Hugh Glass
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40 free Hugh Glass trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
In 1823 a fur trapper named Hugh Glass was torn apart by a grizzly, written off by his companions and left without a weapon, hundreds of miles from help. He refused to die. The story of his crawl back, and of his hunt for the men who abandoned him, is why people still call him the man too angry to die. This quiz covers the real history and the legend that grew around it: the attack, the survival tricks he is said to have used, the trappers and traders of the early fur trade, and what became of everyone involved. It also covers the retellings, from an epic poem and a 1950s novel to The Revenant, and sorts what the film invented from what the records support. It suits anyone who came to the story through the film, a podcast or a history video and wants to know how much of it holds up. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you leave knowing the story better than you arrived.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01To stop gangrene, Hugh Glass reportedly let what feed on the rotting flesh of his bear wounds?
Maggots
Maggots cleaned out the dead, infected flesh. Glass was also carrying a broken leg and gashes across his back deep enough to bare his ribs.
Q 02Why did Hugh Glass reportedly spare the trapper who stole his rifle and left him for dead?
He had joined the Army
He had joined the Army, and killing a soldier would have meant execution. The captain on duty handed the rifle back, and Glass walked away.
Q 03Which Gulf of Mexico pirate reportedly captured Hugh Glass and forced him to join the crew?
Jean Lafitte
Jean Lafitte had helped defend New Orleans against the British before going back to piracy on the Texas coast. Glass said the choice he was given was to join the crew or die.
Q 04Crawling to safety, Hugh Glass reportedly took half a calf carcass left by which feeding animals?
Wolves
Wolves had brought the calf down. Glass waited until the pack had eaten its fill, took half the carcass in the night, then camped beside the meat to regain strength.
Q 05In The Revenant, Hugh Glass survives a freezing night inside the carcass of which animal?
Horse
Horse and rider have just been driven over a cliff in an ambush, and only the rider survives the fall. He shelters inside the body until morning.
Q 06Hugh Glass's story was retold as The Revenant, a title taken from a word meaning what?
One risen from the grave
A revenant is one risen from the grave: the word comes from the French for returning. It suits a man who reappeared months after his companions reported him gone.
Q 07Which actor finally won his first Academy Award for playing Hugh Glass in the film The Revenant?
Leonardo DiCaprio
Leonardo DiCaprio had five earlier nominations without a win. He named the shoot's frozen-river scenes among the most difficult things he had ever done.
Q 08Why did the grizzly charge Hugh Glass, by most accounts of the 1823 attack that made him famous?
She had two cubs
She had two cubs with her when Glass, hunting ahead of the party, walked into them in the brush of a river bottom. Other trappers reached him only in time to kill the bear.
Q 09What were the two volunteers left with the mauled Hugh Glass supposed to do for him?
Bury him when he died
Bury him when he died: that was the whole job, and it came with a bonus. Instead the pair took his rifle, knife and fire kit and reported that he was already dead.
Q 10To play Hugh Glass in The Revenant, the film's lead actor had to eat a raw slab of what?
Bison liver
Bison liver was eaten raw for the part. The actor also described enduring freezing cold and the constant risk of hypothermia during the shoot.
Q 11Which Mexican director won a second straight directing Oscar for the Hugh Glass film The Revenant?
Alejandro Iñárritu
Alejandro Iñárritu had won the year before for Birdman. He shot the survival epic in places so remote that travel to and from the set ate 40 percent of each day.
Q 12Which actor earned a first Oscar nomination as the man who abandons Hugh Glass in The Revenant?
Tom Hardy
Tom Hardy lost Best Supporting Actor to Mark Rylance of Bridge of Spies. The shoot overran so badly that he had to drop out of Suicide Squad.
Q 13Hugh Glass and fellow mountain men trapped which animal, whose fur fed a fashion for hats?
Beaver
Q 21Hugh Glass told of living for years with which Plains nation after its chief adopted him as a son?
Pawnee
Pawnee life taught him which plants and insects were safe to eat, knowledge he is thought to have leaned on during his long crawl a few years later.
