No one knows the exact moment when John Garrison stopped being John Garrison.

One day he was just a young man from New Jersey, born around 1824, carrying nothing but a name and a past no one would ever fully record. And then—somewhere between the Mississippi River and the first line of mountains that cut the sky—he disappeared into the great American West and came out again as someone else.

John “Liver-Eating” Johnson.
Hunter. Scout. Mountain man.
A legend made of hunger, snow, grief, and violence.

But before the myth began, there was simply a man trying to survive a world that had no softness left in it.

A Life Built from Loss

According to the most repeated version of the story, Johnson married a Native American woman from the Flathead tribe. The mountains gave them shelter. The land gave them food. For a brief time, he lived something rare for the frontier:

Peace.

Then it was gone.

While he was away hunting, a band of Crow warriors raided the area. They killed his wife—and the unborn child she carried. When Johnson returned and found the bodies, something inside him broke in a way that never healed.

That moment—true, embellished, or half-invented—gave birth to the legend:
that he swore vengeance on the Crow Nation, hunting their warriors one by one, killing over 300 men across the years, and sometimes cutting out and eating their livers in a ritual of hatred.

Was it true?
No historian can say with certainty.
Even Johnson himself never publicly confirmed it.

But the legend spread like wildfire in saloons and frontier camps, told by men who admired violence because they feared everything else. And over time the story grew bigger than the man who lived inside it.

Whether he ate livers or not, this much was real:

Jeremiah Johnson survived the Rockies alone, through winters that killed stronger men, through ambushes that should have ended him, through hunger that hollowed out his body but not his will. He trapped, hunted, walked, fought, and endured in a world where there was no law but weather and no master but death.

The mountains became his only witness.

A Legend Reborn in Hollywood

More than 100 years later, when director Sydney Pollack decided to make a film about the mountain man, almost every major actor turned the role down. The script demanded silence instead of speeches, suffering instead of glamour, and months filming in real snow, real wilderness, real danger.

Hollywood was not built for discomfort.

Except for one man.

Robert Redford didn’t just accept the role—he wanted to live it.

“We’re not going to pretend the mountain is cold,” he told Pollack.
“We’re going to let it freeze us, and we’ll film the truth.”

He chopped real wood, caught real fish, fought real storms. No stunt double. No studio heater waiting off-screen. He did not want to play a mountain man—he wanted the mountains to shape his performance the way they had shaped Johnson’s life.

One day, a blizzard rolled in unexpectedly during filming. The snow deepened to chest height. Crew members suggested they stop and wait for safety.

Redford looked at the storm and said:
“No. Keep rolling. This is what it really felt like.”

That scene, where the character pushes his horse through the snow with exhaustion and fury written across his body, was not acting. It was survival—just like Johnson’s had been.

Pollack later said:
“Other actors wanted stuntmen. Robert wanted truth.”

Redford refused to play Jeremiah Johnson as a monster or a myth. He played him as a man haunted by loss, torn between peace and violence, trying to live inside a life that no longer had room for softness.

“It wasn’t about bloodlust,” Redford said years later.
“It was about what the wilderness takes from you—and what it leaves behind.”

A Burial 100 Years Late

Two years after the film’s release, life and myth collided in a way no screenwriter could have invented.

In 1974, the remains of the real Jeremiah Johnson—once buried in an unmarked Montana grave—were moved to a new resting place in Cody, Wyoming. The ceremony needed pallbearers, men who understood the symbolic weight of the legend.

Robert Redford did not send flowers.
He did not send a statement.
He came in person.

The man who had carried Johnson’s story on film now carried his coffin in real life.

A frontier ghost, lifted not by fellow mountain men, but by an actor who had walked some of his footsteps, suffered some of his cold, carried some of his silence.

Redford later said it felt less like a duty and more like a final conversation—between the myth he portrayed and the man who never got to tell his own story.

The Man, the Myth, the Memory

The real Jeremiah Johnson lived a life shaped by violence—violence done to him, and violence he returned.
Redford’s Jeremiah Johnson lived a life shaped by longing—for stillness, for a home that no longer existed, for a version of himself untouched by death.

One was fact.
One was art.
But both told a truth:

A man can survive the wilderness and still never find peace.

Johnson died in 1900, not on a battlefield, not in a blizzard, but quietly—of old age. A strange ending for a man whose life was carved out of danger. Some say he lived long enough to outrun his curse. Others say he simply outlived everyone who could kill him.

But legacy is not written in stone.
It is written in memory.

And memory, in the end, was far kinder to him than history ever was.

Why His Story Still Matters

Jeremiah Johnson is not remembered because he was perfect.
He is remembered because he was broken—and still kept going.

Because the wilderness that tried to destroy him became the only place he understood himself.

Because every man who has ever lost something he could not replace has felt the same fire burn in his chest.

And because the line between myth and man is thin, but never empty.

Somewhere beneath the legend of the liver-eater, beneath the snow, the blood, the silence, and the mountain wind, there was once a husband grieving a woman he loved.

That is the part of the story that never made it into the tall tales.

That is the part that turned vengeance into tragedy, and tragedy into history.

That is the part Robert Redford chose to carry—not the violence, but the soul.

And that is why, 100 years after his death, a mountain man’s coffin was lifted not by strangers…

…but by the one man who understood him without ever meeting him.