Stuff You Should Know - The Mystery of The Grand Canyon Newlyweds

Episode Date: February 8, 2018

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.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey, everybody, we are going on tour in 2018, 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 4th, 2018, we are going 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.com website. The next night, we're gonna be in Washington, D.C. at the Lincoln Theater, Chuck, that's April 5th. That is right, and previously we erroneously said March, but it is April. Yeah, it is April. And go to ticketfly.com to look up that show. Then, Chuck, in May, at the end of May, May 22nd

and May 23rd, we're gonna be in St. Louis and then Cleveland. Yes, very excited about those. Those are the new cities you mentioned. That's right, and then in June, and what is the date in June 28th? June 28th, we'll 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 stay tuned for more details. Maybe adding a show in either Denver or Boulder, so stay tuned for that. Yep, so if you're in Denver, go to axs.com for tickets. If you're in Cleveland, go to playhousesquare.org for tickets, and then if you're in St. Louis, you can find it on Ticketmaster.

So come see us live. You're gonna love it, right, Chuck? That's right. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.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 we've got our life jackets on, it's Stuff You Should Know. That might have been in the clumsiest yet. Not bad. It was pretty bad, Chuck. Come on, let's admit it. How you doing? I'm good.

I'm thrilled about this one, man. I love mysteries, especially real-life mysteries and true crime, although this isn't necessarily crime. And to run across one that's genuinely interesting, because there's a lot of them out there that's like, wow, 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, what, 5%? Boy, 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. So I wanted to shout out somebody real quick. OK. As you can see, my new piece of metal in my skull.

Yeah, it looks good. Thank you. Gleaming. So part two of Chuck Implant saga number three, part two of three, does that make sense? Yeah. Third implant, second stage. Now it doesn't make sense.

This is the third implant that I'm getting. I got you. And I've just completed phase two as of yesterday, as you know. OK. And so now I actually have the implant in my skull, and it is going to fuse with my skull for the next few months.

But I wanted to shout out Dr. Goeing here in Atlanta and Casey, one of Dr. Goeing's surgical team members, because here's how this goes down. I'm laying there in a dental chair with one of those surgical hair nets. Is that what they're called? I didn't know there was such a thing. You know, the thing you wear over your head.

A shower tap? I guess, but it's not plastic. It's gauzy. OK, so a gauzy shower cap that wouldn't work in the shower. Right. So I'm laying there. I'm getting heart monitors put on my ankles. They complimented my meandy socks, by the way.

Quick shout out to them. A shout out in a shout out, that's rare. 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 then the doctor comes in, and weirdly, Dr. Goeing always says that I'm an attorney. And I don't know if he's joking every time,

because he has 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. And he's like, what does he 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 host or whatever. And he went, oh, what podcast? And I said, stuff you should know. And this Casey lady starts to like shake. That's what you want the surgical assistant to start doing right before you go under. Dude, this is as I'm getting my IV put in that knocks me out

into that wonderful, blissful state of what they call it, twilight sleep. And Casey is sort of legit freaking out, and obviously is a dedicated superfan type. And 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. Literally don't remember the ride home. All I remember is getting in bed and then waking up like four hours later. All right, with Casey wiping your brows and you sleep. Which is weird.

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 an official stuff you should know, Facebook page.

And if everyone wants to see Chuck knocked out, you can just go to that Facebook page because we posted them. So thanks to Casey for supplying us with the pictures. No, I'm sure they didn't do that. But anyway, thanks to Casey for all her care and support. Nice. Because she literally said, well, you mentioned me on the show.

Oh, and you said yes, huh? Well, I was doped up. Oh, there you go. Who knows what I said yes to. You always have to keep up with promises you make while you're doped up. Well, and the joke too with Emily and I is that that stuff is like truth serum.

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 leaned over in the car and said, here's my truth serum. You are the love of my life. No, 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's got to be. Anyway. That is quite a story, Chuck. I can't wait to hear the third chapter. Thanks for indulging that.

Yeah, I should have another real tooth or a real fake tooth in about three months. Cool. So we'll all be waiting until then. So Chuck, that was a very sweet story, especially the Emily part. And this story that we're about to tell is kind of sweet in a lot of ways too,

depending on how you look at it, or depending on who you listen to, I think, is more to the point. Yeah, well said. So let's start then, since we're going to be telling kind of the sweet story, the sweet version of this, when these two people met, Bessie and Glenn Hyde. It was in 1927, February of 1927.