Q 22Which nation, called the Ree by trappers, wounded Hugh Glass in 1823 and killed him a decade later?
Arikara
Arikara fighters shot Glass in the leg in June 1823, and it was a war party from the same nation that ambushed him on a frozen river in 1833.
Q 23Hugh Glass struggled over 200 miles to reach which trading post, now drowned beneath a reservoir?
Fort Kiowa
Fort Kiowa's site now lies under Lake Francis Case. Glass limped in by mid-October 1823, bought a rifle on credit and set off back upriver within days.
Beaver made the mountain men's living until fashion moved on from the hats and over-hunting thinned the animal. By the late 1840s the trade had collapsed.
Q 14Hugh Glass's 1823 fur expedition took boats up which river, the route Lewis and Clark had used?
The Missouri
The Missouri proved so deadly that summer, with a dozen or more trappers killed in a single fight, that the company gave up the water route and sent its men overland.
Q 15The Revenant shows snowy peaks, but the real Hugh Glass was mauled on the plains of which state?
South Dakota
South Dakota marks the place with a monument beside a reservoir on the Grand River. The attack came in late August or early September, on open prairie.
Q 16The Hugh Glass film The Revenant led the Oscars with 12 nominations but lost Best Picture to what?
Spotlight
Spotlight took the top prize, though the frontier epic had already been named best film at both the Golden Globes and the BAFTAs.
Q 17Left for dead without weapons, what did Hugh Glass reportedly do before starting his crawl to safety?
Set the bone himself
He set the bone himself, the story goes, after the bear broke his leg, then wrapped up in the bearskin his companions had laid over him as a shroud and started for the nearest trading post.
Q 18Hugh Glass and four companions once floated down the Platte in bull boats, craft covered with what?
Buffalo hides
Buffalo hides stretched over a frame of willow poles made a light, tub-like boat, a design the fur traders borrowed from the river tribes.
Q 19Which Great Salt Lake explorer is, by tradition, the teenager who helped abandon Hugh Glass?
Jim Bridger
Jim Bridger was 19, yet no account named him until 1902; an early version says only Bridges. Glass is said to have forgiven the young man when they met again.
Q 20Which trapper, the older of two men left to watch Hugh Glass, took his rifle and reported him dead?
John Fitzgerald
John Fitzgerald meets a violent end in the film version, but the real Glass never harmed him and settled for getting his gun back.
Q 24The Revenant gives Hugh Glass a murdered son whom history never recorded, under what name?
Hawk
Hawk is the film's invention: there is no evidence the real Glass had a son, and in the true story he killed neither of the men who abandoned him.
Q 25With Canada too warm for snow, the Hugh Glass film The Revenant shot its ending in which country?
Argentina
Argentina supplied the snow, in Tierra del Fuego. By the time the cameras stopped, the budget had more than doubled from its original 60 million dollars.
Q 26Which author, later a US trade ambassador in Geneva, wrote the Hugh Glass novel The Revenant?
Michael Punke
Michael Punke was barred from promoting his own book when the film came out: as a serving trade official he could not even sign copies.
Q 27Which 1970s Western retold Hugh Glass's ordeal as the story of a mauled scout named Zachary Bass?
Man in the Wilderness
Man in the Wilderness starred Richard Harris, with John Huston as the captain of an expedition that hauls a full-size boat overland on wheels.
Q 28Which band put Six Weeks, a song inspired by Hugh Glass, on the debut album My Head Is an Animal?
Of Monsters and Men
Of Monsters and Men come from Iceland, and the album's number-six debut was at the time the best US chart showing by any Icelandic act.
Q 29Which online game features a deranged merchant named Hugh Glass with a pet bear called Griselda?
World of Warcraft
World of Warcraft places him in a zone called the Grizzly Hills, a nod to the real trapper's most famous encounter.
Q 30For his Hugh Glass novel Lord Grizzly, Frederick Manfred crawled around his yard and ate what?
Ants and grasshoppers
Ants and grasshoppers were on the menu, along with mice and grubs, and Manfred reported that the grasshoppers tasted better. He also wore a homemade leg splint.