Skip to main content

Ferd V. Fred

March 2023
1min read

We recently received a letter from Michael Rosen, a long-time Colorado resident, who took issue with our spelling of Alfred Packer’s first name in a caption on page 87 of our October, 1976, issue. Packer, of course, was the man accused of having killed and eaten major portions of five companions while snow-trapped on a hunting expedition on the shores of Lake San Cristobal in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains during the winter of 1873-74. “Regarding your caption for Jackson’s Lake San Cristobal photo,” Mr. Rosen writes, “local folklore insists that Mr. Packer’s first name is too often mis-spelled, as it is in reality Alferd , not Alfred. I am a Boulder, Colorado, resident, and a University of Colorado graduate, and have eaten many a Packerburger in the Alferd A. Packer Memorial Grill,” Mr. Rosen concludes.

We called the State Historical Society of Colorado and were mortified to learn that local usage does indeed insist that Alferd is the correct spelling. “Packer,” the Society reports, “always wrote his name that way. He may have mis-spelled it himself, of course, but purists maintain that since he did spell it that way, so should everyone else.”

A further enlightening development: We had at first thought that Mr. Rosen’s reference to Packer-burgers and the Alferd A. Packer Memorial Grill was merely a witticism. Not so. As it turns out, there is in fact an Alferd A. Packer Memorial Grill and it does in fact serve something called a Packerburger. It is a snack shop on the campus of the University of Colorado. It was dedicated in 1968 with all appropriate ceremony and the accompanying strains of a jazz band. Who says the younger generation has no sense of history?

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "April 1977"

Authored by: Alfred A. Knopf

One of America's most distinguished publishers writes of his personal and professional friendship with the famed historian, Samuel Eliot Morison.

Authored by: William Ashworth

Man, Land, and History in the Deepest Gorge on Earth

Authored by: Bernard A. Weisberger

The Man, the Myth, and the Midnight Ride

Authored by: Clark M. Clifford

The behind-the-scenes struggle in 1948 between the President and the State Department

Authored by: Thomas K. Mccraw

The Regulatory Agencies

Authored by: Leon Harris

“The world is my country, to hate rascals is my religion” he once said, and for more than forty years—before he mysteriously vanished—he blasted away at the delusions, pretentions, posturings, hopes, dreams, foibles, and institutions of all mankind. His name was Ambrose Bierce …

How I Beat Jess Willard

Authored by: T. H. Watkins

In southern California the orange found a home.

Authored by: James Axtell

In recent years many voices—both Native-American and white—have questioned whether Indians did in fact invent scalping. What is the evidence?

Featured Articles

Famous writers including Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and the Alcotts turned Sleepy Hollow Cemetery into our country’s first conservation project.

Native American peoples and the lands they possessed loomed large for Washington, from his first trips westward as a surveyor to his years as President.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.

A hundred years ago, America was rocked by riots, repression, and racial violence.

During Pres. Washington’s first term, an epidemic killed one tenth of all the inhabitants of Philadelphia, then the capital of the young United States.

Now a popular state park, the unassuming geological feature along the Illinois River has served as the site of centuries of human habitation and discovery.  

The recent discovery of the hull of the battleship Nevada recalls her dramatic action at Pearl Harbor and ultimate revenge on D-Day as the first ship to fire on the Nazis.

Our research reveals that 19 artworks in the U.S. Capitol honor men who were Confederate officers or officials. What many of them said, and did, is truly despicable.

Here is probably the most wide-ranging look at Presidential misbehavior ever published in a magazine.

When Germany unleashed its blitzkreig in 1939, the U.S. Army was only the 17th largest in the world. FDR and Marshall had to build a fighting force able to take on the Nazis, against the wishes of many in Congress.

Roast pig, boiled rockfish, and apple pie were among the dishes George and Martha enjoyed during the holiday in 1797. Here are some actual recipes.

Born during Jim Crow, Belle da Costa Greene perfected the art of "passing" while working for one of the most powerful men in America.