If the average student of Western American History in our schools were asked to recall those names which loom large for him during the four decades from the purchase of the Louisiana Territory to the coming of the settlers, he would doubtless think of Lewis and Clark, Lieutenant Pike, Major Long, and General FrÉmont, with perhaps one or two others. That is to say, the average student of Western History is familiar with the names of official explorers; and but for their exploits, those forty wonderful years would seem to him little more than a lapse of empty time in a vast region waiting for the westering white man.

It is true that the deeds of those above named were important. The journey of Lewis and Clark from St. Louis to the mouth of the Columbia, and back again, has immense significance in the story of our national life, and it was truly a “magnificent adventure,” to use the phrase of Emerson Hough. Pike holds and deserves a high place for his explorations in the Southwest. Long’s contribution to the early knowledge of the West was considerable; and FrÉmont’s expeditions served, at least, to awaken the popular Eastern mind to the great possibilities of the Trans-Missouri region. FrÉmont’s reputation, however, is out of all proportion to his real accomplishment, for the trails he travelled were well known to white men long before he ventured into the wilderness. In this connection, Major Chittenden, one of the foremost authorities on the subject, tells us that “there never has been a time until very recently when the geography of the West was so thoroughly understood as it was by the trader and trapper from 1830 to 1840.”

When Lewis and Clark were descending the Missouri River in the summer of 1806 on their return from the mouth of the Columbia, they met bands of traders pushing on toward the country from whence the explorers had just come. These were the vanguard of the real history makers of the Early West. It was such men as these who, during the next generation, as Chittenden says, “first explored and established the routes of travel which are now and always will be the avenues of commerce in that region.” The period that followed the return of Lewis and Clark was one of the most enthralling in the entire story of the human race, and yet the very names of its principal heroes are practically unknown except to specialists in Western History. The stories of their exploits have not yet reached our schools, and are to be found, for the most part, hidden away in the collections of state historical societies and in contemporary journals and books of travel long since out of print. The Mormon Emigration, the Mexican War, the Gold Rush to California, and the Oregon Question filled the popular imagination during the early years of the West, and thus an important phase of our national development was overlooked and forgotten.

Nevertheless, it remains true that the story of the West during the first four decades of the nineteenth century is the story of the wandering bands of trappers and traders who explored the wilderness in search of furs from the British boundary to Mexico and from the Missouri to the Pacific. History, as written in the past, has been too much a chronological record of official governmental acts, too little an intimate account of the lives of the people themselves. Doubtless, the democratic spirit that now seems to be sweeping the world will, if it continues to spread, revolutionize our whole conception of history, bringing us to realize that the glory of the race is not the glory of a chosen few, but that it radiates from the precious heroic stuff of common human lives. And that view, I am proud to say, is quite in keeping with our dearest national traditions.

Now the fur trade on the Missouri River dates well back into the eighteenth century, and at the time of the Revolutionary War, parties of trappers had already ascended as far north as the Big Bend in the present state of South Dakota. But it was not until after the return of Lewis and Clark from the Northwest, and of Lieutenant Pike from the Southwest, that the great era of the fur trade began. In 1807 the Spanish trader, Manuel Lisa, ascended the Missouri and the Yellowstone to the mouth of the Big Horn, where he erected a trading post. Returning to St. Louis the next year, he became the leading spirit in the “St. Louis Missouri Fur Company,” the troubled career of which, during the succeeding fifteen years, was rich in the stuff of which epics are made. Major Andrew Henry, who appears in “The Song of Hugh Glass” as leader of the westbound expedition from the mouth of the Grand River, was a member of that company, ascending the Missouri to the Three Forks in the summer of 1809. Driven thence by the Blackfeet, he crossed the Great Divide and built a post on what has since been called Henry’s fork of the Snake River, thus being the first American trader to operate on the Pacific side of the Rockies.

In the spring of 1811, the Overland Astorians, under the command of W. P. Hunt, left St. Louis, bound for the mouth of the Columbia where they expected to join forces with a sea expedition that had set sail from New York during the previous autumn for the long and hazardous voyage around Cape Horn. This is the only widely known expedition in the whole history of the Trans-Missouri fur trade, thanks to Washington Irving, whose account of it is an American classic.

