The Man Behind the Name: 

John “Liver-Eating” Johnston and the Making of a Montana Legend

Origins and Early Life

The man history remembers as “Liver-Eating Johnson” was born John Garrison, most likely in July 1824, in the Hunterdon County region of New Jersey, near a small settlement variously described as Little York or the vicinity of Hickory Tavern (Thorp and Bunker 9; Bender, “Abandoned Scout’s Revenge” 3). The circumstances of his upbringing remain obscure, a condition that would prove characteristic of a life poorly served by documentary evidence and lavishly served by oral tradition. As a young man he enlisted in the United States Navy during the Mexican-American War, serving aboard a fighting vessel, but his military service ended abruptly after he struck a superior officer. He deserted, changed his name to Johnston, and made his way westward, eventually arriving in the northern Rocky Mountain region where he would spend most of the remainder of his life (Legends of America, “John ‘Liver-Eating’ Johnson,” legendsofamerica.com, accessed 29 March 2026).

Johnston appears to have entered Montana Territory by the mid-1860s, bringing with him the kind of physical presence that made an impression on contemporaries. Various accounts describe him as standing between six feet two inches and six feet five inches tall, weighing upward of 260 pounds with, as observers noted, little excess fat. A 1923 article in the Cody Enterprise, drawing on the recollections of surviving pioneers who had known him personally, described him as having come from the Pacific coast to Montana and being “exceptionally expert with his rifle” and “soon known as a bad man to impose on” (qtd. in Sheridan Media, “History: Mountain Man Liver-Eating Johnson,” sheridanmedia.com, accessed 29 March 2026). His occupations in Montana were varied and seasonal: trapping, hunting, supplying cordwood to Missouri River steamboats as a “woodhawk,” prospecting for gold at Alder Gulch after the 1863 strike in the Ruby River Valley, peddling whiskey, and eventually scouting for the United States Army (Thorp and Bunker 21-30).

The Legend of the Crow Vendetta

The story that transformed Johnston from an unremarkable frontier laborer into a figure of Western mythology centers on the alleged murder of his wife sometime around 1847. According to the most widely repeated version, Johnston had married a Flathead (Salish) woman, variously named “Swan” in later accounts, and returned to their cabin one day to find her killed, along with evidence that she had been pregnant. The murder was attributed to Crow warriors, and Johnston supposedly vowed and pursued a one-man vendetta against the entire Crow nation for years thereafter, killing and scalping Crow men and, as the legend developed, consuming the liver of each victim — a gesture intended to insult the dead and to communicate to survivors that their kinsman had been denied passage to the afterlife (Axline 78-80).

It is essential to note at the outset that this entire narrative, as presented in its most elaborate form, is of highly doubtful historical reliability. The primary vehicle through which it reached a general audience was Crow Killer: The Saga of Liver-Eating Johnson, published in 1958 by Raymond W. Thorp and Robert Bunker, and reissued in a new edition in 2016. The circumstances of the book’s composition were not conducive to accuracy: the two authors never met in person, Bunker worked from materials Thorp had assembled without personally reviewing his notes, and Thorp himself had a documented reputation for embellishing frontier narratives, having earlier written a largely fictionalized account of the life of Jim Bowie (Rossborough, “Who Is Liver-Eating Johnson,” centerofthewest.org, accessed 29 March 2026). In his introduction to the 2016 edition, western frontier scholar Nathan E. Bender assessed the book frankly, warning readers that most of the narrative rests on unsubstantiated oral tradition rather than documentary evidence. As scholar and researcher Eric Rossborough of the Buffalo Bill Center of the West summarized the situation, anyone seeking an accurate account of Johnston “is going to have to write your own” (Rossborough, centerofthewest.org).

The specific claim that Johnston literally ate human livers is almost certainly false, or at most a theatrical performance he adopted to cultivate a fearsome reputation. Johnston himself, in a statement recorded by at least one contemporary source, described the incident that gave rise to the nickname as a deliberate act of macabre theater during a battle with Lakota warriors near the Missouri River in 1869, in which he pretended to bite from a piece of liver while taunting a companion with the words “Come on and have a piece! It’ll stay in your stomach ‘til dinner!” (Rossborough, centerofthewest.org). The historical marker currently standing at Johnston’s former cabin site in Red Lodge, maintained by the Montana Highway Department, offers this same interpretation, stating plainly that Johnston “pretended to eat the liver of a recently killed warrior” and that his “misguided reputation as a cannibal served him well for the rest of his life in Montana” (Historical Marker, “Liver-Eating Johnston’s Cabin,” hmdb.org, accessed 29 March 2026).

Bender’s more recent scholarship suggests the liver-eating myth may have begun during Johnston’s own participation in an early Wild West show in 1884, in which he appeared alongside Calamity Jane and Curley, one of General Custer’s Crow Indian scouts. Johnston, Bender argues, was himself partly complicit in shaping the tall-tale version of his life, and may have consciously modeled his self-presentation on earlier frontier legends such as Tom Quick of New Jersey (freerangeamerican.us, “The True Story Behind ‘Jeremiah Johnson,’” accessed 29 March 2026). Whether Johnston killed any significant number of Crow people — figures ranging from dozens to well over a thousand appear in various accounts — cannot be established from surviving documentary evidence. The story of a reconciliation with the Crow, after which they allegedly adopted him as a brother under the name “Dapiek Absaroka” (Crow Killer), is equally difficult to verify and appears in no contemporary record.

