Speaker 1: You're listening to American Shadows, a production of iHeartRadio and
Speaker 1: Grimm and Mild from Aar and Manky.
Speaker 2: Humans have always explored. We've gone to the depths of
Speaker 2: the ocean and the reaches of space. It's brought us
Speaker 2: to new lands or new to us and into contact
Speaker 2: with all different kinds of life, and that contact with
Speaker 2: the other, the unfamiliar has often seemed scary. Just take
Speaker 2: a look at old maps drawn up by Western European
Speaker 2: travelers as ships began to sail around the world. The
Speaker 2: sailors brought home fantastic stories that were almost too big
Speaker 2: to believe. They talked about monsters, and about savages, and
Speaker 2: often about cannibals. The term was coined by none other
Speaker 2: than Christopher Columbus. He wrote in his diaries about his
Speaker 2: alleged encounters with them, describing cannibals as a dog headed
Speaker 2: men who ate human beings. Amerigo Vespucci did the same
Speaker 2: during his explorations of the continents that now bear a
Speaker 2: derivation of his name, and when Queen Isabella of Spain
Speaker 2: legalized the enslavement of Native Americans in fifteen oh three,
Speaker 2: she did so by alleging that they were cannibals too.
Speaker 2: What's true is that many cultures have participated in cannibalism
Speaker 2: long before records existed. We have evidence stretching back over
Speaker 2: one hundred thousand years that tells us as much. Today,
Speaker 2: the idea of eating a loved one or enemy might
Speaker 2: give you the itck like nothing else, But we have
Speaker 2: to understand that not all cannibalism was created equal across
Speaker 2: the world. Endo cannibalism has been a grief practice in
Speaker 2: which one's community consumed parts of their body. Rather than
Speaker 2: an act of destruction, it was a profound celebration of
Speaker 2: a life in which the dead carried on in the living.
Speaker 2: Exocannibalism is the act of eating those outside of one's community.
Speaker 2: This flavor of consumption, if you'll forgive the pun, was
Speaker 2: also marked by community ritual. Seldom was anyone eating someone
Speaker 2: else without a lot of care. It's very easy to
Speaker 2: point fingers at people who aren't us, to say, but
Speaker 2: we aren't like them. But where do you draw the
Speaker 2: line and how do you decide what's monstrous? What Queen
Speaker 2: Isabella and her ilk failed to acknowledge was the widely
Speaker 2: accepted practice of medicinal cannibalism in Europe, it leaned on
Speaker 2: the beliefs of sympathetic magic, or that like serves like.
Speaker 2: For example, drinking from a human skull was said to
Speaker 2: help with headaches, blood was said to help with bleeding.
Speaker 2: Rendered human fat had a number of uses. Executed bodies
Speaker 2: were the most highly prized, as it was believed that
Speaker 2: a quick traumatic death gave no time for a life
Speaker 2: force to slowly seep away. The hypocrisy is glaring. When
Speaker 2: colonists came to the New World, they were regaled with
Speaker 2: tales of indigenous cannibals. Cannibalism was practiced in some Native
Speaker 2: American societies, particularly in some groups in the North and West,
Speaker 2: but for many it was never simply to fill their
Speaker 2: bellies in a stroke of irony. It was likely the
Speaker 2: English settlers who became the first gastronomic cannibals in that
Speaker 2: part of the world. The winter of sixteen oh nine
Speaker 2: to sixteen ten in Jamestown, Virginia has been remembered as
Speaker 2: the Starving Time. A seven year drought, fractured leadership, and
Speaker 2: a siege by Powaton warriors had created a fatal predicament
Speaker 2: for the colony. In that period, about three quarters of
Speaker 2: Jamestown ended up starving to death. Of the sixty or
Speaker 2: so settlers who remained, they scraped by on whatever they
Speaker 2: could find, including the flesh of their recent debt. Archaeological
Speaker 2: evidence of these years was discovered as recently as twenty thirteen,
Speaker 2: when human bones bearing the marks of butchering were discovered
Speaker 2: in a trash pit. It was one of many pits
Speaker 2: and one of many bodies that have been found at
Speaker 2: the site. America has long been a land of cannibals,
Speaker 2: but that distinction has never really belonged to one group.
