The Grand Canyon’s Lost Honeymooners

1928 was the year of adventurers. Charles Lindbergh earned a Medal of Honor for being the first solo pilot to cross the Atlantic on a non-stop flight. Amelia Earhart took off on her voyage to become the first female aviator to cross the Atlantic Ocean. Explorer Richard Byrd’s first expedition to Antarctica launched. The wonders of the world seemed more attainable than ever. For newlyweds Bessie and Glen Hyde, this was the perfect year to spark their novel lives as noteworthy adventurers.

In October 1928, the couple embarked on a rafting voyage through the vast Grand Canyon. Their honeymoon trip would have broken records and made Bessie the first woman to raft through the entire Grand Canyon. With over a hundred miles under their belt, they stopped to resupply and visit a famous Grand Canyon photographer. After bidding adieu to a hitchhiker, the newlyweds happily set off into the rapids, and were never seen again.

Searchers found their boat a month after their disappearance but shockingly found that it was completely intact and all their possessions, including Bessie’s diary, were neatly organized in the boat. Rumors abound of Bessie having survived the ordeal, leaving her identity behind to start anew, with flimsy bits of supporting evidence. Nonetheless, the lovers’ tragic disappearance and the unanswered questions remain one of the Grand Canyons’ most famous and divisive mysteries.

The Grand Canyon hasn’t always been a tourist megalith. To see the world wonder nowadays, visitors stop at the entrance booth amid the throngs of other visitors, pay the hefty $45 fee per car, and stuff their backpacks with glossy brochures detailing the most popular trails and water recommendations for hikers in the sweltering Arizona desert. But in 1928, just a year before the Great Depression weighed down the dreams of a generation, it wasn’t the heavily curated experience it is today. It was dangerous, untamed, and nearly mythical — a magnet for any wannabe adventurer to craft their legacy in the turbulent wilderness. Many answered the call, including a young couple looking to have an extraordinary honeymoon.

Rollin Hyde arrived in Spokane, Washington in the late 1800s. The Wisconsin farm boy had only a sixth-grade education but despite that, worked as a school teacher before leaving for the promise of prosperity on the West Coast. With Spokane’s population on a sharp rise, he tried his hand in the booming real estate business, which brought great fortune to Rollin and his brothers. Together, the Hyde family boasted more than four hundred land transactions in just two years. In 1889, pockets flushed with cash and an upper-class life within grasp, Rollin married Mary Thérèse Rosslow. She was quite the catch for the solemn but hardworking man. Mary was a bright and worldly woman who grew up in a French settlement in Ohio and didn’t learn English until grade school.

Their fate shifted during the 1893 spring financial crisis when Rollin fell from being a near-millionaire to penniless in three grueling days. He overextended himself financially while building the Fernwell Building. With not a cent to his name, he took a job as a janitor at the building he had built and owned just months prior.

The couple did, however, receive a blessing amid the gloom of financial ruin. Mary and Rollin finally had children who would survive into childhood: Edna in 1896, Glen in 1898, and Jeanne in 1900. By all accounts, Mary and Rollin were doting parents who adored their children while pushing them to be their best selves. After becoming disenchanted with real estate, Rollin moved his young family to the only piece of property he could keep after bankruptcy: a farm in Davenport where he made a living by farming and logging.

Despite the clean country air, Mary’s health took a turn for the worse and the family migrated to sunny San Francisco with prayers on their lips. Doctors hoped the warm weather and sunshine would improve her condition. They marveled at the glitz and glamor of Hollywood and the balmy beaches, quickly settling into their new life. Escaping the frigid Washington weather soothed Mary, but only for a time. She died of Bright’s Disease at age forty-eight, leaving Rollin a single father of Edna (fifteen), Glen (thirteen), and Jeanne (eleven).

Reeling from Mary’s death, the Hydes picked up again, this time settling in British Columbia. Amid farm life and frequent camping trips, Glen had developed into an experienced outdoorsman. With every spare moment, the family relished in nature, whether camping, fishing, or hiking. They traversed the deserts of New Mexico, climbed remote mountain peaks, sunbathed in California, and explored Alaskan glaciers. During the family’s time in Canada, canoeing trips on the Skeena River sewed the seeds for young Glen’s love of rafting.

