Perhaps the most memorable scene from the 2015 movie The Revenant was Hugh Glass, played by actor Leonardo DiCaprio, being attacked by a grizzly bear. It was arguably one of the most realistic depiction of bear attack in movies till date. Had it not been based on a real incident critics would have argued that it was impossible for Glass to have survived an attack of that magnitude and then crawl hundreds of miles through the forest to safety.

Hugh Glass was a fur trapper, one of the hard-driving mountain men of the early 19th-century American West, who trapped beavers for their fur and sold them to hat makers in the US and Europe. It was a highly lucrative but dangerous trade where men like Glass had to live and hunt among the mountains for years at a time. The mountaineers were daring and rebellious men in their twenties and thirties who learned how to survive in the wild with limited supplies, a rifle and a few tools. But Hugh Glass’ survival against the odds was a story so amazing that it became legend even among the mountaineers themselves.

Leonardo DiCaprio as Hugh Glass and a sketch of the real Hugh Glass