The landmark 1972 movie Jeremiah Johnson featuring Robert Redford should be mandatory viewing for every red-blooded American, and was based on a book entitled “Crow Killer: The Saga of Liver Eating Johnson.” But who was he really, and was his name even Johnson?  From the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, Nathan Bender tells us all about this part-man-part-myth historical figure. Where’d he come from, why’d he prefer Hawkins guns, what’d he do for money, why’d he fight the Crows and why’d he start eating their livers–or did he? Inspired into a history career by the original Jeremiah Johnson movie, he’s since become an authority on the topic. Following this interview, I returned to Mountain View Mallard’s lodge and rewatched the movie for the umpteenth time. Check it out.


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The Iconic Mountain Man

The story goes that he was a man of proper wit and adventure, spirit suited to the mountains.

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast. Have you ever heard of a man named Jeremiah Johnson? 1972 there was a movie featuring Robert Redford, Jeremiah Johnson. It’s an iconic mountain man movie. But there’s more to the story, of course, than what Hollywood, it was based on a real life character named Liver-Eating Johnson. And today’s guest, Mr. Nathan Bender from the Buffalo Bill Center of the west, is an authority of sorts on the Crow killer himself. In 1972, the movie kind of opens like this, this is the open narration of the movie, and I think it’s going to set you all up for what we’re going to talk about today. His name was Jeremiah Johnson, they say he wanted to be a mountain man. The story goes that he was a man of proper wit and adventure, spirit suited to the mountains. Nobody knows whereabouts he came from, and it don’t seem to matter much. He was a young man, and ghostly stories about the tall hills didn’t scare him none. He was looking for a Hawken gun, 50 caliber or better. He settled for a 30, but damn, it was genuine Hawken, you couldn’t go no better. Bought him a good horse, traps and other truck that went with being a mountain man and said goodbye to whatever life was down there below, this hears his story. Only today, we’re going to hear his real story. Nathan, how the heck are you?

Nathan Bender: I’m doing good.

Ramsey Russell: What led your interest into Jeremiah Johnson? What was his real name?

Nathan Bender: Okay, well, I first saw the movie Jeremiah Johnson when I was a kid back in Ohio, and it stoked my interest in mountain man and all things, fur trade era of the time on that. And so as I got older and worked with professional collections, I moved out here to Cody, and we received, as a gift, Liver-Eating Johnson’s Hawken rifle and his bowie knife.

Ramsey Russell: Really? Are you kidding?

Nathan Bender: No, it’s on display.

Ramsey Russell: Like the real deal?

Nathan Bender: Yeah, it’s on display upstairs.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, we got to go see that, I did not know that.

Nathan Bender: Yeah, it’s here. This was a gun and knife that he left with one of his friends in Bozeman, Montana, who was actually the newspaper editor of the town, who was also a gun collector. And this was like, 1899, just about 6 months before he died, he got on the train and went to the old folks home in California, to the veterans hospital there, where he passed away. So the rifle and his knife stayed in Bozeman and were documented as being belonged to that family and then another gun collector in Bozeman, until it was finally donated to the museum here. So we’ve got a provenance for the rifle from Johnson himself to the museum.

Ramsey Russell: Who was he and where did he come from?

Nathan Bender: Nobody really knows. He’s on his –

Ramsey Russell: But he was a veteran of a war?

Nathan Bender: He was a veteran in the Civil War, in the Colorado second company, and we do have US military records for that. And he listed on those records that he was born in 1824 in, I think it’s Huntington county, little York, New Jersey.

Ramsey Russell: New Jersey.

Nathan Bender: Yeah, he’s from New Jersey.

Ramsey Russell: Well, had he come out west for some reason preceding the Civil War and just got drugged into the skirmish, or -?

Nathan Bender: Well, it’s all oral narrative as to where he was before and then some stuff that showed up in his obituaries that implied he may have first gone when he was like a teenager, may have gone out to sea and was in sailing ships and possibly worked as a whaler for a while. Then there’s rumors that he may have been in the Spanish-American War, in the navy at that time, or the Mexican-American War in the 1840s. But there’s not hard documentation, we do not have military records for that. However, he first shows up in history in the early 1860s in the gold mining camps up in Montana and that’s where he met X Beidler and some of the other founders of Montana, the state of Montana, from the gold mining up there. And that’s where he started getting established in Montana after the gold ran out, then he was a fur trapper, wood hawker, wolfer, anything he could do to make a living outdoors. He was road trapping on the Sioux Indian lands and part of his whole story was because he was trapping illegally on the Sioux lands, and they stole his traps because he wasn’t supposed to be there, and he got real annoyed and just started shooting Sioux Indians because they stole his traps.

Ramsey Russell: Is that how he became Liver-Eating Johnson?

Stories of Savage Times

Nathan Bender: Not yet.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Nathan Bender: He didn’t acquire that name until 1869. And there’s probably well over a dozen stories of how he got his name, but the most historically credible version is that May of 1869 on the Musselshell River in Montana at Fort Hawley, which was the trading post, there was the person who ran the trading post and his girlfriend living with him, there was this beautiful blonde woman, and –

Ramsey Russell: This man on the cover of this book had a beautiful blonde woman at the time.

Nathan Bender: No, he worked there at the time. But the guy who was actually running the wolfing expedition that winter, he was just an employee there. The man who was running there, there were two women in the fort, one was this guy’s girlfriend, who was this buxom, beautiful woman everybody was in love with. And then there was also mentioned a young Indian woman, which not much is said about her. However, in the spring, there was a party of Indian warriors came and attacked their post. And the women were down trying to grab a couple buckets of water to take back up to the cabin. And I guess the young Indian woman got shot through the thigh, but she made it back to the fort, the young blonde woman, she got scalped on that.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, my God.

Nathan Bender: But she did finally make it back into the fort, so she lived. And they held off this attack of the American Indians who were trying to push them out of the area on there.

Ramsey Russell: Which tribe was it? Was it Crow or Sioux?

