The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge

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William H. Ashley slammed his tin cup on the crude slats of the table. The carefully groomed gray of his beard did not conceal the tight clench of his jaw. For its part, the clenched jaw seemed unlikely to contain another outburst, as Ashley found himself confronting again the one thing he despised above all else-waiting. In the end, Fitzgerald brings this up, saying he and Glass had had a deal and Hawk wasn’t listening to him try to explain. Glass yells that they’d had no deal. He did blink though! But maybe he wasn’t fully comprehending what Fitzgerald had been saying at the time, or maybe his eyes were just feeling dry and he had to blink sometime lol. A thrilling tale of betrayal and revenge set against the nineteenth-century American frontier, Michael Punke's The Revenant is the astonishing story of real-life trapper and frontiersman Hugh Glass. The Audible audiobook narrator was AWFUL. He didn't try to do any voices with anyone, and his voice acting was not great in general. Also, because he was Native American, his voice (and the stacatto/proper style of it) was jarring when it came to the Army's perspective.

After this recharge, Glass comes across a destroyed Arikara village, where he finds an old, blind woman. He makes her a meal, and she dies the next morning. As he builds her a funeral pyre, he's approached by a group of Sioux warriors—traditional enemies of the Arikara. Their leader, Yellow Horse, brings Glass to a medicine man, who heals Glass's infected wounds. Afterwards, Yellow Horse escorts Glass to Fort Brazeau. The book is a great story, but I think for me personally, it just worked better in film. There were times when I kind of spaces out while reading some sections; whereas the movie, even though it’s about the same thing, captivated me the whole time. Even though the movie wins here, I would still recommend the book. There is a section at the end where he talks about the real history of these people and what happened to them. (In real life Henry wasn’t killed by the way). Often when I buy a book it ends up languishing on my shelf. This was one that I tore into right away. The Indian characters are not drawn much better. Punke clearly went out of his way to present the Indians sympathetically and sensitively, which is well-intentioned. He tries so hard, however, that he is almost condescending. Crazy Horse, for example, does not have a single thought – or say a single word – that doesn’t involve the white people encroaching into the Powder River Country. Undoubtedly, Crazy Horse had these concerns. Yet I am confident in saying that he had other thoughts as well. Instead of humanizing Crazy Horse, he is transformed into a gloomy prophet uttering portents of doom. Not flesh-and-blood but a symbol, as lifelike as his half-finished monument in South Dakota.Will Poulter speaking of Jim Bridger, he is played here by Will Poulter. I don’t think I have seen any other movies with him, but he is excellent as the young Bridger. A superb revenge story . . . Punke has added considerably to our understanding of human endurance and of the men who pushed west in the footsteps of Lewis and Clark--a significant feat.” — The Washington Post Book World There are a couple scenes that show how white people ruined the land of the Native Americans, one part being when the Arikara chief is speaking to the main French guy. Ridgeline, by Michael Punke, stands out first by having the best title ever. If you've ever explored NE Wyoming, then you know what I mean. It's all about the ridgelines, and what beyond they hide. No one can know exactly what happened on that bloody day — or why it happened the way that it did — but Punke’s combination of historical fact and logical speculation is certainly plausible. The basic facts are these:

His new novel Ridgeline, which came out last June looks at 1866 Dakota Territory and (to me) a little known battle between the Indian tribes and the US Army called "Battle of the Fetterman" which occurred in December 1866.

That said, the scene where it is Hugh Glass against the blizzard will give you frostbite. It’s late December. You may remember stories about men in the Klondike killing and gutting a bear and climbing inside it for the night. This scene is kind of like that but no animals were harmed. After the movie, I read the book and my only memory from it was that I found the book disappointing. There is a specific scene in the book I didn’t like, and I will get into that later. Reading the book this time around, made me realize how little I remembered about it from that first reading lol. It was much better than I had remembered. Although varying in small details, the major arcs were the same. I felt as if The Revenant did a better job of building the tension than Lord Grizzly but we both agreed that the ending to the story (in both books) was a let-down. Ridgeline, Michael Punke’s second novel, is set to be published on Jun 1, 2021, just 9 days short of 19 years since his first novel, The Revenant was published. I have not read The Revenant, but I did see the movie which was not a movie one easily forgets.

The standard – and mostly fabricated – wisdom about the battle is that Fetterman was a boastful idiot who proclaimed that he could “ride through the whole Sioux nation” with only eighty men. Generations of western historians have therefore enjoyed Fetterman’s comeuppance, served with a side of irony, since Fetterman led exactly that number of men on December 21, 1866. The reality, though, is that Fetterman was a decorated Union officer with an impeccable service record who never – at least according to contemporary sources – uttered any such boasts. Punke’s Fetterman is presented as the competent, tactically sound officer that the evidence says he was. The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins? The main deficit is in the characters, all of whom are shallow archetypes. The Revenant revolves around Glass and the two men who abandoned him: Jim Bridger and John Fitzgerald. None leave much of an impression. Glass is a true OG. Born in the late 1700s, he made a name for himself as an explorer and trapper on the great American frontier, though many seemingly mythical accounts of his life credit him as a part-time pirate and Pawnee as well. Despite this prodigious résumé, Glass is best known for one important event in his life: his quest for revenge.In this interview with WKMS, historian Ted Belue digs deeper into The Revenant's historical context. Several Indian tribes, some of them longtime enemies, worked together to bring approximately 2,000 warriors to the battlefield. While reading this exciting western adventure, I was constantly reminded of how many things we take for granted today. Little things like blankets, lighters, automatic rifles, and those two words that kept running through my mind while reading: ANTI. BIOTICS.

This fascinating radio piece examines our modern view of the frontier through the lens of music. Images In the movie, Bridger and Hawk (Glass’s son, who is half Pawnee) are off doing something and Fitzgerald tells Glass that he can mercy kill him basically, that way they can be on their way. He tells him to blink if that’s what he wants done. Glass does blink eventually, and it is a long seemingly purposeful blink. Fitzgerald starts to gag Glass, when Hawk comes up and stops him and is yelling. Fitzgerald is trying to explain the “deal” he and Glass had, but Hawk keeps yelling for Bridger, so Fitzgerald stabs him and kills him. Three summers ago, a friend with longtime family ties to Wyoming suggested that we visit Fort Phil Kearney while I was wandering around that part of the country. About the only thing that sounded remotely familiar to me at the time was the name of the Civil War general for whom the fort was named. I knew nothing about the history of the fort itself or what had happened there. Fort Phil Kearney is in such a remote location even today that it is easy to envision how scary it must have been there when the fort was constructed by military personnel in 1866, but it was only after hearing the fort’s history from an excellent Wyoming State Parks ranger that I wondered why it was still such a well-kept secret. Why were there no movies or novels about Fort Phil Kearney and the “Fetterman Fight” that happened there on December 21, 1866? After all, the Fetterman Fight, right up until the massacre of troops at the Battle of the Little Bighorn almost ten years later, was the worst defeat the US army ever suffered in battle against united tribes of American Indians. Due to his work with the U.S. State Department, Punke can't actually talk about The Revenant (even the movie version); this article from Maxim is the closest that we can get.I really liked the portrayal of the scout Jim Bridger - he seems like the kind of man I would like to meet and share a beer with. I enjoyed two quotes from this novel relative to Bridger; first, "New information didn't cause most people to change their view of the world, in his experience. Usually they just found some way to cram it in to fit with the notions they already had." I have found this to be true for the overwhelming majority of people.