Pages 9-26, 171-207, 235-36

This plain-worded treatment of three period journals places the Liver-Eater at the time and place where he earned his name, at the expense of a Sioux, rather than a Crow, organ. The editor of these letters and diaries also sketches the tribal and racial landscape of the area. The reader comes away with the sense that the post-beaver period in this portion of the Rockies was incredibly violent. Men, such as Johnson, who worked as “whoodhawks,” were more likely than not to be slain by Indians. The character of the various tribes is noted:

-The Sioux were warlike and sought battle constantly with Whiteman or Redman.

-Assinibone folk were largely peaceful.

-Blackfeet wanted nothing to do with the Whiteman, and with few exceptions fought him at every turn.

-Fatheads were also peaceful, and the Crows killed them on sight.

-The Crows, legendary foes of Johnson, come off as quirky and arrogant and willing to deal with the whites.

-The whites simply came to murder the land, to kill every animal, cut down every tree, extract every valuable mineral and move on, repeating the same pattern set in motion by Cavaliers and Pilgrims in new England and Virginia in 1619-22. The most disgusting passages are those that describe the wasteful hunting methods, particularly wolfing, which involved killing and poisoning a bison and leaving it lay, then returning to the scene to skin the 60 wolves, dogs and coyotes that would be dead around it—the only meat taken from all of these sixty-odd lives being the bison tongue.

-Also repeated, is the inability of westward whites to keep their word—at all. These criticisms are made by the white editor and the various white authors of the journals, not the Indians.

In terms of the Liver-Eater himself, the suspect account of Del Gue is generally buttressed by the information here, the cold facts lining up, but the just and good-hearted and even romantic attributes of Johnson [suggested in Gue’s account] being completely absent. It is clear that he could have been little more than a monstrous killer on a private scale, which is what one expects of a figure so prodigiously credited with killing the heathen enemies of a Christian nation but denied general status as a hero. The evidence—such as it is—is continuing to confirm my suspicion that the best way to look at Johnson is as a heroic monster in the ancient pagan sense [a Herakles or Gilgamesh], and not as a hero in the Christian Soldier tradition favored for the period—and unfitted to his savage moral frame.

I will review the individual journals separately: three documents Mister Hampton did an excellent job of framing for the reader.