February 8, 2018 • 52 mins
In 1928 Bessie and Glen Hyde attempted to navigate their way through the belly of the Grand Canyon in a homemade boat. They disappeared without a trace and their mystery endures all these years later. Listen in today to hear all about the tragic and mysterious disappearance of the Grand Canyon Newlyweds.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, we are going on tour in eighteen, and
we are super excited because there are a couple of
new cities in addition to a couple of old favorites.
And where are we headed, my friend, are you ready
for this? Chuck? Not only do I know where we're headed,
I know the exact dates that will be there. That's good.
On April four, two thousand and eighteen, we are going
(00:20):
to be in Boston at the beloved Wilbur Theater. We're
excited about that. That's right, yep, And you can get
tickets there at the Wilbur dot com website. The next night,
we're going to be in Washington, d C. At the
Lincoln Theater. Chuck, that's April five, that is right. And
previously we erroneously said March, but it is April. Yeah,
it is April, and go to ticket fly dot com
to look up that show. Uh. Then, Chuck, in May,
(00:44):
at the end of May, May twenty two and May
twenty three, we're gonna be in St. Louis and in Cleveland. Yes,
very excited about those. Those are the new cities you mentioned,
that's right. And then in June, and what is it
in June June will be in Englewood, Colorado at the
Gothic Theater. That's right, And we may be adding a
show the day before. We do not know yet, but
(01:04):
stay tuned for more details. Maybe adding a show in
neither Denver or Boulder, so stay tuned for that. Yep.
So if you're in Denver, go to a x S
dot com for tickets, If you're in Cleveland, go to
playhouse square dot org for tickets, and then if you're
in St. Louis you can find it on ticket Master.
So come see us live. You're gonna love it, right, Chuck,
that's right. Welcome to Stuff you should Know from House
(01:28):
Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and
there is Jerry Jerome Rowland. And so since the three
of us are together and um, we've got our life
(01:49):
jackets on, it's stuff you should know that might have
been in the clumsiest Yeah, not bad. It was pretty bad, Chuck.
Come on, let's admit it. How you doing. I'm good,
I'm I'm thrilled about this one. Man. I love like mysteries,
especially like real life mysteries and true crime, although this
isn't necessarily crime. Um and to run across one that's
(02:14):
like genuinely interesting because you know, there's a lot of
them out there that's like, wow, this is this is
kind of interesting, or this is a mystery, but it's
actually not that interesting. It's kind of like documentaries. There
are a ton of documentaries out there, but the top
the best ones maybe represent the top one five. Boy,
(02:36):
I don't know. Same with horror movies too. Yeah, but
I think it's the same thing for unsolved mysteries. Some
are definitely more interesting than others. So I guess what
I'm saying is, thank you for introducing me to this
unsolved mystery because I hadn't heard of it before, and
it's a good one. I think that was even more
clumsy than the first thing. Oh, I thought that was
pro Uh so I wanted to shout out somebody real
(02:59):
quick as you can see my new piece of metal
in my skull. Yeah it looks good. Thank you. Gaming.
So Part two of Chuck Implant Saga number three, Part
two of three. That makes sense. Yeah, third implant, second stage,
(03:19):
Now it doesn't make sense. This is the third implant
that I've I'm getting and I just completed phase two
as of yesterday, as you know. And so now I
actually have the implant in my skull, uh, and it
is going to fuse with my skull for the next
few months. But I wanted to shout out Dr Going
here in Atlanta and casey Uh, one of Dr Going's
(03:43):
uh surgical team members, because here's how this goes down.
I'm laying there in a dental chair with like one
of those surgical hairnets. So I didn't know there was
such a thing. You know, the thing you wear over
your head. Is it your cap, I guess, but it's
not plastic. It's gauzy. Okay, so a gauzy shower cap
(04:06):
that wouldn't work in the shower. Right. So I'm laying there,
I'm getting um heart monitors put on my ankles. The
complimented my many socks. By the way, quick quick shout
out to them, shout out in a shout out, that's rare. Uh.
They're putting on my heart monitors and all that stuff.
They're like, your blood pressure is a little high, and
I said, don't talk to me about that, and uh.
(04:28):
Then the doctor comes in and weirdly doctor going always
says that I'm an attorney, and I don't know if
he's joking every time, because he's he's an odd sense
of humor, or if he really thinks I'm an attorney.
And he said something to one of his assistants turns
out to be Casey, about me being an attorney for somebody,
and I was like, you know, I'm not a lawyer,
(04:49):
and he's like, what does you do? And I said, well,
I'm a podcast host, which you can actually say now
without some big, long, dumb explanation like we used to
have to do or making something up like saying I'm
a radio sist or whatever. Uh, And he went, oh
what what what podcasts and staid stuff you should know,
And this Casey lady starts to like, shake, that's what
(05:10):
you want the surgical assistance to start doing right before you.
And dude, this is as I'm getting my I V
put in, and uh that that knocks me out into
that wonderful, blissful state of what do they call it
twilight sleep? And Casey is sort of legit freaking out
and obviously is a dedicated super fan type, and um,
(05:33):
we sort of are having a bit of a conversation
as I go under, and I'm like, I don't know
how I feel about that, but anyway, she was great,
how do you feel about it now? Well, I kind
of came out of it, and then you don't remember
anything for like four hours, Like I literally don't remember
the ride home. I'll remember is getting in bed and
then waking up like four hours later, right with which
(05:58):
because it was in my house. But I woke up
and I was like, well, that was kind of fun
that she was in there. And I was like, but
wait a minute, do I have all these weird pictures
now of me asleep in a chair. So I'm glad
you led it to this. We have a an official
stuff you should know facebook page, and if everyone wants
to see Chuck knocked out, you can just go to
(06:20):
that Facebook page because we posted him. So thanks to
Casey for supplying us with the pictures. I'm sure they
didn't do that, but anyway, thanks to Casey for all
her care and support. She literally said, will you mentioned
me on the show? Oh? And you said yes? Huh,
Well I was doped up. Oh who knows what I
said yes to. You always have to keep up with
(06:40):
promises you make while you're doped up. Well, And the
joke too with Emily and I is that I that
stuff is like truth serum, you know, like when you
come out of it like anything, Emily will ask me,
I will tell her. And we were joking about that beforehand,
and then on the way home, apparently I think over
in the car and said, here's my truth orm, you
(07:03):
are the love of my life. That is sweet. She said.
It was very sweet, and I have no memory of it,
so nice, so you know it's legit it anyway, that
is quite a story, Chuck. You can't wait to hear
the third chapter. Thanks for indulging that. Yeah, it should be.
I have another real tooth or a real fake tooth
in about three months. Cool, so we'll all be waiting
(07:26):
until then. So, Chuck, that was a very sweet story,
especially the Emily part. And this story that we're about
to tell um as kind of sweet in a lot
of ways to depending on how you look at it.
We're depending on who you listen to, I think is
more to the point. So let's start then, since we're
gonna be telling kind of the sweet story, the sweet
(07:47):
version of this when these two people met Bessie and
Glenn Hyde. It was in seven February of n and
they were on a boat, which would prove prescient for
them for them to meet on a boat, But they
were on a like a kind of a small cruise
ship that was traveling down the California coast from San
Francisco to Los Angeles on a trip. And they met
(08:08):
on this boat and they apparently hit it off immediately,
and they spent the next year together. Um and then
on April of they tied the knot in Idaho, which
is kind of surprising because if you had taken Bessie
Hayley I think was her maiden name, and Glenn Hyde
(08:29):
and you put them side by side, which you can
do because there are photographs of them together, they're not
exactly like the couple that you'd point to on in
different corners on other sides of the room and say
those two, those two are meant for each other. But
it turns out they seem to have been Oh why
what what do you think? They were not well matched? Well,
I they were just different people. Like they look. They
(08:51):
don't visually look correct together necessarily, which doesn't really matter,
it doesn't mean anything. But they were different people. You
know like he was. He was a bean farmer from Idaho.
She was a West Virginia girl who made her way
out west to San Francisco to study poetry at the
California Institute of Fine Arts, I believe, which is now
(09:15):
the the San Francisco Art Institute. Um, they just had
different paths, but when they came together, I think what
they what they shared in common, was a sense of
a love of adventure and trying new things. Yeah. Here's uh.
She was married previously for a very short time, for
just a couple of months, and it was It's really
(09:38):
hard because obviously they weren't like as well documented as
many people, and not many people back then were well
documented at all. But I saw two months marriage and
that she she got divorced the day before she got remarried.
What I saw was that her divorce was finalized the
day before. Yeah, so then they got married the day after,
(10:00):
like the first day they could. Once her divorce is final,
they got married, I think, is what it was. Well,
that's pretty sweet to see, That's what I'm saying. It's
a pretty sweet story. Really. Well, let's go back even further.
I can talk a little bit about their earlier lives
because uh Mr Glenn Hyde was pretty interesting. He was
born December and he had a younger sister named Jean
(10:22):
Or is that genie? I think Jean gene Hyde j
e a n any that always throws me for a
loop um every time the old Jeane trick. Uh. So
that was his sister. And the reason she's important is
because they seem like they were just a and an
adventurous outdoorsy family as a whole. Because he and his
(10:45):
sister would eventually take a trip together on a boat,
he met a dude named Harry. Uh gl glicky glucky
glucky and Gean those are the two names that throw
you off. Well that's very weird spelling of galecky. But
this was he was an experience a boatman, and he
(11:06):
knew a lot about this boat called a sweep scal
scow and these things. You should just look up sweep scale.
It's it's been called a coffin on the water. It's
very boxy and does not look like the kind of boat,
especially in today's from today's point of view that you
would want to go down um and shoot the rapids
(11:28):
in No, definitely not looks like it should be slowly
pulled by a donkey walking along the bank. That's absolutely
what it looks like. And the and one of the
things besides it's ungainly shape. It's a flat bottomed wooden
boat that's kind of curved up slightly at the front,
and it is just it's his boxing is like a
early eighties Volvo, you know. But the other the other
(11:49):
thing about it that would make you not want to
take it on whitewater rapids is that is the way
it's steered. It's steered by basically twenty ft long oars
that don't go out the sides of the boat. They
go out the bow in the stern the front and
the rear of the boat. Those are the sweeps, right,
and they're very heavy and they move pretty fast, and
(12:11):
you have to stand in the middle of the boat
in between the sweeps and hang on to one or
the other, both depending on whether you're steering at yourself
or if you and a friend are steering it too
um and you basically just kind of navigate and steer
down rapids or a river or whatever in the scow
(12:33):
holding these sweeps just kind of these paddles that are
going front and back Um, and it looks extraordinary, Like
it's just the worst idea you could think of when
you think of shooting whitewater rapids in a boat, like
not that. Yeah, I mean, I'm there was some steering involved,
but it also looks to me like the boat probably
(12:54):
kind of goes where the river takes it in many cases. Sure,
you know, so Glenn is an interest guy. When he
was twenty one, he he started doing these big long
canoe trips with friends. Um. And I'm not talking like
let me go out for a couple of days. I
mean he had a big plan with the sister and
the scot to go from the Salmon River in Idaho
(13:14):
all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Yeah. They did that,
and they did that finally, which um, is pretty amazing.
