The party that left the Uncompahgre Valley in February of 1874 had been warned not to go. Chief Ouray of the Ute, whose knowledge of the San Juan high country was authoritative and whose counsel was not given lightly, told the men directly that the passes were impassable in February, that the snowpack would hold through April, and that the distance they proposed to cover before spring would kill them. He offered to provide food and shelter until conditions improved. The party numbered twenty-one at the agency. Sixteen of them accepted his offer. Five did not, and they persuaded a sixth man to guide them as far as he was willing. The guide, a prospector named Alferd Packer who had been through portions of the San Juans the previous season, agreed to lead the party forward.
The six who continued were Packer and five companions: Israel Swan, a man in his mid-sixties who had prospected across the territories for two decades; Shannon Bell, a former soldier with a volatile reputation; James Humphrey, the quietest of the group and the one whose family would wait longest for news; Frank Miller, a butcher by trade before he came west; and George Noon, the youngest, eighteen or nineteen years old, who had not yet had reason to mistrust his own confidence in his stamina. The notices of the period carried advertisements of exactly this character — parties forming for San Juan routes, winter experience requested, shares of whatever claims they located to be divided equally. Men read those notices and believed them. The mountains did not adjust themselves to the terms of the advertisement.
By the time the party was three weeks into the crossing, they were snowbound at elevations where the timber thinned and game had long since descended to lower country. Their provisions were exhausted. The cold at that altitude in February is not the cold of a hard night — it is the cold of a sustained assault, working through clothing, through shelter, through the body’s capacity to generate heat, with a patience that outlasts any human response to it. The San Juan range in that season is not indifferent to men. It simply does not notice them.
Alferd Packer walked out of the mountains alone in early April 1874 and presented himself at the Los Pinos Indian Agency. He was in better physical condition than his stated ordeal should have allowed. He had money — not a great deal, but some — when all provisions of the party should have been spent months before. When asked about the other five men, he gave an account that satisfied no one who heard it, and then, over the following weeks, gave several additional accounts that did not agree with one another. His own version of events, as he offered it at various points in the record, describes a crossing in which men died sequentially of cold and starvation, with Packer the last survivor, sustained by what the mountains provided. What the mountains provided, the investigators would later establish, was the bodies of the men who died before him.
The five bodies were located in August 1874 in a gulch along the Lake Fork of the Gunnison, a site that entered the territory’s maps as Dead Man’s Gulch and has been marked under that name ever since. The physical evidence contradicted Packer’s account in several respects that could not be explained away. The wounds on the bodies were not consistent with men who had died of exposure and been consumed after death. They were consistent with blunt force applied to men who were alive at the time it was applied, by someone with the strength and intent to apply it. Four of the five had received blows to the back of the skull. Shannon Bell, whom Packer eventually named as the aggressor — the man who killed the others in a fit of madness and was himself killed in self-defense — had wounds that did not support that sequence. The death records filed by this archive’s correspondent note that Bell’s wound pattern specifically contradicts Packer’s final version: a man swinging a hatchet at another man does not receive the wound Bell received, at the angle Bell received it, unless he was facing away.
Packer was not captured immediately. He was gone from the territory for nine years, living under an assumed name in Wyoming, before a former member of the original prospecting party recognized him in 1883 and reported it. He was brought back to Colorado and tried in Lake City, the county seat of Hinsdale County, which by 1883 had grown from open range to a functioning town largely on the basis of the silver boom in the San Juans — the same country that had consumed his companions. He was convicted and sentenced to death. The Colorado Supreme Court found that the trial had been conducted improperly: Colorado had not been a state when the crimes occurred, and Packer had been tried under state statutes that did not apply to actions taken while Colorado was still a territory. He was retried in 1886, convicted on five counts of manslaughter, and sentenced to forty years.
He served fifteen. A Denver newspaper journalist named Polly Pry took up his case in 1899, argued that the sentence was excessive for manslaughter convictions, and conducted a public campaign that generated enough pressure for the governor to act. Packer was paroled in 1901, walked out of the state penitentiary at Canon City at sixty-four years old, and settled in the foothills west of Denver, at a small property near Deer Creek Canyon. He worked as a guard for a time, kept a garden, and gave occasional interviews in which he maintained his innocence with what observers described as a weary consistency rather than a passionate one, as if he had long since stopped expecting to be believed and had reduced the claim to a kind of reflex. He died on April 23, 1907, at Deer Creek Canyon, of what the attending physician called senility and general decline, which is the medical language for a man who lived long enough that the body ran out of reasons to continue. He was seventy years old.
What the case left in the record is a sequence of questions that the evidence answers in one direction and Packer’s testimony answers in another, and that no living witness can resolve because the only men who saw the interior of that crossing are five names in the obituary files of territories that did not yet have newspaper offices sufficient to notice their deaths. Israel Swan, Shannon Bell, James Humphrey, Frank Miller, George Noon — they went in with a man who came out, and the mountains kept the rest. The gulch has a name because of them. The man who named it, by surviving it, was the one who had the least claim to the naming.