Speaker 2: Despite what European colonists thought about themselves, they were certainly
Speaker 2: not above cannibalizing their peers, as the incident in Jamestown
Speaker 2: proves to us. So what really separates the monstrous from
Speaker 2: the rest of us? If anything at all? I'm Lorn Vogelbaum,
Speaker 2: Welcome to American shadows. The promise of hidden riches sang
Speaker 2: like a siren, and hungry prospectors came from all over
Speaker 2: to heed its call. In November of eighteen seventy three,
Speaker 2: a party of twenty one men left Utah to search
Speaker 2: for silver in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado. In
Speaker 2: this group was the thirty one year old Pennsylvania born
Speaker 2: drifter named Alfred Packer. He was a curious man, this Alfred.
Speaker 2: He was a little bit odd. It was hard to
Speaker 2: know who he really was. He prided himself on being
Speaker 2: a great entertainer, but his tall tales often fell short
Speaker 2: of convincing. He had a way of contradicting himself and
Speaker 2: just seemed to try a little too hard to sell himself,
Speaker 2: often alterating important details about his life in the process.
Speaker 2: What we also do know as fact is that he
Speaker 2: was discharged from the Civil War on the account of
Speaker 2: being a severe epileptic, experiencing bouts of seizure as many
Speaker 2: as three times every forty eight hours, and he had
Speaker 2: worked all sorts of odd jobs, but it's likely it
Speaker 2: was hard for him to hold anything down for a
Speaker 2: significant period of time. Taking bromide seemed to help his condition,
Speaker 2: but they weren't totally curative. This was a part of
Speaker 2: the story he was always sure to leave out. Packer
Speaker 2: had volunteered to lead the silver hunting party. He set
Speaker 2: off with confidence with twenty men in tow into the
Speaker 2: dense forests and jagged mountains of Colorado. There actually wasn't
Speaker 2: even a set path to their destination. Any expedition to
Speaker 2: that part of the country was sure to be a
Speaker 2: treacherous one, and it was imperative that the guide knew
Speaker 2: the land well. What his team didn't know was that
Speaker 2: Alfred wasn't the expert on the Colorado Mountains that he
Speaker 2: claimed to be. Even so, the first part of their
Speaker 2: trip was fairly smooth. Spirits were high, folks were filled
Speaker 2: with hope. They had big dreams about what they'd find
Speaker 2: in the mountains and what they'd do with it all
Speaker 2: once they got home. But it wasn't long before things
Speaker 2: began to unravel. Into their journey, Packer had an epileptic
Speaker 2: episode and fell into the campfire. He was saved by
Speaker 2: a companion, but when he came to he brushed it off,
Speaker 2: claiming it was the first seizure he had ever experienced.
Speaker 2: But he soon began to have seizures several times a day,
Speaker 2: and the other travelers began to suspect that he was
Speaker 2: lying to them. It soon became clear that there were
Speaker 2: other things that Packer couldn't hear himself of. He was
Speaker 2: outed as an habitual petty thief. He was also quarrelsome
Speaker 2: whiny and apparently greedy with rations. He was said to
Speaker 2: be surly and bragged about a jail stint he served
Speaker 2: after buying the services of frontier sex workers. But Packer
Speaker 2: was no dummy. He knew his party had grown to
Speaker 2: disdain him, and he felt the same right back. He
Speaker 2: called this a cordial hatred and was happy to continue on.
Speaker 2: Others didn't share that feeling. By the time they crossed
Speaker 2: the Green River, about eighty five miles from the Colorado border,
Speaker 2: the party had come to the mounting realization that Packer
Speaker 2: had been lying to them about knowing where he was headed.
Speaker 2: Horror and rage gripped the men. All of the other
Speaker 2: issues they could live with, this they quite literally could not.
Speaker 2: On January twenty fifth of eighteen forty seven, the party
Speaker 2: was surrounded by a group of Ute warriors as they
Speaker 2: approached the Colorado border. The party was on reservation land,
Speaker 2: and one account tells that the Ute took pity on
Speaker 2: the sorry, hungry prospectors in front of them. Chief Urray,
Speaker 2: who was present that day, offered to take the men in.
Speaker 2: He warned them not to continue and offered them his
Speaker 2: hospitality until the spring thaw came. For a few weeks.
