AMC has been showing Robert Redford's Jeremiah Johnson a lot lately. Which reminded me that Santa brought me a copy of the book <span style="font-style: italic">Crow Killer</span> for Christmas, the near-as-possible account of the real life of the mountain man who inspired the movie.
Even if you're not a historian, you won't get very far in to the book (first published in 1958) before you realize it contains a lot of hyperbole and exaggeration, and I mean <span style="font-style: italic">a lot</span>. But eventually the historical truths bleed though. Like most of the characters in the movie were real. Hatchet Jack, "Bear Claw" Chris Lapp, Del Gue, The Swan and the Crazy Woman in the Wolf Tail Valley all were real people. And some of the peripheral details were correct, like Johnson did originally set out with a .30 caliber Hawken rifle.
But I stop short of recommending the book because if you're a fan of the movie, the book might not sit well with you. The people might be real but the events almost all are pure fiction. And the characters in the movie are very, very different from their historic counterparts.
Johnson, for starters, wasn't even named Johnson. He called himself Johnston when he first came to the mountains. It's not discussed in the book but some think even that was an assumed name he'd taken after deserting from the US Navy during the Mexican-American war. Somewhere along the way, Johnston slipped into Johnson, and it seems he was content to let it go.
He was very large and powerfully built, had no love for the Indians and no apparent regard for coexisting peacefully with them, regardless of the tribe, especially after Crows killed his Indian wife (who really was named "The Swan", and who really was pregnant). After that, he took such particular relish in killing Crows that the Indians began calling him "Crow Killer." And whites called him the "Liver-Eater" because of the gruesome ritual he engaged in whenever he'd killed a Crow. Which was often.
Johnson didn't find Hatchet Jack frozen to death, or Del Gue buried up to his neck. It was not Chris Lapp who tutored Johnston/Johnson in the mountain ways, it was "Old John" Hatcher. Among other things, Hatcher taught him how to take scalps, something the Johnson depicted in the book never showed any hesitancy to do.
He also was an accomplished baker, renown for his biscuits. In one incident, an Indian snuck into his camp and stopped to help himself to one of his delicious biscuits left beside the campfire before turning his attentions to the sleeping Johnson. He must've eaten noisily because Johnson supposedly stirred and killed him before he could finish his snack.
In another incident, Johnson is said to have laced a large batch of biscuits with strychnine and left them where no one but Indians was likely to find them. When Johnson's companions next passed that spot, the biscuits were gone and 29 picked-over Indian carcasses remained.
The Crazy Woman lived many years after her party was attacked and her children killed. Her husband had in fact run off and lived out his life as a mountain man known as "Mad Mose." The mountain men habitually left food for her but she finally starved to death after taking snow blind in a blizzard so bad that it prevented them bringing her more supplies.
One of the few storylines from the book that did make it into the movie was that after they raided his cabin and killed his wife, the Crows did send braves one at a time to kill Johnson. According to the book, it was exactly 20 braves, and he met them all man-to-man in ritual combat, a fair fight to the end. Like I said, <span style="font-style: italic">a lot</span> of hyperbole.
Some of the information used to flesh out the book came from correlating the stories told by the men who had known Johnson back in the day and outlived him, like Del Gue and White-Eye Johnson. Some came from people who'd been told the tales by Johnson as an old man. It does seem that Johnson considered his battles with those 20 Crow braves (if indeed it was 20) strangely sacred because he never discussed details of any of the fights. But other whites were present when some of them occurred so it seems certain that at least those few did take place.
The spirit of the movie definitely wouldn't have been the same if it had remained truer to the facts. Like that Johnson left the mountains and went back east to serve in the Union Army during the War Between the States. The book, as you might expect, portrays him as a very capable warrior, but he was reprimanded for scalping Cherokee Indians killed in battle. Not because the act was unseemly but because these Cherokees also happened to be fighting for the yankees.
And instead of fading into the mountains while he was still a young and handsome man, the real Johnson lived to be almost eighty. He grew fond of the comforts of town life when he'd got old and creaky and even served as a sheriff a time or two. When his health began to fail, he moved to an old soldier's home in Los Angeles and died there in 1900. He originally was buried in the Los Angeles National Cemetery but after the movie was his remains were moved to Cody, Wyoming.
