I am laid up recuperating from spinal surgery so I am ‘festing” on these. Some of those mountain men were tough, eg Hugh Glass. There is an excellent 1971 movie loosely based on his life, ‘Man in the Wilderness’ I have just watched again…Glass found himself abandoned, without weapons or equipment. He had festering wounds, a broken leg, and deep cuts on his back that exposed his bare ribs. Glass lay mutilated and alone, more than 200 miles (320 km) from the nearest American settlement, at Fort Kiowa, on the Missouri River. Glass set the bone of his own leg, wrapped himself in the bear hide his companions had placed over him as a shroud, and began crawling back to Fort Kiowa. To prevent gangrene, Glass allowed maggots to eat the dead, infected flesh in his wounds. terribly wounded in an attack by a grizzly, he nonetheless survived and made his way back 200 miles to ‘civilisation’: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Glass
It has now remade as The Revenant – but is nowhere near as good: http://www.theultralighthiker.com/i-felt-quite-rich-when-i-found-my-knife-flint-and-steel-in-my-shot-pouch/
Also ‘Jeremiah Johnson’ another of my favourite movies; The Mountain Men 1980, Yellowstone Kelly, The Far Horizons, The Big Sky, Death Hunt 1981, Daniel Boone 1936 and of course Davy Crockett…All are available from eg The Pirate Bay if you have a VPN and Utorrent to download them.
The ‘Mad Trapper of Rat River’ aka Albert Johnson still presents an interesting mystery: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Johnson_%28criminal%29
More on the ‘Mad Trapper’: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c96YQ9yWbX0
Another great old film with an associated theme (opening up the west) The Big Trail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fVXWUIcvHc and The Way West.
