John Garrison Johnston, who would become famous as Liver-Eating Johnson, was born on July 1, 1824, in Little York, New Jersey. His mother was Eliza Garrison, and his father, Isaac, was thought to be of Irish or Scottish descent. Johnson had five sisters and likely a brother as well. His childhood was harsh.
Isaac was an alcoholic, prone to brutal behavior, and he overworked his young son to repay his own debts. Johnson labored as a farmhand, sometimes passing out from exhaustion, and he was often beaten. The experience hardened him, but it also shaped the man he would become: quick-tempered, violent, and fond of drink. As a teenager, Johnson reached his limit and left home.
He found work hunting whales on a coastal schooner and spent roughly twelve years at sea before growing tired of it. By then he had become a large man, over six feet tall and around 260 pounds, described as all muscle with almost no fat. In 1846, at age twenty-two, the Mexican-American War broke out, and he enlisted in the U. S.
Navy. His naval career ended quickly. When a lieutenant punished one of his comrades, Johnson struck the officer on the neck, temporarily knocking him out. The lieutenant was dazed and unsure what had happened, though he suspected Johnson.
As punishment, Johnson was confined to shore duty for a month. The moment he could step on land, he deserted the Navy and fled into the West, aware that capture could mean execution by hanging. He changed his name from John Johnston Garrison to John Johnson. He is believed to have made his way to California, where he mined just before the gold rush.
From there he traveled east through Colorado, then north through Wyoming, eventually reaching the Montana Territory. He worked as a woodcutter, providing cordwood to steamboats, and took on other jobs including hunting, trapping, and bootlegging. During this period he met his lifelong friend and partner, J. X.
Beidler. Both men shared a love of drinking and a violent nature. It was in Montana that the legend of Liver-Eating Johnson began to grow. According to the popular tale, Johnson met a young woman of the Flathead tribe who became his wife.
They lived in a log cabin he built himself, and she soon became pregnant. In 1847, while Johnson was away, a group of Crow warriors raided his home, killed his pregnant wife, and burned the house to the ground. When Johnson learned what had happened, he swore to hunt down the Crow and take his revenge. He killed many of them.
When the Crow chief heard of this, he sent his twenty best warriors to finish Johnson off, but they failed, and Johnson killed them all. The nickname Liver-Eating Johnson supposedly came from his habit of cutting out the liver of each Crow he killed and eating it, since the Crow believed the liver was essential for entering the afterlife. By consuming it, he was denying the dead their afterlife, an act of utmost disrespect. The story holds that he killed more than three hundred Crow in his vendetta, and his reputation grew so fearsome that tribes cowered at the sound of his name.
The tale continues with his capture by the Blackfoot tribe, who intended to sell him to the Crow for a handsome price. They tied him in leather straps, stripped him to the waist, and left a single guard. Johnson broke free, knocked out the guard, and fled into the woods. It was even rumored that, hungry during his escape, he cut off one of the guard’s legs and ate it.
While fleeing, he ran into his old partner, who helped him find his way home. About twenty-five years after his wife’s death, the legend claims, Johnson finally made peace with the Crow, a pact driven by the rising danger of frontier wars and growing violence between tribes. But this dramatic story was largely a myth. There is no real evidence to support it, and Johnson himself denied it on many occasions, strongly insisting he never had a wife.
The story appears to have come from an incident in which Johnson escorted a Native American woman to a frontier post. Upon their arrival, she claimed they were man and wife to keep him from being harassed. His military record makes no mention of a personal war against the Crow. In fact, he was generally on good terms with the tribe, and one source claims he was even made a chief of the Crow nation out of their respect for him.
Johnson did admit to killing some Crow warriors, but he maintained they were acts of self-defense. With the outbreak of the Civil War, Johnson enlisted in the Union Army, joining the First Division, Second Colorado Cavalry, Fourth Brigade, H Company, as a scout. He was thirty-nine years old. His time in the service was short-lived.
After just five days, he deserted, spending all his pay on whiskey. He was later reassigned to the Second Regiment, though whether he was punished or managed to bluff his way out remains unknown. In October 1864 he fought at the Battle of Westport, where he was shot in the leg and shoulder. After recovering, he continued serving until his discharge on September 23, 1865.
Unsure what to do next, Johnson returned to the work he knew best: gold fields, peddling alcohol, and chopping wood. He spent most of his earnings on whiskey. Working as a woodcutter, often called a woodhawk, Johnson and his partner faced constant danger. Camped in the heart of Sioux territory, they were frequently attacked.
In the summer of 1868, seven woodcutters were reported killed in the local area. That same year, while working at the mouth of the Mussel Shell River, Johnson and other woodcutters were ambushed by six Sioux men. A gunfight broke out, with injuries on both sides and one Sioux killed. The fight settled into a stalemate.
Then Johnson stepped out onto open ground and pretended to feast on a small piece of liver he removed from his knife. The five surviving Sioux and his companions all thought it was real. It was in this moment that he was given the name Liver-Eating Johnson. Beyond cutting wood, Johnson trapped and hunted inside Sioux territory, where he was not welcome.
They stole his traps and pelts, and on one occasion forced their way into his cabin, waiting to ambush him when he returned. Johnson responded by laying traps of his own, including poisoned meat, and digging a small tunnel under his cabin as an escape route. When he sensed something was wrong, he would crawl into the tunnel and shoot at attackers from under the floorboards. Johnson thrived in this mountain man lifestyle well into his forties.
He took part in every major fight and even became a scout for General Miles. His bootlegging days were over, though, as he knew the dangers of peddling whiskey and his age made the risks too great. In earlier years, he had made good money in the trade, especially because he was daring enough to travel through the Whoop-Up territory, considered one of the most dangerous and hostile areas for a white man. For a time he guided trips into the mountains of southern Montana, kept up his hunting and trapping, and even established a stagecoach line.
During the 1880s he became a lawman in Coulson, and later in Red Lodge, Montana. The work was uninteresting, so he joined a Wild West show, but he hated Buffalo Bill and was unsatisfied with his pay. He soon quit and returned to Coulson. Wanting a quiet life alone, he built himself a cabin in the woods.
Before long, though, he became the town’s sheriff, a position he held until his retirement in 1894. He lived in the town for a few more years until he was placed in a veterans hospital in Santa Monica, California, in December 1899. He died just one month later, on January 21, 1900. John Johnson was buried in a veterans cemetery in Los Angeles.
In June 1974, after negotiations and a campaign led by a group of young students, his remains were relocated to the old trail town of Cody, Wyoming, just sixty-five miles from his former cabin in Red Lodge and one of his favorite places. In 1972, a film based on Robert Bunker’s book Crow Killer: The Saga of Liver-Eating Johnson was released. The film, Jeremiah Johnson, starred Robert Redford.
Both the book and the film are based loosely on his life and differ significantly from the true story.