And they were on a boat, which would prove prescient for them, for them to meet on a boat. But they were on 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 on this boat, and they apparently hit it off immediately. And they spent the next year together.

And then on April of 1928, they tied the knot in Idaho, which is kind of surprising, because if you had taken Bessie Haley, I think, was her maiden name, and Glenn Hyde, 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 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 do you think they were not well matched? Well, they were just different people. Like they don't visually look correct together, necessarily, which doesn't really matter. It doesn't mean anything. But they were different people.

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 the San Francisco Art Institute. They just had different paths. But when they came together, I think what they shared in common was a sense of a love of adventure and trying new things.

Yeah, here's. She was married previously for a very short time, for just a couple of months. And it's really hard, because obviously they weren't as well-documented as many people, and not many people back then were well-documented at all. But I saw a two-month marriage, and she got divorced the day before she got remarried.

What I saw was that her divorce was finalized the day before they got married. Yeah. OK. So then they got married the day after. Like the first day they could, once her divorce was final, they got married, I think, is what it was. Well, that's pretty sweet, too.

See, that's what I'm saying. It's a pretty sweet story, really. Well, let's go back even further and talk a little bit about their earlier lives, because Mr. Glenn Hyde was pretty interesting. He was born December 9, 1898. And he had a younger sister named Gene, or is that Genie? I think Gene.

Gene Hyde, J-E-A-N-N-E, that always throws me for a loop. Every time, the old Gene trick. So that was his sister. And the reason she's important is because they seemed like they were just an adventurous, outdoorsy family as a whole, because he and his sister would eventually take a trip together on a boat. He met a dude named Harry Galecki.

Galecki? Galecki and Gene. Those are the two names that throw you off. Well, that's a very weird spelling of Galecki. Right. But he was an experienced boatman. And he knew a lot about this boat called a Sweepskow, S-C-O-W. And these things, you should just look up Sweepskow.

It's been called a coffin on the water. It's very boxy and does not look like the kind of boat, especially from today's point of view, that you would want to go down and shoot the rapids in. No, definitely not. It looks like it should be slowly pulled by a donkey walking along the banks. That's absolutely what it looks like.

And one of the things besides its ungainly shape, it's a flat bottom wooden boat that's kind of curved up slightly at the front. And it is just as boxy as an early 80s Volvo. But the other thing about it that would make you not want to take it on whitewater rapids is the way it's steered. It's steered by basically 20 foot long oars that don't go out the sides of the boat.

They go out the bow and the stern, the front and the rear of the boat. Yeah, those are the sweeps. Right. And they're very heavy and they move pretty fast. And 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 it yourself

or if you and a friend are steering it too. And you basically just kind of navigate and steer down rapids or a river or whatever in the scow, holding these sweeps, just kind of these paddles that are going front and back. 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, there was some steering involved. But it also looks to me like the boat probably kind of goes where the river takes it in many cases. Sure. You know? Yeah. So Glenn is an adventurous guy.

When he was 21, he started doing these big long canoe trips with friends. And I'm not talking like, let me go out for a couple of days. I mean, he had a big plan with his sister and the scow to go from the Salmon River in Idaho all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Yeah, they did that. And they did that in 1926, finally, which is pretty amazing.

So especially at that time to go in these long journeys with these crazy, boxy boats, it was brave. And at the time, people would literally die trying to do things like the Grand Canyon River. Yeah, man. At the time, the Grand Canyon, so around the late 1920s, the Grand Canyon was just like basically a widowmaker. Like it was extraordinarily treacherous

to go down the Grand Canyon. It still is today. But today, you have the advantages of helmets, of really good life jackets, of the fact that the rapids and the obstructions and 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 1920s, there were people who knew the river. But it wasn't anything like it is now. There weren't commercial trips. 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 had only been successfully navigated for the first time, like less than 60 years before, Bessie and Glenn decided to do it themselves. Yeah, I think here in 1928, only 45 people had managed to fully traverse the entire length of this river by boat. Yeah.

And there were all dudes, 100% of them. And like you said, none of them were led on a guide. It was all just these adventurous, death-wish-oriented fellows. Yeah, 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 Charles Lindberg. This was going down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon was the same thing as Charles Lindberg flying across the Atlantic. The same thing as a Mallory trying to crest Everest. Like it was the same type of expedition slash adventure. Like the Smithsonian would back it, 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. I think it was just insane what people were doing back then. Imagine going down a river with class 5 whitewater rapids that'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've got to have some serious construction, inner construction, inner constitution. It seems like Glenn Hyde definitely had that. But he also had experience, too. In addition to the Salmon River run that he did with the sister Jean, years previous to that, he'd also done the, I think, either the Peace River or the Pierce River.

