The Other Side Of The Coin

Alferd Packer (and that is believed to be the way he usually spelled it), like the bad penny, turned up often enough in his day to satisfy a lot of people.

But, while history records his bad reputation, there is another side to the coin.

Packer, Colorado's alleged cannibal, spent his final years at Phillipsburg, and a number of people in the Littleton and Deer Creek Canyon area remember him kindly. They say Packer liked children - and they were children at the time. It has been recorded that children followed Packer "like the Pied Piper". One account states that Packer died from natural causes in 1907 in Littleton, Colorado, and was mourned by the children, for whom he had bought candy and spun yarns in his declining years."

The Packer story has been told many times. Briefly, he was the sole surviver of a party of six who disregarded warnings and left Chief Ouray's camp on a prospecting trip in the fall of 1873, bound for gold fields near Breckenridge.

Beset by storms, the party took a wrong turn and became hopelessly lost, and ran out of provisions.

According to one of Packer's confessions - and there are several - he left his friends and climbed higher on the mountain to scout around. When he returned, he said, he found only one of his companions alive. This one man, he said, was in the act of roasting a piece of human meat. When the man saw Packer, he allegedly came at him with a hatchet, and Packer shot him in self-defense.

To shorten a long story, whose details are available in many books, Packer then stumbled, sick and half frozen, (according to one of several versions of the story) into the Los Pinos Indian Agency on Cochetopa Creek in April, 1874.

When it was later discovered that the other five men had been killed, Packer was jailed. He escaped, and for nine years, under the name of John Swartze, remained free. He was subsequently brought to trial and imprisoned for 17 years before his parole in 1901.

One of the more colorful stories states that a judge spat at Packer, "There were seven Dimmycrats in Hinsdale County and you et five of them!" The truth, apparently, is that the judge was a very literate man and made no such statement.

Packer, in about 1905, moved to a cabin in Phillipsburg near the site of the present building, once known as the Lone Pine Dance Hall. He is said to have had a number of mining claims in the area.

Fred Clark, former resident of Phillipsburg, and one-time owner of the dance hall, now living in Littleton, described Packer as having "kind of short, black whiskers, and his hair was a little long, not too long, and he seemed to have awful piercing black eyes." Clark, who was a little boy at the time, said he saw Packer only once.

Another lifelong resident, the late William Couch, said, "Packer lived between the store and the dance hall. There were four slab buildings there then. He worked on ranches." He continued, "He was an awful nice man. I was a kid, and he used to talk to my dad. He did what he did to protect himself. He never was the kind of man they say he was."

About the murder of the five men, all of whose deaths were blamed on Packer, Couch said, "Packer went off for something to eat, and when he came back, one man came at him with an ax and he had to shoot him. They were starving to death. Packer said he tried to eat a piece of the one man's hip, but it made him deathly sick and he never did it again. Just after that, they found him, I guess."

Alma Clawson Thorpe of Littleton said she lived in Phillipsburg before Packer did, and didn't know him, but that she saw him several times after she moved to Littleton. "He was said never to eat meat after he came back," she reported. She said she didn't believe the cannibal stories about him, and that Packer gathered children about him and gave them candy and told them stories.

Laura Kuehster, who spent most of her life at Critchell, a few miles south of Phillipsburg, said Packer lived at Critchell before going to Phillipsburg, and that one Christmas, he gave her a doll.

"I was a little kid four or five years old," she said, "and I thought he was great."

In late 1906, so the story goes, a state game warden found Packer unconscious in the yard of the Conaly Ranch about a mile from his home. A Mrs. Van Alstine assumed his care for the remaining months of his life. Clark said Mrs. Van Alstine's home was where the McKinney Ranch now stands. According to the U.S. Geological Survey map, the ranch lies along "Van Alderstien Gulch."

In 1940 Bishop Frank Hamilton Rice led six of his followers plus a goat to the Packer gravesite in the Littleton Cemetery, and in a macabre ceremony absolved Packer and his victims of sin, transferring those sins to the goat, who, according to record, was unimpressed.

Whatever you may believe of the Packer story, and Alferd Packer seems to have engendered strong feelings either for or against him from those who knew him, the little wide spot known as Phillipsburg has its permanent place in Colorado history as the last home of Alferd Packer.