The Mountain Man Who Inspired Robert Redford’s Jeremiah Johnson
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 27 August 2025
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Our American Stories, when Robert Redford took on the role of Jeremiah Johnson in 1972, audiences fell in love with the image of a rugged mountain man who carved out a life in the wilderness. But the real Johnson lived a life far stranger and harsher than Hollywood ever showed. Historian Ashley Hlebinsky joins us to pull apart fact from folklore and reveal what Hollywood got right—or wrong.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:14.2 | And we continue with our American stories. |
| 0:18.3 | The lore and legend of the American Mountain Man is a story that only seems to grow with time. |
| 0:24.7 | In 2015, Leonardo DiCaprio played the legendary mountain man, Hugh Glass, in The Revenant. |
| 0:31.4 | In 1972, Robert Redford starred as the title character in Jeremiah Johnson. |
| 0:37.4 | Here to separate fact from fiction is Ashley Lubinsky. |
| 0:42.2 | Ashley is the former co-host of Discovery Channel's Master of Arms, |
| 0:46.0 | the former curator in charge of the Cody Firearms Museum, |
| 0:50.6 | and she's president of the Gun Code LLC. |
| 0:54.7 | Here's Ashley. |
| 0:59.0 | I used to run this very large museum in the American West, |
| 1:03.5 | and on display at that museum, there was a firearm called a hawken rifle |
| 1:08.2 | and a buoy knife with a sheath. |
| 1:11.4 | And these two things belong to a man named liver-eating jogson. |
| 1:17.1 | Although that's not really his name. |
| 1:19.9 | His name was John Johnston with a tea, but he also, at some points in his life, went by |
| 1:25.8 | John Garrison, John Johnson with no tea, |
| 1:28.7 | because spelling standardization wasn't a thing in the 1800s, Jack Johnson, |
| 1:33.4 | and then by his prolific mythic name, Liver Eating Johnson. |
| 1:38.4 | And a lot of people who'd come to the museum would also call him Jeremiah Johnson. |
| 1:42.7 | And the reason behind that was because of a movie that was starring Robert Redford called |
| 1:49.0 | Jeremiah Johnson in 1972. |
... |
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