Lord Grizzly - a book report

I recently read the book Lord Grizzly, by Frederick Manfred. Here's the Wikipedia summary:

Lord Grizzly is a biographical novel by Frederick Manfred. It describes the ordeal of mountain man Hugh Glass, who is attacked by a bear and abandoned in the wilderness by his companions. Glass, with a broken leg, had to crawl to Fort Kiowa to reach safety.

The book has three parts: The Wrestle, describing events up to and including Glass's fight with the grizzly, The Crawl, describing his 200-mile crawl to Fort Kiowa, and The Showdown, describing his confrontations with Jim Bridger and John Fitzgerald, the men he is convinced abandoned him to his fate after his mauling by the bear.

Even though I haven't read many of his books, Frederick Manfred has quickly become one of my favorite authors. The reasons are many: his prose is pointed, complex, rich, and deep. His characters are subtle and complex, his writing is thought-provoking, and his imagery is what I think of as very yin--fertile loam for dreams and nonlinear thought.

The breadth of Manfred's vocabulary is one thing that adds this richness to his books. I was happy to learn the word immane, used near the very end of the book (p. 341):

They were following the high west bank of the Missouri, going north. To the east lay the immane expanse of the rushing muddy river, some of its waters sheeting swiftly ahead, and some of it standing still, and some of it eddying backward.

This word is rare enough that Firefox spell check highlights it as a misspell! A little digging uncovers the definition "Very great; huge; vast; also, monstrous in character; inhuman; atrocious; fierce." I also like the Merriam-Webster definition: monstrous in character.

Lord Grizzly has also piqued my interest in the practice of scalping and the history of the Arikara ("Ree") tribe. The threat of scalping by various individuals recurs frequently. Here's one notable passage from an early part of the book (page 72):

At last a tall lean man stood up. It was Silas Hammond. During the battle on the Ree sand bar, Silas had been stunned by a flying horsehoof and had been left for dead. While unconscious he had been scalped by the Rees. Yet somehow in the melee, after he came to, Silas, like Jack Larrison, had managed to escape in the night by swimming the river.

Silas removed his cap. It was a tight one made of beaverskin. The moment he took it off, his whole face sagged horribly. All eyes looked to where he'd been scalped. The crusted scar on his skull looked like a chip of black bark. The scar was healing very slowly along the edges. The scalping had cut the nerves of his facial muscles, and the skin under his eyes and off his jowls hung slack like a mournful hound's.

And another visceral section near the end of the book (page 304), describing Hugh's final encounter with the Rees ("Stabbed" is the brother of Bear Mouth, killed by Hugh in the same battle in which Silas Hammond is scalped):

Then followed the most awful part of the victory ceremony dance. Three braves, led by Stabbed's companyero, stopped the horses, and with cries of savage triumph, went over and counted coup on the still live men, and then scalped them, cutting out the whorl or crown below which, as the Indians believed, lay the seat of intelligence, cutting it out with a single twist of the skinning knife and lifting it with a jerk.

I find it interesting that I can recall being taught that the practice of scalping was introduced to the New World by Europeans. A short time spent googling shows that this is disputed by some. This merits a little research.

The Wikipedia entry on the Arikara ("Arikaree", "Ree") tribe says in part:

Arikara (also Sahnish, Arikaree, Ree) refers to a group of Native Americans that speak a Caddoan language. They were a semi-nomadic group that lived on the plains of South Dakota for several hundred years. They lived primarily in earth lodges, used tipis while traveling from their villages, and were an agricultural society. Their primary crop was corn (or maize), and it was such an important aspect of their society that it was often referred to as "Mother Corn."

Coincidentally, the tiny town of Ree Heights (population 85 according to the 2000 census) is on the route between Minneapolis [wikipedia] and Highmore [wikipedia]--it was occasionally a topic of conversation when visiting rellies on my father's side of the family. Lo and behold, the landscape of Highmore, South Dakota is the same land I was reading about in Lord Grizzly (from the website of the Eagle Pass Lodge in Ree Heights):

If you go back in time, the area was home to the Arikara Indian Tribe, also known as the Ree Tribe, who came to the area in about AD 1500. The Ree Heights area still contains artifacts of that tribe. Central South Dakota is known for its tall-grass prairie that was home to vast buffalo herds.

Ghod I'd hate to have to crawl 200 miles over that--driving it was bad enough!