A Popular History of Unpopular Things
A podcast that makes history more fun and accessible - we love all things gory, gross, mysterious, and weird!
A Popular History of Unpopular Things
The Tale of Liver-Eating Johnson
Join Kelli as she goes over the tale of Liver-Eating Johnson, a mountain man in the early 19th century American frontier who became legendary for how he avenged the murder and scalping of his Flathead indigenous wife. A book, called Crow Killer, really popularized his life - so much so that it was turned into a movie, Jeremiah Johnson, released in 1972 and starring Robert Redford.
But is this a true story? Or is it just an embellished legend of a mountain man?
Let's look at the (abridged) story, then look at some efforts at debunking this classic wild west tale of struggles, survival, murder, revenge, and liver-eatin' in the American frontier.
Only light cannibalism this time :)
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The Tale of Liver-Eating Johnson
Intro
Welcome to A Popular History of Unpopular Things, a mostly scripted podcast that makes history more fun and accessible. My kind of history is the unpopular stuff - disease, death, and destruction. I like learning about all things bloody, gross, mysterious, and weird.
Just a quick reminder that you can support me and the show on Patreon, just look up either A Popular History of Unpopular Things or APHOUT: A-P-H-O-U-T. And you can also now watch episodes on YouTube - so go subscribe to my channel there! I appreciate all the love and support :)
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So I thought maybe I’d covered the last of the known cannibals of westward expansion-era America, but I was apparently wrong. Because today, we’re talking about a man who earned the nickname Liver-Eating Johnson.
Many of you may not know who that is from the outset, but some of you will have seen references to this in pop culture. The 1972 film Jeremiah Johnson is based on this story. And if you send memes or reaction gifs to your friends, then you’ve probably used or seen a screenshot from this film - Robert Redford looking back towards the camera, grinning with his ridiculous haircut, wearing brown leather. Go ahead and look up “Jeremiah Johnson” in Google Images and it’ll be the first or second image.
The real person behind the film here was John Jeremiah Garrison Johnson, a man who (according to the story) deserted the armed forces during the Mexican-American War and headed West to try his hand at digging for gold. He married a woman from the Flathead American Indian tribe, and when she was pregnant, some warriors from the Crow tribe killed and scalped her. In his vengeance, Johnson went on a one-man killing spree, hunting down and killing any Crow he came across. Supposedly he killed upwards of 300 of them, eating their livers and collecting their scalps. After 25 years, he made his peace with them and settled down to become a mountain man hero.
But this whole legend might be just that - a legend. A work of overly exaggerated fiction, only loosely based on real history. So today, we’re going to look at the story of John Jeremiah Johnson, the liver-eating, scalp-collecting vigilante murderer. First, we’ll look at the historical context to get a good sense of the world he lived in, then once we hear the story of Liver-Eating Johnson, we’ll try to make sense of how much is fact, and how much is fiction. Or if we could ever really find that out with what little information can be corroborated.
So let’s get started!
Historical Context
Now for those of you who might be new to this podcast, the first thing I like to do with a topic is explore the historical context - what was happening in the world that led to this event? Or in this case, what did Liver-Eating Johnson’s world look like? Did his environment lead him to becoming a cannibal Crow-killer? …That sounds like a good name for a metal band.
Now I’ll keep the context somewhat brief since I’ve already covered this general period several times, but it’s important to know about westward expansion-era America and the mountain men to understand Liver-eating Johnson’s world.
So part of the trouble with this story is that it comes from what we can consider the “Heroic Age” of fur-trappers and mountain men. Many of these guys, like Kit Carson, Buffalo Bill (not the serial killer from Silence of the Lambs…), Hugh Glass (which is the guy Leonardo DiCaprio played and won the Oscar for in The Revenant)... they were all legends, whose stories grew over time to romanticize the whole period. These stories championed the idea of the white trapper living amongst the indigenous, toughing it out in the wilderness, and surviving the harsh realities of life in the untamed regions of the US.
As folklorist Richard Dorson writes in the foreword to the new edition of the book Crow Killer: The Saga of Liver-Eating Johnson, quote:
“We know that the Mountain Men, living by their woodcraft in the remotest reaches of the continental United States, generated a vigorous oral lore. In their winter cabins and at their annual rendezvous, they ate fresh-killed meat, drank whiskey, and talked endlessly of their own and their fellows’ exploits… John Johnson is a product of [this] oral legend.” End quote.