Nathan Bender: No, it was Sioux.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Nathan Bender: At least it depends on who’s telling the story. He’s either Sioux or Blackfoot, and we’re not even sure they would know how to clearly identify them either. But anyways, they nursed this woman back to health, and they were spitting tobacco on top of her head and rubbing her in with asphalt and all that stuff. And they finally got her healed up so she was functional again, but they were angry. So they started posting guards out around at night so they wouldn’t be surprised again. Well, about a month or two later, another group of Native Americans came and attacked them, this time they were ready, though, and it was kind of a wet, drizzly day, and there were like 77 people in this group attacking them and they managed to corral them up and channel them down into a gully wash, right next to where their camp was, where the Musselshell River came off. And what they were shooting around them kept them down in that wash. Then they went around to the front of the wash with their lever action rifles and just started shooting up into the canyon. And so people inside, they were running, putting blankets up and their shields and stuff, trying so they couldn’t see them, but they just kept shooting until they could just walk up and just start the final mop up. And so they basically killed almost everybody in that expedition. At that time- so they were getting their revenge, they were all pretty hot about where this beautiful woman had been scalped and all this stuff, their blood was really up and so they got their revenge here. So what they did was they pulled all these dead bodies out of the gulch and they go, well, there’s money to be made here. They’re selling skulls back in DC, back in Washington. So, they butchered –

Ramsey Russell: Like the museums or –?

Nathan Bender: Yeah, collectors, people who wanted to sell the Indian heads. And so they chopped all the heads off the Indians, except – and they were butchering and they were quartering them legs in one pile, the arms in another pile, and all this stuff, it was like a production line.

Ramsey Russell: Those were savage times, Nathan.

Nathan Bender: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: That’s hard to imagine.

Nathan Bender: And you can imagine Liver-Eating Johnson, he had his full beard, he was just covered with blood at this time in this stuff. Well, they found one guy on the bottom who was still alive from this pile of stuff. And the story, if you read in his obituary, it was then like a half hour long fight between, with knife fight and everything, rolling down the hill and finally, like a Hollywood finale. The other stories you get from people who were there and said, yeah, we saw he was alive, so Johnson just stuck his Knife in his gut and pulled it out, and there was a piece of liver on it. And then he made a joke and go, hey, anybody want some raw liver? And so then he made a like, pretended to eat the liver and some people say he actually did eat that piece of Liver. And Forevermore, he had the name Liver-Eating Johnson.

Ramsey Russell: What was his real name? Was it Jeremiah?

Nathan Bender: No, that’s a Hollywood invention. Pure Hollywood, Jeremiah.

A Controversial Historical Figure

He said, well, his real name was Garrison, it wasn’t Johnson. So that’s where people started looking for Garrison instead of Johnson. But it’s still not ironclad. 

Ramsey Russell: What was his real name?

Nathan Bender: Well, he may have been born John Garrison in New Jersey. They’ve tried to track it down to a specific family, but the family doesn’t quite match up with the dates he was given. He had, like 1824, the dates they have for a Garrison family, or from 1831, 1836. Then they say he may have taken the name of his brother, but it doesn’t explain where the name Johnson came from. There is one newspaper account from Anaconda, Montana, from one of his old partners. He said, well, his real name was Garrison, it wasn’t Johnson. So that’s where people started looking for Garrison instead of Johnson. But it’s still not ironclad. We don’t have that nailed down, there’s still some controversy about that.

Ramsey Russell: Where does his story take place? Is it in Montana?

Nathan Bender: Yeah, Montana, Wyoming. For the historic liver eating. Raymond Thorpe, who was the author of the book Crow Killer. He loved to invent romantic western propaganda and make heroes out of people as much as he could. He did this with Jim Bowie, too, for the Bowie Knife book that he wrote. There’s all kinds of stories about Jim Bowie forging his knife out of a meteorite and this stuff. And a lot of that just came out of Thorpe’s inventive mind.

Ramsey Russell: Well, from what I do know about Jim Bowie, he was a Bowie knife, knife fighter of epic proportion. I mean, right there in Natchez, Mississippi.

Nathan Bender: Yeah. Well, you read the new books on the Bowie knife, and they’re just all over. A lot of this misinformation that just Raymond Thorpe invented and he did the same thing with Liver-Eating Johnson. A lot of this stuff, he would take newspaper accounts that he found and then attribute them to oral histories that he was getting and stuff.

Ramsey Russell: He was the kind of guy that sounds like they could take a paragraph of fact and write a book of imagination.

Nathan Bender: Yeah, he was sort of that. Well, the thing is, Liver Eating Johnson never went to war with the Crow Indians.

Ramsey Russell: Well, why is it called Crow killer?

Nathan Bender: Because my theory on this is, first I want to tell you, I interviewed Joe Madison Crow, who was the chief and the last hereditary chief and the tribal historian of the Crow nation. This is the guy that stole horses from the Germans in World War II in order to get the coups necessary to become the last traditional chief.

Ramsey Russell: You are kidding.

Nathan Bender: No, I’m not kidding. He was a badass.

Ramsey Russell: That was what the Crows specialize now was that horse stuff, isn’t it?

Nathan Bender: And then when he got home, he went to school and got college education and became the tribal historian. He just passed away a few years ago, and I talked with him at length about this. And there’s a name in the Crow tribe for liver eater, and Joe Madison Crow’s father in law was a liver eater. So that name was actually in his own family, they were friends with him. They would sit around the fire and eat raw liver with this guy. In the 1870s, he lived with the Crow Indians at Crow agency.

Ramsey Russell: They were friends?

Nathan Bender: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And somebody in the last chief’s family was named liver eater after the friend of the family.

Nathan Bender: And the name’s been passed down. And so when we in Joe Madison Crow grew up at old trail town, he was at the grave of Liver-Eating Johnson, he’s in his – and he’s joking with his family, he goes, hey look, there’s your cousin.

Ramsey Russell: Let’s take this aside. I want to hear more about the last chief stealing horses from the Germany.

Nathan Bender: Yeah. Joe Madison Crow. Oh, he wrote his book in Crow country. He’s written several books about Crow history and culture. He was a wonderful historian, and he was a totally indigenous historian. He used his tribal oral history as well as written white history and made them all work together to try to tell the story of his people.

Ramsey Russell: And to be a chief, you had to steal horses and count coup?

Nathan Bender: Yeah. It was part of the traditional –

Ramsey Russell: And did you say in World War II?

Nathan Bender: World War II.

Ramsey Russell: World War II.

Nathan Bender: Yeah, he stole horses from the Nazis.

Ramsey Russell: He was in the military, US military. And wrangled up a horse and went and stole more horses. How did he count coup?

Nathan Bender: Well, you have to –

Ramsey Russell: Touch them on the head.

Nathan Bender: Yeah, without killing them.

Ramsey Russell: And he did that?

Nathan Bender: That’s the story.

Ramsey Russell: That’s amazing. I mean, there ought to be a movie about that.

Nathan Bender: There should be. But anyways, this Liver-Eating Johnson, all the local history before 1958, when the Crow Killer book was published, is all about Liver-Eating Johnson killing Sioux and Blackfeet. And he had a vendetta against the Sioux. He was, like, shooting them on sight.

