Below is a tale from the Secret History of America selected to illustrate the interplay of honor. Liver-Eating Johnson may not exist in the America of the mythic Founding Fathers, the martyred frontier mothers, and the rising feminist elite. Even the most right wing U.S. presidents could not abide ruling over a nation that such men as Johnson, in the ages old honor-based way of men, wrested from a proud race of stone age warriors; and did so as stone age warriors themselves. The American West has to be seen as having been won by John Wayne charging across the badlands as a trumpeter on a horse tolls the dirge of manifest destiny.
The closest thing American media ever did to memorializing one of the men who did the most to close the frontier even as he fled from hated civilization was the movie Jeremiah Johnson starring Robert Redford. This movie was based on Johnson’s life. But went on to water down and misrepresent almost everything. The telling point is that the screen writer John Milus was a historian [so knew the real Johnson story] and is regarded as the most right wing Hollywood person of all time, having directed Conan the Barbarian and the apocalyptically jingoistic Red Dawn. One reviewer described Conan as ‘Star Wars by a psychopath’. If it were possible for America to swallow the truth about its origin John Milus would have been just the hard case to shove it down there throat. But he chose not to.
The following tale was verified by eye-witnesses and includes telling non-combat details that the violence researcher looks for when ascertaining authenticity. This narrative is adapted from Crow Killer: The Saga of Liver-Eating Johnson by Raymond W. Thorp and Robert Bunker.
Dramatis Personae
Del Gue, lifetime companion of Johnson and teller of the tale
Jim Moorman old frontiersman
Waving Grass, the banished widow of Screeching Cat of the Cheyenne, whose first wife stabbed him to death for marrying Waving Grass and was burned at the stake for it as Waving Grass was banished to die in the wild, to be found and rescued by Johnson
Black Eagle, chief of 28 Crow Scouts under Nelson Miles, operating against the Sioux.
Sam Grant, ‘an especially black negro’ cowboy who was wanted for murder and contract killings the length of the Chisholm Trail and had made his way up the Bozeman Trail and joined the Crow Scouts against their wishes. Sam Grant was a feared gunfighter who had shot the famous Pinkerton bounty hunter Charlie Siringo, who only survived because of the actions of a black cowboy coming to his aid. Sam Grant was a large man who wore two revolvers and a bowie knife on his belt.
Liver-Eating Johnson, white chief of the Flatheads and Shoshone, blood enemy of the Sioux, Blackfeet, Nez Perce, Ute and Cheyenne, and former enemy and now ally of the Crow Nation, of whom he was said to have killed and eaten the livers of 247 of their warriors. Indians and whites had often sought the ‘Crow Killer’ out as a war leader and peace keeper at various times.
The Buffalo-hide Tepee
Arriving at the camp of Yellowstone Kelly, chief of scouts for General Nelson Miles in his latest campaign against the Sioux, ‘Liver-Eatin’ as his fellow Mountain Men affectionately called him, was informed by Del and Jim that Sam Grant had attached himself to the unit of scouts against Yellowstone Kelly’s wishes, and was ‘terrorizing’ the Crows, eight of whom had decided to burn him at the stake.
However, Black Eagle and his warriors did not want to incur the wrath of the white soldiers by killing a black man, who were, contrary to our current black hero mythology, not regarded as a friend to the Indian, but rather as a kind of dark-skinned buffalo-haired version of the white man.
Johnson was sitting up against Black Eagle’s teepee enjoying a smoke with the chief. Confident that Jim Moorman would speak of their desire to preserve their honor by doing away with the black gunfighter without impugning the honor of their white allies, the Crow warriors remained silent [Imagine a world where friends might not even speak upon meeting but remain friends—a man’s world, not a chattering woman’s world.] as Waving Grass broiled antelope steaks. Jim Moorman told him, that the Crows wanted “ter tie up an’ burn the varmint.”
Johnson said, to Moorman’s astonishment, “Burnin’s too cruel. Whar is this black galoot?”
Jim Moorman pointed upstream to a copse of trees where Sam Grant was camped, having crudely informed the Crow warriors that if they made him mad he was going to piss in their water.
Johnson assured his host and his warriors in his wretched English, “He’ll never pizen yer water, less’n by his carcass floatin’ in it. Ye know, I ain’t et sin’ yesterday.”
Johnson then began to eat the steaks his woman was broiling, to eat them very slowly and with relish.
Honor Interplay
This scene represents the interplay of five overlapping codes of honor:
1. Trophy
2. Autonomy
3. Society
4. Ethnicity
5. Hierarchy
Sam Grant has insulted the collective ‘society’ warrior honor of the Crow by threatening to kill, grinning at [which was considered rude], and threatening to pollute their drinking water by camping upstream and declaring that he would piss in their water.
