On April 16th, 1874, Alferd Packer walked out of the woods near Sagauche, Colorado. He told a story of survival. But his legacy as being the “Colorado Cannibal” deserved? Find out on this episode of Footnoting History. Hey Footnoters, Josh here with a harrowing story of adventure, murder, and cannibalism. Or maybe not. I’m going to tell you the story of the infamous Alferd Packer, who, at the time, was one of the most notorious killers not just Colorado history, but American history, too.
But this story may not be all that seems to be, because we’re honestly unsure if Packer committed the murders he’s accused of. We’re sure that he ate human flesh to survive (he readily admitted doing so), but the rest of the story doesn’t have definitive evidence one way or another. First of course, some background. Maybe you’ll find this hilarious. Maybe you’ll find it disturbing. Maybe you’ll find it hilariously disturbing.
I first heard of Alferd – or Alfred – Packer when I was in elementary school. Alferd Packer is buried in my hometown – Littleton, Colorado. If that southern suburb of Denver Colorado is familiar to you, it’s for another reason. And, I realize some listeners might be thinking of that event. So let me answer some questions real quick. Isn’t that where... Yes, it is. You didn’t go there, did you? Yes, I did. You weren’t there when it happened, were you? Yes, I was.
But we’re not here to talk about that transformative event, we’re here for a little true crime as history. When we were told Packer’s story during those elementary school years, we also were treated to a “history of Littleton field trip.” We went to the Littleton History Museum, we took a walk through downtown Littleton, which included touring the historic theater on the main street, and a visit to Alferd Packer’s grave. The late 1980s and early 1990s were a heck of a time, man.
Look kids, a MURDEROUS CANNIBAL! Isn’t that neat! Oooooooooooh, we all said, I’m sure. Honestly it feels like something out of The Simpsons the more that I think about it. But before we get to Packer and his lost party, I’d like to make a couple of notes on the word “cannibal” and the idea of cannibalism itself. It’s difficult to divorce the word “cannibal” from a European colonial context.
As I found out through my research for this episode, it was Christopher Columbus who seems to have heard “canib” when the Carib people told him their names. And quite frankly, whether any peoples of the Caribbean world ate the remains of their fellow humans is still a hotly debated topic and quite controversial. The other thing that I want to point out is that cannibalism is also a part of the Europeans’ own stories in America.
Cabeza de Vaca (a Spanish conquistador, who I will be doing an episode on soon) and his crew ate the remains of their dead compatriots instead of going ashore and negotiating with the native peoples they encountered (out of fear of cannibalism, ironically enough). If you know the story of the early Jamestown, VA colony, you know about the so-called “starving time,” when those first settlers ran out of food and turned to the flesh of the dead to survive.
But the important thing is that the story of American colonization includes cannibalism by the colonizers themselves; even as they fear the cannibalism of native peoples. It’s just something to. keep in mind. So now let me introduce you to our most ineligible of bachelors, Alfred Packer. Alfred G. Packer was born on January 21, 1842, near Pittsburgh, PA. He did not have a particularly great childhood, and fell out with his parents before moving to Minnesota to try and eek it out as a shoemaker.
From what I gathered from research, he decided to slightly alter his name to Alferd because he hated the name that his parents gave him. If I use Alferd and Alfred interchangeably, I apologize. It’s the same guy, I promise. When the American Civil War broke out in 1861, Big Al... Can I call him Big Al? Hungry Al seems a bit... macabre. In any event, Big Al enlisted in the Union Army in 1862.
But Packer was an epileptic and struggled with seizures, so he received an honorable discharge about 8 months after his initial enlistment. He enlisted in the Union Army again in 1863, but again, his seizures struck again and he received a second honorable discharge in 1864. Now Big Al was a bit stuck. He could have gone back to his shoemaking gig, but, the dude wasn’t exactly a sneakerhead. Not that they had sneakers back in 1864 like we do, but, come on, work with me a little bit here.
I know YOU want a pair of Air Alferds. I’d worry about the leather though. Yup. So Alfred Packer did what anyone in the post-Civil War era would do when they had no real direction in life. He went out west in search of his fortune. Now, we have this image in our minds of these intrepid men out on their own in the West, finding veins of silver or gold, striking it rich, and living the good life. But, folks, the reality of the West does not match those expectations.
The West, such as it was, had been quite corporatized, especially in agriculture and mining. So when Packer got out there, that’s the reality that he found. Don’t think of the prospector standing in the river with his pan and sifting for gold. Most miners were wage workers who worked long hours in incredibly dangerous conditions. Packer ended up taking a series of odd jobs, but spent a good amount of time working in a copper mine in Utah.
Big Al would catch the prospecting bug in the early 1870s, when a new gold and silver rush began in the San Juan Mountains in southwestern Colorado. If you’ve ever been to Silverton or Telluride or even Ouray – you've been in the San Juans.
Before the massive influx of miners into the San Juans in search of gold and silver, this was land that belonged to the Ute people. The Ute had made deals with the United States government for sale of land, but the US government, as it so often did (and does) with indigenous peoples, broke that agreement.