Meanwhile, the Great War was boiling over in Europe and stories filled the headlines of families who’d lost their sons in the hellacious trenches. After Canada threw their hat in, Rollin took his family back to the United States where the Canadian military draft couldn’t reach Glen. American soldiers wouldn’t join the war until three years later. Glen avoided the tragic fate of many young men of his generation.

After boundlessly bouncing around the West Coast searching for another land to settle, the family found a beautiful homestead in rural Idaho. The Hydes arrived in 1915 with only 50 cents among them.

“On our farm we had no telephone, no electricity, no plumbing. We got our water from a well (cistern) and carried out wastewater which we threw a short distance from the house. Needless to say, this, in addition to the stock, brought flies, millions of them. I’m afraid that farm life was not my cup of tea,” wrote Edna Hyde Emerson of Idaho farm life in her memoirs.

Despite Edna’s lack of enthusiasm, Glen thrived in Idaho. He was a big shot on the swimming and basketball teams and friends remembered him for his sense of humor and lust for adventure. Glen had his first taste of exploration in 1919 when he and a friend set off on an impressive six-month canoeing expedition from the Peace River in British Columbia, eventually making it to Montana.

Respecting Rollin’s high regard for higher education, Glen enrolled in the University of Oregon studying drama and public speaking. Active on his campus’s social scene, he joined the Sigma Nu fraternity, won debate competitions, and wrote for the school’s literary magazine. His specialty was fictional stories about explorers in nature. Despite his integration into the school’s social scene, he lacked direction and enthusiasm in his studies and dropped out in 1923 at the age of twenty-five.

Once free of the pressures of higher education, Glen planned his most ambitious adventure yet: traversing the Salmon River in Idaho on a sweep scow. Sweepboats (often called scows) were large and boxy rowboats, usually hastily handmade by the boatman or boatwoman, and steered using long and heavy oars called sweeps.

Using a scow he built himself, Glen and his sister Jeanne ran the Salmon River 300 miles across Idaho in seventeen days, arriving in Lewiston on September 15, 1926. On this expedition, Glen proved himself a natural boatman and adept outdoorsman.

In stark contrast to Glen, historians know little about Bessie Haley’s family. Her story is full of enigmas and unanswered questions, the first being the background of her parents. William Haley was born in Maine in 1866. When he met Lottie Baynard, he was a divorced bachelor in a dead-end job. Lottie and William met in Takoma Park, Maryland, a comfortable suburb just outside Washington D.C. They married in 1901 and soon welcomed two babies, Bessie in 1905 then William in 1910. The family moved around the Northeast, and Bessie spent much of her childhood in the impoverished suburbs of Pittsburgh.

Drained by the grit and grime of the city, the family relocated to the up-and-coming oil town of Parkersburg, West Virginia. Here, the Haley’s were solidly middle class after having spent so much of Bessie’s life in poverty. In West Virginia, Bessie thrived as she poured herself into her hobbies. She was popular in school, even playing Juliet in the school’s production of Romeo and Juliet, passionately spoke in the debate club, and drew illustrations for the school paper. Among her many interests, her driving passion was art.

It was at the school paper, The Quill, where she met Earl Helmick, a creative and sensitive young man in the gardening and literature clubs. The high school sweethearts were drawn together, both expressing themselves through their artistic passions. After graduating, Earl went to work a few miles away from Parkersburg while Bessie pursued art and design at Marshall College. She immersed herself in the popular, free-spirited culture of the 1920s, fashioning her hair into a short and trendy bob and dreaming of a cosmopolitan life as a big city artist. She yearned for an existence that few in West Virginia led. But in the summer of 1926, Bessie’s vision of her future drastically went amiss.

Telling no family or friends, Bessie and Earl traveled just across state lines into Kentucky, where they wed in a secret courthouse ceremony. Even more strange, Bessie and Earl only lived together afterward for two months before Bessie packed up and made her way to San Francisco.

A brief announcement in the Huntington Advertiser printed news of their union and mentioned Bessie’s plans saying, “Miss Bessie Haley, who has been a student at Marshall College, and an assistant at the Young Women’s Christian Association here, has returned to her home in Parkersburg. She plans to spend the next year in California studying art.”