And I’m not suggesting John Johnson isn’t real - he was a real dude - but the legend associated with him most likely is not. So let’s dig deeper into this mountain men era of western expansion to get a sense of the world he lived in.
The Mountain Men were fur traders and trappers that went out west in the early nineteenth century, that’s the 1800s. So, for those of you who have been listening to my other episodes on this period of US history, that’s the early days of Westward Expansion - before the Mexican-American War, before the discovery of gold in California, before the heavy days of the Oregon Trail, before the Civil War - all of that.
The earliest trappers went west in search of fur - particularly beaver fur - found in mountains and mountain streams in the West, both in the US and Canada. And although the fur trade only made up a small percentage of the economy, the mountain men still helped contribute to goods that North American ports could ship off to Europe; the fur industry was one of the earliest economies in the US, alongside whaling and fishing. Larger agricultural plantations, like rice, indigo, and tobacco, soon followed.
So mountain men, following the fur, went West once Jefferson purchased the Louisiana territory and Lewis and Clark and Sacagawea explored the northwestern reaches. As more trappers headed west, they built trading posts - towns like Independence Missouri, which later became a major starting point on the Oregon Trail, and Fort Laramie in today’s Wyoming. Their peak years were from after the Louisiana Purchase to Westward settlement, so roughly 1806 to 1840.
But not everyone was cut out for life as a trader in the American frontier. Its location meant interaction with local indigenous groups, which sometimes was fruitful and profitable, and other times was violent - relations between different indigenous groups was complicated enough before French and American trappers entered the picture. Being a fur-trapper also meant being alone, a lot. You needed to be skilled with woodcraft, hunting, tracking, and surviving in the woods. Many trappers were also pretty educated and spoke multiple languages, needing to converse with local indigenous populations.
And contrary to the popular folklore image of the white, solitary man in the woods, decked out in furs, long bushy beard and long hair… not all of the trappers and traders were white; some were escaped Southern slaves. And there were even a handful of women!
These mountain men were not only among the first to explore the frontiers of the US, but they also helped establish later justification for Manifest Destiny because they had all of this valuable knowledge about the West. American mountain men were there and had conquered it, so the government should move in and make it official, right?
So these mountain men were legendary. They survived out in the wilderness, were tough, smart, crafty, resourceful, solitary men. No wonder they became legends. And as oral accounts of these men were spread over time, they grew and became exaggerated. The mountain men became legendary heroes. Some, because of their abilities, and others, because of their struggles against the indigenous populations they sometimes clashed with. The subject of today’s story falls into that latter category. Liver-eating Johnson’s highly embellished story has become a legend for how he hunted down and killed the Crow who supposedly wronged him by killing his Flathead wife. So let’s get into who John “Liver-Eating” Johnson was, how he ended up out West, what the traditional legend is, and then we’ll see if we can read between the lines of the exaggerated oral history to get a sense of who he really was and why his story ended up being so… fictional.
And also, because of the name, I have to know - was he actually a cannibal?
The Abridged Story of John Jeremiah Johnson
First, I’ll give the abridged story of John Jeremiah “Liver-Eating” Johnson. He lived a long, interesting life and did a lot of stuff - but I’m just interested in the liver-eating parts! Then we’ll dive into the sourcing and how that impacts the truth of the story.
John Jeremiah Garrison was born in New Jersey in 1824. He was a pretty big dude at 6 feet, 2 inches; the average at the time was only 5 foot 6. He enlisted in the Navy and served in the Mexican-American War aboard a frigate, but he hit an officer and deserted. To help escape the potential fallout from that, he changed his name to John Johnson instead of Garrison, and went to Montana to try and find wealth digging for gold. His name actually started off as Johnston, but over time it became Johnson, so I’m just going to simplify that.
In Montana, he met and married his wife, a Flathead indigenous woman known as The Swan. And it’s worth noting again that despite the narrative that many of these early trappers were constantly in battle against the indigenous, many had excellent relationships with them and sometimes melded into their society. Johnson’s marriage to his wife illustrates that. They lived in a log cabin in Montana, making a living through trapping, hunting, and selling whiskey. They treated each other kindly; she taught him some of her Flathead language, and he taught her how to shoot. The two settled into Johnson’s cabin on the Little Snake River in Wyoming, where she cooked for him and made him moccasins for the upcoming trapping season.
When he left, she busied herself with hunting small game around the property. She was also pregnant, but it’s not likely either of them knew that when he left for the winter to go trapping. One day, while out in the woodlands around their cabin, some Crow warriors saw her. They snuck up on her and the cabin, killed her with a tomahawk to the back of the neck, and scalped her.
