Historical Revenants

Purported sketch of trapper and frontiersman Hugh Glass, circa 1830
This writer is guilty of going down some pretty deep online rabbit holes.Seeing a post about the 1970s cult film “Billy Jack” got me to thinking about the weird fascination in the USA with martial arts during that era.
This was the age of Bruce Lee.
This was the age of Elvis throwing kung fu moves on a Las Vegas stage in a spangled jumpsuit.
This was the age of the TV series “Kung Fu”, with David Carradine wandering the Wild West as a disowned, half-Chinese Shaolin monk, kicking cowboy ass pretty much everywhere along the way.
This post isn’t about Kung Fu, nor is it about the Chinese influence on 19th century American culture and ethnicity.
Nope, this post is about Hugh Glass, the trapper and frontiersman played by Leonardo DiCaprio in “The Revenant”.
It’s also about a celebrated American actress named Barbara Hershey.
Why?
Because she was lurking just around a dark bend in the rabbit hole, as the ex-partner of “Kung Fu” actor David Carradine.
Online biographies mentioned her “Scots-Irish” ancestry.
As someone who writes about ethnicity in America, that is like a red rag to a bull.
I begin to ponder the multitude of Americans who falsely claim a “Scots-Irish” identity.
I begin to ponder the multitude of Americans falsely attributed a “Scots-Irish” identity by others.
With that explanation of my weird rabbit-holing thought processes out of the way, let’s press on.
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Ms. Hershey was once considered something of a “kooky hippy chick”, but has grown old gracefully into one of the most respected talents of her generation.
Check out her relatively recent turn in Darren Aronofsky‘s psychological horror film “Black Swan”.
At any rate, as someone who writes about American ethnicities, the dark good looks of Ms. Hershey made me curious. She certainly doesn’t look “Scots-Irish”, but of course that is a highly subjective take.
But yes, upon checking, she turns out to be of mixed-ethnicity.
Like most of the other creatives involved in the film “Black Swan” (Aronofsky, Natalie Portman, Winona Ryder, Mila Kunis, etc.) Barbara Hershey has a Jewish background, being born “Barbara Herzstein” in 1948 Hollywood, California.
But once again, this post isn’t about the Jewish influence on the American entertainment industry – a subject which could fill a hundred posts.
This is about Barbara Hershey‘s mother, “Melrose Moore“, an Arkansas girl by birth.
This how Wikipedia describes the ethnic background of Melrose Moore:
“…her [Barbara Hershey’s] mother, a native of Arkansas, was a Presbyterian of Scots-Irish descent.”
Really? How odd that the two “sources” for this assertion of “Scots-Irish” ancestry are just dead links to old celebrity magazine interviews.
To borrow a line from Stephen Stills (writing for the band Buffalo Springfield in 1966):
“There’s something happening here,
what it is ain’t exactly clear…”
Did Barbara Hershey herself mention Scots-Irish ancestry to an interviewer? Who knows? The sources cited stubbornly refuse to appear in any internet search.

American actress Barbara Hershey at a party in 1966
No matter. When you’ve sniffed through old historical records for as many years as this old dog, certain things leap out immediately.
Like the relations between certain places and certain surnames.
“Arkansas” and “Moore“, for example.
The Moore surname runs through the underground river of Old Mix American ancestry like a seam of silver ore.
And when we walk a path back upriver, what we find are ancestors of Barbara like the Farrars (don’t ask – worth a post on its own), and early Moores and Goodmans of colonial era North Carolina who migrated into Kentucky.
Not a particular point of interest, if we agree to buy into the “Scots-Irish” history of frontier America and Appalachia.
Except these Moores and Goodmans are enumerated in the earliest census records as “free people of color”.
Not only that.
There is not one single line in the maternal ancestry of Barbara Hershey which can be readily ascertained as “Scots-Irish”.
Not one.
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This is not the first, second, or even hundredth time this researcher has seen this “phenomenon”. It’s ubiquitous.
Any readers here see a film called “The Revenant” with Leonardo DiCaprio? Based on the life of American frontiersman Hugh Glass?
Faceless “experts”, including page editors on Wikipedia, have decided over time that Hugh Glass – just like Barbara Hershey‘s mother – was also “Scots-Irish”.
