Reading Notes, 2015
The following story is properly placed in the realm of folklore. Of the many stories about the Liver-eater, this is, to me, one of the more believable, as it's telling fairly consigned this most violent of Mountain Man to the historical scrap heap. American historians would never endorse a man who was a cannibal, and would go on to completely neglect to mention him. Although Johnson was known for his feud with the Crow, his feud with the Blackfeet was bloodier, nastier, and much longer lived. It is my opinion, that, rather than the off repeated 247 Crows slain by this man, it was closer to 24, many of these probably murders with Johnson simply hunting his enemies like animals. We might safely, as we investigate these accounts, remove a digit from the numbers as one must when reading Herodotus.
When looking into accounts related as part of an oral history—which was the bedrock of my Harm City violence study—the recorder, in attempting to establish the veracity of the account, has numerous tools, the first of which is numerical reduction of the stated figure. Another is negative admissions of non-heroic or taboo behavior. Killing Indians was great in the Old West. Eating them was never kosher. Another clue is reticence to relate details of accounts known by inference.
I once faced down a man who many other men feared—and rightly so, for I feared him. He actually broke down and cried. We then became friends. In the future I always denied his crying when people asked about it. As his friend I had no desire to excavate his humiliation for his detractors to savor. Liver-Eater made peace with the Crows after an undetermined number of their warriors died at his hands or in pursuit of him [bears, Blackfeet, Sioux, other Mountain Men?] one at a time over the years. It is telling to me that no claim of his relating a killing of a Crow has come down to us in the folklore. We might even take his 'liver-eating' as a sacral act that precluded his discussion of the combat, which would, in spiritual terms, be a debasement of the act. The only Crow interactions noted in Crow Killer, my primary source, which is a questionable folk lore-based biography, are his making peace with a Crow Chief, his killing a black gunfighter as a favor to a Crow sub-chief, and his killing of a large Crow warrior while making biscuits while camped with his friend Del Gue. Del may be a suspect character. But, if he only sought to inflate the image of his dead friend, why did he place him unawares and doing domestic chores when attacked, and why did he use terms of revulsion to describe Liver-eater, well, eating liver?
The Black Foot
Feared Mountain Man Liver-Eater Crow-Killer Johnson had killed many Crow, Sioux and Black Feet warriors by the time of this adventure in the late 1840s. Nine of these kills had been seen by others, seven with his bare hands and moccasin-clad feet! Johnson was a big fearsome man who did not brag and barely talked. Most of his exploits come down to us from Indian witnesses and the three Mountain Men he worked with. The Crow Chief Big Robert had sent the twenty best warriors of his nation—selected by his mother—to kill Johnson. At the point of this story, Johnson was 18 livers deep into the 20 Crow heroes.
The non-drinking trapper decided, uncharacteristically, to take 50 gallons of whiskey to his Flathead allies. The infamous Liver-Eater was headed 300 miles to Flathead territory when he was ambushed by a chief of the Blackfeet Nation. He had killed numerous Blackfeet for Crazy Woman, a white pioneer widow who used to top the poles set over her slain children’s graves with Blackfeet warrior heads taken by her and Johnson. This chief, ‘The Wolf,’ who captured him in a defile at arrow point, intended to sell him dearly to the Crow Nation.
Again, if the Liver-Eater is the peerless Mountain Man, the account of his easy capture is something that a hero-making story teller would omit. Throughout the reading of his supposed exploits, I will be on the lookout for such besmirching details. To such a man hunter, being called like a rabbit in a snare had to be humiliating.
Left tied with his hands in front in a tepee with a single knife-armed guard while the Blackfeet drank his whiskey, Johnson chewed on his bindings. As the warrior looked on Johnson burst his binds and rose to face him. The warrior drew his knife and motioned for Johnson to sit back down. Johnson kicked the warrior in the groin with such force as to lift him in the air. He then slugged him with a ham-fisted punch, knocking him unconscious.
Johnson’s closest safe house was Del Gue’s cabin 200 miles east. It was the middle of winter in the Rocky Mountains, during a roaring blizzard. He was naked except for leggings and moccasins. Johnson took the Blackfeet warrior’s knife and did a spiral slice around his hip—as the poor bastard lived! He then grabbed hip and leg between his massive hands and snapped the leg bone clean, leaving the warrior to bleed on the floor as he made his way out into the night with his knife and leg. There is an indication that the warrior did not die of this amputation, at least not immediately.
Johnson set out through The Great Divide Basin, gnawing on the leg as he went. Due to the extreme cold the leg did not rot, as it was frozen solid. His problem was eating the frozen flesh. He once tried to cut through a portion and broke the knife.
Another dumb shit moment.
One night he retreated into a cave and curled up with the leg, letting his body heat warm it enough to be gnawed on. A large male cougar came into the cave after the leg, and tried to take it from Johnson, who used the leg as a club to drive off the cougar with a big racket. This battle awoke the grisly that slept in the back of the cave, which hobbled out to Johnson’s front portion of the cave to drive him off. Johnson managed to beat the grisly about the snout hard enough and often enough with the frozen leg to drive it back into the depths of the cave. Johnson, knowing that the grisly would return and prevail, went out into the night and walked through a blizzard to Del Gue’s cabin.
Within his cabin, cozily snowed in for the winter, Del Gue enjoyed a smoke on his pipe as he mended some moccasins. He was astonished to see the latch on his cabin door open, to reveal a gaunt naked version of his trapping partner, his giant face ‘cadaverous’ from his ordeal. Then Liver-Eating Johnson un-slung the Blackfoot warrior’s leg from his bony shoulder and said, “How air ye fixed fer meat, Del?”
That is a hero—even the Blackfeet thought so.
For further reading see Crow Killer: The Saga of Liver-Eating Johnson by Raymond W. Thorp and Robert Bunker.