It's a river in Canada. And he and a friend of his named Jess Nebucher spent six months just kind of running this river and camping and fishing and haunting. So he had experience in addition to a desire for adventure, too. Yeah, so Bessie, for her part, like you said, was, I mean, she ended up going on this trip.

So she clearly had a little bit of a sense of adventure, but I get the feeling it wasn't her idea to begin with, you know? Yeah. Because she was a poet and she was an artist. She was born on December 29th, 1905. Was a theater girl. She acted the part of Juliet in the stage production

in high school of Romeo and Juliet. And like you said, went to Cal Arts by herself, just moved to California alone from West Virginia, which was, yeah, I mean, that was pretty adventurous in 1924. For sure. 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 hadn't had enough life to really mention too many other things, you know? Yeah. 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 look up images of Bessie and Glenn Hyde. And there are, you know, quite a few very famous black and white photos of them, and they're just cool looking. Like Bessie looks contemporary to me. Yes, she does. And a lot of times you look at these pictures and they look like of the time.

She looks a little bit like one of Emily's friends from college, and she always wore, at least in these photos, she always wore this cool bomber jacket, and she just looks like a cool lady. And she's a cool dude, I'll just admire them as a couple. Yeah, no, 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 1920s style. All right, well, should we take a break? Yes, let's, because their adventure's about to start. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker

necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references

to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you.

Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael, and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy.

You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. OK, Chuck, as I promised, and then laughed about their adventure

is about to start. Yeah, and I'm glad you dug up that thing. Well, first of all, a lot of this is from Hyde River Tragedy from Arizona State University's website. Go Sun Devils. And then an article from the LA Times from 2001 by, called What Really Happened to Bessie and Glenn by Ann Judinga.

And then, really, the big shout-out we need to give is to Brad Demock, who those articles based a lot on his research. He's this dude who was a river guide through the Grand Canyon for years, who was also, I don't know if he's a self-taught or formerly trained historian, but he did exhaustive research for a couple decades, I believe, actually recreated the river run

that Bessie and Glenn did with his wife. And is the most knowledgeable person who has ever lived about this case. For sure. But you ended up digging up the thing. And what leads me to this is I was about to say that the idea behind their trip to begin with was a woman's never done this.

And what we're going to do is do this trip. And afterward, we will be famous. Like Charles Lindberg, or like Hillary Mallory. Hillary, yes. I think I said Mallory. I was thinking family ties. And the idea is that they could make money off this, go on the lecture circuit, write books.

And everyone, you see that printed everywhere. But you ended up digging up. That's a little bit under dispute, because you found a letter actually from Bessie pre-trip where she doesn't really mention anything about that, which seems a little weird. Yeah. And so this is Brad Dimmock.

Again, this historian who knows more than anybody about this mystery. And he dug this letter up. But I have to give myself a shout out for digging the Brad Dimmock note up, which was in a 2003 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 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, it was written to her aunt and uncle Ruth and Millard Haley.

And apparently hours before she departed, they departed from Green River, Utah. And one of the things it did was clear up the size of the boat, because everyone always said it was five feet wide, but apparently it was five and a half feet wide. Yeah, which would have made it more stable but harder to maneuver.

Sure. But she never says anything in there about, hey, we're doing this so we can use the store advantage and become famous and make money. She didn't mention it at all. 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's 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 of this legend that grew after the mystery happened or after this likely tragedy happened,

part of it was that there is this idea that Bessie and Glenn undertook this to basically make their fame and fortune. And that paints a different picture of their character than what they actually were, which was real deal legit adventure seekers who 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 was a neat thing to try to do together on their honeymoon. That's the reality of it, not this gold diggy thing that grew up as part of the legend over the years. Yeah, and this one thing even says it was sure to bring book deals, lecture circuits, and possibly even a vaudeville play. Yeah, I mean, still to this day, if you see sources

or read write-ups about this mystery, that's almost across the board how people characterize it. And part of the reason why they do is because Brad Dimock in his 2001 book characterized it the exact same way. But in that Boatman's Quarterly or Boatman's Review, this was published in 2003. So he must have just wanted to just die

because he found this thing after a book was out. Yes, and he said that it confirmed like a nagging suspicion in his head. And he didn't just make it up or he didn't just take a campfire legend and publish that. The problem was is there is 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 Canyon as a whole, and he dedicated a chapter to the hides. And he interviewed people, but he was interviewing people like 30 years on. And in his collection of notes, there's a note from an eyewitness that says that they said that they were seeking fortune and fame

and were thinking about writing a book and taking it on a lecture circuit. And that's where 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 use historians as sources that it can still be gotten wrong.