During the War of 1812 the fur trade on the Missouri declined; and though in the year 1819 five companies of some importance were operating from St. Louis, none of these was doing a profitable business. The revival of the trade, which ushered in the great epic period of our national development, may be dated from March 20th, 1822, when the following advertisement appeared in the Missouri Republican of St. Louis:

The subscriber wishes to engage one hundred young men to ascend the Missouri River 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 of Washington, who will ascend with and command the party; or of the subscriber near St. Louis.

Major Henry has already been mentioned as a veteran trader of the upper country. Ashley, who was at that time General of the Missouri Militia and Lieutenant Governor of the recently admitted state, was about to make his first trip into the wilderness.

Setting out in the spring of 1822, Major Henry, with his one hundred “enterprising young men” (some of whom were young only in spirit), ascended to the mouth of the Yellowstone. This was before the era of the Missouri River steamboat, and the two keelboats, that bore the trading stock and supplies of the party, were “cordelled,” that is to say, pulled by tow-line. General Ashley accompanied the expedition, returning to St. Louis in the fall. Early in the spring of 1823 he started north again with a second band of one hundred men. Stopping to trade for horses at the Ree villages near the mouth of the Grand, he was attacked by that most treacherous of the Missouri River tribes, received a sound drubbing, lost most of his horses, and was compelled to drop down stream to await reËnforcements. It was in this battle that old Hugh Glass received his hip wound.

Jedediah Smith, who was a member of the defeated party, and who had fought with conspicuous bravery, volunteered to carry the news of disaster to Henry at the mouth of the Yellowstone. He was then but twenty-four years old; yet during the next six years he was destined to discover and explore the central and southwestern routes to the Pacific—an achievement of equal importance with that of Lewis and Clark, and performed under much greater difficulties. Immediately upon the arrival of Smith at the mouth of the Yellowstone, Henry, with most of his band, started south to the relief of Ashley.

In the meanwhile, Ashley had apprised the Indian Agent and military authorities at Fort Atkinson of his rough treatment; and Colonel Leavenworth started north with 220 men, intent upon chastising the Rees and making the Missouri River safe for American traders. The campaign that followed, in which the Whites were aided by a band of Sioux, was in some important respects a fiasco, as the opening lines of the poem suggest. But that does not greatly matter here.

What does matter, is the fact that the muster roll of the two parties of Ashley and Henry, then united at the mouth of the Grand, contained nearly all of the great names in the history of the West from the time of Lewis and Clark to the coming of the settlers. Harrison Clifford Dale, whose “Ashley-Smith Explorations to the Pacific” easily ranks him as the supreme authority on this particular period, has the following to say regarding the Ashley-Henry men: “The wanderings of this group during the next ten or fifteen years cover the entire West.... It was the most significant group of continental explorers ever brought together.”

After the Leavenworth campaign against the Rees, Major Henry, with eighty men, set out for the mouth of the Big Horn by way of the Grand River valley. Hugh Glass acted as hunter for the westbound party, and it is at this point that the following narrative begins. Old Glass was not himself an explorer, yet his adventures serve to illustrate the heroic temper of the men who explored the West, as well as the nature of the difficulties they encountered.

In building the epic cycle, of which “The Song of Hugh Glass” and “The Song of Three Friends” are parts (each, however, being complete in itself), I am concerned with the wanderings of that group of men who were assembled for the last time at the mouth of the Grand. Long ago, when I was younger than most of you who are now about to study the poem here presented, I dreamed of making those men live again for the young men and women of my country. The tremendous mood of heroism that was developed in our American West during that period is properly a part of your racial inheritance; and certainly no less important a part than the memory of ancient heroes. Indeed, it can be shown that those men—Kentuckians, Virginians, Pennsylvanians, Ohioans—were direct descendants, in the epic line, of all the heroes of our Aryan race that have been celebrated by the poets of the Past; descendants of Achilles and Hector, of Æneas, of Roland, of Sigurd, and of the knights of Arthur’s court. They went as torch-bearers in the van of our westering civilization. Your Present is, in a great measure, a heritage from their Past.

And their blood is in your veins!