The Crow, being polite and mindful of the collective ‘racial’ and ‘hierarchal’ honor of the white soldiers, who reserved the right to punish their own [and Grant had been working for the soldiers as a cattle driver until he recently deserted] deferred to Johnson to settle the matter as he had fought as a Blue Coat in the Whiteman’s War, and was regarded as a chief of white men and red men both.
Johnson, for his part, was always loathe to set personal ‘autonomous’ honor aside and thought that Grant deserved a one-to-one reckoning. This was a Crow tradition as well, as each of the 20 heroes they had sent hunting for Johnson had attacked him individually, and he had returned the honor by declining to use his gun and fighting with hand, foot and knife. [This was a world of polite behavior even in do or die situations.]
Also, one must not forget the fact that Johnson had risen to his current station, where the hierarchies he was associated with respected his autonomy and he was held in high esteem by the various societies of the men he kept company with by virtue of his prowess as a warrior. This prowess was represented by the numerous scalps and heads and livers he had taken as trophies, as well as the stone tomahawk he wore at his belt, a weapon of honorable significance from his past. Johnson normally favored fighting with his massive bowie knife and kicking men high into the air with his huge double moccasins. He was of course an excellent sniper and stalker and could have killed Grant like an animal, without the renegade cowboy even knowing.
But this was an affair of honor. Johnson may well be suspected of having only preserved Sam Grant’s autonomous honorable status to enhance his own. There is also the fact that Johnson was proud of never having killed a white man, and Grant’s status as a Reconstruction Era black made him socially closer to a white man than an Indian.
Civilized people have often looked down upon primitive honor bound warriors as crude and simplistic. To a primitive warrior who lives by a code of honor the civilized system of laws or military rules seems to promote oversimplified and necessarily clumsy behavior, with little attention to the many personal and social nuances that underlay such complex human interaction as conflict.
The Stone Tomahawk
After finishing his meal Johnson stalked over to Sam Grant’s camp where he was mending his gear. The cowboy never heard Johnson or the 2 Mountain Men, 8 warriors and one woman that trailed him. The witnesses said that Sam hummed as he plied his needle and his white teeth flashed in the sunlight.
Suddenly, his horse tethered nearby having never giving a warning as Johnson’s horse would have, Sam looked up to see the giant Mountain Man standing beside him. He looked around to find that Crow warriors with faces painted for war were peering at him from behind trees.
As Grant, a large man in jeans and flannel shirt, rose to his feet looking about at the Indians, Johnson said, “Them won’t hurt ye. Them is hyar ter see me move ye on down ther road.”
Sam Grant looked into Johnson’s hard eyes and looked way, saying, “Reckon yer don’t know who I am, white man.”
A white man laughed harshly from among the trees and Del and Jim stepped forward. Jim corrected Grant, “I reckon it’s t’other way roun’, black feller, reckon ye don’ know Johnson hyar.”
Grant put his right hand on a pistol butt.
Johnson hooked his thumbs in his belt and spoke in his precious mountain garble “Ther hell with who ye air. I’m offerin’ ye yer life. Now git on yer hoss an’ git outen hyar.”
Sam drew his pistol and the slug went into the ground as Johnson seized the wrist with his right hand, stepped back behind the gun arm, gripped Sam’s neck with his left hand and did a type of standing rear arm bar that snapped Grant’s elbow, which came apart with two distinct sounds.
Grant, a big tough man, gritted his teeth and reached for his left-hand gun. Johnson countered by doing a back heel throw which sent Grant about ten feet, drawing his stone tomahawk, and throwing it as the black cowboy came to his feet drawing the gun. The sharpened stone head of the weapon buried itself between the man’s eyes.
Jim Moorman yanked out the tomahawk. Waving Grass took the weapon from his hand and washed it in the spring. Johnson turned to Black Eagle and said, “Ye kin hev his skelp, an; his hoss an’ his weppins.”
That sure beats spending six months trying to get a restraining order against Sam, knowing that he’s still running around out there threatening the strong and wary and killing the weak and unwary. In fact, in our current honorless society there is no possible redress for the type of blatant threat that Sam Grant posed to the Crow warriors, only the state’s half-hearted promise of punishment.
We have fallen so far that our masters cannot ever let such tales as this creep into the national narrative from which they have been so ruthlessly expunged, lest their descent from humanity be appreciated by the resulting livestock now wallowing in human guise.
A Tribalism Note
Today many people who value masculinity also value tribalism. As we are a degenerate domesticated species attempts on our part to return to our wild tribal lifeway will naturally tend to be feral; or 'corrupt' through the contaminating agent of our civilized animus fueled and fanned by the manipulative political process. So it is no surprise to the researcher to note that those small number of tribal masculinity advocates tend to be found amongst Native American political advocates, black separatists and white ethno-nationalists, and that the tendency is to equate tribalism as an 'us versus them' 'in group out group' worldview.
