After visiting six museums and numerous natural features in the land that Liver-Eating Johnston called home for the second half of his life, I have had to confront the debunking of the premise for the projected novel, Kettle of Bones, about the legendary feud between John Johnston—who was really William Garrison—and the Crow Nation, who were not so named before whites confused low land, coastal flock crows with high plains ravens.

!. The Crow were not the Crow but Apsaalooke, or The Children of the Large-Beaked Bird, or raven, which was a sacred bird, often operating individually, which is a superior cousin to the flocking crows us low landers know so well.

2. There is no record of Johnston having a feud, other than that in the book Crow Killer, which is mostly myth.

3. There was no time for Johnston to have such a feud with the Apsaalooke, as his documented activities preclude it.

4. Johnston and the Apsaalooke had the same Indian enemies, though the Apsaalooke had even more.

5. Johnston patronized Apsaalooke women working as companions at frontier posts.

6. Johnston worked side-by-side with Apsaalooke scouts.

7. Johnston, counter to myth, was also a prolific killer of white men, though he concealed this fact as best he could.

The myth however, pales before the truth. In fact, it seems that the authors of the myth that Johnston brought scalps of slain Apsaalooke warriors back to his fictional Flathead wife's kettle, where he supposedly stored her bones, seems to have been based on the fact that in Johnston's long, brutal feud with the Sioux, that he cooked their heads in a kettle, defiled them with humorous graffiti and sold them to tourists!

I have found my monster and he had a kettle for human bones even more dastardly than in the lionizing myth. While he did not eat any human liver, he did admit to pretending to do so in order to frighten the Indians and shock the tenderfeet, both of which he hated. Johnston was also a drug dealer, a seller of bad medicine an al around junkyard dog of the frontier, a brutally compelling, many-faceted man who shunned publicity—exactly the kind of man hunter that could have committed the actions that were later reattached to a romanticized version of the actual man.

Johnston was a monstrous man, grown from a savagely abusive boyhood and calloused in military service, whaling and vigilante work, who makes a perfect villain from the Indian's perspective. Also, his Blackfeet enemies—for which their is little evidence for a feud other than their abject terror of him—were descended from Algonquin immigrants from an earlier period, who carried the myth of the Eastern Woodland peoples concerning the Wendigo, a white cannibal monster-man who roams the forests. This description more aptly fits Lewis Wetzel, who hunted Indians down into the Ohio Country a generation before Johnston, who got their sacred pipe stone from the same sources as the plans Indians, near the Great Lakes. The Rattler, Chief of the Shoshone, describes meeting other pilgrims to this location at the time Wetzel was still pursuing his vendetta against the Shawnee and their allies

The Medicine Trace Tales will comprise a trilogy written in 2017, 18 and 19, in Chronological and westward order, which will also follow my learning curve from east to west. The three novellas will be titled:

1. Wendigo: Old Death Wind and the Summer Warriors

2. Bad Medicine: Wolf Killer and the Blackfeet

3. Kettle of Bones: Fire Demon and the Allied Warriors

The subtitles will be altered to better conform to the perspective of the natives in terms of how they named themselves, which shall require more research.