When Johnson returned, he saw a vulture at the doorway to their cabin home. After shooing it away, he saw his wife on the floor, her skull picked clean, little more than a pile of bones at this point. The story also makes it clear that he saw what was formed of the fetus by that point, knowing that he had an unborn child that was murdered as well.
As a skilled hunter, trapper, and woodsman, he had keen knowledge of the different indigenous groups. He soon found evidence of where the Crows had waited before ambushing his wife, and was able to suss out that it was Crow warriors. And as a result, he swore vengeance on them. And this is when Johnson went around killing Crows, scalping them, and then eating their livers - raw. And the implication was not survival cannibalism; he was a skilled hunter and trapper, right? The man could find food. It was the principle of it - getting revenge. And as he killed Crows, his legend spread, and groups of Crows would seek him out to kill him. But Johnson would instead kill them, which kept the legend of this vengeful mountain man vigilante going. Sounds pretty convenient to me, to be honest. Like the plot to a movie, maybe.
Now despite being a tall, scary guy, he learned from and worked with other trappers quite frequently - first, a man named “Old Hatcher,” from whom he learned how to kill and scalp a man. He later ran around with a guy named Del Gue - from whom we get a lot of this story. Del was there for a lot of Johnson’s adventures. For example, in the book Crow Killer Del tells a story that Johnson, in an argument, killed a Sioux brave just by hitting him once, and in the fight that ensued with other Sioux braves around him, he killed five with his fists alone. Del also tells a story of how Johnson killed two indigenous men at once by only kicking. My point is that he had a reputation for killing, and was good at it, but that vengeance was only directed towards the indigenous. He apparently had never killed a “white man,” not even a French trapper. Just a lot of indigenous.
Soon after his vendetta started, he had earned the nickname Dapiek Absaroka, or Crow Killer. Then came “Liver-Eating Johnson,” as each of his kills had a cut beneath the ribs, their livers removed. As gold prospectors came out west, they heard tales of Liver-Eating Johnson. He became a boogeyman that mothers in Western settlements would use to threaten their unruly children.
On one particular raid, he and some other Mountain Men came across a Crow camp in the Bitter Roots, mountains in Montana. After killing many of the Crows, the story goes that Johnson found - and killed - the man who killed his wife; he saw a scalp on the Crow’s belt and knew it belonged to his wife, somehow. So he scalped the guy, braided the hair of this guy’s scalp with the dried one that supposedly belonged to his wife, and went off hunting more of them. The Crow then decided that Johnson needs to be killed, so they sent twenty warriors off to hunt him down, individually, and kill him.
Are you getting the sense that this is a bit too… Fictional and dramatic? Exaggerated and bordering too closely on legend rather than fact? ‘Cause I sure am.
Johnson killed the first 19 Crow warriors before joining the Civil War and fighting for the Union in February 1864, already 3 years into it. When he was honorably discharged in September 1865, he headed back westward to get back into trapping. Shortly after, he killed the final, 20th Crow warrior who was sent to kill him, more than a decade after the death of his wife. According to legend, he killed almost 300 Crow men and boys over 25 years, scalping each and consuming their liver. But after the Civil War, things were different - the fur trade was dying off, indigenous lands were being taken, and conflicts between settlers and the indigenous were not as prevalent. Johnson eventually sought peace with the Crows because the days of the mountain men frontiersmen living alone in the woods were just over. Settlements were growing. Indigenous lands were being firmly taken by the American government. Times had changed.
Fact or Fiction?
So as historians, our job here is to figure out fact from fiction - how much of this story can we corroborate? Because if not… I’m not inclined to believe it.
Well what’s interesting here is that most of the information about Liver-eating Johnson’s exploits comes from oral history - a lot from his trapping partner, Del Gue, and actually a lot from Liver-eating Johnson himself. At some point, he kept embellishing his own story. Johnson used to attend and act in Wild West shows, telling his story, making it seem more outlandish than it was. So he’s an unreliable narrator - much like HH Holmes was in his trial for murdering a bunch of people who got in his way. That was a previous episode, so have a listen if you haven’t already.
But the trouble here is that we have no real way of knowing how much of this story is real, and how much is fiction. For example, we don’t have proof that Liver-eating Johnson… did eat livers. Sure, Del Gue tells us that he did, but did he just say that to give this man a legend? To help secure him as one of the great Mountain Men of his time? Again, it’s not something we can corroborate.