Ramsey Russell: Going back to them having harmed their women.

The Original Wild Wests: Hardwick’s Show

Well, he started in Montana he had Calamity Jane and Curley, who was a scout for General Custer at the Little Bighorn and the three of them were the stars of Hardwick’s show. 

Nathan Bender: Going back to that, and also from them stealing his beaver traps. Because he wrote about this. He wrote letters to the editor, and he had his own wild west show called Hardwick’s Show.

Ramsey Russell: You’re kidding.

Nathan Bender: No. In 1884.

Ramsey Russell: And where was this show at?

Nathan Bender: Well, he started in Montana he had Calamity Jane and Curley, who was a scout for General Custer at the Little Bighorn and the three of them were the stars of Hardwick’s show. And they traveled, like, through Nebraska and ended up in Chicago and were playing in Chicago, where they finally ran out of money and show failed there. But they had his script, and they were re-enacting the battle of the Little Bighorn there. There’s some rumors that, Buffalo Bill was doing the first scalp for Custer in his Buffalo Bills wild west. Liver-Eating Johnson might have portrayed the first liver for Custer in his re-enactment of the Little Bighorn.

Ramsey Russell: So the actual liver eating was a big publicity stunt for him.

Nathan Bender: Yeah. He was trying to make money off of that in his – and then he was writing up his adventures and trying to make – as he was getting older, he was trying to make money off himself as a western hero and a western figure. Now, Raymond Thorpe had written a book on Doc Carver, who was Buffalo Bill’s first partner when they did the very first wild west show, traveling there in 1883, 1884 then they were doing this, and they split ways after that. And then there was the Doc Carver’s Wild west and Buffalo Bill’s wild west after this. But Thorpe wrote the biography of Doc Carver, and so he was getting most of his information from Doc Carver, and that’s where he got a lot of his information about Liver-Eating Johnson.

Ramsey Russell: And this picture on the cover of the book, is that his Hawken rifle?

Nathan Bender: That’s a sharp’s rifle.

Ramsey Russell: That’s what it looks like. That’s not at all a Hawkens.

Nathan Bender: No, that’s a sharps.

Ramsey Russell: The movie gets started, he bought that 30 caliber. I know, I’m learning there’s absolutely no similarity between Jeremiah Johnson, the movie and the story of Liver-Eating Johnson.

Nathan Bender: But let me tell you more about this wild west show.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Nathan Bender: Buffalo Bill had hired the Sioux Indians to work in his wild west show and Liver-Eating Johnson hated Sioux Indians. However, in his wild west show, they had Curley, they were able to employ the Crow Indians in their wild west show. And so then this is where – and Johnson had lived with the Crow during this time. And so he had a very close association with the Crow Indians. And somehow when Raymond Thorpe was writing up the biography of Doc Carver and getting this story about Liver-Eating Johnson, he got it in his head that Liver-Eating Johnson had been fighting the Crow Indians. But that was only in the auditorium for the wild west show, not in real life.

Ramsey Russell: And I suppose at some point in time, he graduated from a Hawken to a sharps.

Old School Firearms

…he wanted the newest and the best in the way of firearms. 

Nathan Bender: There’s a lot of historic accounts of Liver-Eating Johnson, being he wanted the newest and the best in the way of firearms. He had a lever action repeating rifles, he had rifles with very early telescopic sights on them, he had used buffalo rifles and stuff, he had sharps. So he was definitely using cartridge rifles and stuff, even though he still had a Hawken when he went away, that was a gun he had kept with him, he may very well have used in his early days, but the rifle itself is in pretty good shape and didn’t get used to dust because he was using a lot of other rifles at the time. But what we know for sure is that that’s the last Hawken rifle that he owned, and that’s a 56 caliber.

Ramsey Russell: In the movie, they made a real big deal. The movie had nothing to do with the real man, the book ain’t got nothing to do with real man, it sounds like. But I want to go back, I know you know a little bit about this. It was a genuine Hawken, he said, but it was a 30 caliber, and he was prowling around the mountains hunting one day, and he come up on a man that was frozen to death on the side of a mountain, and there was a note pinned to him that said, I, Hackett Jack, being a sound mine and broke legs, do hereby leaveth my bare rifle to whatever finds it. Lord, hoping to be a white man. It’s a good rifle and killed the bear that killed me anyway, I’m dead. Yours truly, Hackett Jack. Again, the Hawken rifle?

Nathan Bender: Yes.

Ramsey Russell: What was it about the Hawken rifle that’s so significant, probably to Liver-Eating Johnson’s story, also to the romanticized version of Jeremiah Johnson and to the west itself. What was it about that Hawken rifle?

The Hawken Rifle: Pioneers of Rifle Craftsmanship

There’s a romance about the Hawken rifle that’s undeniable. It’s all through our literature and culture on this part of it was Samuel and Jacob Hawken.

Nathan Bender: There’s a romance about the Hawken rifle that’s undeniable. It’s all through our literature and culture on this part of it was Samuel and Jacob Hawken. They were there in St. Louis from 1822 on. That’s when William Ashley was starting the fur brigades. And so they were right there from the very beginning and were able to get some of their rifles in the hands of some of the leaders of these fur brigades right from the get go. And they never concentrated on mass production, their rifles always cost a little bit more than their competitors. But there was a prestige element to owning the Hawken. Part one, they were strongly pursuing the percussion ignition as opposed to the old flintlock. And they had very heavy rifles, it became sort of the plane’s rifle because they were assuming your horse was going to carry the gun for you most of the time.

Ramsey Russell: Where were they manufactured?

Nathan Bender: St. Louis.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Nathan Bender: And so you’re making 13lbs, 15lbs rifles.

Ramsey Russell: 50 caliber was the standard?

Nathan Bender: 50, 54, 56, 58. I’ve seen some down like little 36 and some 45s on that as well. We have about 10 Hawken rifles up on display, upstairs and a couple of Hawken pistols and there’s a Spencer Hawken, Spencer repeating rifle that’s been sporterized probably by Jemmer, who bought out, who was one of the workmen for the Hawken and eventually bought out Sam Hawken’s in the 1860s.

Ramsey Russell: Were they particularly accurate?

Nathan Bender: They had the reputation of being very accurate, yes.

Ramsey Russell: What was everybody using?

Nathan Bender: But everybody was still using open iron sights too, at that time.

Ramsey Russell: What was the gun that everybody was using if you couldn’t afford a Hawken?

Nathan Bender: Well, you had your Henry trade rifle, you had Lehman rifles.

Ramsey Russell: These were all breech load.

