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“Cannibalism
is not a subject for the thin-skinned.”
James Starrs
March
5, 1981
USA: Alleged murderer and cannibal
Alferd
Packer was exonerated
posthumously. However, Governor Lamm later denied
Judge Kushner's request for a pardon.
The
Alferd Packer case is one of the most infamous episodes of the Wild
West, and a case that is far from resolved.
Alferd
(or Alfred – he preferred the misspelling which he took from a
badly done tattoo) Packer
(November
21, 1842
- April
23, 1907)
is often known as the only American
ever convicted of cannibalism,
though in reality his conviction was for murder, not cannibalism. In
1874, sometime between February
9 and April
6, Packer was embroiled in a massacre and the eating of human
flesh in the snow-bound San Juan mountains (in the Rocky
Mountains of Colorado).
He later confessed to killing one man in self defence, and to
cannibalism due to starvation, but denied having murdered.
On
February
9, 1874, a party of six left for Gunnison,
Colorado. At an unknown date, the party got hopelessly lost, ran
out of provisions, and became snowbound in the Rockies. Packer
allegedly went scouting and came back to discover one of his party,
Shannon Wilson Bell, roasting human meat. According
to Packer, Bell rushed him with a hatchet; Packer shot and
killed him. It was Bell who had gone crazy due to starvation, and
hacked the others to death with a hatchet, Packer maintained.
Unfortunately, over the years, Packer’s
confessions were inconsistent.
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.”
Another
version: “Stand up, yah voracious man-eatin' sonofabitch, and
receive your sentence! Thar were only seven Democrats in all of
Hinsdale County and you ate five of them!”
In
fact, Judge
Gerry’s statement is replete with florid Victorian prose:
“I do not say these things to harrow
your soul, for I know you have drunk the cup of bitterness to its
very dregs, and wherever you have gone, the sting of you
conscience and the goadings of remorse have an avenging Nemesis
which have followed you at every turn in life and painted afresh
for your contemplation the picture of the past. I say these things
to impress upon your mind the awful solemnity of your situation
and the impending doom which you cannot avert. Be not deceived,
God is not mocked, for whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also
reap. You, Alfred Packer, sowed the wind; you must now reap the
whirlwind. Society cannot forgive you for the crime you have
committed. It enforces the old Masonic law of a life for a life,
and your life must be taken as the penalty of your crime. I am but
the instrument of society to impose the punishment which the law
provides. Will society cannot forgive it will forget. As the days
come and go, the story of your crimes will fade from the memory of
men.”
Alfred
has been humorously memorialised by a movie, a musical, several
cookbooks, a collector's doll, and the Alferd
Packer Grill for students at the University of Colorado – all
very amusing, unless of course Packer's claims of being “unjustly
dealth with”
[sic] are true. However, the matter is still one of much debate.
David
P Bailey, Curator of History at the Museum
of Western Colorado has made claims
that recent forensic evidence helps vindicate Packer.
James
Starrs, a professor of law and forensic
science at George Washington University, differs. Starrs led the
1989 expedition that focused on Packer's supposed victims. He
believes that markings on the skeletons he exhumed verify that
Packer had probably eaten the victims, just as he was convicted of
doing.
“Packer
was a scoundrel, disreputable in every possible way,” Starrs
claimed. “His claim of self-defence was absolute bullwah. There's
no question that the 17 years he spent in prison was short, very
short, for what he did.”
“Cannibalism is not a subject for the
thin-skinned”, Starrs has also been quoted as saying.
Alferd
Packer is widely rumoured to have become a vegetarian
before his death of reputed "Senility – trouble &
worry" in 1907 at the age of 64. His grave is still in Littleton,
Colorado. According to the Littleton, Colorado newspaper, the
Independent, Packer's last words before he died were, "I'm not
guilty of the charge."
No
doubt we will never know what really happened on 'Cannibal Plateau'
near present-day Lake City, but in a modern court of law Alfred
might easily have established reasonable doubt.
“In
1977, the United States Department of Agriculture dedicated its
Washington cafeteria (The Alfred Packer Memorial Dining Facility)
to the famous nineteenth-century Colorado pioneer Alfred Packer.
