Between Grass And Sky: Where I Live And Work

At the Rattlesnake Rendezvous

A T T H E R A T T L E S N A K E R E N D E Z V O U S 1 2 6 The Hugh Glass Rendezvous is named after a fur trapper who enlisted as a hunter with Major Andrew Henry’s party in 1823 and became a legend on the northern plains. The group ascended the Grand River, exploring and looking for creeks and rivers full of beaver for pelts that would eventually become top hats for English gentlemen. In what is now northern South Dakota, Hugh was attacked and terribly mutilated by a grizzly that broke his leg and gnawed on various body parts. Ashley took one look at the mess and ordered two men to stay with Glass until he died, to bury him, and then catch up with the party. The men waited a couple of days—reports vary—but Glass refused to die, and the men grew nervous, alone in Indian country. So they took his weapons —the worst crime a man could commit against another in those perilous days—and left him. Glass’s fury when he came to and realized he’d been betrayed may have helped him survive. He crawled nearly two hundred miles, to Fort Kiowa, near Chamberlain, South Dakota, where he outfitted himself and began a long search for the two men, and revenge. His story has been told by writers John Neihardt and Frederick Manfred. The rendezvous named after Glass was first held in 1982 on a ranch along the Bad River in South Dakota, a region Glass probably came to know well as he scrambled through the cactus on his hands and knees, mumbling about ••• Hasselstrom/113-156 6/13/02 10:51 AM Page 126 what he’d do to his faithless partners when he caught them. Modern mountain men respect the old boy’s stamina, but we went to the event in pickups and vans. The first year George and I attended, he explained that this was a special event, open by personal invitation only to buckskinning aristocracy: people who preferred “primitive” camps. The unspoken rule allowed nothing modern—manufactured after 1840—to be visible in camp. We followed rumors thin as smoke along a dirt trail marked sparingly with silhouettes of tipis instead of signs. In a grove of cottonwoods along the trickling river, we unloaded and piled our belongings where we’d erect our tipi, then parked our van behind a dusty hill a half-mile away. Shadows lengthened toward dusk as we sat on blanket-covered wooden boxes to catch up on news. A buckskinner in his sixties, properly dressed in breechclout and leggings, squatted in the grass near us, talking about his winter trapping. Abruptly, with energy belying his gray hair and lean shanks, he exploded into the air howling and prancing. “Bee in his breechclout?” George muttered. Then two men and a woman sprang into the air, yelling. We looked at each other: this strange affliction was apparently contagious. Then one man grabbed a shovel and whacked a coiled rattlesnake while the first man explained how he’d reached down to brush an ant out of his breechclout and patted the snake on the head. He was embarrassed about his outburst, considering such cowardice unbecoming to a mountain man. The tumult scattered us to put up our tipis and dig firepits before dark. Soon whoops and shouts shattered the drowsy afternoon. Rattlesnakes everywhere. One was coiled under a stack of blankets a woman had dropped only minutes before. A child reached for a stick of firewood that crawled away. George grabbed his hatchet to pound in a tipi stake, and saw a rattler gliding under the tipi cover toward our bed. Soon a whisper of sound was enough to send crowds of folks soaring skyward. Parents collected their children in a bare spot near the center of camp and lectured them on rattlesnake etiquette, while someone gathered car keys and rummaged through everyone’s glove compartment for snakebite kits. Around the night’s council fire, debate raged over methods of treating snakebite. The folks who adhered to the traditional method of cut and suck tended to be conservative in other ways, too; some of them used flint and a t t h e r a t t l e s n a k e r e n d e z v o u s • 1 2 7 Hasselstrom/113-156 6/13...