I'm pretty sure I grabbed that photo of the rifle, knife, and beaver pelt
en suite from the "Real World Survivor" website (
Real World Survivor Is Now Part of BallisticMag.com's Survival Content ). That is definitely where I found the detail picture of the knife. The photo at the top of the article in the link is part of a slideshow with images of the rifle and knife, the knife and sheath, and their rather scruffy-looking former owner.
However, I think that particular photograph of the rifle, knife, and beaver pelt, may have originated with the Buffalo Bill Center of the West. There was an article about Liver Eating Johnson in the Billings Gazette online (
The legend of Liver-Eating Johnson keeps getting taller) that featured the same photo, and they credited the Buffalo Bill Center. I have not followed up on that yet, but I am cursed with an inquisitive nature and will probably attempt to track the image to its source when time permits.
I had picked up that photograph quite a while back, but researched it again yesterday with a Google search. I used "liver eating johnson hawken" as a search term. If you do a search like that, right below the toolbar at the top of the screen you'll see a menu. Click "Images" and it will light up a page full of thumbnail photos with web links attached. My search yesterday turned up a lot of interesting material. There was a biography of Johnston/Johnson that I did not know about, entitled
The Never-Ending Lives of Liver-Eating Johnson. There are more details and a lengthy excerpt on Google Books (
The Never-Ending Lives of Liver-Eating Johnson ). I also found that Nathan Bender authored an article in
The Journal of Arms and Armour (Volume 3, 2006 - Issue 2), entitled "A Hawken rifle and Bowie knife of John 'Liver-Eating' Johnson." The article apparently compared the actual gun and knife to the ones described in Thorp & Bunker's book,
Crow Killer. The full article is not readily available online, but you can access the abstract here:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1179/174962606X136874?journalCode=yaaa20
There was also a thread about Johnson's rifle on the ALR forum:
https://americanlongrifles.org/foru...71c8d2606434c0f0666ff4ad2fe881b&topic=51452.0
I would like to take the opportunity to thank you and Phil Meek for sharing your expertise. You guys invest a lot of time in the posts submitted here and on the ALR forum, and the rest of us appreciate it.
Best regards,
Notchy Bob