Service in the Civil War and the Indian Wars

Whatever the truth of the Crow vendetta stories, Johnston’s military service is better documented. In 1864, he enlisted in Company H, 2nd Colorado Cavalry, in St. Louis as a private, and was honorably discharged the following year (Thorp and Bunker 180). He subsequently served in a civilian scouting capacity during the Plains Indian Wars of the 1870s, working under Generals Oliver O. Howard, Samuel Sturgis, and Nelson Miles during the Sioux and Nez Perce conflicts. He was present when Chief Joseph surrendered to General Miles at the Battle of Bear Paw on October 5, 1877, an engagement that brought the Nez Perce War to its conclusion in northern Montana (True West Magazine, “John ‘Liver-Eating’ Johnson,” truewestmagazine.com, accessed 29 March 2026). General Sturgis later spoke publicly of Johnston in respectful terms, confirming that Johnston served as his guide during the pursuit of Chief Joseph. The Cheyenne Weekly Leader, in a notice published on January 31, 1878, reported that General Sturgis had been interviewed about Johnston following what was then believed to be his death, providing one of the more credible contemporary confirmations of his scouting service (qtd. in Sheridan Media, sheridanmedia.com).

Lawman in Red Lodge

Whatever violence Johnston had been party to on the frontier proved to be a professional asset when it came time to enforce the law. Red Lodge, located in what would become Carbon County in the Beartooth foothills of south-central Montana, was in the 1880s an emerging coal mining community with all the social turbulence attendant on such places. Johnston arrived in the area in the mid-1880s, filed on a homestead approximately three miles south of town, and built himself a log cabin of Douglas fir salvaged from timber killed in a forest fire (Historical Marker, “Liver-Eating Johnston’s Cabin,” hmdb.org). He was elected Red Lodge’s first marshal in 1888, and for several years thereafter served as the town’s constable during its most volatile period of growth (Red Lodge Historical Marker, hmdb.org, accessed 29 March 2026).

The Carbon County Historical Society and Museum, which maintains a permanent exhibit on Johnston and preserves artifacts from his time in Red Lodge, identifies him straightforwardly as the town’s first constable and notes that his reputation, whether earned or manufactured, served a practical purpose in keeping order (Carbon County Historical Society and Museum, “Liver Eatin’ Johnston,” carboncountyhistory.com, accessed 29 March 2026). A contemporary historical marker erected by the Montana Highway Department in Red Lodge, placed near what is now called Liver-Eating Johnston Park, states that Red Lodge “had a large population of single men and an abundance of saloons” and that Johnston kept the peace as constable for many years, his outsized reputation functioning as his greatest law enforcement tool alongside, as the marker dryly notes, “his large fists” (Red Lodge Historical Marker, hmdb.org). By the late 1890s, however, local children had stripped him of his fearsome moniker entirely, preferring simply to call him “Dad” (Historical Marker, “Liver-Eating Johnston’s Cabin,” hmdb.org).

Jon Axline, whose essay on Johnston appears in Still Speaking Ill of the Dead: More Jerks in Montana History — a volume published in 2005 by Two Dot/Globe Pequot Press in cooperation with the Montana History Conference — situates Johnston within the broader context of frontier figures whose historical profiles were shaped as much by the demands of popular culture as by actual conduct (Axline 76-90). Axline notes that Johnston’s contemporary fame in Montana was already well established before any major published biography appeared, drawing on the same well of oral tradition and self-promotion that would later be codified and embellished by Thorp and Bunker.

Later Years, Death, and Posthumous Reinvention

By December 1899, Johnston’s health had deteriorated to the point where he was no longer able to care for himself. He was admitted to the National Soldiers’ Home in Santa Monica, California — an institution serving Union Army veterans — where he died of peritonitis on January 21, 1900, at approximately seventy-five years of age. He was interred in the adjacent veterans’ cemetery near what would eventually become the site of the Los Angeles National Cemetery, adjacent to the San Diego Freeway in Westwood (Rossborough, centerofthewest.org; Legends of America, legendsofamerica.com). By the accounts of people who knew him, Johnston wept when he boarded the train in Red Lodge for the last time, leaving the mountains he had inhabited for more than three decades.

His burial in urban California satisfied no one who cared about his memory, and the story of his reinterment is in some ways more revealing of American cultural attitudes toward the frontier than any detail from his actual life. In 1974, a biology teacher in Lancaster, California, named Tri Robinson, himself a passionate reader of mountain man history, told his seventh-grade class the story of Johnston’s burial far from his Montana home. The students’ indignation became the engine of a six-month letter-writing campaign to have Johnston’s remains relocated to the West. After the Governor of Montana declined to participate — citing, according to Robinson’s account, concern about the reaction of Native American constituents to a public celebration of an Indian fighter — a Cody, Wyoming, historic preservationist named Bob Edgar offered a site at Old Trail Town on the banks of the Shoshone River. The Veterans Administration, in an unusual decision, designated Robinson’s class as Johnston’s next of kin for the purposes of the exhumation and relocation (Rossborough, centerofthewest.org).

