The Colorado Cannibal: The Story of Alfred Packer

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Welcome to Civics and Coffee, a history podcast. The show all about United States history, delivered to you and the time it takes to enjoy your morning cup of coffee. I'm your host, Alicia, a historian trained in United States history with a passion for telling both the known and unknown parts of America's past. So grab your coffee and get ready for some bite-sized history. Hey everyone, welcome back. In the spring of 1874, a beleaguered man stumbled into the Los Pinos Indian Agency seeking a cool drink of whiskey. Located just outside of Gunnison, Colorado, high in the eastern mountains, the agency was established in 1868 when the federal government entered into one of its many treaties with the surrounding indigenous communities, this time with the Ute people. As the stranger quenched his thirst, he told patrons a story of abandonment and fortitude, explaining that he was part of a traveling party on the hunt for recently discovered gold in the Colorado Mountains. This new narrator captivated the audience as he explained that he was left behind by his companions due to his failure to keep up out of exhaustion and snow blindness, and only thanks to good fortune was he able to make it through the unforgiving wilderness to the Indian agency. The only problem was he looked too healthy for someone who had survived such an ordeal. And his story only grew more questionable when other members of his party began poking holes in the story. What no one could have anticipated was that this stranger, this seemingly harmless individual, had resorted to cannibalism. The only question was was it premeditated or an act of desperation? This week I'm diving into the story of Alfred Packer. Who was he? What happened in those Colorado mountains? And was he a cold blooded killer? Grab your cup of coffee, peeps. Let's do this. Alfred Packer, who sometimes went by Alfred Packer, was born on november twenty first, eighteen forty two, near Pittsburgh. A man who always seemed to be a bit shifty, Packer sometimes took to using the birth date of january twenty first. For what reason remains unclear. His early home life is also a bit murky, though he did have a brother and two sisters. He left the family home at a young age while still a teenager, where he became a shoemaker in Minnesota. Packer likely suffered from some form of epilepsy throughout his life, a disease that in the 19th century was viewed as a mental defect and made Packer a bit of a pariah wherever he went. This made obtaining and keeping a job incredibly difficult, since Packer would inevitably be struck with a seizure at the most inopportune moment, usually in front of co-workers, and he would quickly find himself out of a job. Whether feeling a sense of patriotism or desperately in need of income, Packer tried to serve in the Civil War twice, serving in two different regiments, lasting less than a year both times. Again, his seizures were to blame, outing him as someone deficient in the hearts and minds of the authorities of the era, and prompting his immediate dismissal. Lacking any kind of care or treatment for seizure or epilepsy in the mid-19th century, Packer dealt with pretty frequent seizures, sometimes occurring every few days. By 1872, Packer had migrated to Colorado, where he found work as a miner in Georgetown. Always a dangerous occupation, Packer learned the violent side of mining when he lost his index finger and part of his pinky when a sledgehammer landed incorrectly. By 1873, Packer was in Utah, still working the mines to eke out a small semblance of a living, when he heard some exciting news. Gold had been discovered back in Colorado. Only 20 years removed from the California gold rush, Packer surely knew that if he was able to get back over to the Colorado Hills fast enough before the big industrialists had time to take over, he might be able to permanently change his life for the better. Of course, it was unknown exactly how much gold might be waiting for him when he got there, but much like in 1849, the prospect of striking it rich was a powerful draw, and Packer decided he had to figure out a way to get there and do it quickly. Packer heard of a group gathering in Bingham County, Utah to prepare for a trip to the San Juan Mountains, and he desperately wanted to join them, but he did not have enough money to cover the cost of his provisions. Thus, he made an offer. He could pay $25 towards the costs, plus his quote, knowledge of Colorado's high country and his ability to guide, end quote. One of the many jobs Packer held and lost was as a scout and guide of the Colorado Mountains. He hoped that this exchange would be enough to earn him passage with the traveling party. One man, Robert McGraw, was working with a four-horse team and needed some help and decided to take Packer up on his offer. The group, comprised of 21 men, quickly came to dislike Packer. He put people off almost immediately by asking weird questions like how much cash they'd brought with them on the trip. And the men described Packer as having a bad attitude. One man who would come to be one of Packer's biggest antagonists, Preston