Following Johnston’s trails to Red Lodge found me riding numerous gravel roads which led to farms and ranches along the route. Once I stopped to ask directions from a rancher who was working on an irrigation ditch that ran along the side of the road. I shut off the motorcycle and coasted to a stop next to him. After taking off my helmet and sunglasses I asked him if I was close to where Johnston’s cabin had originally been located. He said, “Nope, you’ve got to go back to that last house on the right, that’s where it was.”

I thanked him, started the motorcycle and was putting my helmet back on when he said, “You be careful around there, they don’t like you bikers making all that noise, scares the cows and horses, might run you off with a gun.”

“Thanks for the tip,” I said, “but this motorcycle is a Kawasaki and it’s pretty quiet. Can you hear it running now?”

“Nope,” he said, “but to them folks down there you bikers are all the same.”

I decided to heed his advice and did not to stop at the ranch house to ask for photo permission. This was a rural area where I could easily be called a trespasser and dealt with “wild west style.”

In Red Lodge I not only found Johnston’s cabin, but also a section of the Carbon County Historical Society Museum devoted to Johnston. The museum flyer said I could “Discover the true history of John ‘Liver Eatin’ Johnston, Red Lodge’s first constable.” It seemed Red Lodge had become quite proud of their first sheriff, making him a tourist attraction.

The Johnston hunt next took a big jump from Red Lodge, Montana to Los Angeles, California. Most of those miles I rode on paved highways or Interstates, while Johnston had done it on a train. Johnston’s health began to fail him after 1895. He was suffering from rheumatism and spinal scoliosis, a skin disease, loss of vision in one eye, general loss of hearing and diminishing mobility. An invalid who was once described as the most powerful man in Montana, Johnston’s body was succumbing to the hard life of an adventurer, and rapidly failed him. Riding anywhere on a horse was over for Johnston.

On December 9, 1899 Johnston was accompanied by an attendant for his last travels, this time over rails by train to his next home, the Old Soldier’s Home in Sawtelle, California, and shortly thereafter the Veterans Hospital in Los Angeles. According to the Certificate of Death filed with the Health Department of Los Angeles County, Johnston died just over a month after leaving Red Lodge, on January 21, 1900, at the age of 76. A day later he was buried as a veteran at the nearby national cemetery.

I rode to the cemetery in Los Angeles, arriving at the brown smog-covered city during rush hour. His final resting place, a few hundred feet from the San Diego Freeway, was an ugly contrast to the open and green country of Montana and Wyoming where Johnson had spent much of his life. The contrast was softened a bit by seeing a road just north of the cemetery named Montana Avenue. I thought that at least the adventurer was resting close to a road reminding him of home.

The described grave site at the cemetery headquarters showed Johnston buried at the second marker in row “D” off the San Juan Hill Road. I slowly and quietly rode my motorcycle up the San Juan Hill Road and parked next to the headstones that ended on row D. Weary from thousands of miles following Johnston’s trail I could almost relate to the end of his long journey. What a surprise I got when I found his site was occupied by another soldier: Johnston was gone!

Back at the cemetery offices I was told he had been exhumed on June 4, 1974 and buried in a private cemetery near Cody, Wyoming. A group of 25 junior high school students from the Park View School in Lancaster, California, with the help of their teacher Tri Robinson, had undertaken a volunteer project called the “Committee for Reburial of Liver-Eating Johnson” to get the old warrior closer to his last home near the Wyoming and Montana border and the surrounding country near Red Lodge. Bob Edgar, the founder of the Old Trail Town, offered a final resting-place in his private cemetery and the students embarked on the difficult task to get the United States government, and therein the Veterans Administration, of allow the exhumation and burial closer to the mountains Johnston had lived in and loved.

My motorcycle was happily turned around in Los Angeles and I rapidly drove away from the mountain-less urban prairie that I (and likely Johnston) disliked, back towards the Shoshone Canyon, Beartooth Mountains, and Buffalo Heart Mountain, all of which I knew could be seen from the Old Trail Town. Two days later I found the gravesite. Johnston had been re-interned June 8, 1974, with more than 1,000 onlookers. Robert Redford had been there for the re-internment as chief pallbearer and delivered a short eulogy.

It was a fitting end of the trail for a real adventurer. Following Johnston had taken various bits of my time for nearly 30 years. Over that period I had been sent down numerous real and papered dead end roads by writers, publishers, errant maps, and ill-given directions from ranchers, farmers and government officials. Camping in Montana I had met a black bear that sniffed around my tent one night. In Wyoming, near the cliffs of Fort Fetterman, I had seen too closely a rattlesnake slither into a gopher hole when I stepped off the marked trail to take a photograph. In South Dakota my motorcycle had coughed to a halt when gunk in the gas tank plugged the carburetor and I spent a long afternoon in the hot sun learning how to take a Kawasaki KLR 650 carburetor apart and clean it. Numerous times I had fallen down on gravel trails or dirt tracks with overloaded motorcycles being where they, and I, should not have been.

My hunting Johnston made me many new friends along the routes over the years. Often people would ask me where I was going with my motorcycle loaded for serious off-road riding, especially when I met them in out-of-the-way places like Big Horn, Wyoming, or Pryor, Montana. I would tell them I was following the trail of Liver-Eatin Johnson. Some would know who I was referring to, others became fascinated when I explained, asking me to keep them informed of my findings.

By the time my hunt was over I had likely spent $2,000 - 3,000 on gas, tires, food, sleeping and film, plus innumerable days traveling. The hunt was an adventure by motorcycle for me, following what had been part of a man’s personal adventure through life.

As I stood at the Johnston gravesite I noticed that not only had they moved the remains of Johnston from the smoggy Los Angeles military cemetery, but they had also moved his military headstone. On it was inscribed:
Jno. Johnston
Co. H
2nd Colo. Cav.

The plaque on the stone cairn at his gravesite read:
John Jeremiah Liver-Eating Johnston.

Those two different names at his grave caused me to smile. The man had been an adventurer, a real risk taker, coming west originally from Little York, New Jersey. His life had included time in the US Navy, likely during the Mexican War, where he was known by his real name, John Garrison. He changed his name after he purportedly struck an officer and jumped ship, thereby becoming a military deserter. As for having eaten the liver of a Crow Indian he had killed, thereby acquiring the sobriquet of “Liver-Eating Johnson,” that story was likely 99.9% more bunk. Some said Johnston overindulged in drinking. Others said had said he killed hundreds of Indians. He likely ignored many rules and was known to infringe on Indian hunting grounds, as well as take timber from their reserved areas. What I did learn was he was a colorful character, someone who lived on the edge, a fringe societal person who seemed to hold certain values dear that I admired: resourcefulness, bravery, loyalty, not a shirker nor betraying a friend and someone who was fearsome to a foe. It was fitting that at his grave there was a taste of those elements, what separated the mysterious adventurist from the common settler piloting the Conestoga wagon west, hoping to become a simple farmer in Montana or Oregon.

The 2008 publication of a book by Dr. Dennis J. McLelland, titled The Avenging Fury of the Plains, cleared up much of the speculation and exploded some of the myths about the real John Garrison. To get to the 2008 book I had spent 30 years riding the trails Garrison left behind, good years and long miles. I would do it all again because for me it was an adventure following an adventurer. During the hunt I had also followed something else, some advice the fictional Jeremiah Johnson received in the film I had seen years earlier:

“Keep your nose in the wind and your eyes on the skyline.”