So especially at that time, to go on these long
journeys with these crazy boxy boats, Uh, it was. It
was brave. And at the time people would literally die
(13:34):
trying to do things like the Grand Canyon River. Yeah. Man,
at the time, Um, the Grand Canyon. So around the
late nineteen twenties, the Grand Canyon was just like basically
a widow maker, Like it was extraordinarily treacherous to go
down the Grand Canyon. It still is today, but today
you have the advantages of UM helmets, of really good
(13:58):
life jackets of UM, the fact that the rapids and
the obstructions, and and this the river as a whole,
the Colorado River that goes through the Grand Canyon is
extensively mapped. The people who are on the river know
exactly what's coming and what to do. At the time,
at the late nineteen twenties, people there were people who
knew the river, but it wasn't it wasn't anything like
(14:20):
it is now. There weren't commercial commercial trips um, and
it just wasn't nearly as extensively mapped as it is today.
So it was extremely treacherous and a lot of people
were still dying. I mean it it only been successfully
navigated for the first time, like less than sixty years
before um Bessie and Glenn decided to do it themselves. Yeah.
(14:41):
I think here in only forty five people had managed
to fully traverse the entire length of this of this
river by boat. And they're all dudes them and like
you said, none of them were lead on a guide.
It was all just these adventurous UM death way oriented
(15:01):
fellas Yeah, and and and not even necessarily just like
a sense of adventure that was part of it. But
this is also akin to polar explorations or Everest explorations
they were, or Charles Lindbergh. This was going down the
Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. Was the same thing
as Charles Lindbergh flying across the Atlantic, the same thing
(15:23):
as um Mallory trying to crest Everest. Like it was
the same type of expedition slash adventure like the Smithsonian
would back at that kind of thing. Yeah, those early
days of adventuring like that. I mean what people do
now is amazing, for sure, but just the equipment and
how little was known back then, Like it was just
insane what people were doing back then. Imagine going down
(15:46):
a river with with class five whitewater rapids. That's it's uncharted.
There's no one has ever made a map of that
river before, and you have no idea what's coming up. Yeah,
you gotta be. You gotta have some serious construction in
her construction. And it seems like Glenn Hyde definitely had that.
But he also had experience too. In addition to the
(16:08):
um the Salmon River run that he did with the
sister Jean. Years previous to that, he had also done
the I think either the Peace River or the Pierce River.
It's a it's a river in Canada, and he and
a friend of his name, just Nembucre spent six months
just kind of like running this river and camping and
um fishing and hunting. So he had he had experience
(16:32):
in addition to um a desire for adventure too. Yeah.
So Bessie, for her part, like you said, um was
I mean, she ended up going on this trip, so
she clearly had a little bit of a sense of adventure.
But um, I get the feeling it wasn't her idea
to begin with, you know, because she was a poet
(16:53):
and she was um an artist. She was born on
December twenty, nineteen o five, was a theater girl all
She acted the part of Juliette in the stage production
in high school of Romeo and juliet Um and like
you said, went to cal Arts by herself, just moved
to California alone from West Virginia, which was yeah, I
(17:14):
mean that was pretty Uh, that's pretty adventurous. I mean
it's adventurous today, but I mean back then, especially And
it's funny that everybody mentions that she played Juliet in
a high school play, because it really gets across how
young she was when she was doing this, because she
had she hadn't had enough life to really mention too
(17:36):
many other things. You know, she hadn't done enough yet.
Who knows what she would have done. She was a
pretty interesting person, it seems like. Well, yeah, and you should.
If you're in front of your computer or in a
place where you can look on your phone, just just
look up images of Bessie and Glenn Hyde and there
you know, quite a few very famous black and white
photos of them, and uh, they're just cool looking like
(17:59):
Bessie looks contemporary to me. Um, and a lot of
times you look at these pictures and they look like
of the time. She looks a little bit like my uh,
like one of Emily's friends from college. And she always
wore at least in these photos, she always wore. Um,
they like cool bomber jacket, and she just looks like
a cool lady and cool dude. I'll just admire them
(18:22):
as a couple. Yeah, I know, they do look cool,
especially in their outfits. I know exactly what you mean.
You know. Yeah, No, they look like they're ready for
adventure style. All right, well should we take a break. Yes,
let's because there are adventures about to start. Okay, Chuck,
(19:05):
as I promised and then laughed about, their adventure is
about to start. Yeah, and Um, I'm glad you dug
up that thing. Uh Well, first of all, a lot
of this is from um Hyde River Tragedy from Arizona
State University's website devils um. And then an article from
The l A Times from two thousand one by Um
(19:25):
called what Really Happened to Bessie and Glenn by Anne Jetting.
And then really the big shout out we need to
give is to Brad Demmock. Um. Those articles based a
lot on his research. He's this dude who was a
river guide through the Grand Cane for years, who was
also I don't know if he's a self taught or
formally trained historian, but he did exhaustive research for a
(19:48):
couple of decades I believe actually recreated the river run
Bessie and Glenn did. He did with his wife, Um
and his the most knowledgeable person who is ever lived
on the about this case for sure. But Um, you
ended up digging up a thing. And what leads me
to this is I was about to say that they
(20:10):
the idea behind their trip to begin with was a
woman's never done this, and what we're gonna do is
do this trip and afterward we will be famous, like uh,
Charles Lindbergh, or like um, Hillary Mallory, Hillary, Yes, I
think I said Mallory. I was thinking family ties, um.
(20:31):
And the idea is that they could, you know, make
money off this, go on the lecture circuit, write books
and everyone. You see that printed everywhere. But um, you
ended up digging up. That's a little bit under dispute
because you found a letter actually from Bessie pre trip,
where she didn't really mention anything about that, which seems
a little weird. Yeah. And so this is Brad Dimmock again,
(20:52):
this historian who knows more than anybody about this this mystery,
and he dug this letter up. But I have to
give myself a shout out for digging Brad Dimmock noted up,
which was in a two thousand three issue of Boatman's Quarterly.
It's an academic and literary journal dedicated to boating like
on rivers Well and the Funny thing is you You
(21:14):
weren't even looking for it. You were just on the
john in your house. What a coincidence, right, I happen
to have that issue of Boatman's Quarterly in my bathroom.
So this letter from Bessie Um, it was written to
her aunt and uncle Ruth and Millard Haley, and apparently
hours before she departed. They departed from Green River, Utah,
(21:36):
and Um. One of the things that did was clear
up the size of the boat, because everyone always said
it was five ft wide, but apparently it's five and
a half feet wide, Yeah, which would have made it
more stable but harder to maneuver. Um. But she never
says anything in there about hey, we're doing this so
we can like use the store advantage and become famous
(21:57):
and make money. She didn't mention it, and almost like
the way that she describes the trip. She says she's
very excited about it, but the way that she describes
it is like it does it has nothing to do
with that as far as this letter is concerned. And
she's writing this three hours before and so we're saying
all this, You guys who aren't familiar with the mystery
are probably like, why are you even mentioning this part
(22:18):
of this legend that grew after the mystery happened, or
after this this likely tragedy happened. Um. Part of it
was that the there was this idea that Um, Bessie
and Glenn undertook this to basically make their fame and fortune,
and that paints a different picture of their character than
(22:39):
what they actually were, which was real deal, legit adventure
seekers who um were capable, at least in the form
of Glenn and Willing, who weren't doing it for fame
or fortune. They were doing it because this is a
neat thing to try to do together on their honeymoon.
That's that's the reality of it, not you know, kind
(23:00):
to this gold diggie thing that that kind of grew
up as part of the legend over the years. Yeah,
and this one thing even says, uh, it was sure
to bring book deals, lecture circuits, and possibly even a
vaudeville play. Yeah. And that's I mean still to this day,
Like if you see sources or read um write ups
about this mystery, that's almost across the board and how
people characterize it. And part of the reason why they
(23:22):
do is because Brad Dimmock in his two thousand one book,
UM characterized it the exact same way, but in that
in that Boatman's Quarterly or Bowman's Review. UM he he
this was published in two thousand three. So he must
have just wanted to just die because he found this
thing after his book was out. Yes, and he said
that it confirmed like a nagging suspicion in his head.
(23:44):
And he he didn't just make it up, or he
didn't just take a campfire legend and published that. The
problem was is there is a there's a source that
he used. His main source was a guy named Otis
Doc Marston, and he basically made this exhaustive history of
the Grand Canyon. And I believe the Grand Canyon or
the Colorado River, but I think it was the Grand
(24:04):
Canyon as a whole. And he dedicated a chapter to
um the hides, and he interviewed people, but he was
interviewing people like thirty years on. And in his collection
of notes, there's a there's a note from an eye
witness that says that they said that they were seeking
fortune and fame and we're thinking about writing a book
and taking it on a lecture circuit. And that's where
(24:25):
that whole legend came from. So this isn't necessarily like
a huge thing like the mystery doesn't turn on this.
It's more like a lesson for historians and people who
who use historians and sources that it can still be
gotten wrong, like legends can still pervade into even official
histories of things too. And you've got to take this
stuff of a grain AsSalt. Yeah, and so shout out
(24:46):
to Demock's book Sunk without a Sound colon. Always gotta
have a colon. The Tragic Colorado River Honeymoon of Glenn
and Bessie Hyde. Um. It's one thing we got to
mention here about their trip up is that Glenn High
didn't jet down to the um to the Grand Canyon
(25:07):
River boat Shop and plunk down a thousand dollars on
the best boat he could find. He because he had
had met and was inspired by that Harry Galecky guy.
He's I'm gonna build this thing, and he did for
fifty bucks and took him a couple of days. He
built his own scowl named and clearly they had a
(25:29):
bit of sense of humor because he called it the
rain in the Face, which is very cute and kind
of fun um and that is what they launched. Uh,
that's what they launched. And they you know, they loaded
it up with UM supplies of course, their journals, UM
food they had. They even had a mattress in there
(25:50):
so they could sleep, which I thought was adorable. Which
actually I mean that gives you an idea of how
big this boat long five and a half feet wide,
and the California King mattress right in the middle of it,
right just hanging over the sides. But in getting wet,
that'd be so gross. Um. But the boat was open,
Like the sides were only three ft high and it
(26:10):
was an open boat. So they were living in this
boat and basically basically in a floating tent going down
the river in Uh. The one thing that Glenn did
not bring, and this is where I get a little confounded.
