Due to the tall tale telling Mountain Man, Del Gue and the Robert Redford movie, Jeremiah Johnson most who have heard of Liver-Eating Johnson think of his feud with the Crows, or Sacred Ravens. The only problem is, Del is the only source for that tale and he is murky about it.
The Crow deny it.
The Crow and Johnson had the same enemies—the Sioux and Blackfeet. Ironically, the only confirmed account of Del’s concerning Johnson’s cannibalistic proclivities [confirmed by three others] has him eating a Sioux liver after defending against an attack on the fort at the forks of the Musselshell, where Crow women worked as prostitutes and their men had recently gathered to trade.
However, De Gue checks out on that story against the other sources. Gue’s stories of the Blackfeet feud are more solid, but it was not pursued in the film or in many minds because the Blackfeet were stalwart enemies of the whites and Johnson behaved abominable towards them—with no honor, as he supposedly showed with the Crow. But then again the Crow and Blackfeet were enemies…
Having read the scant primary sources twice, I am convinced that no “history” of this feud can be written. I am also convinced that it happened, for the very reason that Gue told it straighter than the other Indian feuds, with obvious chivalric inserts.
Comparing Gue against the other sources on Johnson, and Gue with himself has convinced me that rather than a hero, Johnson was a monster and also that the feud with the Crow was more limited than Gue’s embellished version. There is the fact that 85% [at a minimum] of the Crow died off at the end of the period the feud was supposed to have spanned, possibly accounting for the outrageous estimates of Crows killed by Johnson as well as the lack of acknowledgement by the Crow that the feud occurred.
On this investigative journey with Shayne and Ishmael I will be focusing on the Native perspective. I have to get more of that than I have through reading, because the only way I see writing this is as a horror story from the Crow perspective. The feud will be minimally represented, sticking to the bare structure of Gue’s tall tale.
That said, Johnson did eat fresh Indian liver—raw, on at least one occasion
Under the God of Things
I would bet that by a large majority all the prospectors who ventured into Indian territory were a bit crazy, stupid, malcontents or all three together. Wandering around by yourself with no tribe to protect you among a group of hostiles who frequently torture people for fun doesn't show much in the way of forward thinking.