In the case of the San Juans, the government sent Felix Brunot to negotiate with Ouray, one of the Ute leaders in the area (and a quite controversial figure to put it mildly) to keep out the prospectors who were trespassing on Ute lands. Ouray and Brunot struck a deal. The US would get the land in question so that they could mine it, but they were supposed to give it back when they had finished. And guess what the US Government has never done. I sure you’re surprised.
So what does this have to do with Alfred Packer? Well, it was the San Juan gold and silver rush that lured Alfred Packer out of Utah and into Colorado. Alfred Packer was many things. But one thing we’re pretty sure of is that Packer was a pathological liar. From all the records of the people who traveled with him emerges a theme: the dude sucked. He lied. He was argumentative. And he apparently had a distinctive high squeaky voice that just annoyed everyone.
Before working in the mines, Packer had tried to make it as a scout for traveling parties. But unfortunately for Al, he was a terrible guide. He always got lost. But now that there were men who were ready to leave Utah for Colorado in search of gold and silver, Good Ole Al met a group of them on their way out of Utah and was like, “Dearest Bros, I am a scout who will definitely not get you lost, let me take you to Colorado, the place I know like the back of my hand.”
For better or for worse, this group of 20 men agreed to let Packer take the wheel and head out to Colorado. And to Al’s credit, he got them to Colorado (because it’s not that hard), but it took way longer than expected. Winter was coming and the wild Rocky Mountains are probably the last place you want to spend the dead of winter without central heating. The party found out Packer was full of it quickly.
Many of them commented on how annoying he was, how he had overstated his knowledge of the San Juans, was greedy with the rations, loved to argue, and other such shortcomings. The dude sounds like a real peach! Well, in January of 1874, Packer and his party reached the camp of Chief Ouray. Ouray was gracious enough to let the men into his camp, and he told them they were welcome to stay there throughout the winter.
Going any further into the mountains at this time of year was dangerous, and Ouray said that not even a Ute would dare try to traverse the mountains in the dead of winter. A few weeks afterwards, word got to Ouray’s camp that there had been a major find in Breckenridge, Colorado, and now the prospecting party had major FOMO. About half the party still had their wagons and other provisions, so they weren’t going anywhere.
But 11 of them, including Packer, did not have much to carry with them and decided that they were going to make a go for it. In February. In the Rocky Mountains. After the native leader said that you really shouldn’t do that. Packer made it worse. Ouray told the 11 men that if they absolutely had to go right now, they should follow the Gunnison River. 5 of the 11 men agreed. But Shifty Al was like, “Nah, bros, we should go through the mountains! I know this area pretty well and it’s faster.”
5 men went with Packer, the other 5 stuck to Ouray’s directions and stuck to the river. Ouray gave the men food enough to keep them fed for 14 days. It turned out that they’d be out there for much longer than 14 days. They had no heavy clothing, minimal supplies, and only a handful of weapons. Alfred Packer finally emerged from the woods on April 16th, 1874, over two months after his party had set out.
He had arrived at the Los Pinos Indian Agency, which, after begging for help, Packer was given food and shelter. He told everyone at the agency that he had been with a party of five other men, but that they had turned on him and left him abandoned on the side of the mountain, though they did leave him with a rifle. Packer had that rifle with him when he arrived at the agency.
Packer sold the rifle and headed to the nearby town of Saguache, where he arranged a hotel room at some expense and started throwing money around generally. Not long after Packer had arrived in Saguache, a few of the original party members who had stayed back with Chief Ouray also came into town. They saw Packer – well, I imagine they probably heard him – and they approached him and they asked where their other companions had gone.
Packer told his former companions that the five other men who were with him left him behind to go searching for food. He presumed that they had abandoned him and he was forced to leave them behind and go search for help. He claimed to not know their fate. His former companions were like, “uh, bro, that doesn’t track at all.
You look well fed, and why would those bros abandon their scout when they don’t know the terrain?” There were arguments, threats made, and Packer decided that he needed to leave Saguache. Back at Los Pinos Indian Agency, the five men who decided to stick to the river route now showed up there too. They heard that Packer had been there, and they discredited everything that Packer had told those he encountered at the Agency.
Then the man in charge of the Agency, General Charles Adams, got involved. They brought Packer back to the Agency. When he arrived back at the Agency, Packer faced General Adams and it wasn’t long before Packer gave his first official statement. Packer told General Adams that his party had begun to starve and subsisted on rosebuds and the occasional rabbit.
Eventually, Packer claimed, their hunger led one of the men to hit another, Israel Swan, in the head with a hatchet and killed him while Packer was out gathering firewood. Packer and the remaining four party members butchered Swan’s body and consumed his flesh. As they ran out of meat, the remaining four party members plotted the next to die and be consumed, until only two men were left, Packer and Shannon Bell.
Packer claimed that Bell had tried to attack and kill him, and that he had killed Bell in self-defense. Packer admitted to butchering Bell and remarked that he found Bell’s pectoral muscles to be the most delicious part. Gross. The first attempt to find the bodies of the missing men ensued and during this first attempt at locating the remains, Packer tried to stab an agency clerk who had come with the search party. So, General Adams rightly threw him in jail.
