Alferd Packer — 1874, the Colorado Cannibal

In the deep winter of 1874, a Pennsylvania-born prospector named Alferd Packer led five other men out of a Ute encampment near present-day Montrose, Colorado, and into the high San Juan Mountains, bound for the gold camps to the southeast. They had been warned — by the Ute leader Chief Ouray and by their own experience of the snow — to wait for spring, and they ignored it. About two months later, Packer walked out of the mountains alone and conspicuously not starving, carrying money and possessions that had belonged to his companions. The other five were never seen alive again.

What happened in those mountains has been argued over for a century and a half, because the only living witness was the man with the strongest reason to lie. When the five bodies were found that summer near the Lake Fork of the Gunnison River, below what is now called Slumgullion Pass outside Lake City, they had plainly been butchered, stripped of flesh, and partly eaten — and most showed signs of violent death, with hatchet wounds to the skulls and evidence of gunshots. Packer admitted to cannibalism but insisted he had killed only in self-defense. His story changed in important ways between his telling in 1874 and his telling in 1883, and the physical evidence never fully matched either version.

Packer was tried twice. In 1883 he was convicted of the premeditated murder of one of the men and sentenced to hang; the Colorado Supreme Court overturned the conviction in 1885 on a technicality of statute. Retried in Gunnison in 1886, he was convicted on five counts of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to forty years — at the time among the longest prison sentences ever handed down in the United States. He served eighteen, was paroled in 1901 after a newspaper campaign on his behalf, and died near Denver in 1907.

This is the most infamous case of survival-cannibalism in the history of the American West, and it sits uneasily between two stories that the surviving facts cannot fully separate: a party of starving men in a death-trap of snow, and a robber who murdered five companions for the money in their pockets. Modern forensic work, including a 1989 exhumation of the remains, strengthened the case that the men were killed rather than simply dying — but it could not settle the central, genuinely contested question of who struck first, or whether Packer’s claim of self-defense holds any truth. The facts that are solid are grim enough; the rest remains uncertain, and this entry tries to keep those two things apart.