Nutter, would later describe Packer as quote, sulky, obstinate, and quarrelsome, end quote. Worst of all, Packer's claim of familiarity with the mountain range proved to be false. He managed to get the group lost several times, forcing the crew to stretch their rations to their limit and far beyond what they anticipated. Traveling during the winter months was already a dangerous mission. Progress proved slow, and getting lost only stressed their limited supplies. By late January 1874, the exhausted party arrived at the Ute camp of Chief Orwe in Colorado, near present-day Delta. The chief shared some of his food with the near starving men and let them get warmed by his fire, before warning his guests not to continue their journey until the snow melted some. But again, the anticipation of gold was just too much for several members in the party who refused to wait out the winter in camp. Deciding that waiting until spring was simply too long, the group sought direction from their gracious host, who explained that their journey would take about seven days to reach the next stop, the government-run Indian agency. One group of men led by Oliver D. Lutzenheiser set off with their new directions. When Packer tried to join them, he was immediately rebuffed, under the threat of gunfire if he dared to follow. However, when a second group of six decided to head out, Packer was able to join, taking a leading role as a guide, a questionable decision given all that Packer had demonstrated thus far. The travelers didn't have much to pack, but their rations were limited to what they were able to carry on their backs, which meant that they had to be very judicious in their travel and could afford no mistakes and no deviations. Departing the camp on February 9th, the group initially followed the chief's directions and the path already outlined by the men who had left before them. But suddenly Packer had a change of heart and suggested that the group take a path that was higher up on the mountain range to make the view easier. Before long, the party of men who ranged in age from young George Noon, who was still a teenager, to Israel Swoon, who was believed to be over 60, were lost. Packer continued to take the group on an alternative route through snow flurries and deep pockets of ice. They continued to walk along the ridge and were out of flour by day nine, already over their projected travel time by two days. In the middle of the wilderness, with little access to additional food supplies, such as game or plants, the men took to foraging their packs for items that could be used for food, using the hairs from their goatskin moccasins to roast over a fire. Things got so desperate that they resorted to living off of picked rose buds from bushes they found along the trail. When the group finally arrived at a frozen lake, they tried breaking the ice to attempt to fish, only to find the body of water devoid of any sea-based protein. Or at least that is the story told by Packer when he arrived at the Indian Agency on April 16th, more than 60 days after he left the chief's camp. But, like I mentioned earlier, when Packer told his version of events, he ran into a few hiccups. The first was his appearance. If he had been subsisting on nothing but berries and bark for upwards of a month, as he claimed, then he should have lost a lot more weight and looked a lot more distressed. The other issue? The other members of the gold seeking travelers, the men who had decided to wait out the worst of the winter in the chiefs' camp, had also made it to the Indian Agency and were skeptical he was telling the truth. Packer also showed up at the Indian Agency suddenly flush with cash. As a man who had to barter his way into the group, it raised more than a few eyebrows that he now somehow seemed to have no issue paying his debts. Packer made matters worse when he visited a local saloon and spent several nights drinking and playing cards, all things that cost money, living way beyond his means, which only prompted more demands from his travel companions that Packer finally fessed up and tell the truth. And that is when Charles Adams showed up. In charge of the Los Pinos Indian Agency, Adams interviewed Packer about his experience on the mountain, trying to get a sense of what actually happened. Adams first asked Packer about the cash, which Packer tried to dismiss as a loan from a local blacksmith. Perhaps not expecting Adams to verify his statement, Packer must have started to panic a bit when Adams came back and explained that he was unable to corroborate the loan. And this is when Packer's story began to change. In discussing the events with Adams on May 4th, Packer claimed that after the group got lost, one of the men passed away unexpectedly, and that the group decided to use the body as meat in order to survive. Packer claimed that the group repeated this behavior when a second member, a man by the name of Humphrey, also passed away. All was fine until Packer went to forage for wood for their communal fire. In this first confession, Packer stated he returned to the camp to find the remaining members of the party murdered by one of the members, a man by the name of Bell, who then launched