The explorer John Charles Frémont ordered the executions. Then, in California, Kit Carson arrested and murdered three non-threatening Californianos, as the Mexican inhabitants were called. Again, there were Boggs family witnesses: In Taos, the murder of Charles Bent, the new governor of New Mexico. Violence also accompanied American conquests in the 1840s.
Repulsed but hungry, Boggs instead ate tree bark. At one point, unable to find bison, the Cheyenne at last strangled an old dog and boiled it. The frontier he described in a 1930 manuscript published in The Colorado Magazine was, like these movies, a place of frequent violence and desperation. He was related to the Bents, who were allied with and intermarried with the Cheyenne. Boggs was in the Arkansas River Valley at Bent’s Fort. However, she added, Euroamericans did create population pressures and new hostilities. She reported evidence of violence and cannibalism in some burials, but no firm answer to my question. I asked a Colorado-based archaeologist, Anne McKibbin, whether prehistoric Native Americans here really were more peaceful before Euroamericans stirred the pot. But DiCaprio’s comments also imply some primeval goodness in these mountains and plains that arriving Euoramericans despoiled. He might also be right about the human race pillaging the planet. Even by the 1820s, the Rocky Mountains were part of global trade. Mountain men trapped beaver, whose pelts were made into hats fashionable in Europe. Making the rounds from Wired magazine to late-night TV, DiCaprio labored to attach layers of ponderous meaning to “The Revenant.” Responding to a simple question from Charlie Rose, DiCaprio talked about the “capitalistic surge to extract the resources from the land, kill these animals and send them off to Europe - and here you have these Native American populations whose culture is decimated in the process.”ĭiCaprio is right about part of it. Instead of the dramatic Canadian Rockies, Glass was mauled on the Great Plains, probably in South Dakota.
The Museum of the Mountain Man in Pinedale, Wyo., described the movie as historically correct in “backdrop, clothes, guns, keelboats and atmosphere.” The geography is wrong, though. Floating down a cold mountain river in a buffalo robe? Don’t try it at home. The stuff about revenge? Way, way overstated. That makes it second cousin to the best efforts of historians, which may make it third cousin to fact. Facts have never gotten in the way of good stories.Ĭredits at the very end of “The Revenant” say it was based on “actual historical events” via a novel by Michael Punke. Even then, the story was fluffed up in print and probably campfire tellings. Glass set his broken leg and laid in maggots to cleanse his wounds before setting out to reach the nearest American settlement, perhaps 200 miles away.Īt least we think we know these things.
Companions dug his grave and, for reasons unclear, took off with his rifle, knife and other tools. He killed the bear with the aid of companions, but was seriously injured and expected to die. As he scouted for game in 1823, a sow grizzly with cubs nearby attacked him. Trappers lived dangerous lives, but the story of Glass is singular. Names of Glass’ companions linger on the landscape today, including Jackson’s Hole in Wyoming (David Jackson) Beckwourth Pass in California (for Jim Beckwouth) and Bridger Bowl, a ski area in Montana, for Jim Bridger.
Iñárritu’s visually sizzling “The Revenant,” DiCaprio plays Hugh Glass, who in fact was part of a fur-trapping expedition that traveled from St. legend in “The Revenant” and “The Hateful Eight” – The Denver Post