Boone Helm wasn't the kind of man's stories were exaggerated about.

In fact, he was the kind of man they were toned down for, just for the sake of decency.

They called him the Kentucky cannibal, but that nickname incredibly barely scratched the surface.

Boone wasn't just violent, he was more like a tornado of blood and bone ripping across the

American frontier with the cold indifference of a natural disaster.

He killed without remorse and fed on human flesh when the need arose, or sometimes

just because he felt like it.

And through it all, he carried himself with the callous swagger of a man who believed

death feared him instead of the other way around.

Apparently, at his execution in Virginia City, Montana, Boone stood on the gallows next

the men he'd fought

alongside and turned on them without a flicker of shame.

When one of them began to struggle and panic in the final moments of his life, Boone calmly leaned

over and offered a few parting words, telling him, quote, kick away old fellow, my turn next,

I'll be in hell with you in a minute.

And this wasn't bravado, this was Boone's

truth. He had stared death in the eye a few hundred times and never blinked, and facing his

own execution, he saw no reason to start then. He didn't fear the noose, he actually welcomed it,

and if there was really a hell, he was already halfway home. Before getting too far ahead, though, his story is one of the darkest ever written into the dirt of the American West.

It's a tale of cruelty and chaos, of blood on the snow and madness on the trail, but beneath the horror, Boone's life reflects something larger.

It was, in many ways, a reflection of the brutal lawlessness of the frontier and what becomes of a man when the wilderness sinks into his bones.

This is the story of Levi Boone Helm, perhaps the most terrifying outlaw the Old West ever produced.

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