Speaker 2: The party stayed with the ute, but they soon grew
Speaker 2: Antsy worried that the riches would be gone if they
Speaker 2: waited until spring to set out again. They calculated that
Speaker 2: they only had forty more miles to go. On February second,
Speaker 2: five men broke from the park. Alfred tried to join them,
Speaker 2: but was threatened with a gun. He would get his
Speaker 2: chance a week later, when five other prospectors decided to
Speaker 2: leave the Ute encampment. Chief Yurey told them not to go,
Speaker 2: and that he wouldn't even allow for his own people
Speaker 2: to try. But the prospectors refused his advice, and Urrey
Speaker 2: reluctantly drew them a map in the snow. He illustrated
Speaker 2: two trails over the mountains, a lower trail which was
Speaker 2: eighty miles long, and an upper trail, which was only
Speaker 2: forty miles. The party set out for the upper trail
Speaker 2: in the dead of winter, without a single snowshoe in sight.
Speaker 2: Two and a half months later, on the morning of
Speaker 2: April sixteenth, Alfred Packer wandered out of the mountains and
Speaker 2: into the Las Pignos Indian Agency. He was alone, with
Speaker 2: none of his companions anywhere to be found. The winters
Speaker 2: in the San Juan Mountains are long, dark and harsh.
Speaker 2: The peaks are impassable and inhospitable, which are both very
Speaker 2: bad things if you find yourself stranded among them. By
Speaker 2: some stroke of luck that felt nothing short of divine intervention,
Speaker 2: Alfred Packer had made his way out of the mountains
Speaker 2: with just a backpack and a rifle. He was ragged
Speaker 2: and ravaged, but otherwise appeared to be in good health.
Speaker 2: He'd endured temperatures down to negative fifty degrees fahrenheit in
Speaker 2: the wild for over fifty seven days, and people were
Speaker 2: simply impressed. His party was lost. Packer told the folks
Speaker 2: at the agency, Oh, this surprised no one. What did
Speaker 2: surprise them, though, was that he didn't appear to be hungry.
Speaker 2: In fact, he looked rather well fed. According to one story,
Speaker 2: rather than scarfing down a breakfast upon arrival, he opted
Speaker 2: to throw back a few shots of whiskey instead. It's
Speaker 2: then that a story began to come now. He claimed
Speaker 2: that soon after he and the other men left Chief
Speaker 2: Uray's encampment, he began to suffer from frostbitten feet and
Speaker 2: snow blindness. His traveling companions elected to leave him behind
Speaker 2: with a rifle and supplies. Where they ended up, Packer said, well,
Speaker 2: he could only assume that they had died from the
Speaker 2: cold themselves. But as fate would have it, Parker wasn't
Speaker 2: the only one who showed up at the agency that day.
Speaker 2: A Preston Nutter, a doctor Cooper, and a fellow by
Speaker 2: the name of Italian Tom, all members of the crew
Speaker 2: who stayed behind at the ute camp, appeared just hours
Speaker 2: after Alfred did. This did not please him. In fact,
Speaker 2: Parker grew visibly upset at their arrival. Nutter asked where
Speaker 2: the rest of his party was, and Packer repeated his story.
Speaker 2: Packer began to move quickly. He started talking about returning
Speaker 2: home to Pennsylvania and sold his Winchester rifle for ten dollars.
Speaker 2: He and three other men to hit the road and
Speaker 2: head to the nearby town of Swatch. During their trek,
Speaker 2: Nutter poked at Packer. He had long been suspicious of him,
Speaker 2: and the intervening months apart did nothing to change that.
Speaker 2: Why he asked Parker did he have the knife that
Speaker 2: had belonged to Frank, one of their lost prospectors, and
Speaker 2: Packer quickly said that Frank stuck it in a tree
Speaker 2: and left it there, which of course made no sense.
Speaker 2: Once they arrived in Sewatch, Packer aroused even more suspicion.