We do know that many Mountain Men have embellished stories and tales. One article I read puts it well - “the mountain man culture, if you will, lent itself to tall tales. They were fond of spinning exaggerated, boastful stories about one’s exploits around the campfire.” That’s a good way of putting it. And over time, as more people add to the legend, that legend becomes fact. The narrative is completely muddied. The truth is lost to history, and what we have instead is embellished oral history that has become the new accepted truth. The 1972 Jeremiah Johnson film doesn’t help; it helps establish this narrative that he went on a vengeful warpath against the Crow for killing his wife and child - although in the film he has an adopted son, which isn’t true.
The book I referenced earlier, “Crow Killer” by Raymond Thorp and Robert Bunker, is considered to be the true story because it’s based on interviews with the men who knew and worked alongside Liver-Eating Johnson. But again, some of these stories were embellished, so by the time they were told to Raymond Thorp, they were exaggerated versions of what actually happened.
But then I did a little digging, and it gets worse than that.
Chief Joseph Medicine Crow, who also served as his tribe’s historian until his death, noted that the story we get about Liver-eating Johnson is fiction - there is no Crow record that there was beef between them, and in fact, Johnson was considered friendly with their tribe they shared raw deer livers - not human livers.
As Dennis McLelland notes in his book, The Truth Finally Revealed, almost nothing from the book Crow Killer is historical fact. He was serving in the Navy when his wife was supposedly killed, so did he ever really marry “The Swan?” Because if he was never married to The Swan, then the entire premise of this story is gone.
Additionally, the Crow saw him as an ally, not a foe. Any conflicts Johnson was in were against the Blackfoot, Sioux, or Cheyenne - not the Crow.
McLelland also notes, in his search for the truth, that he can’t even corroborate Del Gue’s existence! Del is the source of information used in Crow Killer, but he only appears in one other source - a book by another of Liver-Eating Johnson’s contemporaries, White Eye Anderson. And White Eye Anderson, much like Del (if he was real), gave his interpretation of his experiences. It’s all second-hand information, as far as I’m concerned, and it’s not credible.
And on the topic of cannibalism, McLelland tracked down this article from the Billings Times, July 27, 1899. Johnson was asked if he ever ate Crow Liver, and Johnson himself said, quote,
“It’s a [damned] lie. I know I got that reputation, but tain’t so. I’ll tell how ‘twas. It was at the head of the Musselshell. It was back in ‘68. There was 15 of us and we were hunting and making a wood camp. We was attacked by Injuns, and we licked ‘em – licked ‘em good. Hairy Bear was the name of their chief. We killed 36 of them and wounded 60. I chased down one Indian... then I scalped him... then I ran my knife into him and killed him and part of his liver came out with the knife. I waved the knife with the liver on it in the air and yelled ‘Come on, and have a piece! It’ll stay yer’ stomach ‘till you get home to dinner.’” End quote.
And from that, I suppose, the story grew that he ate livers.
If we go back to the foreword to Crow Killer, written by Richard Dorson, quote,
“What we have here is the skeletal biography of a Rocky Mountain trapper and Indian fighter in the middle decades of the nineteenth century retold primarily on the basis of word-of-mouth sources… Their annals belong to what may be called folk history, or saga in the Icelandic sense of family and local chronicles maintained by spoken recitals and filled… with marvelous matter. The history of Liver-Eating Johnson has been kept going by this sort of saga.” End quote.
So there we go. Much of the legend of Liver-Eating Johnson is really just that - a legend, a saga, a story to give the era of the Mountain Men even more prestige. And in the years after Crow Killer was published, and especially after the story was popularized by Robert Redford’s portrayal of Liver-Eating Johnson in the movie, historians and other interested writers have been poring through the history and debunking much of it.
So the really cool and gross story of a man avenging the murder of his wife by killing and scalping Crow men and boys, then eating their livers, will have to stay as just that - a story. Not historical fact. And as you go out there into the world, reading or hearing about all kinds of stories that parade as the truth, try to remember to read and think critically. Everything inherently has bias and stories can easily be fabricated to tell a particular narrative.
Outro
Thanks for joining me for this episode of A Popular History of Unpopular Things. My name is Kelli Beard, and I hope you’ve enjoyed the story of The Tale of Liver-Eating Johnson. Thank you for supporting my podcast, and if you haven’t already checked out my other episodes, go have a listen!
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