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ONE
THE METAPHYSICS OF
HUGH HUNTING
Hugh Glass strode into history upright and proud, a skilled gunman an-
swering a want ad that promised adventure. Or he staggered into view,
drunk, smelling like befouled dog. Either entrance works.
In the winter of 1823, Glass answered William Ashley’s call for one
hundred men to travel to the Rocky Mountains. Ashley placed an ad in
the St. Louis newspapers and sent recruiters into the city’s “grog shops
and other sinks of degredation.” Like most turning points in Glass’s life,
this one frustrates clear description. There’s no person here—no brain to
weigh options; no spirit to desire money, fame, or a change of scenery;
not even a stomach to fill with pork and whiskey. The news of the expe-
dition reached Glass; he joined.1
His absence from the written record confirmed his status as a regular
guy. Ordinariness hid him in the crowd of working-class males who
farmed, mined, boated, hunted, and soldiered along the Mississippi
River and its tributaries in the early nineteenth century. These men
washed onto the docks in Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and New
Orleans looking for wages and entertainment. Sometimes they drank
too much and gouged out each other’s eyes, but in general they led lives
of unremarkable toil.
Except that’s not exactly true. The workers of the Mississippi drain-
age inspired plenty of words. People noted their behavior and especially
their bodies. Some heard and retold their stories. Yet all this print, while
bountiful, said little about the interior life of individual persons. Two
sorts of writers described the West’s laboring population; they both
20 HERE LIES HUGH GLASS
snatched workers’ bodies for their own purposes, neither caring overmuch
about the psychology of their subjects. The first, the semiprofessionals,
seized upon western working males to sell copy back East. These literati
had a taste for boatmen and backwoodsmen, and they often turned them
into dumb, violent, and gleeful stereotypes. The second group of authors
encouraged readers to actually nab working bodies. The composers of
runaway advertisements, court documents, arrest warrants, and public
warnings detailed the physical appearance, the behavioral quirks, even
the speech patterns of some laborers. With divergent audiences and goals,
these authors crafted a literature that split workers in two: they jettisoned
personality in favor of metaphysics and physiques.
The semiprofessionals transported workers into the realm of ab-
straction where they became hollowed-out regional types, masculine
icons, and racial metaphors addressing such heady concerns as nation-
alism, truth, faith, charity, and reason. The subscribers for runaway ads
undercut the personhood of laborers in the opposite direction. They
stuck to the physical, describing scars, skin color, haircuts, and crippling
injuries. Neither type of author gives me what I want: the opinions and
motivations of one worker, a hunter named Hugh Glass. But their words
are all that’s left of the men and women of his class, the grog-shop com-
patriots with whom he shared his life. And the words we are left with
underscore the problems, the confusion, and the unrest the laboring
classes created for their masters, employers, and would-be chroniclers.
The snatchers did not descend on these people because they were easy
marks. On the contrary, it was the workers’ unruliness—their tendency
to run away, assume false identities, fib, and make fun of their superiors—
that made them the targets of literature.
The authors William Ashley and James Clyman stood closest to Glass
in the months before he embarked for the West. Ashley composed the
words that attracted his labor, while Clyman described the social tim-
ber of the men who responded to the ad, headlined “For the Rocky
Mountains.”2
The year before, in 1822, Ashley crafted a differently worded
THE METAPHYSICS OF HUGH HUNTING 21
TO
Enterprising Young Men
The subscriber wishes to engage ONE HUNDRED MEN,
to ascend the river Missouri 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 Washing-
ton, (who will ascend with, and command the party) or to the
subscriber at St. Louis.
Wm. H. Ashley3
wanted “hunters.” The shift in terminology may have reflected the lessons
he had learned during his inaugural year in the fur trade. The previous
spring, he and Henry lost ten thousand dollars’ worth of trade goods and
supplies when a tree branch sank their keelboat. The craft was named
the Enterprize, and its loss hurt. Ashley needed to round up another
hundred men in 1823 so that he could reverse their fortunes. Given his
straits, the word “enterprise” may have depressed rather than buoyed
the general. It no longer suited the business of killing animals for their
pelts in the Rocky Mountains.
