Liver-Eating Johnston's Cabin

The plaque ends in Sawtelle, but Johnston did not stay there. In 1974 Tri Robinson's seventh graders at Park View Middle School in Lancaster, California, campaigned to move him from the veterans' cemetery in Los Angeles. Red Lodge at first declined, calling him an Indian killer, then wanted him back once Bob Edgar of Cody offered a grave at his Old Trail Town. On June 8, 1974, Johnston was reburied in Cody, Wyoming, with Robert Redford, who had played the mountain man in Jeremiah Johnson, among the pallbearers.

What the plaque says

Liver-Eating Johnston's Cabin This log cabin was the home of one of Montana's most notorious citizens—John "Liver-Eating" Johnston, a sobriquet he earned in 1869 while cutting wood for the Missouri River steamboats in north central Montana. After a battle with the Lakota, he pretended to eat the liver of a recently killed warrior. Johnston's misguided reputation as a cannibal served him well for the rest of his life in Montana. He came to the Red Lodge area in the 1880s and filed on a homestead about three miles south of town, building this classic American log cabin of Douglas fir that had recently been killed in a forest fire. For several years, he served as Red Lodge's first constable. Liver-Eating Johnston's reputation was his greatest asset when enforcing the law in the mining community—that and his large fists. Local children loved him, though, and he exchanged the fearsome liver-eating nickname for "Dad" by the late 1890s. In 1899, failing health forced him to retire to an old soldier's home in Sawtelle, California, where he died in 1900.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Smith Mine — 3.6 mi
  Rusting buildings beside the highway, all that is left of the mine where Montana's worst coal disaster emptied a valley.
• Beartooth Highway — 13 mi
  A road over the top of the world, built because a coal town's mines closed and it needed tourists instead.

More markers nearby

• The Red Lodge Country — 1.2 mi
• Red Lodge — 1.2 mi
• The Beartooth Plateau — 1.2 mi
• The Smith Mine Disaster — 3.7 mi