The Myth of the Mountain Man

By Hannah Dreesbach

Rewriting the Saga of Liver-Eating Johnson

An Indigenous perspective on legends of the Old West

I met with Dr. Shane Doyle on a sunny, March afternoon to talk about mountain men. As an educator, Northern Plains scholar, musician, and registered member of the Apsáalooke Nation (also known as the Crow Tribe), Doyle has an unique perspective on the Old West and its larger-than-life legends. I started by asking what he knew about Jeremiah Johnson. 

These days, that name often conjures thoughts of the popular 1970s western movie starring Robert Redford in a titular role. With an hour and forty-eight minutes of sweeping mountain vistas, the movie follows Jeremiah Johnson as he builds a family and learns to trap. Life is relatively peaceful until Johnson trespasses on a sacred Crow burial ground to save a group of stranded settlers. As punishment, a Crow war party murders his Indian wife and adopted son (a plot point that Doyle is quick to point out as historically unlikely; the Crow didn’t have any such burial grounds).

The movie doesn’t end there, however. In his grief, Johnson tracks down and kills the war party responsible, triggering a montage of hair-raising ambushes, as more Native American warriors (unsuccessfully) attempt to take their revenge. The final scene offers an ambiguous conclusion, though it would appear that Johnson and a recurring Crow character—Paints His Shirt Red—have arrived at some form of mutual respect. 

Doyle hasn’t watched the movie the whole way through, but he’s seen enough. He recalls one scene featuring a famous Crow actor named Dan Old Elk. “In the movie, Redford sees him—and he’s gonna kill him—and so Dan starts singing his death-song. That’s a real song that he sings, and Dan was a real prominent ceremonial man… So he was a good person to have that role, I guess. But, I think in real life he would have killed Robert Redford,” Doyle says, laughing.  

It’s an entertaining film—or at least, I’ve found it so. When Johnson’s mentor, played by a weathered Will Geer, introduces himself as “blood kin to the grizzly that bit Jim Bridger’s ass,” it’s hard not to grin. But after watching it again more recently, I found myself wondering what lay beneath the legend.  

“Crow Killer” is perhaps the most well-known biography of the mountain man known as John “Liver-Eating” Johnson (the name Jeremiah, it seems, was a creative liberty taken by the film). Standing at 6-foot-2-inches and weighing over 240 pounds, the popular story is that Johnson nursed a decades-long vendetta against the Crow for the gruesome murder of his Indian wife and unborn child. According to the authors, historians Raymond Thorp and Robert Bunker, he killed over 300 Crow and left their corpses scalped and liverless—hence the cannibalistic moniker. This biography, however, relied heavily on oral myths passed down through the generations—many of which Johnson likely started himself. 

Other sources (see historian Nathan Bender) note that Johnson was well-known for his self-promotion as an Indian-killer, having openly capitalized on it while acting in a Wild West show in 1884, and it seems unlikely that he had a dispute with the Crow Tribe. Even his greatest claim to fame starts to fall apart under scrutiny: “Liver-Eating” is now thought to be the offspring of a grisly joke Johnson made during a battle with a Sioux war party.

Even so, popular culture has approached “Liver-Eating” Johnson and other famous mountain men such as Jim Bridger, John Colter, and Hugh Glass with a sentiment bordering on reverence. The earliest histories of the fur trade, like Hiram Chittenden’s “The American Fur Trade of the Far West,” detail them as “the most interesting and enviable class in the mountains. Bound to no company, free to go where they pleased… They were men of bold and adventurous spirit, for none other would have the courage to follow so hazardous a business.” These were the legends I fell in love with as a kid, but Doyle has a slightly different perspective.

“[Liver-Eating Johnson] falls in the same cultural context as the myth of the noble warrior…” Doyle explains. While they may have been unapologetically violent and vulgar, such men possessed the grit necessary to win the West. “That’s one very narrow, and not very strong way of thinking about the human condition, but it is there.”

Illustration by Aimee Balcerzak

Why, then, do these stories persist in popular culture? At their best, many westerns paint white men and Indians as savage equals—noble warriors draped in the romantic mysticism of the Old West. At their worst, Indians are two-dimensional caricatures of what a white man imagines them to be. “Most people just see it as normal,” Doyle says, addressing the way Native Americans have been portrayed in popular media. “Until we have Native people who control from the top down, and they are open to one another’s voices, things are going to be slow to change.” Part of the reason—Doyle believes—is that we’re constantly looking at one another in a racial context. “And, I think, within the context of racial perspective there’s always this competitive aspect. Who’s the smartest race? Who’s the most athletic race?”  

Deeper than this, I think there’s a question of Who’s right? Who’s wrong? Who’s justified? Stories like “Jeremiah Johnson” validate one view of the West: a West of noble characters and simple values; a West in which white men can be heroes of discovery and survival. This was the West I grew up with: the one I came to love. But, I can also recognize that it shies away from voices we’d rather not hear. After all, the true Wild West can be a much more bitter pill to swallow.

“Not to say that they are lies,” Doyle hedges carefully, speaking of the many legends that surround the mountain men, “because that becomes personal. But I think that there are ways to understand that they’re not accurate [histories], but also appreciate the human quality to these stories and understand why they are told, and who’s telling them.” It is certainly something to ponder if you ever find yourself watching “Jeremiah Johnson.”