For an experienced UM river boatman, he he didn't bring
life jackets, which is weird. He didn't bring life jackets
(26:31):
precisely because he was an experienced river boatman. Yeah, I
still thinks that's odd. So you get the impression when
you hear that that like he just refused to take
life jackets that he was just this kind of like
laugh in the face of danger fool um and to
an extent like that is foolish, but every extent sure.
(26:52):
But it wasn't like it was just him like that's
that was the culture of the river boatman in Idaho
or the people that he knew and and boted with
like that, you just didn't wear life jackets. It wasn't
It just wasn't done. You didn't need them as if
you had any kind of experience, you didn't even need
to take him on an expedition through the Grand Canyon.
(27:13):
And that's why he didn't bring them. Yeah, I'm not
sure I buy that though, because at some point they
met up with another very famous boatman named Emery Coleb
and he said, hey, you guys should have these life jackets,
um inexperienced boatman, and it's there's no shame in that,
and Glenn said, no, no, thank you. Yeah. I think
he just was not He was used to different rivers
(27:35):
than this one. I think there was a different boating
culture on the Colorado than there was a long say,
like the Salmon Well. H Emory Colb, for his part,
said later on, he said, you know, we we hung
out for a little bit and um, my take at
least is that Bessie was kind of ready to quit.
I mean this is after they had made their way
(27:56):
through Labyrinth, Stillwater and Cataract Canyon, and so they had
been been at it for a little while by the
time they met him at Bright Angel Creek, and um,
he said, yeah, I don't think she was so into
it at that point. Yes, So so let's just step
back for a second. They launched on October and they
made it. So they launched from Green River, Utah. Have
(28:16):
have you looked at a map and seen what they
did in a boat. It's insane how what they just
even considering doing this. But the fact that they made
it as far as they did is pretty pretty incredible.
But they launched from Green River, Utah, on the Green River,
followed it down to where it met the Colorado, made
it all the way into the Grand Canyon, UM, and
(28:37):
then stopped and met Emory called on twenty six days
into their journey. Okay, And so when they get out
the day they met Emory called, they were basically resupplying,
restocking um with supplies. And there's there's different um, there's
different descriptions of how best his attitude was toward the
(29:00):
trip from that same day because in addition to um
meeting Emery Cole, they met a bunch of people. They
went and had dinner at the hotel, and I think
they spent the night in the hotel and then set
out again the next day. But the day that they
disembarked from their boat, hiked up the trail um to
like this Grand Canyon village where a lot of people
in tourists were. They met a Denver Post Dispatch reporter
(29:23):
and Bessie told them straight up, she said she's having
the time of her life. Um that she's enjoying every
thrilling minute of it. And then you know, the next day,
Emory coleb says that he spoke to her and she
wanted to quit, and Glenn was urging her on. Now
comes another legend that's developed. And if you go on
like some of these river guide tours down on the
(29:44):
Grand Canyon and they talked to you about the hides,
the way that it's usually painted is that Glenn was
basically a wife beating brute who forced Bessie into this
this adventure scheme again for fame or fortune, and even
when she wanted to quit, he kept pressing her along
against her will. Well, what that reporter didn't mention is
(30:04):
that she was spelling help with her foot in the
dirt as they were talking. He just failed to look down.
Uh yeah, it's I mean, who knows. I mean, part
of the fun of this mystery is that it was
the nineteen twenties and um, everyone you know is kind
of grasping at straws here trying to figure this thing out.
It wasn't like super documented like today. There would be
(30:27):
you know, fifteen thousand pictures before they even launched on Facebook,
right exactly, all taken by them, even selfies. Although it
is interesting to me like they were, Um, they had
set out at an age when when like you had
to be fairly well off to have a camera. But
at the time, the Grand Canyon was just becoming a
tourist attraction for the fairly well off, So there were
(30:50):
people with cameras around there, and there are so like
you said, there are pictures of him, which makes it
the whole thing to me even more interesting. Like I
if I hadn't seen pictures of them, I don't think
I would find the mystery quite as interesting. But to
see them, you know, with pictures taken by like the
last person who saw them alive. It just adds like
a certain interesting element to it. Maybe creepiness, I don't know,
(31:13):
maybe humanity, I'm not sure, pathos how about all that stuff?
All right, So that last person to see them alive
was a man named Adolph Sutro, and he met them
at the river as well. Like you said, there were
a lot of people around, and he was an adventurous guy.
And I think he saw this rain in the face
boat and said, oh daddy, I gotta take a ride
(31:36):
in that thing. That thing's crazy. It's a direct quote. Yeah,
and they said, true man, jump on in. So he
actually rode along for a day, which was the plan.
He mean, he wasn't like, I'm gonna finish the trip
with you. He said, ones, you just take me down
for a day and then I'll hike out at Hermit Creek.
And that's what they did. But he spent you know,
a full a full day with them and then disembarked
(31:58):
and basically that was it. He was the last person
to ever see them. Yeah, and he took a photo
of them, I guess before they disembarked. Um. And that's
the last known photo of them. Uh, and he's the one.
He's the eye witness that Doc Marston interviewed thirty years later,
who supposedly said that they were talking about writing a book,
(32:18):
which is not necessarily in dispute, right, but by that
point they may have been like, man, we should totally
write a book about this. Yeah, exactly. They would have
met a lot of people who would have said, you,
you know, you'll be the first woman who's ever run
this river, and um, yeah, it doesn't there's nothing. There's
nothing to say that they they set out to do that,
(32:39):
but that you know. Of course they could have thought
of it along the way, right. So the ultimate plan
was to eventually finish up in Needles, California on December night. Um,
of course they did not show, and immediately Glenn's dad, uh, Roland,
which was I guess Glenn was a junior exl was
(32:59):
his middle name. Um or maybe not, but that was
his middle name. Roland gets worried and immediately goes to
Las Vegas, thinking, you know, something's wrong here because I
know my son and he would have been where he
said he was going to be unless something was up. Yeah.
He like just immediately was like he didn't sit around
(33:21):
a way to see if maybe a couple of days.
He immediately left for Las Vegas to to to basically
set up a telegraph campaign to get help to try
to find his boy and his daughter in law. R Yeah,
I mean it must have been such a lonely proposition
back then to try and wrangle and get the word out.
It was just so limited with the press and everything.
(33:42):
Like he did though, I mean he had there were
multiple river parties, they were all looking very soon. He
hired very smartly a native American tracker or more than
one to search the rim. And somehow he had a
connection with the government or or least earned one because
Dwight Davis, the Secretary of War, he convinced him to
(34:05):
get military planes looking out. From what I understand, he
managed to get a message to Calvin Coolidge, the President,
who then directed them the Secretary to to get planes out.
And these planes that that joined the search that it
actually worked. Um, they were the first airplanes to ever
fly over the Grand Canyon, and they paid off because
(34:29):
they actually found the boat from the air. That's how
they found it. Yeah, December nineteenth, one of the planes
saw the rain in the face and it was kind
of snagged in the river, kind of right in the
middle of the river, right at mile two thirty seven.
And they reported back and said, hey, this thing is
not in pieces. Um, it actually looks pretty undisturbed. And
(34:50):
immediately Rollin Hyde said, wow, that this is great news.
You know, they maybe are alive somewhere. So he hits
the road, um, searches out those Cole brothers that we
already mentioned. He sets up for Peach Springs, Arizona with
a plan for them to lead him down there and uh,
salvage this boat at mile that was I guess this
(35:15):
boat was just sitting there and they decided to use it. Yeah,
so the Grand Canyon River people knew of a boat,
and rather than take a boat a mile hike a
vertical mile hiked down to the river, they just they
went to a boat that they knew was there and
fixed it. But it took like two days for them
to fix it. And I don't think that the um
that Mr Hyde Glenn's dad was actually on this expedition.
(35:39):
I think he was either at the rim and the
village or back in Las Vegas waiting to hear news
about it. But they they they took two days to
fix the boat, and I think like a full five
days after the boat was first spotted. Um, they set
out on December to go get it. Yeah, Christmas Eve.
(35:59):
I mean, bless the hearts of these people that like
leave their families on Christmas Eve to go try and
find these strangers for this dude. I don't see anything
about reward money. There may have been some involved, but
you know, they went out on Christmas Eve. Finally, Christmas
morning they come up on their boat and it sort
of had a Merry Celeste vibe going on, and that
(36:22):
it was just sitting there in a calm pool. Um,
it was not damaged noticeably, except you know, it obviously
took a little bit of a beating on the trip,
but it was in fine shape. And all of their
stuff was there, which is really super creepy. Yeah, I
mean like their food, their their clothes, their um money,
(36:43):
their gun, Bessie's diary which would be important later on. Um,
like all this stuff. It was undisturbed, untouched, The boat
was intact, and they were nowhere to be found. The
search party looked all over for him, shouted for him.
They were just not with the boat very creepy and uh,
I mean, I guess the good news is even though
(37:05):
they didn't find them, is that Rolin still had hope
because they were like, hey, they they clearly h had
left had not left this boat intentionally, right, So they
just cut the boat free after they salvaged everything they
could from it. And it makes me wonder whatever became
(37:25):
the boat, because this thing was about as sturdy as
a boat could be. So I wonder if it floated
all the way down to the Pacific and it's just
out there somewhere or sunk somewhere in the Pacific. You
never know. This is a Glenn Hide built boat, man,
it's possible it's still out there floating around. Should we
(37:47):
take a break, Yeah, let's all right, Well we'll take
a break. We'll come back and talk about the uh,
the further attempts to locate them and some of the
ideas on what may have happened. Alright, so the boat
(38:25):
has been found, they're not there, no trace of them. Um.
Dad goes back home and is very sad and starts
to kind of think of what to do next. Starts
poring over Bessie's journal for clues. Uh, and of course
kind of as soon as this thing happens, people start
theorizing on what may have happened to them. Yeah, man,
(38:47):
this search for these these people, especially once airplanes were involved,
there was national news like the whole country was keeping
up with this. UM. So a lot of people formed
opinions about this pretty quickly, especially the river people around
the Grand Canyon to you know, those river people. A
lot of people thought that there um, especially later on,
(39:09):
UM that Glenn had forced um Bessie into this and
so he took on this this caricature of a brute
again wife beating husband who had either had probably just
hit Bessie one time too many, and she killed them
and then hiked out of the Grand Canyon and took
(39:30):
a bus east to to start a new life. That
was That was a predominant theory. I think it's still
a predominant theory today. Yeah, I mean there are some
weird things have happened over the years. There have been
more than one woman have claimed to be Bessie Hyde,
most notably this woman named Georgie White, who was a
(39:52):
very experienced in her life. UM. After this, you know,
this period of time, at least very experienced UM boats
person and navigator of wild Rivers. I mean, she was
on the Johnny Carson Show, she was in Time in
Life magazine, and she really made a name for herself.