Nathan Bender: No, these were all muzzle loaders.

Ramsey Russell: Muzzle loaders, okay.

Nathan Bender: A lot of these were still flintlock. Layman’s, they were good at early percussions. Hawken’s would use the percussion snail on the, under the breech, which was stronger than the layman. Just you putting a drum and cylinder in which wasn’t quite as strong and wouldn’t last quite as long. The Hawken’s were very much influenced by English gun making practices over in Britain, the latest how they would. That snail breach was just a lot stronger. You have that hammer coming down, smashing that nipple. If you have your lock underneath it, you got to have something that can support the force of that. That hitting and the snail is just a stronger arrangement than the little side cylinder which we use to convert the flintlock into a percussion on that.

Ramsey Russell: But if I was – If I wanted to have the best, I went for the Hawken gun.

Nathan Bender: A lot of people did. I mean, there were also other very fine gun makers in St. Louis at the same time. Dimmock was well known. Philip Creamer was right across the river in Illinois. His guns were superb as well. So there were other gun makers around who proved to be a fine quality –

Ramsey Russell: This been the early 1800s?

Nathan Bender: This is the 1830s, 1840s, 1850s at that time.

Ramsey Russell: What was Liver-Eating Johnson? What was his role in the fur trade? I mean, was he successful fur trader?

Nathan Bender: He came in later in the 1860s. What he was doing in the 1840s and 1850s, there’s rumors he may have been in California. He may have been trying to find gold. There’s rumors and speculation that he may have been involved in that Indian genocide among the California Indians, where the gold miners just didn’t want any native peoples in their way.

Ramsey Russell: Can you talk a little bit about the fur industry and the trapping? You alluded to it.

Nathan Bender: Yeah. American fur company. Yeah. And Hawken were very much involved.

Ramsey Russell: Because it seems like I heard sometime that, like in the late 1700s, early 1800s, a lot of fur companies had already started combing the west for pails.

Trapping Furs & Origins of the Beaver Trade 

There was also a trade in deer and oak skins that replaced it, but it was never as profitable as the beaver trade was, which made, John Jacob Astor the first millionaire in America.

Nathan Bender: Well, beaver was the main object of the fur trade for decades because that’s where the money was. After 1840, that crashed, that market crashed, and then buffalo hides sort of replaced that. They started hunting buffalo and selling buffalo hides after that. And he had wolfers going out with wolf pelts and whatever else. There was also a trade in deer and oak skins that replaced it, but it was never as profitable as the beaver trade was, which made, John Jacob Astor the first millionaire in America.

Ramsey Russell: From trapping furs?

Nathan Bender: Yeah. Well, he didn’t trap them himself, he paid other people to do it.

Ramsey Russell: Lots of other people.

Nathan Bender: And a lot of your mountain men, they came from the upper Ohio river valley and moved out, and a lot of them were themselves part Indian, part Shawnee or part Delaware, part Cherokee or part Iroquois.

Ramsey Russell: Nathan, when you talk about mountain men, were they employed? I never thought of mountain men, especially it depicted in the movie Jeremiah Johnson, as is working for a fur company. I thought they were independent.

Nathan Bender: There were some independents, that’s true, but there also is a lot of people. Hudson Bay Company had their own employees from up there, and they were trying to move south into the United States area after Mexico got their independence from Spain in the 1820s. Then the Americans felt a lot more comfortable going into the previous Spanish lands that Spain had claimed, but were still actually controlled by American Indians, like, Shoshone, Arapaho, Sioux, Cheyenne, Blackfeet on this, that. And the Shoshone Indians in particular, were just where the sites of the rendezvous for the mountain men were held. So they had strong working relationship with the Shoshones in 1820s, 1830s, up to 1840, and then things started to go sour after that.

Ramsey Russell: Earlier in the podcast, you were talking about a conflict, they were at a fort, they were attacked by Sioux or Blackfeet Indians that want them out of the country. Were the mountain men always in conflict with Native America? Was there every time that they just kind of got along?

Nathan Bender: They couldn’t have made it without the help of the Shoshone Indians in particular, because that was sort of a safe place for them to be.

Ramsey Russell: Which would have been? Where were Shoshone Indians?

Nathan Bender: Well, from Cody on both sides of the mountains. You have eastern Shoshone and your western Shoshone on both sides of the Rocky Mountains around here on that, that was sort of a pretty large area. And the Shoshone had horses on that, just like the other plains Indian people.

Ramsey Russell: They seemed pretty amicable then.

Nathan Bender: At that time, because they were using – they were still in conflict with neighboring tribes, the inter-tribal wars were still going on at that time.

Ramsey Russell: What was all that about?

Nathan Bender: Well, that had been going on forever.

Ramsey Russell: Sure. It’s always about territory.

Nathan Bender: Horse raiding against the others and getting guns and horses from the other tribes, just reinforcing your territorial boundaries. If you had more guns than they did, maybe you could move your territory over. That sort of thing was a lot going on.

Ramsey Russell: Grass was always greener.

Nathan Bender: Well, you still had basic areas that were traditionally Sioux Indians. You had the Black Hills, you had Kio in the Black Hills before, and they sort of got pushed out by the Sioux, who moved further south on that. But in Montana, you had the Crow Indians, you’ve got the Assiniboine, and you got the Blackfeet over in Idaho there, you got Flathead and Penderell and all that. And a lot of these people had your traditional territories.

Mountain Man Entrepreneur

Ramsey Russell: Tell me more about what we do know about Liver-Eating Johnson.

Nathan Bender: So he doesn’t really come into documented history until the 1860s. So most of what’s before then is speculation on that. Some of it’s better than others. And people are starting to fill in more pieces of the puzzle to try to figure this out. But he may have changed his name. If he started as a Garrison and then changed it to Johnson, there may have been a reason for that. And there’s stories that he may have killed an officer in the Mexican War, in the navy, and then jumped ship to avoid getting caught.

Ramsey Russell: Eric Rothberg and I talked a lot about how, as recently as the 70s and 80s, probably as recently as COVID, people came to this part of the west to reinvent themselves.

Nathan Bender: People would reinvent themselves on the frontier quite a bit. He was also spent a lot of time up in Canada, he was a whiskey trader. He was trading after 1869, when he first got that name for liver eating, he actually left the country and went up to Canada because there was some thought he may have been afraid of getting prosecuted for being a cannibalism or something. So he sort of left the country conveniently for a while. But he was trading whiskey from Montana up into Canada there.

Ramsey Russell: So he was a bootlegger too?

Nathan Bender: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: He was just an all out mountain man entrepreneur, wasn’t he?

