In 1847, a young Crow hunting party killed the wife of John Garrison Johnston, a former Navy deserter turned mountain man in Montana Territory. According to historian Andrew Mehane Southerland, "He supposedly killed and scalped more than 300 Crow Indians and then devoured their livers" to avenge her death, and "as his reputation and collection of scalps grew, Johnson became an object of fear."
The vendetta lasted 25 years. One account says the Blackfoot captured him and planned to sell him to the Crow, but he knocked out his guard, took the man's knife, scalped him, and escaped into the woods — then walked 200 miles to his trapping partner's cabin.
He eventually made peace with the Crow, who "became his brothers." In his time he was a sailor, scout, soldier, gold seeker, trapper, whiskey peddler, deputy sheriff, and town marshal. He died in a veterans' home in Santa Monica in 1900. His epitaph reads "No More Trails."
In 1974, a class of seventh graders campaigned to have his remains moved from Los Angeles to Cody, Wyoming. Robert Redford played him in the 1972 film Jeremiah Johnson.
