Alfred Packer, a self-styled wilderness guide, led five travelers into the snowbound San Juan Mountains in February 1874; they never returned, and when Packer reappeared that spring with their possessions, he eventually admitted surviving by eating their remains, though he denied killing them, and a jury sentenced him to forty years before he was pardoned in 1901 after eighteen years in prison and spent his last years near Littleton, where he was buried. Near this spot in July 1820, Maj. Stephen Long abandoned his search for the source of the Platte River after his nineteen-man party had followed it more than five hundred miles across the plains, then turned south toward the Arkansas River; his U.S.-sponsored expedition, the first to explore present-day Denver, produced maps, sketches, and observations of plants and animals, introduced Americans to this part of the West, and included Edwin James's first recorded ascent of Pikes Peak, while Long's judgment that the landscape was wholly unfit for cultivation contrasted with its later emergence as one of the West's most productive farming regions.