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The expert forensic evidence, now available only 106 years after the first trial, indicates that one of Alferd Packer's versions of the tale is true.
In late 1873, six prospectors were snowbound, lost and hungry in the San Juans. Packer said he left camp to look for landmarks. When he returned, Shannon Wilson Bell was roasting Frank Miller's leg over a campfire. Israel Swan, George Noon and James Humphrey lay dead on the ground, killed by Bell's hatchet. Bell lunged at Packer. Packer shot him, built a rude shelter and stayed two months, until the snow allowed travel.
The prosecution charged that Packer, not Bell, had slain the men, probably motivated by robbery, with cannibalism a necessary afterthought.
He was convicted in 1883 -- but of murder, not
cannibalism, even though Colorado lore claims that Alferd
Packer was the only man in U.S. history ever convicted
of cannibalism.
The Packer legend was off to a roaring start, as
evidenced by the top layers of an 1883 headline in the
Denver Republican: HUMAN JERKED BEEF. The Man Who Lived
on Meat Cut from His Murdered Victims. The Fiend Who Became
Very Corpulent Upon a Diet of Human Flesh.
Legend has it that Judge Melville B. Gerry sentenced
Packer with There was seven Democrats in Hinsdale
County, but you, you voracious, man-eatin' son of a bitch,
you ate five of them. I sentence you to be hanged by the
neck until dead, as a warning against reducing the
Democratic population of the state.
In fact, Gerry's sentencing speech was florid Victorian
prose: Close your ears to the blandishments of hope.
Listen not to the flattering promises of life, but prepare
for the dread certainty of death. Prepare to meet thy God;
prepare to meet the spirits of thy murdered
victims...
It turned out that Packer had been convicted of murder at a time when, on account of an oversight by the legislature, murder was not illegal in Colorado. (Incompetence seems to be a continuing tradition in some quarters.) So he was convicted of manslaughter. Polly Pry, the Denver Post's sob sister, got him paroled in 1901.
Packer's notoriety is hard to explain, since cannibalism was not uncommon in the West. The Donner-Reed party resorted to human flesh in 1846-47. Not only were dead companions consumed, but their two Indian guides, who had refused to eat human flesh, were shot and eaten -- a deed as nefarious as anything Packer was ever accused of. Yet there were no trials.
Out on the Smoky Hill Trail, near present-day Limon in the summer of 1859, the Arapaho found Daniel Blue wandering around half-crazed, near the partially eaten body of his brother Alexander. Before Alexander's death, he and Daniel had eaten another brother, Charles, as well as another gold-seeker named Soleg.
Anthropophagy was so widespread that Mark Twain joked
about it in an 1868 short story, Cannibalism in the
Cars,
about a snowbound train between St. Louis and
Chicago: I shall always remember Walker. He was a little
rare, but very good.... For supper we had that Oregon
patriarch, and he was a fraud, there is no question about
it -- old, scraggy, tough...
Perhaps the nation had had enough of frontier cannibalism a century ago, and Packer happened to be the one who was made an example. It does appear now that he didn't commit murder, which comes as no surprise to Ervan F. Kushner, a retired judge who researched the case long before this summer's exhumation.
Kushner sought a posthumous pardon for Packer. Gov. Dick Lamm agreed the evidence exonerated Packer, but refused to issue a pardon.
Gov. Romer will see similar pressure now. Justice or
not, he should resist. Even if most of the legend isn't
true, Colorado is a more entertaining place for having
Republicans in Alferd Packer Clubs, for an Alferd Packer
Grill in Boulder, and for the Alferd Packer Society of Lake
City, whose motto is Serving our fellow man since
1874.
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