His word choice may have reflected other lessons as well. In 1823,
Ashley knew his labor pool better than he had the year before, and expe-
rience may have taught him that “hunter” would attract more employees
than “Enterprising Young Men.” The chance to shoot animals ranked
high in Jedediah Smith’s reasons for joining Ashley in 1822. He wrote
in his journal that he engaged “to go . . . as a hunter,” and as the party
worked its way up the Missouri, Smith was pleased that Ashley “kept
[him] constantly hunting to which I was no means averse.” Tracking
game freed Smith from the “dull monotony” of moving the boats up-
river and “enabled [him] to enjoy the full novelty of the scene.”5
The idea of hiring St. Louis men to hunt was largely untested, mainly
because the United States government barred Americans from hunting
in Indian territories. Prior to Ashley, Manuel Lisa tested (and violated)
the law; he contracted and transported workers up the Missouri to trap,
but most fur trade outfits continued to acquire their hides from Indian
hunters. Thomas Hempstead, the managing partner of the rival Missouri
Fur Company, didn’t think highly of Ashley’s plan. He watched Ashley’s
party leave St. Louis in 1822. The men appeared “untried and of evry
description and nation.” They looked disorderly, and Hempstead predicted
that they would “leave in a mass” once they reached the mountains. Work-
ers, especially fur trade employees, needed discipline. They couldn’t exer-
cise their independence and scatter under duress. Insubordination
during an Indian attack or a starving winter killed people and dampened
profits. “This kind of business of making hunters,” Hempstead warned,
“will take time and much trouble.”6
Hempstead spoke as a boss. From the workers’ perspective, hiring
on as a hunter carried enormous benefits. Foremost, as Smith hinted,
THE METAPHYSICS OF HUGH HUNTING 23
the title offered some protection from the crushing labor of the boatmen.
The Missouri roughed sailors up. The river pushed millions of tons of
Rocky Mountain sediment toward the Gulf of Mexico. The particles al-
tered the water’s appearance. In contrast to the Mississippi’s gun-barrel
blacks, oily greens, and contusion blues, the Missouri wore a palette of
browns, and these hues signaled trouble. The suspended dirt made the
river “a monotonous and crooked stream.” Grit collected in bars and
bent the current into horseshoes and S-curves. The river deposited the
sediment and then cut into it, producing the stream’s distinctive high
banks, which tended to break off and crash into the water in mammoth
hunks.7
To move up the Missouri, boatmen unfurled sails and unpacked
oars. They jammed poles into the sandy bottom and pushed against the
current. When all else failed, they “cordelled.” Fastening a “long cord”
to the ships, they jumped out, waded to the banks, and walked the ves-
sels toward the Rocky Mountains. Cordelling stunk, and the hunters
avoided it whenever they could. James Clyman watched the towing of
Ashley’s boats in the spring of 1823. “A slow and tedious method of as-
sending swift waters,” he reported. It’s unclear whether, like Jedediah
Smith, Clyman escaped this chore completely. Ashley had hired crews
of “St. Louis gumboes” to man the keelboats, but Clyman’s description of
cordelling suggests that more than French-speaking bodies were needed
to move the craft. “It is done,” he wrote, “by the men walking on shore
and hauling the boat.” The men—the workers—hauled the craft. The
hunters belonged to this category. They were hired hands; people called
them “Ashley’s men.” Clyman insisted on the separation of “hunters”
and “boatmen,” but the labor requirements of hauling goods upriver
eroded such distinctions.8
The cordellers battled the Missouri’s energy, and to move against
the current, they required the constant replenishment of their own en-
ergy stores. The boats carried food, and Ashley supplemented these
calories with wild game. Rather than keep track of seventy armed men
scattered throughout the wilderness, Ashley offered the daily task of
hunting along the banks to a small number of gunners. Not all the men
who had signed on as “hunters” in St. Louis escaped into the brush and
cottonwoods each morning. Ashley never intended for all his “hunters”
24 HERE LIES HUGH GLASS
to hunt all the time. Once they arrived at the Yellowstone River, every
man could wreak havoc on the local fauna; before then, only a few won
the privilege. Jedediah Smith drew the job consistently because of his skill
and trustworthiness. An honest man, he wouldn’t use the opportunity to
abandon the expedition and seek his own fortune as many of Ashley’s
hires did. Smith’s character made him a smart choice for the job.
Yet while integrity freed Smith from the towlines, hunting did not
necessarily produce righteousness. In 1823, James Clyman witnessed a
hunt in which the “Missourie Boats men” participated. One evening,
only weeks out of St. Louis, strong winds forced the expedition off the
river. The men camped on the bank and fanned out into the country-
side with their guns in search of meat. They brought back “Eggs Fowls
Turkeys and what not” and roasted the morsels late into the night, tak-
ing care “to burn all the fragments.” The next morning the reason for
the cremation of the guts, heads, necks, and other refuse showed up.
