Introducing Richard Feynman & Hugh Glass: Outstanding:

Hugh Glass, a trapper (1780-1833) was one of 'Ashleys Hundred' exploring the upper Missouri River.  - Why is he someone you should know a little about? - Well, while I must accept that he lived in a era "when men were men" - Hugh Glass did stuff that was way beyond the norm.

 He was robbed of his weapons and abandoned by two members of his party thinking that he was a gonner, - after he had been attacked and mauled by a female Grizzly bear with two cubs - and left barely conscious - so terribly injured that his survival was deemed hopeless. While he was fighting the bear with his knife - she was ripping flesh from his body and throwing it to her cubs!

 - Despite his fifteen major shocking wounds that included his back ribs being exposed and his throat ripped - he later regained consciousness - splinted his broken leg and crawled 200 miles alone through 'Indian country' to Fort Kiowa and help.

Hugh Glass.

He had survived the journey by eating rattle-snake, roots, berries and 'carrion'. - When later healed he set-out to find the two men who abandoned him to die and ..  He got his rifle back.

You should research the story for yourself online in Wikipedia and in 'Montanas Mountain Men' - Big Sky Words.

The younger of the two men who left Glass to die was Jim Bridger - who himself became a well-known mountain man.

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The next 'hero' is much more modern and recent - and indeed - much of current scientific achievement is down to his clever thinking and pioneering  work:

 Richard Feynman.

 

 

Feynman (centre) & Oppenheimer (right) at the Los Alamos Manhatten Project

 

This man was a bloody genius - but he was also a guy with a great mischievous sense of  humour - but more than that - he proved to be a man of firm principle who was prepared to 'stand-up and be counted'.

 

Certainly a great starting point to learn of this man is again Wikipedia - but make sure that you have got time to savour the story - the section about his involvement in the Challenger Space Shuttle Disaster - as a member of the Presidential Rogers Commission is key evidence of Feynmans strength of character.

Explosion of Challenger Space Shuttle 1986.

 

 I truly don't generally admit to honouring anyone for who they are (you know - football players or pop singers etc.) - but both of these men are examples of something that we might strive to be like if we could.

Thanks are due to John for telling me about both extraordinary men.

- I felt a similar wonderment again later - when watching Ray Mears using a pebble of iron-pyrites and a flint nodule (both found on a beach) to strike sparks into kindling to light a fire and cook a feed of beach gathered shellfish, - this excitement is of-course entirely the result of my total ignorance up till then!!

 

Marty K