40 Fun Facts About Hugh Glass

To stop gangrene, Hugh Glass reportedly let what feed on the rotting flesh of his bear wounds?

Maggots cleaned out the dead, infected flesh. Glass was also carrying a broken leg and gashes across his back deep enough to bare his ribs.

Why did Hugh Glass reportedly spare the trapper who stole his rifle and left him for dead?

He had joined the Army, and killing a soldier would have meant execution. The captain on duty handed the rifle back, and Glass walked away.

Which Gulf of Mexico pirate reportedly captured Hugh Glass and forced him to join the crew?

Jean Lafitte had helped defend New Orleans against the British before going back to piracy on the Texas coast. Glass said the choice he was given was to join the crew or die.

Crawling to safety, Hugh Glass reportedly took half a calf carcass left by which feeding animals?

Wolves had brought the calf down. Glass waited until the pack had eaten its fill, took half the carcass in the night, then camped beside the meat to regain strength.

In The Revenant, Hugh Glass survives a freezing night inside the carcass of which animal?

Horse and rider have just been driven over a cliff in an ambush, and only the rider survives the fall. He shelters inside the body until morning.

Hugh Glass's story was retold as The Revenant, a title taken from a word meaning what?

A revenant is one risen from the grave: the word comes from the French for returning. It suits a man who reappeared months after his companions reported him gone.

Which actor finally won his first Academy Award for playing Hugh Glass in the film The Revenant?

Leonardo DiCaprio had five earlier nominations without a win. He named the shoot's frozen-river scenes among the most difficult things he had ever done.

Why did the grizzly charge Hugh Glass, by most accounts of the 1823 attack that made him famous?

She had two cubs with her when Glass, hunting ahead of the party, walked into them in the brush of a river bottom. Other trappers reached him only in time to kill the bear.

What were the two volunteers left with the mauled Hugh Glass supposed to do for him?

Bury him when he died: that was the whole job, and it came with a bonus. Instead the pair took his rifle, knife and fire kit and reported that he was already dead.

To play Hugh Glass in The Revenant, the film's lead actor had to eat a raw slab of what?

Bison liver was eaten raw for the part. The actor also described enduring freezing cold and the constant risk of hypothermia during the shoot.

Which Mexican director won a second straight directing Oscar for the Hugh Glass film The Revenant?

Alejandro Iñárritu had won the year before for Birdman. He shot the survival epic in places so remote that travel to and from the set ate 40 percent of each day.

Which actor earned a first Oscar nomination as the man who abandons Hugh Glass in The Revenant?

Tom Hardy lost Best Supporting Actor to Mark Rylance of Bridge of Spies. The shoot overran so badly that he had to drop out of Suicide Squad.

Hugh Glass and fellow mountain men trapped which animal, whose fur fed a fashion for hats?

Beaver made the mountain men's living until fashion moved on from the hats and over-hunting thinned the animal. By the late 1840s the trade had collapsed.

Hugh Glass's 1823 fur expedition took boats up which river, the route Lewis and Clark had used?

The Missouri proved so deadly that summer, with a dozen or more trappers killed in a single fight, that the company gave up the water route and sent its men overland.

The Revenant shows snowy peaks, but the real Hugh Glass was mauled on the plains of which state?

South Dakota marks the place with a monument beside a reservoir on the Grand River. The attack came in late August or early September, on open prairie.

The Hugh Glass film The Revenant led the Oscars with 12 nominations but lost Best Picture to what?

Spotlight took the top prize, though the frontier epic had already been named best film at both the Golden Globes and the BAFTAs.

Left for dead without weapons, what did Hugh Glass reportedly do before starting his crawl to safety?

He set the bone himself, the story goes, after the bear broke his leg, then wrapped up in the bearskin his companions had laid over him as a shroud and started for the nearest trading post.

Hugh Glass and four companions once floated down the Platte in bull boats, craft covered with what?

Buffalo hides stretched over a frame of willow poles made a light, tub-like boat, a design the fur traders borrowed from the river tribes.

Which Great Salt Lake explorer is, by tradition, the teenager who helped abandon Hugh Glass?

Jim Bridger was 19, yet no account named him until 1902; an early version says only Bridges. Glass is said to have forgiven the young man when they met again.

Which trapper, the older of two men left to watch Hugh Glass, took his rifle and reported him dead?