And at one point she claimed, uh, she claimed to
(40:12):
be Bessie Hyde and even had the marriage certificate in
her belongings, which is, yeah, that was weird. It's very weird.
And I've seen zero explanation of how she got that
and why she got it. The closest thing to an
explanation I've seen, and this was found after her death
in among her belongings. Um, so it's not like she's
(40:33):
like I got the wedding certificate. It was like just
a mystery within a mystery why this particular lady had
this wedding certificate. And they dug a little deeper and
found that on her birth certificate she was born Bessie
that was her real name. But uh, later on bred
Dimmock compared the two and like that it was definitely
not the same woman. They didn't look alike, Yeah, they looked.
(40:56):
I looked as many pictures as I could side by side,
and I thought, it's doesn't quite look like her, But
it wasn't so unlike her that it was impossible to me.
One of the things um Denmark put up was that, um,
Georgie White was not precisely literate. She was an illiterate.
She just was not the literate type. She wasn't a poet,
(41:17):
and Bessie Hyde was, yeah, a poet and she know it.
You know, I'm barely literate too. Uh. That historian you
were talking about otis Marshton. Um. He thought that there
was this uh at mile thirty two, a very violent rapid.
He said, that's where I think they crashed. Um and
(41:40):
very importantly, like I just figured, yeah, they probably crashed
or you know, one of those sweeps because those things
were crazy knocked them off and they drowned. But why
in the world weren't their bodies found? And you dug
into um Demo's book and apparently, Um, I mean, how
many were there between eighteen eighty and nineteen thirty five? Uh?
(42:04):
There they Some people have performed a study I think
of ten. Ten. Well, no, this was in a study.
These were real drownings, right, they surveyed real drownings for
a study, I think, is what I meant. Okay, Uh,
they did ten. There were ten life jacket lists drownings
between eighteen eighty and nineteen thirty five, and only three
(42:25):
of those bodies were recovered. And these things would go
a long way. I think it was an average of
like nineteen and a half miles from where they drowned
four and a half days later. I think it says
forty one and a half days later. Well, demox books
is nineteen a half miles right, and forty one and
a half days later, nineteen and a half miles down
(42:47):
below the po and a half days later. That's in
like six point Yeah, no, I know it's tiny, but
the the His point is that statistically speaking, Glenn and Bessie,
had they drowned owned at mile market to thirty two,
which uh we'll talk about in a second, why that's
probably the case UM. When they finally did surface again,
(43:10):
it would have been below where the search party stopped looking,
but above where later search parties started looking. So they
would have come up at just the right geography, just
the right distance from where they drowned to evade search,
and then at just the right time that UM people
(43:30):
would not have been looking for them right then. And
he also points out that the the UM winter of
nine there was historically low um River flow and so
they may have surfaced, and if they had, the current
would have been slow enough that they would have washed
ashore in a very very remote place, and that they
(43:51):
would have been um picked clean basically by the buzzards
in the area. And then once the river flowed again
very heavily in the spring, their bones would have been scattered.
There just wouldn't have been any trace of them whatsoever.
Which I mean initially when I thought about that, I
was like, no way they pop up. But after hearing
(44:12):
that stuff, it's quite likely that that it was just
a regular disappearance. They drowned and just were never found. Yeah.
And and Dimock makes a really great case at the
end of his book, and it does a really good
like he like, he's very it's just the humanity of
the case has clearly gotten to him because he and
his wife did the same thing um and a scow
(44:34):
like they rebuilt, they recreated the scow. So he really
got into these people's heads or they got into his there.
And the reason why Mile thirty two is what um
bred Dimmock and then earlier Doc Marson think is the
place where they died is if you look along the
Colorado River. Wherever there are rapids, it's because the canyon
(44:55):
is emptying like a side river into the Colorado River,
right it right, so it pushes the Colorado River up
against the canyon wall on one side, and then that's
your rapid. That's what you want to shoot, because this
this canyon has been feeding into the Colorado for so
many hundreds of thousands or millions of years that it's
(45:17):
worn down right there, so it's it's relatively deep and
boulder free. But there are two spots that that have
rapids on the Colorado River where this isn't the case.
Where the water from an incoming canyon pushes the river
up against some very treacherous rocks. And one of them
is Bedrock rapids, which is one place where Glen and
(45:41):
Bessie wrecked, the one place they did wreck and had
to repair their boat for two days. And then the
other places mild to thirty two rapids which are called
um killer Fangs falls, uh, and that's mild to thirty two.
And they think that they just simply didn't make it,
whether they got thrown over the boat and drowned or
(46:03):
one of them got thrown out and the other one
jumped in after them that that their boat just didn't
make it through there. But the boat did it, just
didn't make it with them on it, Yes, which would
to me indicate maybe those sweeps did knock them out.
It's entirely possible those things had done it before. Both
of them had been knocked out by sweeps during the
(46:23):
during the trip already. Hats off to Mr Brad Demock.
And if you were listening, sir, uh, what a great
piece of investigative journalism. Uh. And like he said, when
he and his wife made this trip in their own scale, Um,
they had helmets and life jackets, and they knew the
river and they had a motorized boat following them, so
they had all the safety precautions. Um. And it was
(46:44):
still a rough trip. Yeah, they he said, they were
like bruised and bloody from those sweeps themselves too. So
some of the other weird things that have happened over
the years. There was Demock interviewed, uh in one these
people on a commer trip. Um. They were sitting around
by the campfire as you do after a long day
(47:04):
of boating, and one of the women said that she
was Bessie Hyde and one of the other people said,
what did you do with Glenn kind of ha ha,
and she said, I killed him, apparently without looking up. Um,
she stabbed him and hiked out to Arizona. Then did
catch that bus back east, which is a little creepy. Uh.
And then at one point also there was a bullet
(47:26):
pierced skull found in a garage of a river guy
that had passed away. That's Emory Colb Yeah, and Glenn Hyde.
I mean, it seems like a big jump to just say, hey,
was that Glenn Hyde all of a sudden, But people did, right,
they did, and I think they still do. But I
think in two thousand so Emory Cole died in and um,
(47:50):
when they were going through his belongings his family, they
found in a boat that he had stored in his
garage a man's skeleton with like clothing on and everything
still and the skull had a bullet hole in it.
So of the first thing everyone said was Glenn Hyde.
It's like that mystery is one of the big legends
of the Grand Canyon, right, So, um, they figured out
(48:12):
it wasn't Glenn Hyde pretty quickly. I think he was
a different statue or whatever. But they didn't know who
it was, and they think now that it was a
victim of suicide from N three who was found in
by a botanist back then, and for some reason Emery
Cole got his hands on the guy skeleton and kept
him in a boat in his garage for all those years.
(48:34):
So that's normal, right. I don't know why you would
do that. It says a lot about the dude. Maybe
he just felt sorry for him because nobody claimed him.
Maybe he was a ghoul. I don't know, but it wasn't.
It wasn't um glenn Hyde for sure. So that's it.
It's it's not like the case of settled that's the
great thing. It's it's like, that's just bread Demock's opinion.
(48:55):
It doesn't necessarily mean that happened. But again he knows
more than anybody, and he's probably right if you ask me. Yeah,
this one will never be settled. No, because maybe they
might find some bones somewhere one day, who knows. I
don't know, Chuck, but that would be the only thing,
So that would be something. Or if they found the
scow floating around in the Pacific would be cool. Uh,
(49:19):
are you got anything else? Nothing else? Well, If you
want to know more about the disappearance of Glenn and
Bessie Hide, go read Sunk without a Sound The Tragic
Case of Glenn and Bessie Hyde by Brad Demmock. Right.
That's right. Uh. And since I said that it's time
for a listener, ma'am, I'm gonna call this eulogy for
(49:43):
a teacher. This is from Caissa. Hey, guys, today I
found out that a teacher who was a big influence
on me, uh in my life long love of learning
has passed away over the weekend. It just breaks my heart.
She's the reason I listened to you, guys, because without
her influence, I highly doubt it would have loved school
as much and would not enjoy the process of learning
as much, which is why I keep coming back to
(50:04):
you guys. Jane Mobley was her name. She was my
teacher uh third and fourth grade, and then amazingly we
both changed schools and she ended up being my teacher
in the fifth grade. She taught English and history and
did things like give us creative writing promos by having
us all bring in a crazy shoe and write a
story about another students shoe. Weird things like that that
(50:25):
are why I love writing to this day. And not
only was she amazing teacher, but also very kind hearted.
I grew up quite poor and my mom was a
single mom, raising my sister and me on her own.
When my backpack broke in the fifth grade, my mom
did not have any way to buy me a new
and um Miss Mobile knew my mom's situation, and one
day before recess asked me to stay behind for a
bit when the other kids left. She told me she
(50:46):
was going to pay for a backpack for me with
her own money, and not just any old backpack. She
bought me the very popular at the time l L
Bean with my own initials and everything. My mom was
very grateful for kindness, as was I. Miss Mobile passed
away January one will be greatly missed by all her
students and family. She was very much loved. That is
(51:08):
from Carissa, and it just seemed like something we should
we should highlight because teachers are have a lot of
impact on kids and and throughout the years, I'm sure
Miss Mobile touched very very many students like that, so
that's just wonderful. That'd be cool to hear from other
people with a Miss Mobile story too. You know for sure. Well,
if you have a miss mobile story, we want to
(51:29):
hear it. Actually, you can tweet to us at Josh
M Clark or at s Y s K podcast. You
can join us on who is That from Chuck Carrissa,
Thanks a lot, Curissa. You can join us on Facebook
dot com slash stuff you Should Know or slash Charles W.
Chuck Bryant. You can send us an email the Stuff
podcast at how stuff Works dot com and has always
joined us at our home on the web, Stuff you
(51:50):
Should Know dot com. For more on this and thousands
of other topics. Is it how stuff Works dot com
Hey, everybody, we are going on tour in eighteen, and
we are super excited because there are a couple of
new cities in addition to a couple of old favorites.
And where are we headed, my friend, are you ready
for this? Chuck? Not only do I know where we're headed,
I know the exact dates that will be there. That's good.
