Alferd Packer

In the early months of 1874, a prospecting party of six men entered the San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado in the middle of winter against the explicit advice of Ute Chief Ouray, who had sheltered them at his camp and told them the snow was too deep and the cold too severe for travel. One of the six men, Alfred Griner Packer — known through most of the documentary record as Alferd, a spelling that appears in his own hand in later letters and that the archive uses throughout — emerged from the mountains alone in April. The other five were dead on a mesa above what is now Lake City, in Hinsdale County, and the physical evidence at the site described a sequence of events that Packer's various accounts could not fully explain. What happened on that mesa between late January and mid-April of 1874 is the question that two trials, an escape, a nine-year manhunt, forensic examination, and more than a century of subsequent investigation have failed to definitively answer.

The archive does not attempt to resolve what cannot be resolved. It presents the complete case record: the facts established by evidence, the claims made by the accused, and the places where the two do not align.

The Party and the Route

Packer was born in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania on January 21, 1842. He enlisted in the Union Army during the Civil War and was discharged multiple times for epilepsy. By the early 1870s he was in Utah territory, presenting himself as a mountain man and guide with knowledge of the San Juan country. In November 1873 he joined a party of twenty-one prospectors assembling near the town of Provo to travel to the newly opened silver country of southwestern Colorado. He did so in the capacity of a guide, which the subsequent record suggests he was not qualified to be.

The full party reached the camp of Chief Ouray near the Uncompahgre River in January 1874. Ouray received them hospitably, fed them, and advised them plainly that the mountain passes to the east were impassable until spring. The majority of the party accepted this judgment and remained at the camp. Packer persuaded five men to continue. They left in early February 1874.

What happened after they left Ouray's camp is not documented by anyone but Packer, who gave at least two substantially different accounts of the same events at different points in time. The mountains they were crossing — the San Juans in February, at elevations above twelve thousand feet — were conditions under which the survival of any party depended on adequate food, navigational knowledge, and physical capacity. The record is unambiguous that Packer had overstated his qualifications as a guide. Whether he had adequate food when the party left is disputed. Whether the party became lost is certain.

Arrival at Los Pinos: April 1874

On April 16, 1874, Packer arrived alone at the Los Pinos (Uncompahgre) Ute Agency in Saguache County. He told the agency agent, General Charles Adams, that the other men had abandoned him on the trail. He appeared well-nourished for a man who had been in the mountains for approximately sixty-five days in winter conditions. He had money — more money than he should have had — including bills that agency employees and other members of the original party identified as belonging to the dead men. He bought whiskey at the agency store and spent freely.

Adams was suspicious. Within days of Packer's arrival, members of the original prospecting party who had wintered at Ouray's camp began arriving at Los Pinos and identifying the money Packer was spending as belonging to their companions. Confronted, Packer offered a revised account: he had been abandoned by the others and had survived by eating the body of one of them who had already died of exposure. He agreed to lead a search party back to the mountains.

The search party found nothing on the first attempt. Packer was arrested and held at the Saguache County jail, where he gave a formal written confession in May 1874. In this version, Shannon Bell had gone mad from hunger and cold and had killed the other four men. Packer had killed Bell in self-defense and had survived by eating the bodies of the dead. He had remained at the camp for approximately sixty days after the deaths before traveling out of the mountains.

The Bodies: August 1874

The remains of the five men were discovered in August 1874 by John A. Randolph, an artist traveling with Harper's Weekly, on a mesa above the Lake Fork of the Gunnison River — the area now known as Cannibal Plateau, near what became the town of Lake City. The site was approximately seventy-five miles from where Packer had told investigators the events occurred.

The physical evidence at the site contradicted Packer's account in several specific ways. The men had not died in the positions that starvation or exposure would have produced. The wounds were consistent with blunt force trauma and hatchet blows to the back of the head. Several of the bodies showed evidence of flesh removal from the limbs and torso. The preserved condition of the remains — the cold had maintained them through the spring — allowed a reasonably detailed forensic assessment by the standards of 1874. The assessment was that these were not men who had died of cold and hunger and been eaten afterward. The manner of their deaths raised different questions.

