TimeTales

04/18/2026

03/07/2026

He was born plain John Garrison in a small New Jersey town in 1824. He died a legend the entire American West called "Liver-Eating Johnson." And somewhere in between those two facts lies one of the most extraordinary, terrifying, and strangely moving lives the frontier ever produced.
His early years hold the seeds of the man he'd become. Young, enormous — well over six feet tall and built like a mountain himself — he enlisted in the Navy during the Mexican-American War. Then he punched a superior officer, deserted, changed his last name to Johnson, and fled west. Not to hide. To live.
He became a trapper, a woodhawk, a wanderer of the Rockies. And for a brief, rare moment, he found peace. He built a cabin on the Wyoming frontier. He married a Flathead woman. She was pregnant with their child when he left one morning to hunt.
He came home to find her murdered by a Crow raiding party.
What followed was not justice. It was not war in any organized sense. It was one man, alone, spending the next twelve years hunting down the warriors responsible — and by most accounts, many more besides. The legends that grew around this vendetta are gruesome enough to make the stomach turn: that he killed over 300 Crow fighters, that he cut out their livers and ate them as a final, horrifying act of dominance. Historians debate how much of this is truth and how much is frontier mythology. But here is what no one debates: the Crow people themselves eventually ended the war — not by defeating him, but by adopting him. They called him a warrior worthy of respect. He accepted. The killing stopped.
He went on to become a scout, a deputy sheriff, a town marshal. He survived the end of the Mountain Man era. He survived almost everything. What finally broke him was old age and poverty. In December 1899, the man who had once terrorized an entire tribe was admitted — reluctantly, achingly — to a soldiers' home in Santa Monica, California. He died there on January 21, 1900, and was buried in Sawtell National Cemetery, his grave tucked in the sprawling city he'd always despised, just a stone's throw from what would eventually become one of the busiest freeways in America.
He had wanted to go back to the mountains.
For 74 years, nobody made it happen.
Then, in the early 1970s, a middle school teacher in California named Tri Robinson was telling his students the story of Jeremiah Johnson — the 1972 Robert Redford film had just come out, and people were paying attention again. Robinson learned something that bothered him deeply: the real man behind the legend had been buried far from the wilderness he loved, his final wish ignored. Robinson told his students. His students decided to do something about it.
They wrote letters. To the Veterans Administration. To politicians. And to Robert Redford himself.
Redford wrote back.
On June 8, 1974, the remains of John "Liver-Eating" Johnson were reburied at Old Trail Town in Cody, Wyoming — surrounded by the mountains he had called home. Robert Redford, the actor who had immortalized him on screen, stood at the graveside and served as one of the pallbearers. The man who had played Jeremiah Johnson carried the real man's coffin to his final resting place.
He rests there still, beneath a bronze statue, under a name he never used in life — "Jeremiah Johnson" — marked with an epitaph that says everything:
No More Trails.
The grave is reinforced to protect it from disturbance. Which feels right, somehow. A man that formidable probably should rest undisturbed.
What makes this story so enduring isn't just the violence or the vengeance. It's the quiet underneath all of it — a man who wanted nothing more than to live free in wild country, who was pulled into brutality by grief, and who in the end was carried home by a movie star and a group of middle schoolers with something to prove.
History is usually written by the powerful. Sometimes, though, it gets corrected by twelve-year-olds who thought it wasn't fair.
That's the real legend of Jeremiah Johnson.

