Hand to hand combat with a grizzly bear. Enough said. ( )

Very interesting book -- I had no idea why the attack happened at the beginning of the movie or after reading a different account of the story -- but this book tells all. It is recommended by the South Dakota travel site. It was published in 1954. Now I have an entirely different opinion of the movie and Hugh Glass.

The author, Frederick Manfred, spent 10 years researching the story and even crawling areas with his leg tied up with sticks and vines. He went to South Dakota to gather gravel, plants, and other natural things along the path Hugh Glass traveled. He crawled through his yard in Bloomington, MN, as well, as his family watched. He ate ants and grubs.

Really interesting account and I feel like I understood little of the real story before reading this book.
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Lord Grizzly by Frederick Manfred is a mythical survivor story based on fact. Hugh Glass was part of a fur-trapping brigade travelling up the Missouri River in September of 1822. While out hunting, Glass surprised a mother Grizzly bear with two cubs. Before he could react, the bear was on him. The bear did tremendous damage, but when he regained consciousness and discovered that he had been tended to and then left to die fuelled his rage to the point that he was able to drag himself over 200 miles back to Fort Kiowa. He then embarked on a trail of vengeance against his best friends that had left him to die alone and weaponless in the wild.

An amazing story and in the capable hands of author Frederick Manfred the legend and the facts are blended into one almost unsurpassable adventure story. His descriptions are spot on, whether he’s writing of hostile Indians, the natural wildlife, or the scope and vistas of the American west, he paints a rich yet real picture of this wilderness.

Lord Grizzly is a book I would recommend to anyone with an interest in the American West. The author writes of an incredible event and manages to do so without placing the main character on a pedestal. Hugh Glass is portrayed as a real human with many flaws, and like many men that migrated to the west in those days, one that had both selfish and slightly shady reasons for doing so. The author makes no excuses for this character but simply tells the story and leaves it’s moral quandaries in the reader’s hands. ( )