John "Liver-Eating" Johnston, one of Montana's most notorious citizens, earned his sobriquet in 1869 while cutting wood for Missouri River steamboats in north central Montana, when after a battle with the Lakota he pretended to eat the liver of a recently killed warrior. His 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, filed on a homestead about three miles south of town, and built a 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, and in the mining community his reputation and his large fists were his greatest assets in enforcing the law. Local children loved him, however, and by the late 1890s they had exchanged his fearsome nickname for "Dad." In 1899, failing health forced him to retire to an old soldier's home in Sawtelle, California, where he died in 1900.