Alfred Packer's World: Risk, Responsibility, And the Place of Experience in Mountain Culture, 1873-1907‪.‬

On the morning of April 16, 1874, the bedraggled figure of a lone prospector appeared at the Los Pinos Indian Agency near Gunnison, Colorado. Asking for a drink of whiskey, the man said that he and five others had left a larger party of miners at Chief Ouray's winter camp on the other side of the mountains in January. He claimed that his companions left him behind when due to exhaustion, frozen feet, and a bad case of snow-blindness, he could not keep up with them. He told his audience that he had spent months trapped in the snowy mountains existing off of the land. But over the next few weeks the prospector's tale unraveled. When members of the original Utah party arrived at the Agency they pressured the man to explain what exactly had happened to his companions. He seemed too well fed for a man who had spent the winter in the mountains and he had more money than any of them had seen him with during the trip. He eventually broke down and revealed a horrible series of events that started ten days after their journey began. The prospector confessed "one after another" the men "had been killed by the remainder to be used as food by the rest." (1) He admitted that he had killed the last man in self-defense not twenty miles from the Agency.