The neighboring farmers “came in hunting for [their] poultry.” Ashley
let them search the boats, but they found no incriminating carcasses.
The expedition traveled on, and as the boats turned one of the river’s
sweeping curves, a favorable wind kicked up. Ashley ordered the sails
opened. A shower of cooked pigs and chickens fell on the decks.9
Clyman told this story to reveal the “character” of the boatmen in
contrast to the hunters. In his mind, the tale constructed an ethical
rampart between the honest and the conniving workers engaged in the
fur trade. The boatmen pilfered other people’s animals instead of hunt-
ing wild, un-owned ones. Unlike the Americans, the “Gumboes’ ” race
and national allegiances were hard to pin down. The boatmen signed
less generous labor contracts than the hunters. Were they freemen or
slaves? Most damning in Clyman’s eyes, they frequently disobeyed
their American bosses, and their insubordination endangered and em-
barrassed Ashley’s more upstanding employees. Yet even as he tried to
distinguish himself and other workers from the rascal “Boats men,” Cly-
man’s anecdotes and asides often undermined his typology of laborers.
As in his description of cordelling, Clyman’s language slipped easily
from the specific to the general—from “Boats men” to “the men.” Both
sailors and hunters took part in the sporting chase that devolved into a
THE METAPHYSICS OF HUGH HUNTING 25
raid on chicken coops and hogpens. The sails filled with pork butts
and drumsticks incriminated the boatmen, but all the men contrib-
uted meat and watched the previous night’s suspicious cookery. If recti-
tude defined the hunters, why didn’t they put a stop to this shameful
business?
Clyman knew why not. Ashley had sent him into the St. Louis bars
to collect these people. He was the one who labeled the establishments
where he found them “Grog shops and sinks of degredation.” The day
the expedition left St. Louis, he recorded the excitement as keelboats
shoved off and the men fired a “swivel” for the crowd gathered on the
shore. Scanning the faces on the decks, he shook his head: “a descrip-
tion of our crew I cannt give but Fallstafs Battallion was genteel in com-
parison.” Hugh Glass stood on the deck, and his appearance did nothing
to change Clyman’s opinion of the men.10
painted ladies, and taciturn males. The actors jabber endlessly, and
their hammy dialogue reminds the audience of classic Western opposi-
tions: nature versus culture, savagery versus civilization, masculine ver-
sus feminine, action versus language, history versus literature.11
John Ford inserted a Shakespearean actor into My Darling Clemen-
tine, his 1946 retelling of the OK Corral legend starring Henry Fonda as
Wyatt Earp and Victor Mature as Doc Holliday. The thespian Granville
Thorndyke arrives in Tombstone with his troupe and is promptly kid-
napped by the dastardly Clantons. Earp and Holliday go in search of
the actor and find him in a saloon, half drunk, surrounded by guffawing
men. The Clantons force Thorndyke to recite Hamlet’s “To be, or not to
be” speech while teetering on top of a poker table. He has made it halfway
through when Ike Clanton, the patriarch, orders him to shut up: “That’s
enough, that’s enough. You don’t know nothing but poems.” Holliday
intercedes, ends the humiliation, and asks Thorndyke to continue. He
does until alcohol and fear cloud his memory. He looks to Holliday for
the lines, and the consumptive gambler finishes the speech, punctuating
the final “thus conscience does make cowards of us all” with a rattling
cough.12
Doc Holliday is a genre buster. He’s a cultured gunslinger, a card-
sharp with a sheepskin. Educated in Boston as a dentist, he has studied
the mysteries of the human body; thus he knows the tuberculosis in his
lungs is about to eat him alive. This awareness demolishes the Victorian
reserve that kept most middle-class physicians out of the ranks of violent
Western heroes. Undamaged gentlemen didn’t reside in towns like
Tombstone. They didn’t blow holes in their enemies with sidearms or
self-medicate with gallons of whiskey. They certainly didn’t cohabit
with “Apache” women named Chihuahua. In My Darling Clementine,
Holliday indulges in all kinds of transgressive high jinks: he’s a wheez-
ing Hamlet perched over the abyss with a six-gun, a shot glass, and a
multicultural lover. A doomed figure, he can mix regions, races, and
classes. He’s a mongrel, a mutant who will saunter into the OK Corral
but not out of it. Like the Clantons, he does not belong in a West with
settled boundaries.
Holliday won’t challenge Earp for supremacy or threaten the
THE METAPHYSICS OF HUGH HUNTING 27