A highly-lauded Wyoming mountain man in his day was John Johnson. In fact, he was such a notable character he was photographed with a pantheon of Western heroes in 1883, a group which included – in the same photograph taken in Hunters Hot Spring, Montana in 1883 – Wyatt Earp, Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid, Judge Leroy Bean, Bat Masterson and Doc Holiday along with yet-to-be-President of the United States Theodore Roosevelt. No one believes the photo to be authentic but it has been raising historical eyebrows for more than a century and a half.
Johnson was living a routine life as a mountain man, such as things were in those days, when tragedy struck. In 1847, his Flathead Indian wife was killed by a Crow brave. This enraged Johnson to the point he declared a one-man war against the Crow. Over the next two decades he hunted down and killed about 300 Crow warriors and ate their livers. Thus he acquired the sobriquet John “Liver Eating” Johnson. Johnson was as tough as they come. Once he was selling liquor to his Flathead in-laws – which was illegal – alone in the dead of winter – which was foolhardy – on a trip of 500 miles – which would have been exhausting in mid-summer. Midway through his journey he was captured by a party of Blackfeet braves – undoubtedly ecstatic to get free liquor – who decided to double their loot by selling Johnson to the Crow. Johnson was tied with rawhide bonds and dumped in a tepee while the band went to contact the Crow. They left one, inexperienced Blackfoot to guard Johnson.
This turned out to be a bad idea.
Johnson was able to slip free of his rawhide bonds, kicked the guard unconscious, killed the guard with the guard’s own knife, scalped the guard and then cut of the guard’s leg. Why did Johnson cut off the guard’s leg? So he would have something to eat on his 200-mile trek across the frozen Badlands to a trapping partner. Unlike Alferd Packer who was convicted of cannibalism in 1874, Johnson was never charged with the crime. Apparently, whites eating Natives was legal. But not the other way around. Today Alfred Packer lives on as the name of the cafeteria at the University of Colorado Boulder which offers, among other fares, “El Canibal Mexican Specialties.” As for Liver-Eating Johnson, well, he is remembered with a statue in Cody.