Johnston was reinterred at Old Trail Town in June 1974, with actor Robert Redford — who had portrayed a fictionalized version of Johnston in the 1972 Warner Bros. film Jeremiah Johnson — serving as a pallbearer and speaking to the assembled schoolchildren. The ceremony drew over two thousand people. Edgar, who had grown up listening to disputes over the burial location of Buffalo Bill Cody, took no chances: he arranged for a substantial quantity of concrete to be poured over the coffin to discourage any future relocations (Rossborough, centerofthewest.org). Johnston’s new headstone reads “John ‘Jeremiah Liver-Eating’ Johnston” — a compound of his actual surname, a name invented for the Redford film, and the nickname that may itself have originated in theatrical performance.

The Problem of Myth and History

Johnston’s story presents the historian with a challenge that is itself characteristic of the American West: the near-impossibility of separating the historical person from the legend that accumulated around him during his own lifetime. The cottage industry of tall tales he apparently cultivated — along with his participation in a Wild West show, his striking physical presence, and the lurid appeal of the “liver-eating” moniker — ensured that the actual documentary record would be sparse and the oral record extravagant. Bender’s academic work, published in the Annals of Wyoming and the Rocky Mountain Fur Trade Journal in 2006 and 2007, represents the most rigorous scholarly effort to date to trace the origins of the Crow Killer saga back to its evidential foundations, concluding that much of the narrative as it has been received is an artifact of storytelling rather than history (Bender, “Abandoned Scout’s Revenge” 2-17; Bender, “Perceptions of a Mountain Man” 93-106).

What can be stated with reasonable confidence is this: John Johnston was a large, physically formidable man who arrived in Montana Territory in the 1860s and spent roughly three decades working in a variety of frontier occupations. He served the Union Army during the Civil War and scouted for the Army during the Indian Wars of the 1870s. He settled in Red Lodge, built a home, held public office, and was remembered with evident affection by the community that gave him his last years of meaningful employment. He died in California, far from the mountains, and was eventually returned to a place he had never actually lived, under a name he had never heard, buried under concrete so he would not be moved again. The stories about his eating of livers, his multi-decade war against the Crow, and his eventual adoption as a tribal brother almost certainly belong to the realm of frontier folklore — a genre that was already flourishing in Johnston’s own time and that he, by most accounts, actively helped to produce.

Works Cited

Axline, Jon. “In League with the Devil: Boone Helm and ‘Liver-Eatin’ Johnston.’” Still Speaking Ill of the Dead: More Jerks in Montana History, edited by Jon Axline and Jodie Foley, Two Dot/Globe Pequot Press, 2005, pp. 76-90.

Bender, Nathan E. “The Abandoned Scout’s Revenge: Origins of the Crow Killer Saga of Liver-Eating Johnson.” Annals of Wyoming, vol. 78, no. 4, Autumn 2006, pp. 2-17. Wyoming State Historical Society.

Bender, Nathan E. “Perceptions of a Mountain Man: John ‘Jeremiah Liver-Eating’ Johnston at Old Trail Town, Cody, Wyoming.” Rocky Mountain Fur Trade Journal, vol. 1, 2007, pp. 93-106. Museum of the Mountain Man.

Carbon County Historical Society and Museum. “Liver Eatin’ Johnston.” Carbon County Historical Society and Museum, www.carboncountyhistory.com/. Accessed 29 March 2026.

Historical Marker. “Liver-Eating Johnston’s Cabin.” Historical Marker Database, www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=190093. Accessed 29 March 2026.

Historical Marker. “Red Lodge.” Historical Marker Database, www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=45250. Accessed 29 March 2026.

Legends of America. “John ‘Liver-Eating’ Johnson — Mountain Man and Lawman.” Legends of America, www.legendsofamerica.com/liver-eating-johnston/. Accessed 29 March 2026.

Rossborough, Eric. “Who Is Liver-Eating Johnson, and Why Are They Saying Those Terrible Things About Him?” Buffalo Bill Center of the West, centerofthewest.org/2022/01/26/liver-eating-johnson/. Accessed 29 March 2026.

Sheridan Media. “History: Mountain Man Liver-Eating Johnson.” Sheridan Media, sheridanmedia.com/news/207817/history-mountain-man-liver-eating-johnson/. Accessed 29 March 2026.

Thorp, Raymond W., and Robert Bunker. Crow Killer: The Saga of Liver-Eating Johnson. Introduction by Nathan E. Bender, Indiana University Press, 2016.

True West Magazine. “John ‘Liver-Eating’ Johnson.” True West Magazine, www.truewestmagazine.com/article/john-liver-eating-johnson/. Accessed 29 March 2026.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​