WITHOUT ONE SOLITARY SHRED OF DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE.
The Wikipedia annotation meant to act as a “source” confirming Glass‘s purported birth in Pennsylvania to Irish or “Scots-Irish” parents, points to a 2013 article published by the online “History Herald”.
This “source” article was written by a retired man named Jim Keys, whose short bio says that he is “indulging his passion for history” since his retirement – having “spent his working life in the motor trade”.
This writer has a lot of time for autodidacts. But the self-educated must stick to the same high standards expected of those with higher degrees in a specialist subject.
One cannot claim to be writing a history article if one is not willing to stand-up every assertion made. Opinion must be flagged as “opinion”, and speculation must be called “speculation”.
In fairness to Wikipedia, a second annotation points to a 2016 article in The Irish Examiner which quoted a professional historian at The Mountain Man Museum in Pinedale, Wyoming as stating:
“So far no records have come to light on Glass’s birth place and origins. So there is no real evidence as to his place of birth and rearing. There is a great deal of speculation regarding his life adventures, both at sea and on land. He was supposedly born in the vicinity of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania sometime around 1783, although the exact date and the precise location are unknown.”
Why do hundreds, even thousands, of articles and web pages in the USA insist on repeating an inaccurate recounting of American history? Especially ethnic history?
And why are so many people said to be of mostly “Scots-Irish” extraction, when they clearly are not? People like J. D. Vance, for example?
Because the myth of the American frontier must remain firmly rooted in the soil of “White Protestant”, or at least “White Christian” America.
Yet “Glass” is a surname found commonly among Indigenous and partly Indigenous American people of Appalachia.
“Glass” is also a surname found among descendants of Black Appalachians.
Where did these people “borrow” their “white” surnames?
The answer is “from a lot of places”.
“Glass” is a surname also found among Palatine German Redemptionist immigrants, the majority of whom disembarked at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, just like many immigrants from Ulster.
Among these German-speakers fleeing war and famine were many Jewish and Sinti (German Romani) people.
Not to mention the many Gaelic-speaking or bilingual Irish and Scottish Catholic immigrants who arrived in a steady stream to America’s shores during the two centuries BEFORE Irish famine refugees.
These latter also often arrived in America via Ulster – just like their better-known Protestant co-travelers – although one rarely hears of it.
In fact, when found in the British Isles/Ireland, the very surname “Glass” tends to point more commonly to such people of a Gaelic or Welsh background, with “Glas” being found across all Celtic languages (Scots-Gaelic, Irish Gaelic, Welsh, Manx, and Cornish) as a word usually describing a gray or bluish-green color.
Our “Hugh Glass” might have just as easily been a Welshman calling himself “Huw Glas“. Or a German Jew adapting the name “Hubert Glass” to an American idiom.
To presume that anyone arriving in America from Ulster during the 1700s must have been “Scots-Irish” is simply, utterly wrong.
But the point is moot.
We cannot even say whether Hugh Glass was the son of recent immigrants, let alone whether they arrived from Ulster.
Mr. Glass could have been a run-of-the-mill descendant of early colonial English settlers. The surname was already present in 1600s Virginia Colony.
Letters attributed to a 40-year-old Glass show a firm grasp of English and its spelling, pointing to some level of education.
The fact is, without new primary sources coming to light, or DNA analysis of his or his immediate family’s descendants, no one can know the true origins of Hugh Glass.
He COULD have been “Scots-Irish”. But until we know it for a fact, his biography should read “origins unknown”.
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Trying to keep a lid on “conjured history” would be a full-time job for an army of volunteers willing to play “whack-a-mole”.
Within 10 minutes of my first re-edit of the Hugh Glass Wikipedia page (to reflect actual facts), someone had jumped in and re-edited my re-edit, reasserting Glass‘s “Scots-Irish” ancestry.
A paranoid or conspiracy-minded person might be forgiven for wondering if “white” nationalists or “white” supremacists actively “work” Wikipedia, inserting their preferred ethnic background into the biographies of many more American figures.
So the next time you see the term “Scots-Irish” anywhere in the context of American history, have a care.
As suggested earlier in this post:
“There’s something happening here,
what it is ain’t exactly clear…”
But we’ll keep trying to make it clearer.