A comfortable life gives us plenty of reasons to forget how vulnerable people can be. We trust the plane to land, the ship to reach port, the trail to lead us home, and the weather forecast to give fair warning. Then something fails, and the familiar world is replaced by cold, thirst, injury, darkness, or a silence that stretches on for days. The people in these stories had no single formula for surviving. Luck played its part, too, although luck rarely carried anyone through the entire ordeal. They still had to make decisions while exhausted, frightened, and often alone. A few of these accounts have gathered legendary details over time, so it is important to separate documented events from later embellishments. Even with those corrections, the true versions remain powerful. They remind us that endurance is not always dramatic. Sometimes it looks like crawling another few yards, saving one mouthful of water, or refusing to let the next hour become the last.
#1: Hugh Glass and the 200-Mile Crawl Through Wilderness
The American frontier produced plenty of campfire legends, but this one began with a real bear attack in 1823. While traveling with a fur-trading expedition near the Grand River in present-day South Dakota, Hugh Glass surprised a grizzly and was left with terrible wounds. Members of the party expected him to die, and two men assigned to remain behind eventually departed, taking his rifle and other equipment with them. Somehow, consciousness returned.