On April four, two thousand and eighteen, we are going
(00:20):
to be in Boston at the beloved Wilbur Theater. We're
excited about that. That's right, yep, And you can get
tickets there at the Wilbur dot com website. The next night,
we're going to be in Washington, d C. At the
Lincoln Theater. Chuck, that's April five, that is right. And
previously we erroneously said March, but it is April. Yeah,
it is April, and go to ticket fly dot com
to look up that show. Uh. Then, Chuck, in May,
(00:44):
at the end of May, May twenty two and May
twenty three, we're gonna be in St. Louis and in Cleveland. Yes,
very excited about those. Those are the new cities you mentioned,
that's right. And then in June, and what is it
in June June will be in Englewood, Colorado at the
Gothic Theater. That's right, And we may be adding a
show the day before. We do not know yet, but
(01:04):
stay tuned for more details. Maybe adding a show in
neither Denver or Boulder, so stay tuned for that. Yep.
So if you're in Denver, go to a x S
dot com for tickets, If you're in Cleveland, go to
playhouse square dot org for tickets, and then if you're
in St. Louis you can find it on ticket Master.
So come see us live. You're gonna love it, right, Chuck,
that's right. Welcome to Stuff you should Know from House
(01:28):
Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and
there is Jerry Jerome Rowland. And so since the three
of us are together and um, we've got our life
(01:49):
jackets on, it's stuff you should know that might have
been in the clumsiest Yeah, not bad. It was pretty bad, Chuck.
Come on, let's admit it. How you doing. I'm good,
I'm I'm thrilled about this one. Man. I love like mysteries,
especially like real life mysteries and true crime, although this
isn't necessarily crime. Um and to run across one that's
(02:14):
like genuinely interesting because you know, there's a lot of
them out there that's like, wow, this is this is
kind of interesting, or this is a mystery, but it's
actually not that interesting. It's kind of like documentaries. There
are a ton of documentaries out there, but the top
the best ones maybe represent the top one five. Boy,
(02:36):
I don't know. Same with horror movies too. Yeah, but
I think it's the same thing for unsolved mysteries. Some
are definitely more interesting than others. So I guess what
I'm saying is, thank you for introducing me to this
unsolved mystery because I hadn't heard of it before, and
it's a good one. I think that was even more
clumsy than the first thing. Oh, I thought that was
pro Uh so I wanted to shout out somebody real
(02:59):
quick as you can see my new piece of metal
in my skull. Yeah it looks good. Thank you. Gaming.
So Part two of Chuck Implant Saga number three, Part
two of three. That makes sense. Yeah, third implant, second stage,
(03:19):
Now it doesn't make sense. This is the third implant
that I've I'm getting and I just completed phase two
as of yesterday, as you know. And so now I
actually have the implant in my skull, uh, and it
is going to fuse with my skull for the next
few months. But I wanted to shout out Dr Going
here in Atlanta and casey Uh, one of Dr Going's
(03:43):
uh surgical team members, because here's how this goes down.
I'm laying there in a dental chair with like one
of those surgical hairnets. So I didn't know there was
such a thing. You know, the thing you wear over
your head. Is it your cap, I guess, but it's
not plastic. It's gauzy. Okay, so a gauzy shower cap
(04:06):
that wouldn't work in the shower. Right. So I'm laying there,
I'm getting um heart monitors put on my ankles. The
complimented my many socks. By the way, quick quick shout
out to them, shout out in a shout out, that's rare. Uh.
They're putting on my heart monitors and all that stuff.
They're like, your blood pressure is a little high, and
I said, don't talk to me about that, and uh.
(04:28):
Then the doctor comes in and weirdly doctor going always
says that I'm an attorney, and I don't know if
he's joking every time, because he's he's an odd sense
of humor, or if he really thinks I'm an attorney.
And he said something to one of his assistants turns
out to be Casey, about me being an attorney for somebody,
and I was like, you know, I'm not a lawyer,
(04:49):
and he's like, what does you do? And I said, well,
I'm a podcast host, which you can actually say now
without some big, long, dumb explanation like we used to
have to do or making something up like saying I'm
a radio sist or whatever. Uh, And he went, oh
what what what podcasts and staid stuff you should know,
And this Casey lady starts to like, shake, that's what
(05:10):
you want the surgical assistance to start doing right before you.
And dude, this is as I'm getting my I V
put in, and uh that that knocks me out into
that wonderful, blissful state of what do they call it
twilight sleep? And Casey is sort of legit freaking out
and obviously is a dedicated super fan type, and um,
(05:33):
we sort of are having a bit of a conversation
as I go under, and I'm like, I don't know
how I feel about that, but anyway, she was great,
how do you feel about it now? Well, I kind
of came out of it, and then you don't remember
anything for like four hours, Like I literally don't remember
the ride home. I'll remember is getting in bed and
then waking up like four hours later, right with which
(05:58):
because it was in my house. But I woke up
and I was like, well, that was kind of fun
that she was in there. And I was like, but
wait a minute, do I have all these weird pictures
now of me asleep in a chair. So I'm glad
you led it to this. We have a an official
stuff you should know facebook page, and if everyone wants
to see Chuck knocked out, you can just go to
(06:20):
that Facebook page because we posted him. So thanks to
Casey for supplying us with the pictures. I'm sure they
didn't do that, but anyway, thanks to Casey for all
her care and support. She literally said, will you mentioned
me on the show? Oh? And you said yes? Huh,
Well I was doped up. Oh who knows what I
said yes to. You always have to keep up with
(06:40):
promises you make while you're doped up. Well, And the
joke too with Emily and I is that I that
stuff is like truth serum, you know, like when you
come out of it like anything, Emily will ask me,
I will tell her. And we were joking about that beforehand,
and then on the way home, apparently I think over
in the car and said, here's my truth orm, you
(07:03):
are the love of my life. That is sweet. She said.
It was very sweet, and I have no memory of it,
so nice, so you know it's legit it anyway, that
is quite a story, Chuck. You can't wait to hear
the third chapter. Thanks for indulging that. Yeah, it should be.
I have another real tooth or a real fake tooth
in about three months. Cool, so we'll all be waiting
(07:26):
until then. So, Chuck, that was a very sweet story,
especially the Emily part. And this story that we're about
to tell um as kind of sweet in a lot
of ways to depending on how you look at it.
We're depending on who you listen to, I think is
more to the point. So let's start then, since we're
gonna be telling kind of the sweet story, the sweet
(07:47):
version of this when these two people met Bessie and
Glenn Hyde. It was in seven February of n and
they were on a boat, which would prove prescient for
them for them to meet on a boat, But they
were on a like a kind of a small cruise
ship that was traveling down the California coast from San
Francisco to Los Angeles on a trip. And they met
(08:08):
on this boat and they apparently hit it off immediately,
and they spent the next year together. Um and then
on April of they tied the knot in Idaho, which
is kind of surprising because if you had taken Bessie
Hayley I think was her maiden name, and Glenn Hyde
(08:29):
and you put them side by side, which you can
do because there are photographs of them together, they're not
exactly like the couple that you'd point to on in
different corners on other sides of the room and say
those two, those two are meant for each other. But
it turns out they seem to have been Oh why
what what do you think? They were not well matched? Well,
I they were just different people. Like they look. They
(08:51):
don't visually look correct together necessarily, which doesn't really matter,
it doesn't mean anything. But they were different people. You
know like he was. He was a bean farmer from Idaho.
She was a West Virginia girl who made her way
out west to San Francisco to study poetry at the
California Institute of Fine Arts, I believe, which is now
(09:15):
the the San Francisco Art Institute. Um, they just had
different paths, but when they came together, I think what
they what they shared in common, was a sense of
a love of adventure and trying new things. Yeah. Here's uh.
She was married previously for a very short time, for
just a couple of months, and it was It's really
(09:38):
hard because obviously they weren't like as well documented as
many people, and not many people back then were well
documented at all. But I saw two months marriage and
that she she got divorced the day before she got remarried.
What I saw was that her divorce was finalized the
day before. Yeah, so then they got married the day after,
(10:00):
like the first day they could. Once her divorce is final,
they got married, I think, is what it was. Well,
that's pretty sweet to see, That's what I'm saying. It's
a pretty sweet story. Really. Well, let's go back even further.
I can talk a little bit about their earlier lives
because uh Mr Glenn Hyde was pretty interesting. He was
born December and he had a younger sister named Jean
(10:22):
Or is that genie? I think Jean gene Hyde j
e a n any that always throws me for a
loop um every time the old Jeane trick. Uh. So
that was his sister. And the reason she's important is
because they seem like they were just a and an
adventurous outdoorsy family as a whole. Because he and his
(10:45):
sister would eventually take a trip together on a boat,
he met a dude named Harry. Uh gl glicky glucky
glucky and Gean those are the two names that throw
you off. Well that's very weird spelling of galecky. But
this was he was an experience a boatman, and he
(11:06):
knew a lot about this boat called a sweep scal
scow and these things. You should just look up sweep scale.
It's it's been called a coffin on the water. It's
very boxy and does not look like the kind of boat,
especially in today's from today's point of view that you
would want to go down um and shoot the rapids
(11:28):
in No, definitely not looks like it should be slowly
pulled by a donkey walking along the bank. That's absolutely
what it looks like. And the and one of the
things besides it's ungainly shape. It's a flat bottomed wooden
boat that's kind of curved up slightly at the front,
and it is just it's his boxing is like a
early eighties Volvo, you know. But the other the other
(11:49):
thing about it that would make you not want to
take it on whitewater rapids is that is the way
it's steered. It's steered by basically twenty ft long oars
that don't go out the sides of the boat. They
go out the bow in the stern the front and
the rear of the boat. Those are the sweeps, right,
and they're very heavy and they move pretty fast, and
(12:11):
you have to stand in the middle of the boat
in between the sweeps and hang on to one or
the other, both depending on whether you're steering at yourself
or if you and a friend are steering it too
um and you basically just kind of navigate and steer
down rapids or a river or whatever in the scow
(12:33):
holding these sweeps just kind of these paddles that are
going front and back Um, and it looks extraordinary, Like
it's just the worst idea you could think of when
you think of shooting whitewater rapids in a boat, like
not that. Yeah, I mean, I'm there was some steering involved,
but it also looks to me like the boat probably
(12:54):
kind of goes where the river takes it in many cases. Sure,
you know, so Glenn is an interest guy. When he
was twenty one, he he started doing these big long
canoe trips with friends. Um. And I'm not talking like
let me go out for a couple of days. I
mean he had a big plan with the sister and
the scot to go from the Salmon River in Idaho
(13:14):
all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Yeah. They did that,
and they did that finally, which um, is pretty amazing.
