For a century the story of Hugh Glass, the trapper mauled by a grizzly near the forks of the Grand River in August 1823 and left for dead by the men paid to stay with him, belonged to the campfire and the dime novel. The Nebraska poet John G. Neihardt gave it its literary form in The Song of Hugh Glass, and in 1923, for the centennial, he helped raise a monument near the forks. At its dedication he challenged the young people of 2023 to come back to the spot two hundred years on, and local tradition holds that a time capsule was sealed inside the stone.
The forks themselves are gone under water. The Bureau of Reclamation dammed the Grand River below them to make Shadehill Reservoir, the government bought the land around it, and Neihardt's monument now stands at a state campground on the reservoir's south shore, the Hugh Glass Lakeside Use Area, with a later marker on a bluff across the water. Nobody has cut into the stone to see whether the capsule is there.
In August 2023 Lemmon held a Hugh Glass Rendezvous for the bicentennial, students took up Neihardt's challenge, and the 1923 monument was rededicated. The Grand River Museum in Lemmon tells the story of the marker and the legend. The reservoir draws walleye fishermen and campers, and the grassland around it is the Grand River National Grassland, much of it the same open country Glass crawled across.
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