,

And fighting stories by a dying fire!”

The sunset reared a luminous phantom spire

That, crumbling, sifted ashes down the sky.

Now, pausing, Jamie sent a searching cry