Alferd Packer — 1874, the Colorado Cannibal

Summary

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.

Timeline

The Setup

The party formed out of the gold fever of the early 1870s. A larger group of prospectors had set out from Utah in the winter of 1873–74 hoping to reach the new diggings in Colorado, and in January 1874 they arrived, cold and ill-provisioned, at the winter camp of the Ute leader Chief Ouray near the present site of Montrose. Ouray fed and sheltered them and told them plainly what the mountains in winter would do to them: stay until spring. Most of the men heeded him. Packer, who had talked his way into the group as a guide despite a thin knowledge of the country, did not.

On or about February 9, 1874, Packer led a breakaway group of six — himself and five others — out of the Ute camp on a direct route through the San Juans toward the Los Pinos Indian Agency and the gold camps beyond. The five who went with him were Israel Swan, an older man reportedly carrying a substantial sum of money; Shannon Wilson Bell, a red-bearded man; the young George Noon, sometimes called 'California'; James Humphrey; and Frank Miller, a German-born butcher. They carried provisions calculated for roughly ten days to two weeks, a few firearms and little ammunition, and no snowshoes — into some of the most rugged high country in Colorado, in February.

It was, by any sober assessment, a reckless undertaking, and the men around Ouray's fire had said so. The San Juans in midwinter are a maze of steep timber and deep, unstable snow, where a route that looks short on a map can become impassable and where a small party without snowshoes can be pinned for days by a single storm. Packer's chosen line was not much shorter than the safer way the rest of the prospectors took, but it was far more dangerous. The six men walked into it anyway, and only one of them walked out.

The Disaster

Because no one but Packer survived, the disaster itself can only be reconstructed from his shifting accounts and from what the ground and the bodies later showed. By every version, the small party became lost and snowbound in the high country, their provisions ran out, and they were trapped far from help in killing cold. From that shared starting point, Packer's story diverged — and changed over time. In his first confession, made at the agency in 1874, he described the men dying or being killed one by one over many days, with the survivors eating the dead, and named Bell as having killed others before Packer finally killed Bell. In his 1883 statement he told it differently: that he had gone off to scout, returned to find Bell had murdered the other four and was roasting human flesh, and that he shot Bell in self-defense when Bell rushed him.

What is not in dispute is that the men were eaten. When the five bodies were discovered in the summer of 1874 — the discovery is generally credited to an artist, John A. Randolph, working for Harper's Weekly — they lay close together in a shaded gulch below Slumgullion Pass, near the Lake Fork of the Gunnison above Lake City, in what became known as Dead Man's Gulch. The remains had been stripped of flesh from the fleshy parts of the body, and a beaten path and a crude shelter nearby suggested someone had camped beside the dead and returned to them for food over a period of time. That detail cuts against the picture of a lone starving man eating only to stay alive in extremis.

The condition of the bodies argued strongly for violence, not mere starvation. Several skulls bore crushing wounds consistent with blows from a hatchet, one body's head was missing entirely, and there were indications that some of the men had been shot. Critically, substantial flesh remained on parts of the bodies — which sat awkwardly against Packer's claim that the meat had been consumed as each man died of hunger. The arrangement of the remains, the hatchet wounds, the apparent gunshots, and the leftover flesh together suggested that the men had been killed, and killed before starvation had run its full course. But which man killed which, and in what order, and whether any blow was struck in genuine self-defense, the silent bodies could not say.

The Ordeal

The aftermath, rather than the ordeal, is where Packer's case became infamous, because his own conduct after walking out of the mountains was what damned him. He emerged alone at the Los Pinos Indian Agency around the middle of April 1874, telling a story of having been abandoned and snow-blind. But he did not look like a man who had starved for two months — observers found him oddly well-fed — and he was carrying money and items that had belonged to the missing men, including a skinning knife said to be Miller's. In the nearby town of Saguache he spent freely, paid for a horse, and could not give a consistent account of where his wealth had come from. Suspicion hardened quickly.

Confronted at the agency — by some accounts after strips of dried human flesh were found — Packer broke down and gave his first confession, then later changed the details. He was held in a makeshift jail, escaped (likely with help) before he could be tried, and vanished under an assumed name, John Schwartze, for nine years. He was recognized by chance in Wyoming in 1883, arrested, and brought back to Lake City to face trial at last.

His first trial, in April 1883, convicted him of the premeditated murder of Israel Swan and sentenced him to hang. (The widely repeated story of the judge thundering a folksy, politically pointed sentence in a saloon is a colorful newspaper invention; the formal sentence delivered by Judge Melville Gerry was sober and legal.) In 1885 the Colorado Supreme Court reversed the conviction on a technical ground — the murder statute he had been tried under had been repealed before Colorado became a state, so it could not lawfully be applied to him. Rather than free him, the state retried him in Gunnison in 1886 on five counts of manslaughter. He was convicted on all five and sentenced to forty years, eight years per man — among the harshest sentences in the country at the time.

How They Survived

Rescue & After

Packer served eighteen years of his forty-year sentence in the Colorado penitentiary at Cañon City. His release came not through the courts but through the press: the Denver Post reporter Polly Pry took up his cause around the turn of the century, portraying him as an ordinary man caught in a catastrophe rather than a monster, and her campaign helped persuade Governor Charles Thomas to grant him a conditional parole — not a pardon — on February 8, 1901. The terms forbade him from leaving Colorado and from profiting off his notorious story. He never received a formal pardon, and the manslaughter convictions stood.

In his last years Packer lived quietly near Denver, working odd jobs and, by some accounts, becoming a vegetarian and being remembered kindly by neighborhood children. He died on April 23, 1907, in his mid-sixties; the cause was recorded in the language of the day, and he was buried under a veteran's headstone, having served in the Union Army before the war's epilepsy discharges. The man who had been sentenced to hang for cannibal murder ended as a frail, half-forgotten old-timer on the edge of a growing city.

The case has never stopped being argued. Forensic investigations — the 1989 exhumation and later microscopic analysis of the soil beneath Shannon Bell's remains — built a strong material case that the men were killed, and that Bell in particular was shot, which is consistent with at least part of Packer's later story even as it undercuts his innocence. But the decisive question of whether Packer murdered five men for the money in their packs, or killed one in genuine self-defense after the others had died, cannot be answered from the evidence that survives. What can be said soberly is this: six men went into the San Juans against good advice, five died there and were eaten, the one who lived profited by their deaths and lied about how they came, and two juries found him a killer. Beyond that, the mountains kept their secret.

Lessons

References

• Alferd Packer Wikipedia
• Alfred Packer: A Colorado Mystery Revisited History Colorado
• Alferd Packer Colorado Encyclopedia
• Hinsdale County Museum (Lake City, Colorado) Hinsdale County Historical Society