A Bicentennial Tribute to Liver Eating Johnson

Born 200 years ago today, John Jeremiah Garrison (1824-1900), gold prospector, guide, hunter, lawman, sailor, scout, soldier, trapper, woodhawk, whiskey peddler, and more. Originally from New Jersey, Garrison served on a naval vessel in the Mexican-American War, but deserted, changed his name to Johnson, and moved out west after striking an officer. As John Johnson, he served in the Union Army with the Colorado Cavalry during the last year of the Civil War. When he was in his sixties, he was also a lawman in Montana.

But…(to revive the old W.C. Fields bit from Six of a Kind)….how come they called him “Liver Eating” Johnson? The legend told about this eccentric man was that he embarked on a vendetta after some Crow braves killed his wife, herself a member of the Flathead tribe. In revenge he was said to have killed, scalped, and eaten the livers of 300 Crow people! The natives called him “Dapiek Absaroka”, or Crow Killer, and he was also respected and given a wide birth by the Sioux and Blackfeet, although they had run-ins with him as well.

All this became the basis for the book Crow Killer: The Saga of Liver-Eating Johnson, by Raymond Thorp and Robert Bunker, which then became the basis of a motion picture.

As it happens, today would also be the 90th birthday of the late director Sydney Pollack (1934-2008). I’m kind of chomping at the bit to do a dedicated post on that much-missed actor/director today, having recently re-watched Three Days of the Condor and Tootsie, and spent a good deal of time with The Swimmer, which he co-directed. But we’ll have to kick that can down the road, as there are only so many hours in the day. The occasion warrants that we give specialized attention to his 1972 film Jeremiah Johnson.

Jeremiah Johnson was one of my first westerns, and it was frequently shown on television back in the day, so I’ve probably seen it half a dozen times. It was one of numerous team-ups between Pollack and Robert Redford, who’d established a friendship and professional relationship in the ’50s while working on live TV dramas. This film in particular captures Redford at his very moment of falling in love with the American west, more so even than Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, notwithstanding the fact that he named his Provo film complex Sundance.

Jeremiah Johnson is a kind of mash-up of the Liver Eating Johnson book and the novel Mountain Man by Vardis Fisher. The fictionized Johnson gets his revenge, but sadly he eats no livers. It’s kind of tough to love a protagonist who eats human livers. Anyway, I watched it again not many years ago after a gulf of many years while researching what was originally intended to be my follow up book to No Applause, a book about westerns that is still simmering and bubbling on a back burner in my literary kitchen, hence this entire section of Travalanche.

I had remembered Jeremiah Johnson over the years as a film full of micro-events in which nothing much happens. On the more recent viewing I realized that this is very much not the case. It is true that Johnson, a trapper, spends much of his time alone, or with mutes, crazies or non-English speakers. It’s almost a silent film. But there is a huge central event: Johnson’s dearly beloved family is massacred, and then he fights his one man war against the Crow.

It’s set in the Rocky Mountains and surrounding wilderness in the 1850s, and the gorgeous nature imagery is in many ways the true “star” of the film. There have been few films about this important chapter in the west, for the very good reason that it is hard to make a motion picture about solitude. But this one succeeds. After his rudimentary frontier skills cause him much suffering, Johnson meets up with the incomparable Will Geer, as a hermit named Bear Claw, so called for his association with “Griz”, i.e. grizzly bears. Bear Claw teaches Johnson survival skills.

When Johnson gives some horses and rival Indian scalps to a French-speaking Flatfoot chief, he acquires a bride. Having also adopted a traumatized boy who survived a massacre, he now has a family. They build a home of their own, and all is idyllic until some U.S. solders descend and press Johnson into service as a guide to help them rescue some starving pioneers trapped in a mountain pass. The soldiers force Johnson to take them through a sacred Crow burial ground. This outrages the Crow who kill’s Johnson family, triggering the hostilities.

An initial voiceover and recurring theme song sell the legend as real, and as we have seen, it partially is. The screenplay, as bereft of spoken dialogue as it is, has many aspects of true epic structure. There is a mentor (Geer), a series of trials, and of course the provoking of the Gods, and their subsequent retribution. If they’d kept in the liver-eating, the tale would even have taken us to the realm of the Ἀνδροφάγοι (the Androphagoi, or legendary eaters of men).

I am also reminded of that line of Groucho’s in response to the professor in Horse Feathers pointing to an anatomy diagram, telling him “That’s the liver” — “What, no onions?” says Wagstaff, “I’d send that back if I were you!”