Hugh Glass: Grizzly Survivor by James D. McLaird (review)

Growing up in Mobridge, South Dakota, I could look west across the Missouri River and see a vista of buttes and high plains that memorialized three people who filled the stories my father told me. Two of them—Tatanka Iyotanka and Sacagawea—had monuments on a bluff, but Hugh Glass did not. Like the two others, though, his physical and spiritual journey served, and still does, as a monument of inspiration for generations of Americans.

James D. McLaird, professor emeritus of history at Dakota Wesleyan University, in Hugh Glass: Grizzly Survivor, requires the reader to ask, though, inspiration for what? For the sort of rugged individualism that many Americans have promoted since colonial times? Perhaps it serves a greater purpose as inspiration for the search for truth. In that pursuit, McLaird has written a gem of a book for the South Dakota Biography Series.

Because of limited direct evidence about Glass, McLaird set himself the task of "blazing a different trail." Along the way, McLaird uses Plains history to bring the reader closer to the truth about Hugh Glass. He also uses the "perhapses" and "what ifs" surrounding the legend of Glass to deconstruct it through careful analysis of the limited primary sources, as well as the abundant monographs, articles, novels, and films. He does this in almost the opposite way that, say, Natalie Davis uses conjecture to reconstruct Bertrande de Rols in The Return of Martin Guerre.

McLaird demonstrates that there are limits to what history can tell us about "the truth." He demonstrates that many of the "facts" of the Glass legend—his dutiful participation in Major Andrew Henry's party, his survival of multiple Native American attacks and a grizzly attack, his "crawl" across the plains—are either contested or unsubstantiated across the secondary literature and primary sources. In fact, there is something of a heroic template novelists and historians alike have used to develop the legend of Glass that may bring about an entertaining story, but does "not result in good history."

McLaird concludes that whatever "the truth of his story," Glass "stands out as a legendary figure embodying traits that Americans revere." If those same Americans also revere the search for truth about themselves and their heroes, whether on the plains of Dakota or elsewhere, this book is a great place to start.