I can recommend two books set in 19th century North America with a central theme of revenge.
The first is True Grit set in Akansas in 1878 and my opinion has not changed since I wrote this post in 2016: For Starters. The second is set in present day Dakota and Montana in 1823. You may have seen The Revenant as a film when it was released in 2016, I didn’t and probably won’t. It was a huge success garnering 183 nominations and 63 awards and when the accounts department did their sums it had grossed $533 million on a budget of $135 million. Being accountants not wanting to share out too much of the lolly they deemed it had made a profit of $61 million. My antipathy to the film is because it is a travesty of a true story.
The first accounts of Hugh Glass being mauled by a bear, robbed and deserted by two men with him, surviving against the odds and seeking revenge appeared in American newspapers in 1825 but the go-to version is Michael Punke’s account written as a novel in 2002. Punke carries credibility; his day job was ultimately as US Ambassador to the World Trade Organisation in Geneva. His book is as close as we will get to the truth about Hugh Glass and what happened in 1823. For sure he fills in some gaps – in particular creating a back story for Glass about whose early life virtually nothing is known. There are many tropes of the classic Western: bloodthirsty Indian tribes out to kill white men and each other, buffalo in profusion on the range and unmapped territory in which it is safest to follow rivers. I would enjoy the book even if it were not largely true. Don’t watch the film – do read the book.
Ok, you can watch the trailer which should be enough to put you off. But wait until the Coen Brothers make a film adaptation of the book.
If you enjoy reading about that world, I would suggest finding a copy of Bernard DeVoto’s Across the Wide Missouri, about the 1830s fur trade in what is now the western US. I don’t know what more recent historians say about his work, but he certainly spent a lot of time with the original sources.
Punke credits him as a source and, being lazy, I like his distillation of this book and others on the period. I should have mentioned yesterday a pleasure of The Revenant is the fieldcraft, descriptions of the terrain, details of garb, etc and use of terms current at the time but obscure now. And all wrapped up in a good adventure story.