John Fitzgerald meets a violent end in the film version, but the real Glass never harmed him and settled for getting his gun back.

Hugh Glass told of living for years with which Plains nation after its chief adopted him as a son?

Pawnee life taught him which plants and insects were safe to eat, knowledge he is thought to have leaned on during his long crawl a few years later.

Which nation, called the Ree by trappers, wounded Hugh Glass in 1823 and killed him a decade later?

Arikara fighters shot Glass in the leg in June 1823, and it was a war party from the same nation that ambushed him on a frozen river in 1833.

Hugh Glass struggled over 200 miles to reach which trading post, now drowned beneath a reservoir?

Fort Kiowa's site now lies under Lake Francis Case. Glass limped in by mid-October 1823, bought a rifle on credit and set off back upriver within days.

The Revenant gives Hugh Glass a murdered son whom history never recorded, under what name?

Hawk is the film's invention: there is no evidence the real Glass had a son, and in the true story he killed neither of the men who abandoned him.

With Canada too warm for snow, the Hugh Glass film The Revenant shot its ending in which country?

Argentina supplied the snow, in Tierra del Fuego. By the time the cameras stopped, the budget had more than doubled from its original 60 million dollars.

Which author, later a US trade ambassador in Geneva, wrote the Hugh Glass novel The Revenant?

Michael Punke was barred from promoting his own book when the film came out: as a serving trade official he could not even sign copies.

Which 1970s Western retold Hugh Glass's ordeal as the story of a mauled scout named Zachary Bass?

Man in the Wilderness starred Richard Harris, with John Huston as the captain of an expedition that hauls a full-size boat overland on wheels.

Which band put Six Weeks, a song inspired by Hugh Glass, on the debut album My Head Is an Animal?

Of Monsters and Men come from Iceland, and the album's number-six debut was at the time the best US chart showing by any Icelandic act.

Which online game features a deranged merchant named Hugh Glass with a pet bear called Griselda?

World of Warcraft places him in a zone called the Grizzly Hills, a nod to the real trapper's most famous encounter.

For his Hugh Glass novel Lord Grizzly, Frederick Manfred crawled around his yard and ate what?

Ants and grasshoppers were on the menu, along with mice and grubs, and Manfred reported that the grasshoppers tasted better. He also wore a homemade leg splint.

A fellow trapper in Taos once used a straight razor to cut what from Hugh Glass's back?

An arrowhead from a Shoshone ambush had sat in the inflamed wound while Glass's party travelled 700 miles back to Taos.

Hugh Glass attended the 1828 trappers' summer fair at Bear Lake, an annual event called what?

Rendezvous were yearly summer markets where supply caravans from the settlements traded goods for furs; sixteen were held before the last one in 1840.

Hugh Glass was killed in 1833 when a war party ambushed him on the ice of which Montana river?

Ice on the Yellowstone was the scene: Glass and two fellow trappers were crossing it when a war party hidden on the far bank opened fire.

Hugh Glass reportedly fled a pirate crew by swimming two miles to shore near which Texas city?

Galveston was then a pirate colony called Campeche. Glass and a companion jumped ship the night before they were due to be judged for shirking pirate work.

Which explorer, mauled by a grizzly weeks after Hugh Glass, had a friend sew his scalp back on?

Jedediah Smith talked the friend through the stitching, then wore his hair long to cover the scar that ran from eyebrow to ear.

Which cinematographer won a third straight Oscar for shooting The Revenant in natural light?

Emmanuel Lubezki became the first cinematographer to win three years running, having taken the award for Gravity and Birdman.

Hugh Glass left no birth record but is widely said to have been born to Scotch-Irish parents where?

Pennsylvania is the usual answer, though the first writer to print his story admitted he could not say whether Glass was born there or in Ireland.

Which poet, best known for Black Elk Speaks, wrote the epic poem The Song of Hugh Glass?

John G. Neihardt made it one part of A Cycle of the West, a sequence of five epic poems that took him more than 25 years to complete.

Hugh Glass went upriver in 1823 with which general, whose newspaper ad sought a corps of 100 men?

William Ashley's recruits became known as Ashley's Hundred. He was a sitting lieutenant governor when he launched the venture, and later served in Congress.

Which major led the trappers who carried the mauled Hugh Glass on a litter for two days?

Andrew Henry had first gone upriver in 1809 and was among the most seasoned field leaders in the fur trade; he quit it for good the year after the mauling.