The confession's claim that Bell killed the others is incompatible with what the physical evidence showed. The positions of the bodies did not support Bell as an active aggressor. The wounds did not suggest the kind of frenzied attack that Packer's account described. The coroner's assessment, such as it was, pointed toward a more deliberate sequence. The archive notes these inconsistencies without claiming to resolve them: the evidence is more than a century old, the chain of custody was imperfect, and what the bodies showed was suggestive without being conclusive.

The Escape and the Manhunt

Before the discovery of the bodies, Packer escaped from the Saguache jail in August 1874. He disappeared entirely for nearly nine years. The methods of his escape and his movements in the years that followed were not comprehensively established until much later. He lived under assumed names in several western states and territories. The warrant for his arrest remained active in Colorado.

He was identified and apprehended in March 1883 near Fort Fetterman, Wyoming, by former Saguache Sheriff Lou Sherff, who recognized him from the original arrest. Packer was transported back to Colorado and held in Gunnison to await trial. His recapture was news. By 1883, the Packer case had the quality of a legend — nine years of absence, the grim circumstances of the original crime, the question of what exactly he had done and in what order — and the trial that followed attracted extensive press coverage.

The Two Trials

The first trial was held in Lake City, Hinsdale County, in 1883 — in the county where the bodies had been found. Packer was charged with murder. The jury convicted him on five counts. Judge Melville Gerry sentenced him to death. The sentence produced a famous speech that appears in various newspapers of the period in a range of versions; the archive notes that no contemporaneous verbatim transcript exists and that the colorful versions widely quoted in popular accounts do not appear in any documented court record. What is certain is that Packer was sentenced to death.

The conviction was appealed, and the Colorado Supreme Court overturned it on a legal technicality that had nothing to do with the evidence: the murders were committed in February 1874, before Colorado achieved statehood on August 1, 1876. The murder statute under which Packer had been convicted did not legally apply to a crime committed before the state existed. This was a genuine procedural problem, and the court resolved it correctly by the legal standards of the time, which did not make the outcome satisfying to anyone who had followed the evidence.

Packer was retried in 1886, this time in Gunnison County, on five counts of manslaughter under a statute that did apply. He was convicted on all five counts and sentenced to forty years — eight years per count, to be served consecutively. He was imprisoned at the Colorado State Penitentiary in Cañon City.

Parole and Final Years

Packer served approximately seventeen years across his two imprisonments. He was paroled in January 1901, in part due to the advocacy of Polly Pry, a journalist for the Denver Post who had taken up his case and argued that he had already served sufficient time. He was in his late fifties at parole, in poor health, and settled in Deer Creek in Jefferson County, Colorado, where he worked as a security guard and was reportedly known to neighborhood children as a gentle presence who gave them candy.

He died on April 23, 1907, at sixty-five years old, and was buried with military honors at the Littleton Cemetery in Jefferson County, a burial that drew objections from veterans' organizations and an eventual successful petition to have the honors revoked. His grave marker identifies him as a Civil War veteran. The debate about what he was in addition to that has not concluded.

What the Case Record Shows

The Packer case is unusual in the annals of Colorado crime for the volume of its documentary record and the degree to which that record resists a clean conclusion. The physical evidence is real and specific. The confessions are real and contradictory. The trials produced verdicts that were overturned on procedural grounds unrelated to guilt. The popular mythology that accumulated around the case — including the famous judicial quote that no contemporary source can verify — is itself a form of evidence, documenting how a community processes an event it cannot fully explain.

The archive holds the published account of Packer's own statement from the Saguache period, available in the dispatches archive at Statement of Survival — Alferd Packer, 1874. It is the closest thing to Packer's own voice in the record, and it raises more questions than it answers, which is consistent with everything else in this case.