Nathan Bender: But his whiskey trading enterprise up there got attacked by the Blackfeet because they didn’t particularly like him doing that. So coincidentally, within the next year, they had a huge smallpox outbreak, and he was a key suspect for having brought smallpox infected blankets in the trade with people.

Ramsey Russell: Was it speculated that he knew they were infected?

Nathan Bender: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Was that a common practice? Because I thought that was just like an invisible disease, they didn’t understand that just spread.

Nathan Bender: No, it was –

Ramsey Russell: Was there some documented cases of people intentionally doing that?

Nathan Bender: I’d have to research that a little more, but I know that he would brag about leaving strychnine infected food for Indians to eat.

Ramsey Russell: Outside of the Crow nation, he really didn’t like a lot of these Indians out here.

Nathan Bender: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: All because they stole his trap.

Nathan Bender: It’s hard to say. Where he grew up in New Jersey, there was a guy called Tom Quick, and this was during the French and Indian War. And his family was friends with the Delaware Indians, Tom Quick’s family. And when the war started, all of a sudden they were enemies. And these people who had been friends all his life suddenly came and started killing his family. And so Tom Quick then went on a one man vendetta against the Delaware Indians and the thing is he had killed 99 of them and he was on his deathbed trying to raise up saying just one more so he could make a hundred. So this is a story he heard when he was growing up. And I think it was like a role model for him to that when he was writing his stories up and his adventures up, there’s some parallels between those stories and the stories that he was writing of his adventures.

Ramsey Russell: Did he keep count of how many Native Americans he killed?

Nathan Bender: He claimed in one newspaper account he killed 1299.

Ramsey Russell: That sounds a little far fetched for a man.

Nathan Bender: Yeah. We notice it was 1299 and Tom Quick claim to be 99 as one of these things. In the Crow killer book they say over 300. When he was in the civil war, when they were fighting some native troops down in Missouri or Kansas area and that, and he started killing Indians who were fighting on both sides and then scalping them after the battle, he got reprimanded for that.

Ramsey Russell: This guy’s a savage.

Nathan Bender: Yeah. You know in the movie Jeremiah Johnson, the guy who plays Del Gue in that movie, that’s who the real Liver-Eating Johnson, not Jeremy, not Robert Redford. The guy that played Del Gue.

Ramsey Russell: The bald headed guy.

Nathan Bender: Yeah, the bald headed guy, that’s the real Liver Eating Johnson.

Ramsey Russell: I think the last time I saw him I stared up to his neck and soul.

Nathan Bender: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And he shaved his head so he could keep his scalp.

Nathan Bender: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: That guy more reflects real Liver Eating Johnson than Robert Redford.

Nathan Bender: Yes.

Ramsey Russell: What was known about him, if anything – I mean we’ve heard these stories, but have you ever run across any accounts of what his demeanor was, what he was like to be around?

Nathan Bender: Oh yeah, he was a huge practical jokester. He was always playing tricks on people. And some dudes would come into town and he was playing jokes.

Ramsey Russell: What kind of joke?

Nathan Bender: Oh God, I know there’s stories about him. I know one, I can tell for sure. I was up in Red Lodge, the parents would, they would sort of scare their children into good behavior by threatening, Liver-Eating Johnson on them. But one family said, they said, well, if you’re good, we’ll invite Johnson over and we’ll let you watch him eat. Because this guy would just consume mass quantities of food at once and then he wouldn’t eat for like a week. But he could just put away like huge platefuls of food, pounds and pounds of buffalo meat, he would eat, he would gorge themselves. And he got into the habit of eating like that. And so there’s stories telling about him eating like this that have made it down to the day that people have told about him.

Ramsey Russell: Was he a conversationalist? Do you know? Did he tell story about himself?

Nathan Bender: I don’t really know if he was a conversationalist on that but –

Ramsey Russell: When you talk about a man eating, consuming pounds and pounds and pounds of meat and then not eating for a week, I never thought about it. But that was probably pretty common to being a mountain.

Nathan Bender: It’s a feast or famine type.

Ramsey Russell: I mean, when you knock something down, you ate.

Nathan Bender: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And then it might be a week or so before you did again.

Nathan Bender: Well, I mean, you might have some – you dry some of that meat out and take it with you or something to have something that non. But yeah, it was a different time.

Ramsey Russell: What other jokes you know of?

Nathan Bender: God, I got to go back.

Ramsey Russell: And I mean, so he went and ate with these kids. Did he did?

Nathan Bender: Oh, he probably did at some point. There’s stories about him, he would carry candy in his pockets when he was like, 60 years old, he was a sheriff up at Red Lodge and he’d hand out candy to the kids who were running around and stuff.

An Enemy of My Enemy is My Friend

 He did need a safe refuge to retreat into at times when things got too hot.

Ramsey Russell: So whereas in the movie, Jeremiah Johnson, nobody knows what came of him, he just disappeared into the mountains like he’d wish to. But the real Liver-Eating Johnson, gosh, he ran a western show similar to Buffalo Bill Cody.

Nathan Bender: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And he became a sheriff.

Nathan Bender: Yes, he was a sheriff.

Ramsey Russell: He must have been domiciled.

Nathan Bender: He was the sheriff down in Colorado as well, for a while, and then he moved up, back up to Montana. He was friends with ex Beadler. He was a scout during the war with the Nez Perce up here at Clark.

Ramsey Russell: What was known about that period of his life?

Nathan Bender: When Nez Perce were coming out of the Clark river valley there he was in that fight against them.

Ramsey Russell: That was here in Wyoming?

Nathan Bender: Yeah, just north of here, like 20 miles.

Ramsey Russell: He was an unrepentant killer.

Nathan Bender: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: He was a war veteran. And it sounds like he was almost a mercenary. I mean, he may have gone to California, he was involved in the scout in the Nez Perce wars. He had a thing about Sioux for having stolen his trap.

Nathan Bender: He got along well with a lot of the army type people and the people who were settling the west. But he was an enemy of most of the Native Americans, with the exception of the Crow. So that’s why it’s so ironic that the story became Crow killer because that was the one group of American Indians that he really got along with.

Ramsey Russell: What was it? I mean, I would have just – I know they were tribal rivals over territory and land and boundary disputes and everything else, but it just seemed odd to me that somebody that reputedly shot so many Indians was taken in by Indians and so much that they named a kid after him.

Nathan Bender: Part of it because the Crow were also fighting the Sioux and the Blackfeet during those years, those were traditional enemies.

Ramsey Russell: So, an enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Nathan Bender: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Those are strange times.

Nathan Bender: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: What else is known about the real Liver-Eating Johnson?

