Liver-Eating Johnston: The First Marshal

In the folklore of the American frontier, few figures occupy a stranger or more vivid position than the man known as Liver-Eating Johnston. His given name was John Garrison Johnston, sometimes written Johnson, and his story touches Red Lodge directly: he was elected the first marshal of the newly incorporated town in eighteen eighty-eight, making him the original law enforcement officer in a settlement that at the time had twenty saloons and a population of miners who had not come to Montana for the quiet life.

The name Liver-Eating came from a story, whether literally true or embellished by the telling, that Johnston had spent years hunting and killing members of the Crow Nation who had murdered his pregnant wife in eighteen forty-seven, and that after each killing he had eaten the liver of the man he killed. Historians differ on how much of the story to credit. What complicates the tale considerably is its ending: the Crow people, reportedly impressed by Johnston's persistence and physical ferocity, eventually made peace with him, and he came to call them his brothers.

Johnston's later career brought him to Red Lodge, where his reputation preceded him and where his effectiveness as a lawman was apparently genuine, if unconventional. He died in January of nineteen hundred at a veterans home in Santa Monica, near Los Angeles. The nineteen seventy-two film Jeremiah Johnson, starring Robert Redford, was based loosely on his life. The Hollywood version softened and romanticized a story that the historical record leaves considerably more ambiguous.