Liver-Eating Johnson

The American frontier was a badass bitch of an unforgiving wilderness that feasted on the hollowed-out husks of cowards and weaklings and laughed demonically every time some jackass who thought he was the toughest shit since over-cooked turkey ended up on the wrong side of a mouth full of grizzly bear teeth. Between a carnivorous menagerie of miscellaneous flesh-consuming beasts, dense forests dotted with craggy cliffs and Drow-infested caves, and badass indigenous peoples who were more than a little disgruntled about the fact that white men decided to encroach on their ancestral lands, traveling West of the Mississippi was usually about as hazardous to your health as urinating directly into a power outlet. Well, while the West was pretty much making everybody its bitch, the man known as Liver-Eating Johnson made a name for himself by becoming the most hardcore, violently insane motherfucker to ever strap on a Bowie Knife and kick a deer in half while simultaneously skinning an unidentified member of the genus Canis.

John Garrison was born in New Jersey of all places, but it became pretty fucking obvious that he wasn't cut out for life on the East Coast. He enlisted in the Navy at sixteen and soon thereafter deserted his post after he punched out his commanding officer. In order to avoid being brought up on charges for skipping out on his military duties and beating the fuck out of his Captain, Garrison rode the rails out West, settled in the Rocky Mountains, and changed his name to John "Jonathan" Johnson Johnston John's Son Tson.

Of course, today that guy is pretty much universally referred to as "Liver-Eating Johnson", so, even assuming that this is just a clever name (which it's not – I'll get to that in due time) it's still pretty safe to say that he was completely fucking nuts. Well, first off, this guy didn't look like the sort of guy you invite over for cheese and wine and talking about how much everybody has grown up since college. This six-foot tall, 200-pound, ripped-ass fucking mountain man wore buckskin clothing, sported a massive red beard, and carried a twelve-inch Bowie knife, a hand-carved tomahawk, a rifle, and a Walker Colt pistol. He was a professional hunter, trapper, and fur trader, and he was damn good at what he did. He lived off the land, fought Indians and grizzly bears, drank enough rotgut booze to burn a hole through a six-inch plate of sheet metal, and learned the fine art of scalping from the Arapaho Indian tribe. He married a Salish Indian woman in 1846, built a log cabin out of trees he uprooted with his nutsack, and was basically regarded as the toughest and most badass motherfucker in town.

Well, apparently the Crow Indians didn't get the memo – they attacked his home one day while he was out in the wilderness, killed his vastly pregnant wife, scalped her corpse, and burned his house to the ground.

This was not a wise move.