So especially at that time, to go on these long
journeys with these crazy boxy boats, Uh, it was. It
was brave. And at the time people would literally die
(13:34):
trying to do things like the Grand Canyon River. Yeah. Man,
at the time, Um, the Grand Canyon. So around the
late nineteen twenties, the Grand Canyon was just like basically
a widow maker, Like it was extraordinarily treacherous to go
down the Grand Canyon. It still is today, but today
you have the advantages of UM helmets, of really good
(13:58):
life jackets of UM, the fact that the rapids and
the obstructions, and and this the river as a whole,
the Colorado River that goes through the Grand Canyon is
extensively mapped. The people who are on the river know
exactly what's coming and what to do. At the time,
at the late nineteen twenties, people there were people who
knew the river, but it wasn't it wasn't anything like
(14:20):
it is now. There weren't commercial commercial trips um, and
it just wasn't nearly as extensively mapped as it is today.
So it was extremely treacherous and a lot of people
were still dying. I mean it it only been successfully
navigated for the first time, like less than sixty years
before um Bessie and Glenn decided to do it themselves. Yeah.
(14:41):
I think here in only forty five people had managed
to fully traverse the entire length of this of this
river by boat. And they're all dudes them and like
you said, none of them were lead on a guide.
It was all just these adventurous UM death way oriented
(15:01):
fellas Yeah, and and and not even necessarily just like
a sense of adventure that was part of it. But
this is also akin to polar explorations or Everest explorations
they were, or Charles Lindbergh. This was going down the
Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. Was the same thing
as Charles Lindbergh flying across the Atlantic, the same thing
(15:23):
as um Mallory trying to crest Everest. Like it was
the same type of expedition slash adventure like the Smithsonian
would back at that kind of thing. Yeah, those early
days of adventuring like that. I mean what people do
now is amazing, for sure, but just the equipment and
how little was known back then, Like it was just
insane what people were doing back then. Imagine going down
(15:46):
a river with with class five whitewater rapids. That's it's uncharted.
There's no one has ever made a map of that
river before, and you have no idea what's coming up. Yeah,
you gotta be. You gotta have some serious construction in
her construction. And it seems like Glenn Hyde definitely had that.
But he also had experience too. In addition to the
(16:08):
um the Salmon River run that he did with the
sister Jean. Years previous to that, he had also done
the I think either the Peace River or the Pierce River.
It's a it's a river in Canada, and he and
a friend of his name, just Nembucre spent six months
just kind of like running this river and camping and
um fishing and hunting. So he had he had experience
(16:32):
in addition to um a desire for adventure too. Yeah.
So Bessie, for her part, like you said, um was
I mean, she ended up going on this trip, so
she clearly had a little bit of a sense of adventure.
But um, I get the feeling it wasn't her idea
to begin with, you know, because she was a poet
(16:53):
and she was um an artist. She was born on
December twenty, nineteen o five, was a theater girl all
She acted the part of Juliette in the stage production
in high school of Romeo and juliet Um and like
you said, went to cal Arts by herself, just moved
to California alone from West Virginia, which was yeah, I
(17:14):
mean that was pretty Uh, that's pretty adventurous. I mean
it's adventurous today, but I mean back then, especially And
it's funny that everybody mentions that she played Juliet in
a high school play, because it really gets across how
young she was when she was doing this, because she
had she hadn't had enough life to really mention too
(17:36):
many other things. You know, she hadn't done enough yet.
Who knows what she would have done. She was a
pretty interesting person, it seems like. Well, yeah, and you should.
If you're in front of your computer or in a
place where you can look on your phone, just just
look up images of Bessie and Glenn Hyde and there
you know, quite a few very famous black and white
photos of them, and uh, they're just cool looking like
(17:59):
Bessie looks contemporary to me. Um, and a lot of
times you look at these pictures and they look like
of the time. She looks a little bit like my uh,
like one of Emily's friends from college. And she always
wore at least in these photos, she always wore. Um,
they like cool bomber jacket, and she just looks like
a cool lady and cool dude. I'll just admire them
(18:22):
as a couple. Yeah, I know, they do look cool,
especially in their outfits. I know exactly what you mean.
You know. Yeah, No, they look like they're ready for
adventure style. All right, well should we take a break. Yes,
let's because there are adventures about to start. Okay, Chuck,
(19:05):
as I promised and then laughed about, their adventure is
about to start. Yeah, and Um, I'm glad you dug
up that thing. Uh Well, first of all, a lot
of this is from um Hyde River Tragedy from Arizona
State University's website devils um. And then an article from
The l A Times from two thousand one by Um
(19:25):
called what Really Happened to Bessie and Glenn by Anne Jetting.
And then really the big shout out we need to
give is to Brad Demmock. Um. Those articles based a
lot on his research. He's this dude who was a
river guide through the Grand Cane for years, who was
also I don't know if he's a self taught or
formally trained historian, but he did exhaustive research for a
(19:48):
couple of decades I believe actually recreated the river run
Bessie and Glenn did. He did with his wife, Um
and his the most knowledgeable person who is ever lived
on the about this case for sure. But Um, you
ended up digging up a thing. And what leads me
to this is I was about to say that they
(20:10):
the idea behind their trip to begin with was a
woman's never done this, and what we're gonna do is
do this trip and afterward we will be famous, like uh,
Charles Lindbergh, or like um, Hillary Mallory, Hillary, Yes, I
think I said Mallory. I was thinking family ties, um.
(20:31):
And the idea is that they could, you know, make
money off this, go on the lecture circuit, write books
and everyone. You see that printed everywhere. But um, you
ended up digging up. That's a little bit under dispute
because you found a letter actually from Bessie pre trip,
where she didn't really mention anything about that, which seems
a little weird. Yeah. And so this is Brad Dimmock again,
(20:52):
this historian who knows more than anybody about this this mystery,
and he dug this letter up. But I have to
give myself a shout out for digging Brad Dimmock noted up,
which was in a two thousand three issue of Boatman's Quarterly.
It's an academic and literary journal dedicated to boating like
on rivers Well and the Funny thing is you You
(21:14):
weren't even looking for it. You were just on the
john in your house. What a coincidence, right, I happen
to have that issue of Boatman's Quarterly in my bathroom.
So this letter from Bessie Um, it was written to
her aunt and uncle Ruth and Millard Haley, and apparently
hours before she departed. They departed from Green River, Utah,
(21:36):
and Um. One of the things that did was clear
up the size of the boat, because everyone always said
it was five ft wide, but apparently it's five and
a half feet wide, Yeah, which would have made it
more stable but harder to maneuver. Um. But she never
says anything in there about hey, we're doing this so
we can like use the store advantage and become famous
(21:57):
and make money. She didn't mention it, and almost like
the way that she describes the trip. She says she's
very excited about it, but the way that she describes
it is like it does it has nothing to do
with that as far as this letter is concerned. And
she's writing this three hours before and so we're saying
all this, You guys who aren't familiar with the mystery
are probably like, why are you even mentioning this part
(22:18):
of this legend that grew after the mystery happened, or
after this this likely tragedy happened. Um. Part of it
was that the there was this idea that Um, Bessie
and Glenn undertook this to basically make their fame and fortune,
and that paints a different picture of their character than
(22:39):
what they actually were, which was real deal, legit adventure
seekers who um were capable, at least in the form
of Glenn and Willing, who weren't doing it for fame
or fortune. They were doing it because this is a
neat thing to try to do together on their honeymoon.
That's that's the reality of it, not you know, kind
(23:00):
to this gold diggie thing that that kind of grew
up as part of the legend over the years. Yeah,
and this one thing even says, uh, it was sure
to bring book deals, lecture circuits, and possibly even a
vaudeville play. Yeah. And that's I mean still to this day,
Like if you see sources or read um write ups
about this mystery, that's almost across the board and how
people characterize it. And part of the reason why they
(23:22):
do is because Brad Dimmock in his two thousand one book,
UM characterized it the exact same way, but in that
in that Boatman's Quarterly or Bowman's Review. UM he he
this was published in two thousand three. So he must
have just wanted to just die because he found this
thing after his book was out. Yes, and he said
that it confirmed like a nagging suspicion in his head.
(23:44):
And he he didn't just make it up, or he
didn't just take a campfire legend and published that. The
problem was is there is a there's a source that
he used. His main source was a guy named Otis
Doc Marston, and he basically made this exhaustive history of
the Grand Canyon. And I believe the Grand Canyon or
the Colorado River, but I think it was the Grand
(24:04):
Canyon as a whole. And he dedicated a chapter to
um the hides, and he interviewed people, but he was
interviewing people like thirty years on. And in his collection
of notes, there's a there's a note from an eye
witness that says that they said that they were seeking
fortune and fame and we're thinking about writing a book
and taking it on a lecture circuit. And that's where
(24:25):
that whole legend came from. So this isn't necessarily like
a huge thing like the mystery doesn't turn on this.
It's more like a lesson for historians and people who
who use historians and sources that it can still be
gotten wrong, like legends can still pervade into even official
histories of things too. And you've got to take this
stuff of a grain AsSalt. Yeah, and so shout out
(24:46):
to Demock's book Sunk without a Sound colon. Always gotta
have a colon. The Tragic Colorado River Honeymoon of Glenn
and Bessie Hyde. Um. It's one thing we got to
mention here about their trip up is that Glenn High
didn't jet down to the um to the Grand Canyon
(25:07):
River boat Shop and plunk down a thousand dollars on
the best boat he could find. He because he had
had met and was inspired by that Harry Galecky guy.
He's I'm gonna build this thing, and he did for
fifty bucks and took him a couple of days. He
built his own scowl named and clearly they had a
(25:29):
bit of sense of humor because he called it the
rain in the Face, which is very cute and kind
of fun um and that is what they launched. Uh,
that's what they launched. And they you know, they loaded
it up with UM supplies of course, their journals, UM
food they had. They even had a mattress in there
(25:50):
so they could sleep, which I thought was adorable. Which
actually I mean that gives you an idea of how
big this boat long five and a half feet wide,
and the California King mattress right in the middle of it,
right just hanging over the sides. But in getting wet,
that'd be so gross. Um. But the boat was open,
Like the sides were only three ft high and it
(26:10):
was an open boat. So they were living in this
boat and basically basically in a floating tent going down
the river in Uh. The one thing that Glenn did
not bring, and this is where I get a little confounded.
For an experienced UM river boatman, he he didn't bring
life jackets, which is weird. He didn't bring life jackets
(26:31):
precisely because he was an experienced river boatman. Yeah, I
still thinks that's odd. So you get the impression when
you hear that that like he just refused to take
life jackets that he was just this kind of like
laugh in the face of danger fool um and to
an extent like that is foolish, but every extent sure.
