Jeremiah Johnson

About Jeremiah Johnson

Jeremiah Johnson is a 1972 western film about a man of that name, a disenchanted ex-soldier entering the realm of the mountain men, infamous for eating the livers of Crow warriors. It was directed by Sydney Pollack, and starred Robert Redford as Jeremiah Johnson and Will Geer as "Bear Claw" Chris Lapp. The movie is said to have been based in-part on the life of the legendary mountain man Liver-Eating Johnson. Based on Raymond Thorp/Robert Bunker's "Crow Killer" and Vardis Fisher's Mountain Man and scripted by John Milius and Edward Anhalt. The movie was filmed in Utah at various locations.

A veteran of the Mexican-American War (1846-48), Jeremiah Johnson seeks refuge in the West. He aims to take up the life of a mountain man, supporting himself in the western mountains as a trapper. In the winter he has difficulty surviving, and has a brief run in with Paints His Shirt Red, a Native American chief of the Crow tribe. Johnson soon finds a .50 caliber Hawken rifle on the frozen body of Hatchet Jack, another mountain man, replacing his inadequate .30 caliber Hawken. He then inadvertently disrupts the grizzly bear hunt of the elderly and eccentric "Bear Claw" Chris Lapp. After meeting at gunpoint ("I know who you are; you're the same dumb pilgrim I've been hearin' for twenty days and smellin' for three!"), Lapp takes him in and mentors him on how to live in the high country. Johnson claims he can skin most anything, so the first lesson is the delivery of a live grizzly bear into Lapp's cabin for Johnson to skin. After a brush with Crow Indians, including Paints His Shirt Red, (a friend of Lapp's) and learning the skills required to survive in the mountains, Johnson sets off on his own.

In his travels he comes across a small cabin, whose inhabitants apparently were attacked by Blackfoot warriors, and only a woman and her uncommunicative son survived. The woman, maddened with grief, forces Johnson to adopt her son. He and the boy, whom Johnson dubs "Caleb," come across Del Gue ("With an E"!), a mountain man with a severe dislike of several local Indian tribes. The bald-headed Gue had been robbed and buried up to his neck in the sand by the Blackfoot tribe. Del Gue travels with Johnson and Caleb, and they eventually come across a Blackfoot camp.