Nathan Bender: He did need a safe refuge to retreat into at times when things got too hot.

Ramsey Russell: Sounds like it. Well, what other kind of hot situations did he get into?

Nathan Bender: Well, for a while, he was on the Missouri river and he was making money, he would cut firewood for the steamships coming up and down. What you would do, you just cut a big pile of wood, leave it by the river landing, and then the steamships would leave you a bag of silver coins for you to come pick up after they were gone. They weren’t going to wait around for you to show up. But that means you’re out cutting wood and making a lot of noise and exposing yourself on Indian land where you’re not really supposed to be.

Ramsey Russell: So that would draw attention to him.

Nathan Bender: It was a dangerous lifestyle. Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: So in a lot of respects, like in the movie when Robert Redford, I mean, he might be checking his traps, he might be doing something, and they were sending them out one at a time. I mean, he kind of lived that life just by being on their land, making a living, trapping, killing wolves, killing animals, chopping wood, he didn’t care.

Nathan Bender: Well, everybody was trying to make a living back then on that, and it was a rough society.

Ramsey Russell: Did he ever get into the buffalo trade?

Nathan Bender: Yeah, he was. Towards the end, he was part of the buffalo hunting.

Ramsey Russell: That’s where that sharp’s rifle came.

Nathan Bender: Yeah, with Vic Smith was also another buffalo hunter. There’s pictures of them side by side in the same picture.

Ramsey Russell: Who was Vic Smith? Just a friend of his? As much known about him.

Nathan Bender: He was a famous buffalo hunter.

Ramsey Russell: What is known about Vic Smith and his buffalo hunting that became famous?

Nathan Bender: Oh, he was very good at it and did it for a long time.

Ramsey Russell: What would be a good buffalo day or a good buffalo week or a good buffalo haul? What are we talking about? I’ve heard so many stories about these buffalo hunters going out and shooting a bunch, but I don’t know if they’re going out and shooting a dozen what seems like a lot of going out and shooting 1200.

Nathan Bender: They would go out and try to find a herd, and they would specialize in then decimating that herd.

Ramsey Russell: Of a 1000?

Nathan Bender: Well, I don’t know if they could deal with 1000 in one day. I mean, they would have to deal with the number of animals they could skin out and process, too.

Ramsey Russell: I’ve heard that the reason those long distance sharp rifles so popular is because they could back off and fire shots to where feeding buffalo wouldn’t stampede. It just all of a sudden, boom, one of them falls.

Nathan Bender: Oh, you were actually shooting like 500 grain bullets and as opposed to your round ball, which is like maybe 250 grain, which was round and not as ballistically efficient as that long, heavy bullet, those rifles had an increased range over a year.

Ramsey Russell: That’d be a heck of a charge to send a 500 grain bullet several hundred yards.

Nathan Bender: Well, they perfected. They were starting long distance shooting. Buffalo Bill was still doing it the old style where you run up next to the buffalo and shoot it from 10ft away. And he had his 50 caliber –

Ramsey Russell: Kind of like dancing with wolves.

Nathan Bender: Well, he used a 50 caliber Springfield trap door. 5070 and that was his preferred buffalo hunting rifle.

Ramsey Russell: What were those sharps rifles really like though, Nathan? I mean, how far could they back off and send a 500 grain projectile?

Nathan Bender: Well, they had the peep sight ladders, they could go up to a couple hundred yards, which was a lot further than your muzzleloaders were.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Nathan Bender: Typically used out.

Ramsey Russell: And if you heard those kind of stories, like I alluded to, where they would just sit and hide and pick them off one at a time.

Nathan Bender: I’ve heard those stories. Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Sit out there for days and just shoot them.

Nathan Bender: Well, I’m sure they learned the pros and cons of what to do and by trial and error learned how to do it.

Ramsey Russell: How much powder you think they were putting behind a bullet like that?

Nathan Bender: Well, your cartridges, you had your 5070, 5090, you have your 45 caliber cartridges, you had 4590 was a popular cartridge.

Ramsey Russell: It’s got a kick on both ends.

Nathan Bender: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: So, I’m still trying to get my mind wrapped around how many shots a day I might be firing if I’m a famous buffalo hunter. What do you think?

Nathan Bender: Well, it’s also you have to reload your cartridges in the field on there if you’re shooting that much. How many cartridges are you actually going to carry with you? But then you are in the field, reloading them with black powder you can do that.

Ramsey Russell: Have you ever read any documentation of so and so shot X number of buffaloes per day and he’s got the record, or week or month?

Nathan Bender: I’m not up on those right now, I’d have to look those up. They may be out there, but I’m not conversant with those at the moment.

Ramsey Russell: Would you guess?

Nathan Bender: I don’t even want to guess.

Ramsey Russell: I can’t get my mind wrapped around shooting that many buffalo. You see it depicted in Hollywood that just for miles there was just dead buffalo with a skin and their tongue out.

Nathan Bender: There’s that new PBS documentary on American buffalo just came out. Ken Burns crew Florentine films, they came here and did a lot of their research right here at this library.

Ramsey Russell: They didn’t let on to what they found.

Nathan Bender: Well, it’s in their motion, it’s in their documentary.

Ramsey Russell: I see. He was a firewood cutter, he was an Indian hater, he hunted buffaloes, he hunted wolves.

Nathan Bender: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: What else do we know about Liver-Eating Johnson? He was a practical joker, he ate 5lbs of buffalo meat per sitting, might go a week later, apparently didn’t like barbers looking at the picture.

Nathan Bender: He did come down to Cody here because of the hot springs, and later in life he was suffering from rheumatism and arthritis and all that stuff. So he was a big fan of hot springs. So the hot springs up in Montana he would frequent, he would come down here to Cody because there’s hot springs in the Shoshone river here. So right where he’s buried, he was in the hot springs soaking in his old age. So I think it’s appropriate that he’s buried here, this was an area that he actually did frequent in his lifetime.

Ramsey Russell: Seems to me, he kind of came on the scene around the Civil War. When did he die? Like what year did he -?

Nathan Bender: 1900. And he got buried at that veteran’s home in California.

Ramsey Russell: He kind of straddled.

Jeremiah Johnson Movie: Public Perception

And they said, hey, Liver-Eating Johnson, Jeremiah Johnson is buried right here in California, right down the street from us. They all got, oh, that’s horrible, he should be buried in the Rocky Mountains where he was.