Historians assume that Bessie and Earl’s loveless marriage was due to an accidental pregnancy. They wed to save Bessie’s reputation before she decided to either abort the pregnancy or give the infant up for adoption.

In San Francisco, she surrounded herself with fellow poets, artists, and other bohemian-types who gravitated towards the bustling seaside metropolis. She quickly fell in with her new community and worked at a bookstore while studying at the California School of Fine Arts. Here she befriended a nineteen-year-old nude art model, Eraine Granstedt. Eraine had changed her name after allegedly shooting her then-boyfriend and, despite being only fourteen-years-old at the time, had been shunned by her hometown.

The glamorous starlets who graced the movie screens spellbound Eraine, who ached to join them in the spotlight. After much coaxing, Bessie decided to join her friend. In early 1927, the two took off for Los Angeles on a passenger boat, mostly taken by tourists looking to escape prohibition laws. These ships served legal alcohol, as they sailed in international waters, and patrons happily spent their weekends boozing, dancing, and reveling in the jazz bands.

By the time the boat arrived in Los Angeles, Bessie was enthralled with another passenger, Glen, whose stories of outdoor adventures won her heart. While Bessie left Eraine to pursue her newfound romance with the Idaho farm boy, Eraine had her heart set on Hollywood. She changed her name to Greta Granstedt and became one of Hollywood’s most beloved stars. Over her decades in the entertainment business, she earned 119 movies and television credits and married six times.

Bessie and Glen’s whirlwind romance blossomed into love over their shared passions of writing, art, drama, debate, and, of course, adventure. However, Bessie was — legally speaking — still a married woman. In a dramatic confrontation with Glen, Earl refused to sign divorce papers. So, to marry Glen, she moved to Nevada and resided there just long enough to establish residency. The state had notoriously lax divorce laws and the judge granted Bessie a quick and seamless divorce. With the ink on her divorce decree still wet, Bessie and Glen had a small wedding and moved to Rollin’s Idaho farm where they helped with the harvest.

But their time in Idaho reinforced a shared dissatisfaction with simple farm life. Instead, the two dreamed of completing a heroic adventure together, stirring hordes of journalists from around the nation, writing a best-selling tell-all novel by wielding their gifted talents for writing and art, and giving lectures to packed auditoriums. This life of glamor, intrigue, and passion seemed to fit Bessie and Glen Hyde better than a modest life in Idaho. All they needed was a trip worthy of public attention and they soon found the perfect idea: rafting through the wild Grand Canyon on a sweep scow. If completed, Bessie would have been the first woman to raft the entirety of the Grand Canyon, and with their planned schedule, they would have also nabbed a speed record.

As the potato and bean harvest drew to a halt, the pair immediately hopped on a train headed to Green River, Utah, where they would launch their expedition. Glen built his scow on the banks of the Green River while Bessie rested at a hotel. All in all, it took him two days and $50 to finish their boat. While it was a long journey, it wouldn’t be a Spartan one. The large scow could carry more than enough supplies to last them: a long-barreled Winchester rifle, crates of fresh and canned vegetables, kerosene, and bedsprings. At four o’clock on October 20, 1928, the couple set sail, waving goodbye to a handful of curious locals on the riverbank.

Their route went through Labyrinth and Stillwater Canyons, Cataract Canyon, Glen Canyon, and 60 miles into the Grand Canyon in record time. They resupplied at the canyon rim in Grand Canyon Village and spoke to famous Grand Canyon photographer Emery Kolb, who photographed them. Emery Kolb and his brother, Ellsworth Kolb, were noteworthy Grand Canyon photographers famous for their photographs of remote portions of the canyon. Their studio is still standing and operates as a small museum on the Grand Canyon’s rim. Emery, knowing the peril of Grand Canyon rapids, offered the Hydes lifejackets. Glen laughed and refused, saying they’d swim if tossed overboard.

Before hiking back to their scow, Bessie complimented a young girl’s shoes and prophetically remarked, “I wonder if I’ll ever wear pretty shoes again.” A man by the name of Adolph Sutro met the couple and rode with them for a day in the scow from Phantom Ranch to Hermit Rapid. Sutro watched them float away from the banks on November 18 — the last time anyone saw Bessie and Glen Hyde alive.