In the following summer, a writer for Harper’s Weekly discovered the bodies. And what the reporter discovered completely contradicted Packer’s account of what had transpired. And suspicions about Packer increased exponentially. Packer, still in jail for attempted murder, escaped his incarceration. The rumor was that someone passed him a key and then he ran off. Nobody found him. Not for 9 years.
One of the original party members who had stayed behind at Ouray’s camp eventually found Packer in, of all places, Cheyanne, Wyoming. This former party member alerted General Adams, and soon Packer was back in Saguache to face trial for capital murder, though the trial would take place in the next county over. By this time, the court of public opinion had already decided a verdict. Packer was guilty.
And now Packer was claiming that Shannon Bell had killed all the other men after Bell had sent Packer to go search for food. And Packer also claimed that when he returned, Bell had tried to attack him, and so he had shot Bell below the belly before grabbing a hatchet and burying it in Bell’s head. The self-defense uh... defense... didn’t work. Packer was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. But as unfortunate as Packer had been (I suppose), his lawyers were able to find a loophole.
When Packer allegedly committed these murders, Colorado did not yet exist. So, because the Colorado government did not exist when the crime occurred, the Colorado government could not try Packer for the crime. Kinda sounds like the Chewbacca Defense to me. Regardless, the death sentence was thrown out. And Packer could not be tried for murder a second time. But he could be tried for voluntary manslaughter, which he was. And he was found guilty.
Then he was sentenced to 30 years in Colorado State Penitentiary in Canon City. Not a place you want to go, by any means. I have family there. Not – not – in the prison, in Canon City. And it’s grown, but you gotta go there for a reson. Throughout his imprisonment, Packer appealed the verdict several times and eventually exhausted his appeals when the Colorado Supreme Court upheld the verdict and the punishment.
16 years later, Packer had caught the attention of Polly Pry, a journalist at the Denver Post. Pry, like many women journalists of the era, wrote on sensational stories like the interviews of convicted murderers. Pry took an interest in Packer’s case and began writing about him. Eventually, she traveled to Canon City to meet with him. And despite finding him completely repulsive, she came to think that Packer might, in fact, be innocent.
She continued to write about Packer and eventually, the governor of Colorado agreed to parole Packer only 18 years into his sentence. It was important to the governor that Packer be paroled and not pardoned. It was his final condition before he agreed to it. The governor also wanted to make sure that Packer would never profit from his story and barred him from doing so. Packer then went to work for the Denver Post as a guard. And he always referred to Polly Pry as his “liberator.”
Packer eventually retired to Littleton, Colorado, where he died in 1907. By all accounts, he had a good reputation with his neighbors, who remarked that he was kind, built dollhouses for children, and had become – ironically – a vegetarian. In 1989, the bodies of the five men that Packer allegedly killed, were exhumed and the researcher, James Starrs from Georgetown University, concluded that Packer had, in fact, killed all five men with a hatchet, done and dusted.
But about a decade later, another historian, David Bailey, discovered what turned out to be the pistol Packer that claimed to have used. It was hanging out in the somewhat-far-away Grand Junction, Colorado museum, and Packer, well, he might have been telling the truth. Packer had later claimed that he had shot Bell twice. The gun had a capacity of five rounds, and when David Bailey discovered it in that museum, only three were left.
Though he could not exhume the bodies, Bailey did study the photographs taken by Starrs, and noticed that there was a bullet-sized hole in the pelvis of Shannon Bell, the man Packer claimed to have killed in self-defense. Soil analyses were done in 2001, and the results showed that there were lead fragments that were a match for the pistol and the bullets Packer claimed to have used.
So the theory these new researchers landed on was that Packer was telling the truth that he had shot Bell, but whether it was in self-defense, they just didn’t know. Starrs, for his part, rebuffed this theory, saying that the hole in Bell’s pelvis could just have easily have been made by an animal. So what do we do with the story of Alfred Packer besides take a lurid fascination with it? A couple of things, I think.
First, Packer’s story tells us about the perils of the west and the brutal nature of prospecting in the Rocky Mountains. It’s also an interesting counterpoint to the more heroic tales of the so-called Mountain Men like Kit Carson (who quite frankly is maybe more of a monster than Alfred Packer). I also think Packer’s story tells us something about ourselves, as do many stories that involve cannibalism. These stories make us confront a terrifying question: Would we eat human flesh to survive?
Could hunger drive us do to the unimaginable? The answer to those questions is often terrifying. Also, I gotta end it here. I need you to know that the University of Colorado at Boulder student body named a new cafeteria it opened in 1968, and they named it “The Alferd Packer Grill.” It’s still open. Today. Link in the episode description. Its tag-line – I kid you not – is “Have a Friend for Lunch!” Now you know. Thank you for joining me for this episode of Footnoting History.
Don’t forget to head over to FootnotingHistory.com for visuals, links, and sources related to Alfred Packer. Don’t forget that all of our episodes are now on YouTube, complete with closed captions. Go visit our channel, like our videos, and subscribe if you love it. If you’d like to interact with us, we are on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest @Footnoting History. We’d love to hear from you, and remember: the best stories are always in the footnotes. See you next time.