Redford portrayed him in a motion picture show,
And if you saw it, there’s lots that you don’t know.
He headed for the mountains back in Forty-Three.
Thinking he’d be a trapper, livin’ wild and free.
He had a little cabin up on the Musselshell,
And when he aimed his Hawken, his target always fell.
He watched as Crazy Woman tended family graves,
Adorning them with skulls of departed Injun braves.
He took a Flathead wife, who they called The Swan,
Thinkin’ that his wanderin’ days were all but gone.
But the Crows came and found his little wife,
Broke into the cabin and then they took her life.
Then he went to war, and fought it all alone.
He extracted his revenge down on the Yellowstone.
The Crow weren’t afraid of his gun or his brawn,
But when they were found, their livers were all gone.
It might stick you in your craw,
Bit they say he ate ‘em raw.
Nobody knows how many Ceows he killed,
Most will attest that lots of blood was spilled.
Maybe it was right, or maybe it was wrong,
But many noble Crows sang their final song.
The Blackfeet caught him somewhere on the trail,
They held him for a ransom but all they did was fail.
Once they found him at his hideout canyon place,
He slipped out of a tunnel leaving not a trace.
They raided his cupboard hoping for to dine,
He had baked ‘em biscuits laced with strychnine.
They say in the end he made a lasting peace,
And everyone was glad the killing finally ceased.
So goes the tale told under the Big Sky,
Sometimes the truth is worser than the lie.
Liver-eatin’ Johnson was an actual mountain man,
And spreadin’ wild stories was his actual plan.
LDT Sep 9, ‘26
HISTORICAL NOTE: Johnson’s early life is a bit of a mystery. Some say he deserted the US Navy during the Mexican War and changed his name to Johnson. He is supposed to have come West in 1843. There is no concrete documentation of anything he is supposed to have done before the 1860s That includes his marriage to The Swa and, his vendetta against the Crows., Most historians believe he was in Montan in the 1860s, trapping, hunting cutting wood for Ft Brnton-bound steamboats, gold mining, and running Injun whiskey on the Whoop-Up Trail. There is documentation that he served in the Civil WWar and of his role as a lawman in Coulston (now Billingd) and Red Lodge, Montana. He died in California in 1900 and was buried in a veterans cemetary. After the movie Jerimiah Johnson came out, some middle schoolers launched a successful campaign to move his remains to Cody, Wyoming.
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