Crow Killer: The Saga of Liver-Eating Johnson
BOOK – Crow Killer: The Saga of Liver-Eating Johnson (Paperback)
PUBLISHER/DATE – Indiana University Press; First Midland Book Edition (August 1, 1983)
AUTHORS – Raymond W. Thorp Jr. (Author), Robert Bunker (Author)
DESCRIPTION – The true story (on which the film Jeremiah Johnson was partially based) of John Johnson, who in 1847 found his wife and her unborn child had been killed by Crow braves. Out of this tragedy came one of the most gripping feuds, one man against a whole tribe, in American history.
MY REVIEW
I purchased this book with the intent of seeing how well it stood up to the movie, Jeremiah Johnson starring Robert Redford. Boy was I surprised at the huge differences between the movie and the book. There were many differences, one big thing was, his name actually was not Jeremiah Johnson it was Jeremiah Johnston. The movie really dumbed down his life and made it very politically correct. What I mean by this is he was very well known for eating the livers of all the dead that he killed, be it Crow, Siow or Flathead indians. Not to mention he killed over 200 Crow Indians in his time. I could probably talk all day about the differences but I don’t want to give away the story from the book or harp on the differences, because if you’ve ever read a book you know that 9 out of 10 books are better than the movies.
All in all the book is a very good read and it is not very long at a 192 pages. It includes alot of historical facts which I found to be pretty nice because it helps with the authenticity of the characters. There was an issue I did have with the writing style though. Everytime you see a quote from or a conversation between Jeremiah Johnston and another frontiersman the authors put it in the English they spoke. Because of this writing style. I did have problems trying to read through the book. You would be reading along smoothly then all of a sudden you would encounter a few sentences of what I would call “gibberish”. The way the authors translated what the said was in very broken English and was very hard for my brain to understand. Luckily this is a small part of the book and doesn’t distract to bad from the history of the man an the legend.
FINAL THOUGHTS
I am very glad I bought this book off of Amazon seeing that I did get it for a roughly 5 dollars with shipping. I suggest that you should read it if you are a fan of history, frontiersmen or outdoorsmen or even a fan of the movie.