‘Alfred Packer,’ Agriculture Secretary Robert Bergland
declared, ‘exemplifies the spirit and fare that this agriculture
department cafeteria will provide.’
“Several
months later, the General Services Administration promptly removed
the dedicatory plaque, renamed the cafeteria, and accused the
Department of Agriculture of ‘bad taste’.”
Source:
Anecdotage
Was
Ronald Reagan's ancestor a cannibal?
"Daniel
Blue, Reagan's great, great, great uncle on his mother's side,
resorted to cannabalism [sic] to stay alive after he was lost
in the Rocky Mountains. Blue and his two brothers Alexander and
Charles and another man were lost during an expedition to Pike's
Peak that began in February, 1889. Blue was the only one to return,
the others either fell ill, starved to death or died of exposure.
"His account of the events follows:
"We were not strong enough to inter the corpse, neither had
we pick or shovel with which to dig a grave ... The dead body laid
there for three days, we lying helpless on the ground near it, our
craving for food increasing ... until driven by desperation; wild
with hunger, and feeling ... that self preservation is the first law
of nature we took our knives and commenced cutting the flesh from
the legs and arms of our dead companion.
"Later, when his brother Alexander died, he and his other
sibling Charles ate part of him, too. Charles later died, but Daniel
was found by an Arapaho Indian who nursed him back to health and got
him back to Denver City." The men's bodies were never
found."
Source
In the state of Colorado
In the year of seventy-four
They crossed the San Juan Mountains
Growing hungry to the core.
Their guide was Alferd Packer
And they trusted him too long:
For his character was weak
And his appetite was strong.
They called him a murderer, a cannibal, a thief;
It just doesn't pay to eat anything but Government-inspected beef.
Along the Gunnison River
An Indian camp they spied.
An Indian chief approached them,
To stop them he did try.
He warned them of the danger
In the snow that lay around,
But the danger was in Packer,
For his hunger knew now bound.
They called him a murderer, a cannibal, a thief;
It just doesn't pay to eat anything but Government-inspected beef.
Two cold months went slowly by;
Packer came back alone.
"My comrades they all froze to death,
I'm starving," he did moan.
The Indian chief knew how he lied,
He spat upon the ground,
For Packer's belly hung out all over his belt:
He'd gained some thirty pounds ...
From 'The
Ballad Of Alferd Packer' by
Phil Ochs
On
cannibalism, from Wikipedia
Cannibalism
is the act or practice of eating members of one's own species
and usually refers to humans
eating other humans (sometimes called 'anthropophagy'). Cannibalism
has been attributed to many different tribes and ethnicities in the
past, but the degree to which it has actually occurred and been
socially sanctioned is an extremely controversial topic in anthropology,
owing to the extreme taboo
against its practice in most cultures. Some anthropologists argue
that cannibalism has been almost non-existent and view claims of
cannibalism with extreme skepticism,
while others argue that the practice was common in pre-state
societies.
Several archaeologists have claimed that
some ruins in the American
Southwest contain evidence of cannibalism. Individual cases in
other countries have been seen with mentally unstable persons,
criminals, and, in unconfirmed rumors, by religious zealots.
Cannibalism is also sometimes practiced as a last resort by people
suffering from famine.
In the US,
it is commonly believed that the group of settlers known as the Donner
party resorted to cannibalism while snowbound in the mountains
for the winter. There are disputed claims that cannibalism was
widespread during the famine in Ukraine
in the 1930s,
during the Siege
of Leningrad in World
War II, and during the Chinese
Civil War and the Great
Leap Forward in China.
It has been claimed that cannibalism was practiced by Japanese
troops as recently as WWII in the Pacific theater.[1]
A more recent example is of leaked stories from North
Korean refugees of cannibalism practiced during and after a
famine that occurred sometime between 1995 and 1997 ...
«
Index of articles on
folklore and other topics
The
Sawney Beane family, cannibals
of Scotland
Edgar
Allan Poe's mysterious visitor
The
Donner Party: Another American tale of cannibalism
External
links
The
Alfred Packer Collection at the Colorado State Archives
James
Starrs
Alferd
Packer: The Musical
Legend
of Alfred Packer VHS
Packer
archives
A
Fateful Journey
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