Jeremiah (John) Johnson

Jeremiah (John) Johnson. Dapiek Absaroka. , Jeremiah Johnson was a Mountain Man. Indians gave him the name “Dapiek Absaroka”, meaning Crow Killer. He carried on a one-man war with the Crow Indian Nation in retaliation for the death and scalping of his Flathead Indian wife, The Swan, and their unborn child, killed in May of 1847 while Johnson was absent. He tracked, killed, and scalped the marauding band of young Crows, allowing one to escape. Recovering his wife's scalp, he intertwined her hair with that of her killer's scalp in a permanent death embrace. He kept the bones of his wife and unborn child in a brass kettle, hidden in the rocks of a cliff, making repeated pilgrimages to it. , Having declared war on the Crows, he killed them one on one, often with his Bowie knife, making sure his victim knew he was about to die at the hands of Dapiek Absaroka. After scalping the Crow, he cut out his liver, and ate it raw. This prevented the warrior from having a complete body in the afterlife, a serious handicap in Indian mythology. His mystical message of revenge infuriated the entire Crow Nation. Twenty hand-picked warriors were dispatched to kill him, “single, on separate trails”. None could return unless Johnson was dead. None would return; all killed by Johnson. The Sioux, Chippewa, Blackfeet, and Cheyenne would ridicule the Crows. “Isantanka” (Big Knife), they would taunt, drawing a finger below their lower rib cage. Enmasse, Crows could easily have killed Johnson, but their code required a single brave count coup against him. , When Johnson strolled through Fort Laramie, Wyoming, womenfolk often closed their shutters, peering through cracks at the dreaded “Solitaire”, scalps dangling from the ring on his belt, great red beard and grey eyes. He carried a Colt Walker revolver, and a 14-inch Bowie knife, which had matched handles of polished rosewood. His rifle was a Hawken, 30 caliber, prized by all mountain men. He stood six-foot-two with a 240 lb. frame draped in fringed and beautifully decorated Crow buckskin and moccasins, removed from his victims. He was known to the white world up and down the Overland and Oregon Trail as Liver Eating Johnson. , Johnson ultimately made peace with the Crows in 1868, after twenty-five years of war. The Crows gave a full ceremonial burial to an insane woman, Jane Morgan, who lived alone and died of natural causes five miles above the mouth of the Musselshell River in E. Central Montana. The Crows did this out of respect for Johnson, who for many years, left game on her doorstep. Chief Grey Bear intended to honor Johnson and the white woman both of whom they believed had been touched by the Great Spirit. Dapiek Absaroka eventually fought side-by-side with the Crows against other tribes. , Johnson began as a mountain man late in the trade. He was born in New Jersey of Scottish descent and disembarked from the stern-wheel steamer, Thames, on the Missouri River at St. Joseph, Missouri, in 1843, age 20. His trade would be trapping, the Rocky Mountains his home, and anything or anybody that came between him and either of these entities would face death. , The Blackfeet Indians captured and humiliated Johnson in 1861. He broke free of his guard, cut and twisted the man's leg off while he was still conscious, and escaped half-naked into the night in a blizzard. The leg provided food and served as a frozen club, which he used to beat off a semiconscious hibernating grizzly in a cave. , The cutting edge of New England capitalism, names of many mountain men stand out. Sublette, Del Gue, Bear Claw (Chip Davis), Mariano Modeno (Big Thompson), Anton Sepulveda, Grizzly Bill Miller, Senor Wyatt, Wind River Jake (with a back full of arrows like a porcupine), Bald-head Pete and Mad Mose (both survived scalping), Hatchet Jack Ireland, Lobo Med (burned alive by the Cheyennes), Pancho Robles, Arkansas Pete, Apache Joe Wyatt (who routed an entire Apache village and was later riddled with arrows in the San Juans, his head carried off on a pole), and of course, Liver-Eating Johnson. Mountain men were fatalists; an arrow for one, a grizzly bear for another, or to die freezing to death was how life went. , Early frontiersmen came West to trade for beaver pelts, first coming down from Canada and then moving up the Missouri River, creating a series of economic links with the Indians, intermarrying and learning survival skills. Later mountain men like Johnson came West as harbingers of American conquest that would draw the western continent into the United States, and away from Mexico, Spain, France, and Russia. Colonizers from Spain, such as Coronado, preceded Missouri River trappers into the West by several hundred years, establishing colonies as early as 1540 along New Mexico's Rio Grande river valley. The Spanish also colonized other areas that would become Texas, Arizona, Colorado, and California. Americans created the myth that the first Spaniards who came from the south in Mexico, and the mountain men who came from the eastern states entered an open unoccupied West. The fact is, the West was occupied by Indians for up to 40,000 years. This attitude conveniently ignored Indian ownership of anything… land, wild animals, or personal dignity. , During the Civil War, Johnson spent almost two years with Company H, 2nd Cavalry, Colorado Volunteers, as a sharpshooter in the Missouri battles of Newtonia and Mine Creek. He was officially reprimanded for scalping Confederate Indian soldiers. , The Liver Eater's last years were spent in law enforcement as a deputy sheriff in Coulson, Wyoming, and later in 1888 he moved to Bear Creek and became the first marshal at Red Lodge, Montana. All the old forts and frontier trading posts were crumbling, and in 1895 his health crumbled as well. Johnson's last plot of land sold in 1899, and he fretted about taking help or charity. Friends moved him to an old soldier's home in Los Angeles in December and he died one month later, January 21, 1900, age 77. Ironically, for a man who loved the wilderness, he lies buried in Los Angeles, California, in a crowded cemetery just off Wilshire Boulevard, on San Juan Hill, Row D, second stone from the road. It reads simply, John Johnson, Co. H, 2nd Colorado Volunteers. , This plaque was donated by the Fraser River Valley Lions Club