The book isn't very compelling reading, and makes frequent use of the sort of racial epithet that was acceptable in the 1950s but is frowned on now. But if you'd like a clearer insight into the man who Robert Redford turned into a legend by dipping him into a vat of political correctness, it's worth a look.
Even if you're not a historian, you won't get very far in to the book (first published in 1958) before you realize it contains a lot of hyperbole and exaggeration, and I mean <span style="font-style: italic">a lot</span>. But eventually the historical truths bleed though. Like most of the characters in the movie were real. Hatchet Jack, "Bear Claw" Chris Lapp, Del Gue, The Swan and the Crazy Woman in the Wolf Tail Valley all were real people. And some of the peripheral details were correct, like Johnson did originally set out with a .30 caliber Hawken rifle.
But I stop short of recommending the book because if you're a fan of the movie, the book might not sit well with you. The people might be real but the events almost all are pure fiction. And the characters in the movie are very, very different from their historic counterparts.
Johnson, for starters, wasn't even named Johnson. He called himself Johnston when he first came to the mountains. It's not discussed in the book but some think even that was an assumed name he'd taken after deserting from the US Navy during the Mexican-American war. Somewhere along the way, Johnston slipped into Johnson, and it seems he was content to let it go.
He was very large and powerfully built, had no love for the Indians and no apparent regard for coexisting peacefully with them, regardless of the tribe, especially after Crows killed his Indian wife (who really was named "The Swan", and who really was pregnant). After that, he took such particular relish in killing Crows that the Indians began calling him "Crow Killer." And whites called him the "Liver-Eater" because of the gruesome ritual he engaged in whenever he'd killed a Crow. Which was often.
Johnson didn't find Hatchet Jack frozen to death, or Del Gue buried up to his neck. It was not Chris Lapp who tutored Johnston/Johnson in the mountain ways, it was "Old John" Hatcher. Among other things, Hatcher taught him how to take scalps, something the Johnson depicted in the book never showed any hesitancy to do.
He also was an accomplished baker, renown for his biscuits. In one incident, an Indian snuck into his camp and stopped to help himself to one of his delicious biscuits left beside the campfire before turning his attentions to the sleeping Johnson. He must've eaten noisily because Johnson supposedly stirred and killed him before he could finish his snack.
In another incident, Johnson is said to have laced a large batch of biscuits with strychnine and left them where no one but Indians was likely to find them. When Johnson's companions next passed that spot, the biscuits were gone and 29 picked-over Indian carcasses remained.
The Crazy Woman lived many years after her party was attacked and her children killed. Her husband had in fact run off and lived out his life as a mountain man known as "Mad Mose." The mountain men habitually left food for her but she finally starved to death after taking snow blind in a blizzard so bad that it prevented them bringing her more supplies.
One of the few storylines from the book that did make it into the movie was that after they raided his cabin and killed his wife, the Crows did send braves one at a time to kill Johnson. According to the book, it was exactly 20 braves, and he met them all man-to-man in ritual combat, a fair fight to the end. Like I said, <span style="font-style: italic">a lot</span> of hyperbole.
Some of the information used to flesh out the book came from correlating the stories told by the men who had known Johnson back in the day and outlived him, like Del Gue and White-Eye Johnson. Some came from people who'd been told the tales by Johnson as an old man. It does seem that Johnson considered his battles with those 20 Crow braves (if indeed it was 20) strangely sacred because he never discussed details of any of the fights. But other whites were present when some of them occurred so it seems certain that at least those few did take place.
The spirit of the movie definitely wouldn't have been the same if it had remained truer to the facts. Like that Johnson left the mountains and went back east to serve in the Union Army during the War Between the States. The book, as you might expect, portrays him as a very capable warrior, but he was reprimanded for scalping Cherokee Indians killed in battle. Not because the act was unseemly but because these Cherokees also happened to be fighting for the yankees.
And instead of fading into the mountains while he was still a young and handsome man, the real Johnson lived to be almost eighty. He grew fond of the comforts of town life when he'd got old and creaky and even served as a sheriff a time or two. When his health began to fail, he moved to an old soldier's home in Los Angeles and died there in 1900. He originally was buried in the Los Angeles National Cemetery but after the movie was his remains were moved to Cody, Wyoming.
The book isn't very compelling reading, and makes frequent use of the sort of racial epithet that was acceptable in the 1950s but is frowned on now. But if you'd like a clearer insight into the man who Robert Redford turned into a legend by dipping him into a vat of political correctness, it's worth a look.
