The Movie Star & The Cannibal
- Matthew Kerns
- 6 days ago
- 3 min read
Did you know that Hollywood’s greatest leading man, an Academy Award winner and heartthrob of a generation, once served as a pallbearer for one of America’s most infamous cannibals? Even stranger: it happened seventy-four years after the man’s death.
On June 8, 1974, in Cody, Wyoming, Robert Redford carried the coffin of John “Liver-Eating” Johnston, the mountain man whose gruesome legend inspired Redford’s iconic role in Jeremiah Johnson.
Johnston’s story is one of the wildest in the Old West—but not in the way most people think. The real John Johnston was a hard-bitten mountain man, Civil War veteran, lawman, and scout. But the legend that made him famous came later, in the 1958 book Crow Killer, a work of fiction dressed up as biography. In its pages, Johnston became a grim avenger who swore bloody vengeance on the Crow after they murdered his Flathead wife, The Swan. According to the tale, he scalped his victims, cut out their livers, the seat of the soul in Crow belief, and ate them raw. They said the Crow called him Dapiek Absaroka: the Crow Killer.
The truth was very different. Johnston never ate a human liver. In fact, among his friends the Crow he was remembered as the only white man who would join them in eating deer liver raw. They called him “Black Bear,” and far from being an implacable enemy, he was respected in their camps. Late in life, Johnston even signed on with the Hardwick Wild West Show, where he performed on stage alongside his Crow friends and Calamity Jane.
Hollywood doubled down on the legend. When Robert Redford starred in Sydney Pollack’s Jeremiah Johnson (1972), the movie didn’t just adapt the mythologized version of Johnston from Crow Killer—it transformed his story into something larger, more elegiac, and even more enduring.
After the release of Jeremiah Johnson in 1972, the myth completely eclipsed the man.
Robert Redford, under the direction of Sydney Pollack, turned Johnston’s grim legend into one of the greatest frontier films ever made. Jeremiah Johnson was equal parts elegy and survival saga, with Redford’s brooding performance defining how a generation imagined the mountain man.
And then, in one of those stranger-than-fiction turns, Redford was called upon to honor the man himself.
By the late 1890s, Johnston’s health had collapsed. Wracked with arthritis and with no wife or children to look after him, he depended on the charity of friends in Red Lodge, Montana, the last place he’d called home. When they could no longer care for him, they helped arrange for his transfer to the Old Soldiers’ Home in Los Angeles.
There, far from the mountains that had defined his life, Johnston lingered only a short time before his death in January 1900. He was buried in the Los Angeles Veterans Cemetery—so close to the San Diego Freeway that the man who had once roamed the wildest reaches of the Rockies now lay in the shadow of rush-hour traffic.
Decades later, a group of California junior-high students decided that was no proper resting place for a legend. They raised the money, lobbied politicians, and arranged for Johnston’s reinterment in Cody, Wyoming—the heart of Buffalo Bill country, but not the place where Johnston himself had lived.
On June 8, 1974, more than 1,200 spectators gathered as the coffin arrived. Among them was Robert Redford, who shouldered the casket alongside locals and dignitaries. The movie star who had embodied the myth now literally carried the man who had inspired it.
Think about it: a Hollywood icon,leading man, and Oscar-winner known for his quiet intensity, lending his strength to a man remembered, no matter how incorrectly, for scalping his enemies and allegedly eating their livers. It’s one of those rare cultural collisions where frontier myth, pop culture, and American memory all meet in a single moment.
The sight of Redford carrying Johnston’s coffin sealed the story forever. In that moment, the man and the myth were joined. The real man John Johnston was being honored not just for who he was, but for the legend built upon him. And in moving his body from a veterans’ plot beside a Los Angeles freeway to the shadow of the Rockies, the reburial itself became a kind of Western parable: the blending of fact and folklore, history and Hollywood, all carried forward in the hands of a movie star.
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