(26:52):
But it wasn't like it was just him like that's
that was the culture of the river boatman in Idaho
or the people that he knew and and boted with
like that, you just didn't wear life jackets. It wasn't
It just wasn't done. You didn't need them as if
you had any kind of experience, you didn't even need
to take him on an expedition through the Grand Canyon.
(27:13):
And that's why he didn't bring them. Yeah, I'm not
sure I buy that though, because at some point they
met up with another very famous boatman named Emery Coleb
and he said, hey, you guys should have these life jackets,
um inexperienced boatman, and it's there's no shame in that,
and Glenn said, no, no, thank you. Yeah. I think
he just was not He was used to different rivers
(27:35):
than this one. I think there was a different boating
culture on the Colorado than there was a long say,
like the Salmon Well. H Emory Colb, for his part,
said later on, he said, you know, we we hung
out for a little bit and um, my take at
least is that Bessie was kind of ready to quit.
I mean this is after they had made their way
(27:56):
through Labyrinth, Stillwater and Cataract Canyon, and so they had
been been at it for a little while by the
time they met him at Bright Angel Creek, and um,
he said, yeah, I don't think she was so into
it at that point. Yes, So so let's just step
back for a second. They launched on October and they
made it. So they launched from Green River, Utah. Have
(28:16):
have you looked at a map and seen what they
did in a boat. It's insane how what they just
even considering doing this. But the fact that they made
it as far as they did is pretty pretty incredible.
But they launched from Green River, Utah, on the Green River,
followed it down to where it met the Colorado, made
it all the way into the Grand Canyon, UM, and
(28:37):
then stopped and met Emory called on twenty six days
into their journey. Okay, And so when they get out
the day they met Emory called, they were basically resupplying,
restocking um with supplies. And there's there's different um, there's
different descriptions of how best his attitude was toward the
(29:00):
trip from that same day because in addition to um
meeting Emery Cole, they met a bunch of people. They
went and had dinner at the hotel, and I think
they spent the night in the hotel and then set
out again the next day. But the day that they
disembarked from their boat, hiked up the trail um to
like this Grand Canyon village where a lot of people
in tourists were. They met a Denver Post Dispatch reporter
(29:23):
and Bessie told them straight up, she said she's having
the time of her life. Um that she's enjoying every
thrilling minute of it. And then you know, the next day,
Emory coleb says that he spoke to her and she
wanted to quit, and Glenn was urging her on. Now
comes another legend that's developed. And if you go on
like some of these river guide tours down on the
(29:44):
Grand Canyon and they talked to you about the hides,
the way that it's usually painted is that Glenn was
basically a wife beating brute who forced Bessie into this
this adventure scheme again for fame or fortune, and even
when she wanted to quit, he kept pressing her along
against her will. Well, what that reporter didn't mention is
(30:04):
that she was spelling help with her foot in the
dirt as they were talking. He just failed to look down.
Uh yeah, it's I mean, who knows. I mean, part
of the fun of this mystery is that it was
the nineteen twenties and um, everyone you know is kind
of grasping at straws here trying to figure this thing out.
It wasn't like super documented like today. There would be
(30:27):
you know, fifteen thousand pictures before they even launched on Facebook,
right exactly, all taken by them, even selfies. Although it
is interesting to me like they were, Um, they had
set out at an age when when like you had
to be fairly well off to have a camera. But
at the time, the Grand Canyon was just becoming a
tourist attraction for the fairly well off, So there were
(30:50):
people with cameras around there, and there are so like
you said, there are pictures of him, which makes it
the whole thing to me even more interesting. Like I
if I hadn't seen pictures of them, I don't think
I would find the mystery quite as interesting. But to
see them, you know, with pictures taken by like the
last person who saw them alive. It just adds like
a certain interesting element to it. Maybe creepiness, I don't know,
(31:13):
maybe humanity, I'm not sure, pathos how about all that stuff?
All right, So that last person to see them alive
was a man named Adolph Sutro, and he met them
at the river as well. Like you said, there were
a lot of people around, and he was an adventurous guy.
And I think he saw this rain in the face
boat and said, oh daddy, I gotta take a ride
(31:36):
in that thing. That thing's crazy. It's a direct quote. Yeah,
and they said, true man, jump on in. So he
actually rode along for a day, which was the plan.
He mean, he wasn't like, I'm gonna finish the trip
with you. He said, ones, you just take me down
for a day and then I'll hike out at Hermit Creek.
And that's what they did. But he spent you know,
a full a full day with them and then disembarked
(31:58):
and basically that was it. He was the last person
to ever see them. Yeah, and he took a photo
of them, I guess before they disembarked. Um. And that's
the last known photo of them. Uh, and he's the one.
He's the eye witness that Doc Marston interviewed thirty years later,
who supposedly said that they were talking about writing a book,
(32:18):
which is not necessarily in dispute, right, but by that
point they may have been like, man, we should totally
write a book about this. Yeah, exactly. They would have
met a lot of people who would have said, you,
you know, you'll be the first woman who's ever run
this river, and um, yeah, it doesn't there's nothing. There's
nothing to say that they they set out to do that,
(32:39):
but that you know. Of course they could have thought
of it along the way, right. So the ultimate plan
was to eventually finish up in Needles, California on December night. Um,
of course they did not show, and immediately Glenn's dad, uh, Roland,
which was I guess Glenn was a junior exl was
(32:59):
his middle name. Um or maybe not, but that was
his middle name. Roland gets worried and immediately goes to
Las Vegas, thinking, you know, something's wrong here because I
know my son and he would have been where he
said he was going to be unless something was up. Yeah.
He like just immediately was like he didn't sit around
(33:21):
a way to see if maybe a couple of days.
He immediately left for Las Vegas to to to basically
set up a telegraph campaign to get help to try
to find his boy and his daughter in law. R Yeah,
I mean it must have been such a lonely proposition
back then to try and wrangle and get the word out.
It was just so limited with the press and everything.
(33:42):
Like he did though, I mean he had there were
multiple river parties, they were all looking very soon. He
hired very smartly a native American tracker or more than
one to search the rim. And somehow he had a
connection with the government or or least earned one because
Dwight Davis, the Secretary of War, he convinced him to
(34:05):
get military planes looking out. From what I understand, he
managed to get a message to Calvin Coolidge, the President,
who then directed them the Secretary to to get planes out.
And these planes that that joined the search that it
actually worked. Um, they were the first airplanes to ever
fly over the Grand Canyon, and they paid off because
(34:29):
they actually found the boat from the air. That's how
they found it. Yeah, December nineteenth, one of the planes
saw the rain in the face and it was kind
of snagged in the river, kind of right in the
middle of the river, right at mile two thirty seven.
And they reported back and said, hey, this thing is
not in pieces. Um, it actually looks pretty undisturbed. And
(34:50):
immediately Rollin Hyde said, wow, that this is great news.
You know, they maybe are alive somewhere. So he hits
the road, um, searches out those Cole brothers that we
already mentioned. He sets up for Peach Springs, Arizona with
a plan for them to lead him down there and uh,
salvage this boat at mile that was I guess this
(35:15):
boat was just sitting there and they decided to use it. Yeah,
so the Grand Canyon River people knew of a boat,
and rather than take a boat a mile hike a
vertical mile hiked down to the river, they just they
went to a boat that they knew was there and
fixed it. But it took like two days for them
to fix it. And I don't think that the um
that Mr Hyde Glenn's dad was actually on this expedition.
(35:39):
I think he was either at the rim and the
village or back in Las Vegas waiting to hear news
about it. But they they they took two days to
fix the boat, and I think like a full five
days after the boat was first spotted. Um, they set
out on December to go get it. Yeah, Christmas Eve.
(35:59):
I mean, bless the hearts of these people that like
leave their families on Christmas Eve to go try and
find these strangers for this dude. I don't see anything
about reward money. There may have been some involved, but
you know, they went out on Christmas Eve. Finally, Christmas
morning they come up on their boat and it sort
of had a Merry Celeste vibe going on, and that
(36:22):
it was just sitting there in a calm pool. Um,
it was not damaged noticeably, except you know, it obviously
took a little bit of a beating on the trip,
but it was in fine shape. And all of their
stuff was there, which is really super creepy. Yeah, I
mean like their food, their their clothes, their um money,
(36:43):
their gun, Bessie's diary which would be important later on. Um,
like all this stuff. It was undisturbed, untouched, The boat
was intact, and they were nowhere to be found. The
search party looked all over for him, shouted for him.
They were just not with the boat very creepy and uh,
I mean, I guess the good news is even though
(37:05):
they didn't find them, is that Rolin still had hope
because they were like, hey, they they clearly h had
left had not left this boat intentionally, right, So they
just cut the boat free after they salvaged everything they
could from it. And it makes me wonder whatever became
(37:25):
the boat, because this thing was about as sturdy as
a boat could be. So I wonder if it floated
all the way down to the Pacific and it's just
out there somewhere or sunk somewhere in the Pacific. You
never know. This is a Glenn Hide built boat, man,
it's possible it's still out there floating around. Should we
(37:47):
take a break, Yeah, let's all right, Well we'll take
a break. We'll come back and talk about the uh,
the further attempts to locate them and some of the
ideas on what may have happened. Alright, so the boat
(38:25):
has been found, they're not there, no trace of them. Um.
Dad goes back home and is very sad and starts
to kind of think of what to do next. Starts
poring over Bessie's journal for clues. Uh, and of course
kind of as soon as this thing happens, people start
theorizing on what may have happened to them. Yeah, man,
(38:47):
this search for these these people, especially once airplanes were involved,
there was national news like the whole country was keeping
up with this. UM. So a lot of people formed
opinions about this pretty quickly, especially the river people around
the Grand Canyon to you know, those river people. A
lot of people thought that there um, especially later on,
(39:09):
UM that Glenn had forced um Bessie into this and
so he took on this this caricature of a brute
again wife beating husband who had either had probably just
hit Bessie one time too many, and she killed them
and then hiked out of the Grand Canyon and took
(39:30):
a bus east to to start a new life. That
was That was a predominant theory. I think it's still
a predominant theory today. Yeah, I mean there are some
weird things have happened over the years. There have been
more than one woman have claimed to be Bessie Hyde,
most notably this woman named Georgie White, who was a
(39:52):
very experienced in her life. UM. After this, you know,
this period of time, at least very experienced UM boats
person and navigator of wild Rivers. I mean, she was
on the Johnny Carson Show, she was in Time in
Life magazine, and she really made a name for herself.
And at one point she claimed, uh, she claimed to
(40:12):
be Bessie Hyde and even had the marriage certificate in
her belongings, which is, yeah, that was weird. It's very weird.