Speaker 2: For a guy who was constantly broke, he seemed to
Speaker 2: have suddenly, somehow come into some serious money. He ended
Speaker 2: up spending almost two thousand dollars in today's money at
Speaker 2: a local saloon over a two week period. With every
Speaker 2: passing alcohol soaked night, Packer's story got more dramatic and
Speaker 2: more unbelievable. The inconsistencies were glaring, and the looks began
Speaker 2: to fly. But Packer wasn't wholly oblivious. He noticed that
Speaker 2: his companion were growing uneasy as soon he began to
Speaker 2: make plans to depart to Watch, but once again timing
Speaker 2: was not on Packer's side. As he prepared to leave,
Speaker 2: he ran into the general of the Las Pignots Agency,
Speaker 2: a fellow by the name of General Charles Adams, And
Speaker 2: even if he wasn't completely oblivious, he also couldn't resist
Speaker 2: sharing his story again, so he sat down for breakfast
Speaker 2: with the general's wife and told her all about his
Speaker 2: time in the mountains. While his wife was occupied. General
Speaker 2: Adams took it upon himself to do some digging. He
Speaker 2: was quickly informed about the suspicious Packer and soon formed
Speaker 2: a plan of his own. General Adams decided that a
Speaker 2: party would be formed to go search for Packer's men,
Speaker 2: and Packer, it was decided, would be their paid guide.
Speaker 2: What Alfred Packer, General Adams and all the men in
Speaker 2: Sewatch didn't know was that at that very moment, more
Speaker 2: men from Packer's original party were arriving at the Las
Speaker 2: Pinos agency. When General Adams and Packer returned, these prospectors
Speaker 2: did not give their former guide a warm welcome. Instead,
Speaker 2: it ended up being an interrogation. They wanted to know
Speaker 2: what really happened up in those mountains. It didn't take
Speaker 2: long for Packer to crack. He broke down, it suffered
Speaker 2: a short seizure, and then confessed the journey was harder
Speaker 2: than they thought. He admitted that they had been foolhardy,
Speaker 2: and over confident. The conditions were unlivable, with snow above
Speaker 2: their head for miles at some points. Soon they began
Speaker 2: to run out of food, so they began to forage,
Speaker 2: but that was no good. They grew hungry enough to
Speaker 2: start eating their leather shoes and then one by one
Speaker 2: they died. The first to go was old man Swan.
Speaker 2: They decided to eat him right then and there. The
Speaker 2: survivors ate their dead as they each slowly perished through
Speaker 2: their journey, and when they were down to two men,
Speaker 2: Packer and a man called Bell, they made a pact
Speaker 2: to not kill and eat the other. But Bell eventually
Speaker 2: went back on his word and came at Parker with
Speaker 2: the butt of his broken rifle. So Packer did the
Speaker 2: only logical thing, he shot Bell dead. While General Adams
Speaker 2: may have believed Packer's tale, the other men present didn't.
Speaker 2: They knew and respected Bell and doubted he would have
Speaker 2: gone back on his word. The General determined that if
Speaker 2: Packer's story was true, a Bell's body would be lying
Speaker 2: with his broken rifle, and if that's what was found,
Speaker 2: Packer would be set free and sent home to Pennsylvania,
Speaker 2: all expenses paid. So they all set off. Packer quickly
Speaker 2: became disoriented. Once he was back on the trail, he
Speaker 2: was lost and wouldn't be able to lead them to Bell.
Speaker 2: Perhaps this was disingenuous, of course, he didn't want to
Speaker 2: be caught, But don't forget that he actually wasn't a
Speaker 2: wilderness guide. He didn't have a very good idea of
Speaker 2: where he was going, and probably where he had gone
Speaker 2: to begin with. But Parker was taken into custody and
Speaker 2: installed in the cabin of the Swatch County sheriff for
Speaker 2: the summer. Three months later, an illustrator from Harper's Weekly
Speaker 2: stumbled across the mutilated remains of five men near the
Speaker 2: Gunnison River. Their bodies were all laid within a few
Speaker 2: feet of each other, covered in blankets and clothes, and
Speaker 2: badly decayed. All bodies showed bullet holes and all had
Speaker 2: flesh cut from bone. The one man's skull was crushed
Speaker 2: and another's was separated from its body. They were also
Speaker 2: missing all valuable assets cash included, of course. Finding the
Speaker 2: remains of all bodies together completely invalidated. Packers claimed that
Speaker 2: they had all died slowly over time. The artists drew
Speaker 2: a sketch and brought it to the local authorities. They
Speaker 2: quickly set off to the mountains to corroborate the story.
