Crawling all the Way

My son found a tidbit in a travel brochure about Hugh Glass. It seems in 1823, Glass was part of a hunting trip to the Black Hills and tangled with a mother grizzly protecting her cubs. The leader of the trip left two men in charge to do what they could and to bury him when he died. Glass woke up to find himself deserted without any weapons, left to die.

Some accounts say the Glass crawled approximately 190 miles to, Fort Kiowa, the nearest settlement on the Missouri River, north of present day Chamberlain, SD. Other accounts say he crawled 100 miles to the Cheyenne River and built a raft that he then rode to the Missouri River. Either way, he showed up at Fort Kiowa more than 2 months later.

Two lessons in this story are opposite sides of the same coin. The men left in charge of taking care of Glass when he died gave up too soon. They didn’t bury him when he died; they left him to die assuming that was the only possible outcome of his condition. Glass, on the other hand, did not give up even under the most impossible of conditions.

I tend to fall under the first category. When I don’t get things accomplished as quickly as I think I should, I decide that the task is too big, or impossible. Perhaps remembering the determination of Hugh Glass will encourage me to stay on task and finish the big job.