And I've seen zero explanation of how she got that
and why she got it. The closest thing to an
explanation I've seen, and this was found after her death
in among her belongings. Um, so it's not like she's
(40:33):
like I got the wedding certificate. It was like just
a mystery within a mystery why this particular lady had
this wedding certificate. And they dug a little deeper and
found that on her birth certificate she was born Bessie
that was her real name. But uh, later on bred
Dimmock compared the two and like that it was definitely
not the same woman. They didn't look alike, Yeah, they looked.
(40:56):
I looked as many pictures as I could side by side,
and I thought, it's doesn't quite look like her, But
it wasn't so unlike her that it was impossible to me.
One of the things um Denmark put up was that, um,
Georgie White was not precisely literate. She was an illiterate.
She just was not the literate type. She wasn't a poet,
(41:17):
and Bessie Hyde was, yeah, a poet and she know it.
You know, I'm barely literate too. Uh. That historian you
were talking about otis Marshton. Um. He thought that there
was this uh at mile thirty two, a very violent rapid.
He said, that's where I think they crashed. Um and
(41:40):
very importantly, like I just figured, yeah, they probably crashed
or you know, one of those sweeps because those things
were crazy knocked them off and they drowned. But why
in the world weren't their bodies found? And you dug
into um Demo's book and apparently, Um, I mean, how
many were there between eighteen eighty and nineteen thirty five? Uh?
(42:04):
There they Some people have performed a study I think
of ten. Ten. Well, no, this was in a study.
These were real drownings, right, they surveyed real drownings for
a study, I think, is what I meant. Okay, Uh,
they did ten. There were ten life jacket lists drownings
between eighteen eighty and nineteen thirty five, and only three
(42:25):
of those bodies were recovered. And these things would go
a long way. I think it was an average of
like nineteen and a half miles from where they drowned
four and a half days later. I think it says
forty one and a half days later. Well, demox books
is nineteen a half miles right, and forty one and
a half days later, nineteen and a half miles down
(42:47):
below the po and a half days later. That's in
like six point Yeah, no, I know it's tiny, but
the the His point is that statistically speaking, Glenn and Bessie,
had they drowned owned at mile market to thirty two,
which uh we'll talk about in a second, why that's
probably the case UM. When they finally did surface again,
(43:10):
it would have been below where the search party stopped looking,
but above where later search parties started looking. So they
would have come up at just the right geography, just
the right distance from where they drowned to evade search,
and then at just the right time that UM people
(43:30):
would not have been looking for them right then. And
he also points out that the the UM winter of
nine there was historically low um River flow and so
they may have surfaced, and if they had, the current
would have been slow enough that they would have washed
ashore in a very very remote place, and that they
(43:51):
would have been um picked clean basically by the buzzards
in the area. And then once the river flowed again
very heavily in the spring, their bones would have been scattered.
There just wouldn't have been any trace of them whatsoever.
Which I mean initially when I thought about that, I
was like, no way they pop up. But after hearing
(44:12):
that stuff, it's quite likely that that it was just
a regular disappearance. They drowned and just were never found. Yeah.
And and Dimock makes a really great case at the
end of his book, and it does a really good
like he like, he's very it's just the humanity of
the case has clearly gotten to him because he and
his wife did the same thing um and a scow
(44:34):
like they rebuilt, they recreated the scow. So he really
got into these people's heads or they got into his there.
And the reason why Mile thirty two is what um
bred Dimmock and then earlier Doc Marson think is the
place where they died is if you look along the
Colorado River. Wherever there are rapids, it's because the canyon
(44:55):
is emptying like a side river into the Colorado River,
right it right, so it pushes the Colorado River up
against the canyon wall on one side, and then that's
your rapid. That's what you want to shoot, because this
this canyon has been feeding into the Colorado for so
many hundreds of thousands or millions of years that it's
(45:17):
worn down right there, so it's it's relatively deep and
boulder free. But there are two spots that that have
rapids on the Colorado River where this isn't the case.
Where the water from an incoming canyon pushes the river
up against some very treacherous rocks. And one of them
is Bedrock rapids, which is one place where Glen and
(45:41):
Bessie wrecked, the one place they did wreck and had
to repair their boat for two days. And then the
other places mild to thirty two rapids which are called
um killer Fangs falls, uh, and that's mild to thirty two.
And they think that they just simply didn't make it,
whether they got thrown over the boat and drowned or
(46:03):
one of them got thrown out and the other one
jumped in after them that that their boat just didn't
make it through there. But the boat did it, just
didn't make it with them on it, Yes, which would
to me indicate maybe those sweeps did knock them out.
It's entirely possible those things had done it before. Both
of them had been knocked out by sweeps during the
(46:23):
during the trip already. Hats off to Mr Brad Demock.
And if you were listening, sir, uh, what a great
piece of investigative journalism. Uh. And like he said, when
he and his wife made this trip in their own scale, Um,
they had helmets and life jackets, and they knew the
river and they had a motorized boat following them, so
they had all the safety precautions. Um. And it was
(46:44):
still a rough trip. Yeah, they he said, they were
like bruised and bloody from those sweeps themselves too. So
some of the other weird things that have happened over
the years. There was Demock interviewed, uh in one these
people on a commer trip. Um. They were sitting around
by the campfire as you do after a long day
(47:04):
of boating, and one of the women said that she
was Bessie Hyde and one of the other people said,
what did you do with Glenn kind of ha ha,
and she said, I killed him, apparently without looking up. Um,
she stabbed him and hiked out to Arizona. Then did
catch that bus back east, which is a little creepy. Uh.
And then at one point also there was a bullet
(47:26):
pierced skull found in a garage of a river guy
that had passed away. That's Emory Colb Yeah, and Glenn Hyde.
I mean, it seems like a big jump to just say, hey,
was that Glenn Hyde all of a sudden, But people did, right,
they did, and I think they still do. But I
think in two thousand so Emory Cole died in and um,
(47:50):
when they were going through his belongings his family, they
found in a boat that he had stored in his
garage a man's skeleton with like clothing on and everything
still and the skull had a bullet hole in it.
So of the first thing everyone said was Glenn Hyde.
It's like that mystery is one of the big legends
of the Grand Canyon, right, So, um, they figured out
(48:12):
it wasn't Glenn Hyde pretty quickly. I think he was
a different statue or whatever. But they didn't know who
it was, and they think now that it was a
victim of suicide from N three who was found in
by a botanist back then, and for some reason Emery
Cole got his hands on the guy skeleton and kept
him in a boat in his garage for all those years.
(48:34):
So that's normal, right. I don't know why you would
do that. It says a lot about the dude. Maybe
he just felt sorry for him because nobody claimed him.
Maybe he was a ghoul. I don't know, but it wasn't.
It wasn't um glenn Hyde for sure. So that's it.
It's it's not like the case of settled that's the
great thing. It's it's like, that's just bread Demock's opinion.
(48:55):
It doesn't necessarily mean that happened. But again he knows
more than anybody, and he's probably right if you ask me. Yeah,
this one will never be settled. No, because maybe they
might find some bones somewhere one day, who knows. I
don't know, Chuck, but that would be the only thing,
So that would be something. Or if they found the
scow floating around in the Pacific would be cool. Uh,
(49:19):
are you got anything else? Nothing else? Well, If you
want to know more about the disappearance of Glenn and
Bessie Hide, go read Sunk without a Sound The Tragic
Case of Glenn and Bessie Hyde by Brad Demmock. Right.
That's right. Uh. And since I said that it's time
for a listener, ma'am, I'm gonna call this eulogy for
(49:43):
a teacher. This is from Caissa. Hey, guys, today I
found out that a teacher who was a big influence
on me, uh in my life long love of learning
has passed away over the weekend. It just breaks my heart.
She's the reason I listened to you, guys, because without
her influence, I highly doubt it would have loved school
as much and would not enjoy the process of learning
as much, which is why I keep coming back to
(50:04):
you guys. Jane Mobley was her name. She was my
teacher uh third and fourth grade, and then amazingly we
both changed schools and she ended up being my teacher
in the fifth grade. She taught English and history and
did things like give us creative writing promos by having
us all bring in a crazy shoe and write a
story about another students shoe. Weird things like that that
(50:25):
are why I love writing to this day. And not
only was she amazing teacher, but also very kind hearted.
I grew up quite poor and my mom was a
single mom, raising my sister and me on her own.
When my backpack broke in the fifth grade, my mom
did not have any way to buy me a new
and um Miss Mobile knew my mom's situation, and one
day before recess asked me to stay behind for a
bit when the other kids left. She told me she
(50:46):
was going to pay for a backpack for me with
her own money, and not just any old backpack. She
bought me the very popular at the time l L
Bean with my own initials and everything. My mom was
very grateful for kindness, as was I. Miss Mobile passed
away January one will be greatly missed by all her
students and family. She was very much loved. That is
(51:08):
from Carissa, and it just seemed like something we should
we should highlight because teachers are have a lot of
impact on kids and and throughout the years, I'm sure
Miss Mobile touched very very many students like that, so
that's just wonderful. That'd be cool to hear from other
people with a Miss Mobile story too. You know for sure. Well,
if you have a miss mobile story, we want to
(51:29):
hear it. Actually, you can tweet to us at Josh
M Clark or at s Y s K podcast. You
can join us on who is That from Chuck Carrissa,
Thanks a lot, Curissa. You can join us on Facebook
dot com slash stuff you Should Know or slash Charles W.
Chuck Bryant. You can send us an email the Stuff
podcast at how stuff Works dot com and has always
joined us at our home on the web, Stuff you
(51:50):
Should Know dot com. For more on this and thousands
of other topics. Is it how stuff Works dot com
Stuff You Should Know News
Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
Show Links
AboutOrder Our BookStoreSYSK ArmyRSSPopular Podcasts
The Breakfast Club
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy And Charlamagne Tha God!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Decisions, Decisions
Welcome to "Decisions, Decisions," the podcast where boundaries are pushed, and conversations get candid! Join your favorite hosts, Mandii B and WeezyWTF, as they dive deep into the world of non-traditional relationships and explore the often-taboo topics surrounding dating, sex, and love. Every Monday, Mandii and Weezy invite you to unlearn the outdated narratives dictated by traditional patriarchal norms. With a blend of humor, vulnerability, and authenticity, they share their personal journeys navigating their 30s, tackling the complexities of modern relationships, and engaging in thought-provoking discussions that challenge societal expectations. From groundbreaking interviews with diverse guests to relatable stories that resonate with your experiences, "Decisions, Decisions" is your go-to source for open dialogue about what it truly means to love and connect in today's world. Get ready to reshape your understanding of relationships and embrace the freedom of authentic connections—tune in and join the conversation!