Nathan Bender: And then what happened was after the Jeremiah Johnson movie came out, there was a school teacher called Tri Robinson, and he was teaching about mountain man of the west to his schoolchildren. And they said, hey, Liver-Eating Johnson, Jeremiah Johnson is buried right here in California, right down the street from us. They all got, oh, that’s horrible, he should be buried in the Rocky Mountains where he was. So they started a letter writing campaign to the governor’s schoolchildren on this and they got the body. They got themselves declared as next of kin because they couldn’t find his relatives. They got themselves next of kin and authorized the removal of the body, and they got old Trail Town to accept the body and to bury it out here, Bob Edgar.

Ramsey Russell: In his lifetime, all we’ve talked about. But he seemed to have straddled the wild west and the tamed west.

Nathan Bender: Yeah, he was at the end, and that’s why he was trying to make money off of his name and his reputation that he had acquired. But he wanted to sell his stories to the newspapers and that he had actually written up some dramatic episodes and stuff he thought maybe he’d get a stage play out of it or something.

Ramsey Russell: He was a sheriff in a couple of the – Wyoming and Colorado. What brought him to California when he deceased?

Nathan Bender: The veterans hospital. Because he had a pension.

Ramsey Russell: How old would he have been when he died?

Nathan Bender: He was born 1824, died 1900. So like in his 70s there.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I mean, people live a lot longer, but that was a hard life back then, wasn’t it? Here’s a question I’ve got. Is the reason this person that so little is known about is the reason he is famous, book written about him and a dramatized fictional movie. I mean, there had to been just hundreds if not thousands of people just like him. A lot of his contemporaries that lived and behaved just like him. But he still got a historic named, right Nathan?

Nathan Bender: He had some sort of charisma.

Ramsey Russell: He was a character.

Nathan Bender: His story and reputation had almost died out in the 1940s, after World War II, 1950s. Then the book Crow Killer resurrected.

Ramsey Russell: When was it?

Nathan Bender: 1958. And then Vardis Fischer wrote his book called Mountain Man, and that was a huge success. And he wrote his as a novel on study of male and female in the American west. And he took that idea of his wife and child being murdered and then him going on revenge against the whole nation and turn that into a full length novel. And that was what they were working with when they made the Jeremiah Johnson movie was from Vardis Fischer’s book Mountain Man. But that was inspired by Thorpe’s book, Crow killer.

Ramsey Russell: Is this the only picture that exists?

Nathan Bender: So now you’ve got this whole popular culture movement about based on Jeremiah Johnson as this like progressive liberal mountain man, as opposed to the traditional stories of your ultra conservative, Liver-Eating Johnson.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, he was a character, no doubt. Is this the only picture in existence?

Nathan Bender: No, there’s several pictures of him.

Ramsey Russell: Because in this picture on the cover of this book, he doesn’t look like to me a mountain man.

Nathan Bender: Well, that was up at Fort Keogh in Miles City, Montana that picture was taken during the buffalo hunting days up there.

Ramsey Russell: That’s why he’s holding that buffalo rifle.

Nathan Bender: That’s why he’s holding the sharp’s rifle.

Ramsey Russell: What are some of the other pictures that exist?

Nathan Bender: There’s some of them are in here. There’s one of them. A couple of them is an old man. Let’s see. I thought they were somewhere in here.

Ramsey Russell: I didn’t remember any pictures in the book, in the book I have anyway.

Nathan Bender: Yeah, there’s one where he’s dressed up real as a gentleman, it’s a formal portrait and he’s got his beard all groomed and he’s looking like a successful gentleman. And then there’s another where he shaved his beard off and he just has a mustache and he’s pretty much bald and doesn’t have a beard. And that was what he sort of looked like when he went to California, to the old folks home.

Ramsey Russell: Did he ever marry or have kids? Because in the movie he did.

Nathan Bender: He didn’t have any European American wives. He was accused of having a Crow Indian wife, but he heard about that. He actually wrote a letter to the Billings newspaper and said he had never been married to a Crow Indian woman. But then later on, somebody else was interviewing a group of Crow Indian women, one of them claimed to be his wife.

Ramsey Russell: Really? Maybe it was just something that was socially taboo.

Nathan Bender: I don’t think he had any church marriages, let’s say.

Ramsey Russell: I see. He just may have cohabitated with her.

Nathan Bender: That may have been. We will never know that for sure.

Ramsey Russell: He was a very industrious person, Nathan. He was always working on something. He was always trying to make a dollar. Did he make any money?

Nathan Bender: Whatever he had, he would drink. While he was up at Red Lodge, the bar owner would take his rifle on, like, exchange for a hawk, exchange for drinks until he could bring in the cash money to get his rifle back.

Ramsey Russell: Let’s go take a look. I really appreciate this story. I mean, you’ve cleared up a lot, this is the true saga of Liver-Eating Johnson.

Nathan Bender: I want to say Jeremiah Johnson is a movie. Is a fantastic movie.

Ramsey Russell: Fantastic movie. And you know what, I was surprised to learn this –

Nathan Bender: And there’s nothing against the movie, it’s just not a true story.

Ramsey Russell: Well, that’s what Hollywood takes Liberty with the fact.

Nathan Bender: But it’s a novel. It’s a historic telling inspired by other people.

Ramsey Russell: I was surprised to learn, I’m hunting about an hour from here at Mountain View Mallard Lodge with 3 or 4 guys in their 30s and a lady, and none of them have seen the movie Jeremiah Johnson, which made me think, well, there’s probably a lot of folks, a lot of young folks listening to this that never seen the movie Jeremiah Johnson. Go get the movie Jeremiah Johnson. It’s got to be on Netflix or Hulu or somewhere. Jeremiah Johnson, 1972. It was a iconic American film about mountain man.

Nathan Bender: Well, and up in Montana, there’s still people –

Ramsey Russell: Practically every line in the movie is a quote.

Nathan Bender: Yeah. And the odd part is around here, northern Wyoming, southern Montana, there’s still people whose family members have memories of this guy.

Ramsey Russell: Really? Have you had been able to talk to them?

Nathan Bender: Yeah. I was traveling around Wyoming on the Wyoming Humanities Council, giving talks on Liver-Eating Johnson, on my research on him, because I’ve published on him a good bit. And people would come up and talk to me and tell me their family stories. I mean, I would talk to the people who, the guy telling me, yeah, his mother had been one of the nurses that took care of him when he was on his old age, just before he went back to California and helped take care of him.

Ramsey Russell: Did he tell the mother any stories that she imparted to the children?

Nathan Bender: Not that he then told me on that. I’ve heard some others that – but they were all involved, either Sioux or Blackfeet. I haven’t heard a single verification from any of these people that he ever was at war with the Crow.

Ramsey Russell: Well, they got somebody named after him.

