American mountain man and
Indian fighter (???-1899). A seriously
big guy,
six feet tall,
250 pounds, with
flaming red hair and
beard, Johnson married
Swan, a girl from the
Flathead Indian tribe in 1847. After making sure his cabin on
Colorado's
Little Snake River had plenty of
food,
firewood, and other
supplies, Johnson left for the
winter to go
trapping. When he got back after the
spring thaw, he discovered that Swan and her
unborn baby had been
slain by, he surmised from a
feather left at the scene, members of the
Crow Indian tribe. And Johnson swore that he'd get
revenge...
Over the following years, Johnson
stalked and
killed some 300 Crow braves. When he killed one of them, he would cut their
chest open, tear out the
liver, and eat it
raw. (Unsurprisingly and a bit unimaginatively, he was nicknamed
Liver-Eating Johnson) He scared the Crow to
death -- they thought he might be some sort of
wild animal or
monster instead of a mere man. They tried to kill him for years, but they never succeeded -- in fact, he always seemed to know they were coming and was able to
prepare to fight them off (and kill them and eat their livers, of course).
At one point, Johnson was
captured by a group of
Blackfoot Indians, who planned to sell him to the Crow. They tied him up with
leather thongs and stuck him in a
teepee with a guard outside. Johnson managed to
chew through the
straps, then
disarmed one of his captors and
amputated one of his legs. He escaped into the winter
snows and dined on the
Blackfoot's
leg until he reached the
cabin of a fellow trapper.
Eventually, Johnson made
peace with the Crow. He died of
old age in a
veterans'
hospital in
Los Angeles in 1899.
A
film based on Johnson's life, called... wait for it... "
Jeremiah Johnson", was released in
1972. It was directed by
Sydney Pollack and starred
Robert Redford as Johnson,
Will Geer as
Bear Claw Chris Lapp, and
Delle Bolton as
Swan. Most of the
plot conforms fairly closely with the facts, though the stuff about the
liver eating was left out. Oh, for what could have been:
Robert Redford gutting Indians, gobbling down livers, and chewing on
human leg meat...
Research from "The Werewolf Book" (Apparently, the cannibalism is enough to make him a werewolf. Whatever.) by Brad Steiger, published by Visible Ink Press, 1999, p. 160 and the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com)