03/07/2026

"The aircraft was coming apart at 32,000 feet. On the radio, her voice sounded like she was placing a lunch order.
April 17, 2018. Southwest Flight 1380 lifted off from New York’s LaGuardia Airport, headed for Dallas. One hundred forty-nine people settled in. Drinks were served. The Boeing 737 reached cruising altitude. Everything felt ordinary.
Then the left engine exploded.
The blast was so violent Captain Tammie Jo Shults first thought they had collided with another plane. Shrapnel ripped through the fuselage. Window 14A shattered. The cabin depressurized in an instant, air roaring outward at terrifying speed.
Jennifer Riordan, seated at the window, was partially pulled toward the opening. Other passengers grabbed her, holding on with everything they had. Oxygen masks dropped. Alarms blared. The jet rolled sharply and pitched downward. Smoke crept into the cockpit.
In the cabin, people sent what they believed were final messages. “I love you.” “Tell the kids I’m sorry.” Flight attendants shouted commands over the chaos. Many were certain the plane was breaking apart.
One engine was destroyed. Systems were failing. Part of the fuselage was gone.
And in the center of it all, Tammie Jo Shults picked up the radio.
Her voice was steady.
“Southwest 1380, we’re single engine,” she said, as calmly as if noting routine turbulence. “We have part of the aircraft missing, so we’re going to need to slow down a bit.”
Controllers asked if there was fire.
“No, it’s not on fire,” she replied evenly. “But part of it’s missing. They said there’s a hole, and someone went out.”
No panic. No raised voice. Just clear, precise information.
Air traffic control later admitted they were stunned by her composure. When paramedics checked her heart rate after landing, it was barely elevated. While passengers faced terror behind her, she was flying the plane.
That calm was forged long before that day.
She grew up on a ranch near Tularosa, New Mexico, watching jets streak across the sky from Holloman Air Force Base. As a girl, she lay in the grass tracking F-4 Phantoms across endless blue.
She wanted to fly them.
In high school, at an aviation lecture, a retired colonel looked at her and asked if she was in the wrong room. She was the only girl there.
“I want to be a pilot,” she said.
He told her what he believed: there were no women fighter pilots. The military didn’t want them. Airlines wouldn’t hire them. She could stay, he said—but she should be realistic.
She wasn’t.
Air Force recruiters turned her away three times. They needed pilots. Just not women.
She tried the Navy. She scored high on the entrance exam. An officer refused to process her paperwork, saying she scored well enough “for a man,” but standards were different for women.
It took a year to find someone willing to submit her application.
In 1985, she entered Naval Aviation Officer Candidate School. She earned her wings. Became a flight instructor. Flew the A-7 Corsair II. Eventually, she became one of the first women to fly the F/A-18 Hornet in U.S. Navy service.
Yet even then, barriers remained. Combat exclusion policies kept women from certain missions. Her husband deployed to war zones. She could not. Skill did not matter. Policy did.
She became an instructor and aggressor pilot, training others in simulated combat.
Then came a reassignment meant to sideline her.
A commanding officer declared he would not let a woman teach advanced aerial gunnery. He removed her and reassigned her to teach Out of Control Flight recovery.
It was intended as punishment.
Out of Control Flight meant teaching pilots how to recover when aircraft spun, dove, or stopped responding. When instruments lied. When hydraulics failed. When survival depended on instinct and nerve.
For a year, she taught pilots how to bring broken aircraft back from the brink.
“I learned I don’t have to be in control all the time to get back into control,” she later said.
That lesson would matter.
In 1993, she left the Navy and joined Southwest Airlines. For twenty-five years, she flew routine commercial routes. Thousands of flights. Nothing dramatic.
Until April 17, 2018.
When the engine failed, warning lights flooded her panel. Systems cascaded into malfunction. The aircraft resisted her inputs. For a brief instant, she wondered if this might be the day she died.
Then training took over.
She initiated an emergency descent, dropping more than 20,000 feet while stabilizing the crippled jet. She aimed for Philadelphia International Airport.
One engine gone. Fuselage torn. Controls compromised.
She landed it anyway.
Emergency crews surrounded the aircraft. Medics told her she had “nerves of steel.” Her pulse barely betrayed what had happened.
Jennifer Riordan died from her injuries. She was the only life lost. One hundred forty-eight others survived because of those minutes in the cockpit.
After landing, before leaving, Shults walked the aisle. She hugged passengers. Met their eyes. Told them they were safe. She remained until the last person stepped off.
Captain Chesley Sullenberger later called to commend her.
Three weeks after the incident, she was back in the cockpit. She retired in 2020 but continues flying privately and volunteering for medical transport missions.
The world once told her she didn’t belong in the sky. Recruiters dismissed her. Officers tried to ground her. Policies restricted her.
But the sky did not recognize those limits.
She was a girl from New Mexico who watched jets and believed she could join them. They said girls don’t become fighter pilots. She did.
They said women couldn’t handle crisis in combat aircraft. She proved otherwise at 32,000 feet.
When metal tore through her plane and passengers whispered goodbyes, she spoke with a voice steady enough to calm the storm.
Because she had spent decades preparing for a moment she hoped would never come.
Her hands did not tremble. Her voice did not crack. One hundred forty-eight people are alive because one woman refused to accept “no.”
Because policies could not override preparation.
Because discrimination could not outmatch discipline.
She belonged in that cockpit.