Nathan Bender: Well, part of it was the way they wrote the book. Thorpe, the co-author, was Robert Bunker. These two people never actually met.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, really?

Nathan Bender: Thorpe sent his papers to Bunker so he could make a good story out of them. And so then Bunker came up with this idea of, oh, it was a revenge motif and Liver-Eating Johnson did have a lot of revenge stuff, but it was for stealing his stuff, not because they killed his wife. But he made it the more emotionally poignant story of losing his wife and unborn child that motivated him into a noble pursuit, as opposed to just, I just want to get these guys because they stole my stuff.

Ramsey Russell: I mean, really, the story you told today, he was just, no offense to anybody listening that might be related to this guy, I don’t know, but I mean, he looks a lot like Charles Manson. Tell me he doesn’t. Does he not look like Charles Manson?

Nathan Bender: There’s something to his eyes that look like Charles Manson. Yeah, it does. That’s not reflected in all of the photographs of him, but that particular one.

Ramsey Russell: The man was a killer.

Nathan Bender: The man was a killer.

Ramsey Russell: Raise your mic just a little bit. The man was just an unrepentant mountain man killer that made a dollar anyway he could and shot it, sounds like any indigenous person that got in his way of making a dollar.

Nathan Bender: Well, he was also trying to promote his legacy and his story because he was going to try to make money off of that as part of his old age plan. And you look at Buffalo Bill, who made mega –

Ramsey Russell: He saw Buffalo Bill and wanted to be like that.

Nathan Bender: Yeah, because there were people out there doing that, and he wanted to be part of that.

Ramsey Russell: It doesn’t sound like he made much more money than he could drink away at a bar.

Nathan Bender: Yeah, I’ve never heard of him actually accumulating any wealth.

Ramsey Russell: But he would have certainly maybe made a little bit of money had he been around or his heirs been around when the movie was filmed, he probably been proud that somebody like Robert Redford played him.

Nathan Bender: Oh, I think he would have loved that movie.

Ramsey Russell: Wrap it up this way. Did you tell me that when his body was exhumed in California and moved to Cody, Wyoming, that Robert Redford came up?

Nathan Bender: Yeah. When they buried him at Old Trail Town, Robert Redford came up and was one of the pallbearers of the casket. When they put it into the ground.

Ramsey Russell: Who were the other pallbearers?

Nathan Bender: They had some men from the local mountain men group and from around the region.

Ramsey Russell: Any of the actors from Jeremiah Johnson?

Nathan Bender: None of the other actors from the movie were in there, but they had people from local mountain man groups. Some of them came up from Utah. There’s Timber Jack Joe, he was one of the guys that was there and from other places in Wyoming. And then they gave him a mountain man burial that night.

Ramsey Russell: What is mountain man burial?

Nathan Bender: Oh, they all put grave goods in on top of it and gave little speeches and stuff and put medicine bags of, I know of at least one little funny weed thrown in there for him from someone who was there.

Ramsey Russell: Nathan, I sure appreciate you taking time from your busy schedule to come tell us the true saga of Liver-Eating Johnson, AKA Jeremiah Johnson, is depicted in the 1972 film. You young guys who hadn’t seen this movie, trust me, it’s a great movie, it’s worth a day in a recliner watching this movie, you’ll probably watch it again. And I remember this one time, way back when I was in college, which was 25 years, Nathan, 30 years maybe after this movie was filmed, I was sitting in a college class and a Forest Economics professor, old doctor Bullard had – we showed up for class to get our marching orders for the semester, and he handed out a questionnaire, it was just like, who are you? What do you like to do? What’s your favorite TV show? What’s your favorite movie? Whatever, just something to do. And he read out answers to the next class, and he said, every class I’ve ever surveyed, 80% of every classroom always said Jeremiah Johnson.

Nathan Bender: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: It’s just an American icon. Is that what led a guy like yourself here from Ohio? Is that what founded your interest in history?

Nathan Bender: It definitely helped sparked my interest.

Ramsey Russell: Just the movie.

Nathan Bender: That movie was extremely influential to a whole generation of historians as well. Even the historians got their history mixed up from seeing that movie. And they would refer to him in writing as Jeremiah Johnson. Even on his tombstone out here, it says John Jeremiah Liver-Eating Johnson.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Nathan Bender: Yes. And from historians who should have known better, they adopted and thought, and they were referring him to Jeremiah Johnson because that’s how everybody knew him as.

Ramsey Russell: Johnson may not have been his name, Jeremiah certainly was not and the only name that we will ever know about this man is Liver-Eating.

Nathan Bender: Well, he adopted Johnston as his legal name, spelled with a T, Johnston, even though he was popularly known as Johnson without the T on that. But all his legal documents that we have from 1862 on are spelled with the T.

Ramsey Russell: But history indicates it was probably something else. A man came from somewhere and rediscovered himself in the American world.

Nathan Bender: He probably did reinvent himself up there.

Ramsey Russell: I mean, from what I’ve heard today, it would surprise me a bit that he doesn’t kill somebody –

Nathan Bender: Wouldn’t surprise me a bit that he had to leave some history behind him.

Ramsey Russell: Thank you very much, Nathan. And folks, thank you all for listening to this episode of Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast where you now know the true saga of Liver-Eating Johnson. See you next time.

 

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Flashback Decoy by Duck Creek Decoy Works. It almost pains me to tell y’all about Duck Creek Decoy Work’s new Flashback Decoy because in  the words of Flashback Decoy inventor Tyler Baskfield, duck hunting gear really is “an arms race.” At my Mississippi camp, his flashback decoy has been a top-secret weapon among my personal bag of tricks. It behaves exactly like a feeding mallard, making slick-as-glass water roil to life. And now that my secret’s out I’ll tell y’all something else: I’ve got 3 of them.

Ducks Unlimited takes a continental, landscape approach to wetland conservation. Since 1937, DU has conserved almost 15 million acres of waterfowl habitat across North America. While DU works in all 50 states, the organization focuses its efforts and resources on the habitats most beneficial to waterfowl.

It really is Duck Season Somewhere for 365 days. Ramsey Russell’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast is available anywhere you listen to podcasts. Please subscribe, rate and review Duck Season Somewhere podcast. Share your favorite episodes with friends. Business inquiries or comments contact Ramsey Russell at ramsey@getducks.com. And be sure to check out our new GetDucks Shop.  Connect with Ramsey Russell as he chases waterfowl hunting experiences worldwide year-round: Insta @ramseyrussellgetducks, YouTube @DuckSeasonSomewherePodcast,  Facebook @GetDucks