Speaker 2: After the authorities buried the remains of Packer's victims, the
Speaker 2: team returned to the jail to confront him. However, the
Speaker 2: cabin was empty. Packer had escaped, Alfred Packer took to
Speaker 2: the road again. It was easy to be anonymous in
Speaker 2: those days. For the better part of a decade, Packer
Speaker 2: stayed out of the hands of the law. He had
Speaker 2: gotten lucky. Though his digs at the watch hadn't been
Speaker 2: so bad. He was still being held without any evidence
Speaker 2: of wrongdoing. He maintained his innocence, and not everyone was
Speaker 2: as quick to blame him. It would later be revealed
Speaker 2: that two men not only helped Springham loose, but gave
Speaker 2: him food for the journey. They were upset the town's
Speaker 2: resources were going to behold a man convicted of nothing,
Speaker 2: and so they quietly released him, and just days before
Speaker 2: the bodies of Packer's party were discovered. His luck couldn't
Speaker 2: last forever, though, and he was recognized by a fellow
Speaker 2: prospector in Cheyenne, Wyoming in eighteen eighty three. The man
Speaker 2: wrote to General Adams, who made quick work of getting
Speaker 2: to town. There he found an apprehended Packer taking him
Speaker 2: down to Denver by train. A Packer tried to work
Speaker 2: a deal. If General Adams could protect him from the
Speaker 2: angry mob that surely awaited him back in Colorado, he
Speaker 2: would provide the real truth about what had taken place
Speaker 2: in the mountains all those years ago. The men made
Speaker 2: an agreement. Flanked by a sheriff and a deputy, a
Speaker 2: Packer made his confession. Packer claimed that his party fractured
Speaker 2: one day when one of the men, Swan, sent Packer
Speaker 2: ahead to scout into the mountains in order to find
Speaker 2: their way. A Packer claimed he was gone a whole day,
Speaker 2: and on his return saw something wildly frightful. There sat
Speaker 2: his companion Bell, hunched and wild eyed, over a fire
Speaker 2: and roasting a piece of meat. Four other men lay
Speaker 2: dead around him, all in various states of mutilais. Some
Speaker 2: were shot, and some were slashed, and some had hunks
Speaker 2: of flesh cut from their bones. It's then that Bell
Speaker 2: jumped up and came for Packer, and reacting quickly, Packer
Speaker 2: shot him in the stomach and then whacked him over
Speaker 2: the head with a hatchet. Bell was dead, and now
Speaker 2: Packer was alone. He tried and tried again to get
Speaker 2: out of camp, but the snow was impassable, so for
Speaker 2: sixty days he stayed, making fires and living off the
Speaker 2: flesh of his companions. As the spring pain he grew
Speaker 2: hopeful who cooked the last of the meat, took what
Speaker 2: he could and left the camp. This time he had
Speaker 2: make it out. His first confession. He told the men
Speaker 2: was crazed and he couldn't be held responsible for what
Speaker 2: he had said. He had been through quite an ordeal,
Speaker 2: and they had to understand. The news broke in papers
Speaker 2: from the mountains to the sea. It was a sensational story,
Speaker 2: and this man, after all, had just admitted to eating
Speaker 2: his friend. There was certainly a pantalizing drama to that story,
Speaker 2: but the question remained how much of it was true.
Speaker 2: Many thought Packer killed his companions in cold blood. Swan's
Speaker 2: family said that he had left home with six thousand
Speaker 2: dollars in cash and gold, which would have provided Packer
Speaker 2: with plenty of motivation for murder. Others suggested he had
Speaker 2: knocked out members of his party with morphine, which he
Speaker 2: had also used to treat his epilepsy, before killing them.
Speaker 2: In their minds, he had this particular condition and used
Speaker 2: it to aid in cold blooded murder. Packer's trial began
Speaker 2: on April ninth of eighteen eighty three. He was only
Speaker 2: charged with the murder of Swan. This was strategic for
Speaker 2: the prosecution. Team and hopefully an easy sell to the jury,
Speaker 2: and if he got off well, they could bring more
Speaker 2: charges against him in the deaths of the other four men.