“I was at Lee’s Ferry when Hydes went through — they stayed overnight — when they landed he showed me how he manipulated the boat — to me it didn’t look very adaptable to that kind of water — real hazard was going with one boat and I warned him about “Having all eggs in one basket.” His wife couldn’t help much — she was too light — think they did have a rifle — they could sleep and cook on raft — she was enthusiastic about going on — he had enough confidence to go on — he asked about river — I warned him about danger if anything happened to his boat — it was surprising the way he could handle the boat — he could push raft sideways.”

This is what Owen Clark said in an interview. Clark had been on a similar expedition the year before and the water levels at the time of his trip were nearly exact to that of the Hydes.

When Bessie and Glen didn’t make it to the finish line in Needles, California as scheduled, authorities launched a massive search. Nationwide newspapers reported on every new detail in the fated search. The military used aerial surveillance to look for clues from above, while highly skilled Native American trackers scoured the ground for any trace of the pair. On Christmas Eve, searchers found the Hyde’s scow. To their shock, however, it was upright and completely intact. All their supplies were intact and neatly arranged, even Bessie’s journal. According to her notes, they were ahead of schedule at the time of their disappearance. Despite the boat’s discovery, the mystery was far from solved. The obvious answer is that the starry-eyed newlyweds drown in the rapids. But why was their scow upright and completely intact?

Some ships

Sail from port to port,

Following contentedly the same old way.

While others

Who through restlessness,

Watch new seas at the break of each day.

-Bessie Haley

The mind’s desire to seek out glamorous and meaningful deaths in the Rorschach blots of unsolved mysteries isn’t a new aspect of the true-crime community. It’s not uncommon to read theories of hitmen and drug deals gone wrong before a jilted lover is inevitably fingered as the killer. As the adage goes, the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.

However, several rumors have spread about Bessie’s presumed new identity, theorizing that she survived the trip and escaped to assume a new identity.

In 1971 on a commercial rafting trip in the Grand Canyon, a group of tourists gathered together around the fire as they rested in camp. It was close to the end of the excursion and the group was rightfully exhausted. Taking turns telling stories around the campfire, an elderly woman started telling her tale. She told everyone that she was Bessie Hyde. Glen was abusive and cruel to her and, during the trip, she finally had enough. She stabbed him to death and escaped the canyon, abandoning her old life and beginning anew. The group, as one could imagine, was shocked at her tale and they notified the authorities. Under even the most casual scrutiny, her narrative was undoubtedly false. Her real name was Elizabeth and she reportedly enjoyed mind games. Oddly enough, she worked as a psychology professor.

Georgie White Clark was a famous river-runner in the Grand Canyon. After she died in 1992, friends found the marriage certificate of Bessie and Glen among her belongings. Additionally, they discovered her birth certificate, showing her real name to be Bessie DeRoss. This theory has little weight, as her life is well-documented and the women have very different physical characteristics.

Suspicions turned to photographer Emery Kolb after his 1976 death, when his grandson found a male skeleton tucked away in his garage. The mystery man died of a gunshot wound to the head. The rumor mill immediately questioned if Kolb, love-struck by Bessie, murdered his rival Glen. However, it was later found that the skeleton belonged to a man who took his own life at Shoshone Point in the Grand Canyon. Park rangers found his remains in 1933 along with a 32-caliber revolver, two cartridges, and an exploded shell. The man’s identity, however, has never been established.

While the tragic disappearance of the newlyweds is compelling, most historians agree that the two likely just fell overboard and drowned. Perhaps one fell into the rushing torrent and the other dove in to help. They didn’t have life jackets, as these were not common among Idaho scow boaters, and were unfamiliar with the Grand Canyon, which has some of the heaviest whitewater rapids in the country.

This tale tells, more than anything, how people love a good mystery even at the expense of the facts. Sitting around a campfire with good company and debating whether Bessie killed her husband to start a new life is a lot more enjoyable than the alternative: the two, in tragic simplicity, fell overboard and drowned with no drama, intrigue, or fanfare. Usually, our deaths are not another twist in an encompassing, extraordinary tale — one can unceremoniously die because of a single misstep in a place that allows no margin for error.

Much of this information comes from the book Sunk Without a Sound by Brad Dimock. If you’re interested in reading more about Bessie and Glen’s story, this is a wonderful novel.