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Andrew Gulliford 208 starvation, and the psychological disintegration of a mining party hoping to strike it rich. HavingleftthehospitalityofOuray’scampnearMontrose,Packer’spartybecame disoriented in deep snows and began to starve. Packer stated, “Our matches had all been used, and we were carrying our fire in an old coffee pot. Three or four days after our provisions were all consumed, we took our moccasins, which were made of raw hide, and cooked them . . . Our trail was entirely drifted over. In places, the snow had blown away from patches of wild rose bushes, and we were gathering the buds from these bushes, stewing them and eating them” (quoted in Oldham 2005:13). The weary party trudged for about 5 miles (8 km) beyond Lake City, into what today is known as Deadman’s Gulch. One of the prospectors went mad, killed the others, and began to cook and gnaw at their bones. Packer returned from trying to find wild game and was confronted by Shannon Wilson Bell, who attacked him with a hatchet. Packer killed Bell with a pistol. He, too, began to eat his comrades and to steal their belongings. Eventually, Packer made his way to the Los Pinos Agency, then Saguache, where he was arrested and then escaped. Later, when he was found and returned for trial, the March 1883 Saguache Chronicle headline read, “Cannibal Packer—After Nine Years a Fugitive from Justice, the Capture Is Effected of the Human Ghoul Who Murdered and Grew Corpulant [sic] on the Flesh of His Comrades.” In a confession, Packer explained that after killing Bell in self-defense, “I tried to get away every day, but could not, so I lived on the flesh of these men the greater part of the sixty days I was out. Then the snow began to have a crust and I started out up the creek” (quoted in Oldham 2005:31). After his 1877 trial in the Hinsdale County Courthouse, a two-story wood building that still stands, Packer served time in the state penitentiary. The Cannibal Plateau northeast of Lake City commemorates the saga of Alferd Packer, a cautionary tale for other miners about the need for adequate provisions and the difficulties of winter travel in the San Juans. From his headquarters in Saguache, Otto Mears built toll roads across the San Juans to connect the far-flung camps. One toll road linked Ouray, Animas Forks, and Lake City, climbing over Engineer Pass at an elevation of 12,800 feet (3,900 m), for a fare of $2.25. Halfway between Lake City and Ouray stood Corydon Rose’s one-story inn, which served as stagecoach stop, hotel, saloon, restaurant, and post office. Rose kept sixty burros to carry supplies to miners and to bring their ore back for wagon transport to Lake City mills. With the discovery of rich silver deposits, Creede was the site of Colorado’s last big silver strike, with a boom that began in 1889. According to John Canfield in Mines and Mining Men of Colorado: Miners resolved that, when $70,000 is paid for a hole not much deeper than a cellar, in a district before unheard of, there was something going on . . . Dozens of a B r i e f h u m a n h i s t o r y o f t h e e a s t e r n s a n J u a n m o u n ta i n s 209 men tramped up the long road from Del Norte. They came from all parts of the state, and bore upon their brawny backs their tools, bed, and kitchen . . . When night came they rolled themselves in their blankets and slept in the cradle of the silent hills. (Canfield 1893:59–60) In the narrow canyon that houses Creede’s Main Street, one poet-newspaperman quipped, “It’s day all day in the daytime, and there is no night in Creede” (Smith 2000:128). Adjacent mineral deposits swelled the town to almost 10,000 citizens. The town’s fortunes seemed bright when the tracks of the Denver and Rio Grande, coming up through Wagon Wheel Gap, arrived in 1891, a year after the town was founded. During its boom days, local residents included Robert Ford, the saloonkeeper who murdered Jesse James, and bar manager and quick-draw expert William Barclay (“Bat”) Masterson, whose gun never left its holster because of his fearsome reputation. Citing a March 1892 booklet titled “Creed Camp,” published...

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