Speaker 2: For the first two days, men testified against him. On
Speaker 2: the third day he took the stand. He told his
Speaker 2: story once again about finding Belle at a campfire, surrounded
Speaker 2: by his dead companions. He admitted to taking their money,
Speaker 2: he admitted to eating them. He denied killing anyone. But
Speaker 2: bell Packer left the courthouse that day feeling confident in
Speaker 2: his performance. He looked forward to being a free man.
Speaker 2: But even if he was telling the truth where it mattered,
Speaker 2: he lied about other things on the stand, his age,
Speaker 2: his military service, his epilepsy. He just couldn't stop himself
Speaker 2: from lying. He was convicted in the death of old
Speaker 2: man Swan and sentenced to hang. But once this verdict
Speaker 2: came down, his team petitioned since the crimes happened on
Speaker 2: the Ute reservation, it was out of the state court's jurisdiction,
Speaker 2: and they were right legally on the grounds of territory,
Speaker 2: Packer couldn't be charged with murder. They were also right
Speaker 2: about something else. Murders took place. Colorado was not yet
Speaker 2: a state that meant that they could not legally apply
Speaker 2: the laws of the state to the crime which had
Speaker 2: been made after the crime occurred. There had been a
Speaker 2: law allowing the state to prosecute murders that had happened
Speaker 2: in the territory, but that law had since been repealed
Speaker 2: and rewritten. Packer could not legally be tried for murder,
Speaker 2: but he could still be tried from manslaughter the laws
Speaker 2: allowed for that. Packer won his rights to a second trial,
Speaker 2: which took place in eighteen eighty six under the new
Speaker 2: Colorado legislation. He was tried for a voluntary manslaughter of
Speaker 2: all five men instead of the murder of one. His
Speaker 2: second trial was almost identical to the first. The same
Speaker 2: witnesses appeared and the same evidence was presented. A verdict
Speaker 2: was quickly reached. A Packer was guilty of killing his
Speaker 2: companions and sentenced to forty years in prison, the longest
Speaker 2: custodial sentence in American history at that point. By all accounts,
Speaker 2: he was a model prisoner. It was even said that
Speaker 2: he used his pension to help the formerly incarcerated get
Speaker 2: back on their feet. After sixteen years behind bars, he
Speaker 2: petitioned for the fifth time to be paroled. His request
Speaker 2: was denied yet again, but he caught the attention of
Speaker 2: a curious reporter from the Denver Post named Polly Prye.
Speaker 2: She began a media campaign for his release, and the
Speaker 2: tide of public favor slowly began to turn towards him.
Speaker 2: It was revealed that he had largely been convicted on
Speaker 2: flimsy circumstantial evidence. In January of nineteen o one, the
Speaker 2: Governor of Colorado made it his final act before retiring,
Speaker 2: to grant Parker parole. He would spend the rest of
Speaker 2: his days in a quiet flower garden, raising chickens and rabbits.
Speaker 2: He fought until the day he died in nineteen o
Speaker 2: seven for a full pardon. According to the telling, his
Speaker 2: last words were, I'm not guilty of the charge. Alfred
Speaker 2: Packer always maintained that he may be guilty of eating
Speaker 2: the men after they died, he may be guilty of
Speaker 2: taking their money, but the only one of them he
Speaker 2: killed was Bell, which was an act of self defense.
Speaker 2: There have been multiple investigations into the matter to determine
Speaker 2: whether Packer had lied about the events in those mountains
Speaker 2: or not. But in the words of James E. Stars,
Speaker 2: George Washington University law professor and Packer expert. While there's
Speaker 2: no question that Packer was a monumental liar, it's likely
Speaker 2: that he sometimes told the truth. Investigations in recent years
Speaker 2: continue to focus on what really happened that long cold winter.
Speaker 2: Physical evidence points to murder, yes, but it doesn't point
Speaker 2: researchers in the direction of who did the killing. Today
Speaker 2: case is still being debated, but the general consensus remains
Speaker 2: we can't know what really happened. Did the pathological liar
Speaker 2: lie or did he tell the truth? Who shot first?
Speaker 2: And what were the specific circumstances around that violence. Was
Speaker 2: Packer a calculated murderer who led these men to their doom?