If this is your view consider Johnson and the Crows. Not only had he been their greatest enemy until very recently, there was so much Crow blood on his hands that it is inconceivable that there was among those 8 Crows a warrior who was not related to, or a former companion of, a man that Johnson had previously killed and ritually devoured. Despite this they shared a common ethos or society that crossed tribal boundaries, which are after all proto-political demarcations. This would not be the last time that Johnson would kill for the Crows. The Sioux were next, the tribe that had once declared that the Crow nation was a tribe of women for not fielding a force capable of killing this one white man.
Concerning my answer to the comment below. the link is no good as I copied it off the back end of the site. Here is the link to the Stoddard book ‘The Curse Of Heaven’
I am SO enjoying your essays.
As a Pro-White person, I can say I have no hatred for anyone based on skin color. What we fear is that race-mixing, homosexuality and lack of Whites having children will cause us to either die out as a race or (with all the race baiting that goes on) become a hated, hunted minority. Look what happened to the French and even the half french/half blacks at the hands of the pure blacks in Haiti. Slaughtered! Look at the White S.African farmers being picked off one family at a time while the gov look the others way. Peopl with White skin have legitimate concerns!
Glad you are liking it Maureen.
I have done a review of the French revolution in San Domingo, a 20 page screed on Stoddard's classic book, which you should
read, titled The Curse of Heaven.
jameslafond.com/article.php?id=976&pr=0&no_stats=1
The Haitian revolution was not what the whites or the blacks that speak of it think. It was much more interesting. I have also done some fiction set there. I encourage you to read the Hemavore serials My Mamaloi, Wet Me Dead, and Drink Me Dry. Use the tag window in the contents box to the right.
For starters the second ruler of Haiti was a mսlatto.
As far as racial extinction, of the major races one [the copoid] is almost extinct thanks to white and black attention, and the only one of the other remaining major racial groups [with my Neanderthal ancestors unfortunately long ago extinct] are the blacks. World wide black population is declining, and is stagnant in the U.S.
The South African situation is interesting in that whites and black wiped out copoids to take it. Any white that would live in Sub Sahara Africa needs his/her head examined. I don't even know any blacks that want to live there. The entire history of humanity for a millions years was getting the hell out of that place! Places like Detroit and Baltimore will become mini South Africas—and have to some-extent—purely because it is what the U.S. Government has wanted since H. L. Meincken was writing about it 100 years ago. Empire states cannot resist designing ghettos anymore than a golf course designer can resist digging a sand trap.
Take care Maureen.
Happy holidays.
Hi again. Could you refer me to scholarly works on these copoids and also the stats for the black population declining.
Also, are you saying Whites are not a major racial group or that we are not declining?
I'm not seeking to debate...just a seeking truth.
Copoids: Joesph Campbell Way of the Animal Powers, Volume 1, part 1, page 40-3 and Brian Fagan Clash of Cultures, reviewed on this site in 2013 under I don't know what title.
The capoids that remain are the !kung Bushmen of the Kalahari and another small group. The Germans used to hunt them for sport. The ones that the Dutch and Blacks wiped out were the Hottentots. The women have additional fat cells in the butt and a unique labia. Look at the World Health Organization reports for the last 4 years. Black population in Africa is declining slightly and rising slightly in the U.S. partially because mixed race people in the U.S. are classed as black. The most recent survey I saw was on a book reviewed on the blog about 6 months ago—forget the title it was so boring—that has blacks at 11% U.S. expected to peak at 13%. Of course U.S. 'blacks' generally run about 70% African ancestry and are essentially a mixed population, and often considered mongrels by African immigrants.
For demographics search the Nation Geographic data base and the University of Michigan. Stoddard in the Rising Tide of Color did a nice assessment with breeding rates by race, which I reviewed under the title 'Overflowing the Cup of Wrath'. The Five basic races, not primarily classified by color but by an array of characteristics, are in terms of population the
1. Mongoloid, including Native Americans [with up to 5% Neanderthal DNA, increasing world wide]
2. Caucasoid, including Pathans, Berbers, Spaniards, Italians, Semites and other species of humans that Northern Europeans often classify as 'brown'. [with up to 5% Neanderthal DNA, increasing world wide]
3. Negroid, with the widest variety of shades and body types [declining slightly worldwide]
4. Australoid, [with up to 6% disnovian DNA, existing as a small remnant population in decline]
5. Capoid, [nearly extinct]
Worldwide only two of the major races are on the increase. These classifications are no longer politically correct and have become social footballs. There is also the current vast mixed race population in South and Central America. Note that the 2 basic races still expanding and interbreeding in the Americas consistently test higher in IQ than the other races and are also the only two populations with Neanderthal DNA, and those cave dwellers had much larger brains than we do. There is no evidence that this means anything, but it is tempting to suppose that the smartest people on earth ended up at the wrong end of a pointy stick 30,000 years ago.
Take care.