himself at Packer with his rifle, attempting to club him to death. When he missed, Packer got control of the situation and shot Bell in self-defense, taking a chunk of his body to use as a food source as he worked his way off the mountain. Now, one has to ask yourself in this story if Bell was truly crazed and ready to kill why he would use the bunt of a gun and not just shoot Packer. But I digress. Perhaps finding the story too fantastical to be pure fiction, Charles Adams initially believed Packer and asked the perceived would-be victim for his help in locating the bodies. Packer initially agreed, but later claimed that he was unable to retrace his steps, an odd statement from someone who supposedly had a lot of experience navigating the Colorado Mountains. The other members of the traveling cohort refused to believe the story and were adamant that Packer had intentionally led the small group astray so that he could rob them and demanded that Packer be placed under arrest. Despite the lack of evidence, Packer was briefly detained, but he managed to escape just before five bodies were discovered mutilated near the banks of Lake Fork, near Gunnison. The scene was grotesque. The men had been mutilated with a hatchet, and one man was missing his head. Preston Nutter, one of the men in the group, was there to identify what was left of the remains. Bringing Packer to justice would be a decade-long affair. After his escape from jail in 1874, Alfred Packer would all but disappear until 1883, when he popped up in Wyoming. Perhaps a sign of a guilty conscience, Packer was living under a different name, Schwartz, but was identified by one of his former traveling partners, Jean Frenchie Cabazon. Packer was immediately arrested and brought to Lake City to face trial. The man brought in for the arrest was Charles Adams, who by this time was serving as the postal inspector in nearby Manitou Springs. After collecting Parker, Adams successfully elicited a second confession out of his prisoner, which was almost as crazy as the first. In the updated version of events, Packer admitted that everyone died by the lake, but he again had someone else to blame. According to Packer, the only man he killed was Bell, who was the man who was responsible for the deaths of everybody else, and that he only killed Bell out of self-defense after Bell attacked him with hatchet in hand. Amidst the commotion in Packer's words, Bell, quote, fell on his face. The hatchet fell forward. I grabbed it and him in the top of his head, end quote. Bad weather delayed Packer's departure from the camp, prompting him to cut parts of his dead companions to use as a food source. In admitting to cannibalism, Packer said, quote, I tried to get away every day, but could not, so I lived off the flesh of these men, end quote. Packer also admitted to searching the bodies and discovering $70 in cash, which is what he claims he used to purchase the whiskey and play cards once he finally made it to the Indian agency. Adams, who had once believed Packer's tall tales, was more discerning this time around and pushed Packer on why he didn't share this version a decade earlier. Packer didn't have an answer. Alfred Packer was charged with premeditated murder, where the prosecution argued that he deliberately led the travelers off course so that he could rob and murder them. Packer stuck to his self-defense story, but the jury did not buy it, and he was convicted and sentenced to hang by Judge Melville Jerry, the first death penalty decision for the county. However, thanks to a legal loophole, Packer's conviction and death penalty were vacated, only for him to be recharged and convicted for manslaughter, where he was sentenced to a 40-year prison term, the longest sentence handed down by a judge up to that point. Packer spent several years trying to get released and became a model prisoner in the process. His requests were reviewed by the Colorado Supreme Court five times and denied each time. Packer next shifted to parole, where he gathered a lot of support. He even got the warden, Clarence P. Hoyt, to write a letter on his behalf. In 1899, Hoyt wrote partially, quote, I will not bring up the question whether he is guilty or not, nor shall I argue about the legality of his sentence. Of his sentence, however, I have always thought that it was excessive. He continued later, he has only a few more years to live at the most. I believe that justice has been satisfied, and that Packer should be allowed to go out from here without delay. Packer's efforts paid off. He was granted parole in January 1901 before dying on April 24th, 1907. The lore of Alfred Packer continues to permeate Colorado. There was an Alfred Packer Trail Challenge near Denver, and students attending the University of Colorado Boulder can grab a bite to eat, ironically enough, at the Alfred Packard restaurant and Grill. Unfortunately, we will never know exactly what happened on that Colorado mountain in the dead of winter in 1874. Whether an act of desperation or premeditation, five men died in a horrific way, and one man became forever known as the Colorado Cannibal. Thanks, peeps. I'll see you next time. I look forward to our next cup of coffee together.