Speaker 2: Or was he a victim of circumstance? Or was the
Speaker 2: truth somewhere in between. Today, Packer's cannibalism can be just
Speaker 2: as much of a punchline as it is a horror.
Speaker 2: The University of Colorado at Boulder, for example, has a
Speaker 2: dining hall named after him. Slogan is have your friends
Speaker 2: for lunch. We remain fascinated by cannibalism, whether in fact
Speaker 2: or fiction or in some murky space in between. We
Speaker 2: see it span centuries and cultures of myth and legend,
Speaker 2: and propped up high on the silver screen, we can't
Speaker 2: look away. The act represents many different things for each
Speaker 2: of us. How far we'll go to survive, what it
Speaker 2: means to be civilized, the link between the known and
Speaker 2: the other, and fundamentally, what it means to be human.
Speaker 2: How far will any of us go to survive? It's
Speaker 2: a question we can all ask ourselves, but can't ever
Speaker 2: truly know until we are in the most desperate of circumstances.
Speaker 2: In the case of Packer, he is the only one
Speaker 2: who truly knew what happened. There's more to this story.
Speaker 2: Stick around after this brief sponsor break to hear all
Speaker 2: about it. The frigid Yukon was once a place for outlaws.
Speaker 2: It's here that rum runner Louis Lincoln and his Auto
Speaker 2: found themselves caught in a blizzard one night. The unfortunate
Speaker 2: auto accidentally stepped through some ice, soaking his foot and
Speaker 2: chilling him to the bone. By the time the two
Speaker 2: brothers made it back to their cabin, they were in
Speaker 2: pretty bad shape. The frostbite had set into Otto's foot,
Speaker 2: and it became clear that his big toe in particular,
Speaker 2: was at risk for developing gangreen, so Louis did what
Speaker 2: he had to in order to save his brother's foot.
Speaker 2: He amputated the toe and popped it into a nearby
Speaker 2: jar of booze. Why the story doesn't say, but it
Speaker 2: seems likely that there was a thought that it could
Speaker 2: be preserved with the hope that it someday might be reattached.
Speaker 2: Or perhaps it was just a humorous and macabre souvenir.
Speaker 2: He had done the work of growing it himself, so
Speaker 2: why throw it out. The toe, though, would never again
Speaker 2: meet its maker. It languished in its boozy tomb until
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy three, when it said the local boat captain
Speaker 2: named Dick Stevenson found the jar of alcohol while cleaning
Speaker 2: out a cabin. He was delighted. Stevenson picked up the
Speaker 2: jar and ferried it down to his local watering hole.
Speaker 2: There he brought it around the bar, daring patrons to
Speaker 2: dunk the toe in their drinks, and thus the Sour
Speaker 2: Toe Cocktail Club was born. Sadly, though, the original toe
Speaker 2: was not long for this world. In nineteen eighty a
Speaker 2: miner was going for the sourte cocktail world record, and
Speaker 2: on his thirteenth glass he swallowed the toe by accident.
Speaker 2: Not to be dissuaded by this temporary roadblock, the club
Speaker 2: carried on and lives on at the Sour Toe Saloon,
Speaker 2: still in operation in Dawson City today. It's said that
Speaker 2: plenty of amputated toes have been donated for the cause.
Speaker 2: One even arrived with a warning, don't wear open toed
Speaker 2: shoes while mowing the lawn. So if you may make
Speaker 2: it to Dawson City and are feeling brave, saddle up
Speaker 2: to the bar. The club is still taking members, and
Speaker 2: lucky for you, the bartender will make the cocktail with
Speaker 2: any alcohol of your choice. You might even get a
Speaker 2: chance to hear a taunting jingle. You can drink it fast,
Speaker 2: you can drink it slow, but your lips must tough
Speaker 2: that gnarly tow. American Shadows is hosted by Lauren Vogelbaum.
Speaker 2: This episode was written by Robin Minietter and researched by
Speaker 2: Alex Robinson, with fact checking by Jamie Vargas. It's produced
Speaker 2: by Jesse Funk and Trevor Young. The executive producers Aaron Menke,
Speaker 2: Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. To learn more about the show,
Speaker 2: visit griminmild dot com and four more podcasts. My Heart
Speaker 2: Radio visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you
Speaker 2: listen to your favorite shows.