Like legends can still pervade into even official histories of things too. And you got to take this over the grain of salt. Yeah, and so shout out to Democ's book, Sunk Without a Sound, Colin. Always gotta have a colon. Sure. The tragic Colorado River honeymoon of Glenn and Bessie

Hyde. So one thing we got to mention here about their trip is that Glenn Hyde didn't jet down to the Grand Canyon River boat shop and plunked down $1,000 on the best boat he could find. He, because he had met and was inspired by that Harry Galecki guy, he said, I'm gonna build this thing.

And he did for 50 bucks and took him a couple of days. He built his own scowl named, and clearly they had a bit of sense of humor because he called it the rain in the face, which is very cute and kind of fun. Sure. And that is what they launched. That's what they launched in.

They loaded it up with supplies, of course, their journals, food, they even had a mattress in there so they could sleep, which I thought was adorable. Which actually, I mean, that gives you an idea of how big this boat is. 20 feet long, five and a half feet wide. And a California king mattress right in the middle of it. Right, it was just hanging over the sides.

But then getting wet, that'd be so gross. But the boat was open. Like the sides were only three feet high and it was an open boat. So they were living in this boat and basically in a floating tent going down the river. That's what they lived in. The one thing that Glenn did not bring,

and this is where I get a little confounded, for an experienced river boatman, he didn't bring life jackets, which is weird. He didn't bring life jackets precisely because he was an experienced river boatman. Yeah, I still think 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. And to an extent, like that is foolish, but- To every extent. Sure, but it wasn't like, it was just him. Like that was the culture of the river boatman in Idaho or the people that he knew and boated with, like you just didn't wear life jackets.

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 them on an expedition through the Grand Canyon, 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 Colb,

and he said, hey, you guys should have these life jackets. I'm an experienced boatman, and there's no shame in that. And Glenn said, nope, no thank you. Yeah, I think he just was not, he was used to different rivers than this one. I think there was a different boating culture on the Colorado than there was along say like the salmon.

Well, Emery Colb for his part said later on, he said, you know, we hung out for a little bit, and my take at least is that Bessie was kind of ready to quit. I mean, this is after they had made their way through Labyrinth, Stillwater, and Cataract Canyon, and so they had been at it for a little while by the time they met him at Bright Angel Creek,

and he said, yeah, I don't think she was so into it at that point. Yeah, so let's just step back for a second. They launched on October 20th, and they made it, so they launched from Green River, Utah. Have you looked at a map and seen what they did in a boat? Oh yeah. It's insane how, just even considering doing this,

but the fact that they made it as far as they did is 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, and then stopped and met Emery Colb on 26 days into their journey, okay? And so when they get out, the day they met Emery Colb,

they were basically resupplying, restocking with supplies, and there's different, there's different descriptions of how best his attitude was toward the trip from that same day, because in addition to meeting Emery Colb, 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 to this Grand Canyon village where a lot of people and tourists were, they met a Denver Post Dispatch reporter, and Bessie told them straight up, she said she's having the time of her life, that she is enjoying every thrilling minute of it,

and then the next day Emery Colb says that he'd 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 some of these river guide tours down on the Grand Canyon and they talk 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 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 that she was spelling help with her foot in the dirt as they were talking. He just failed to look down.

Yeah, I mean, who knows? I mean, part of the fun of this mystery is that it was the 1920s, and everyone is kind of grasping at straws here trying to figure this thing out. It wasn't like super documented, like today there would be 15,000 pictures before they even launched on Facebook.

Right, exactly, all taken by them even. Selfies. Although it is interesting to me, they had set out at an age when 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 people with cameras around there,

and there are, like you said, there are pictures of them, which makes it the whole thing to me even more interesting. If I hadn't seen pictures of them, I don't think I would find the mystery quite as interesting, but to see them with pictures taken by the last person who saw them alive,

it just adds a certain interesting element to it. Maybe creepiness, I don't know, maybe humanity, I'm not sure. Pathos. How about all that stuff? Sure. All right, so that last person to see them alive was a man named Adolf 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 in that thing. That thing's crazy. It's a direct quote. Yeah, and they said, sure, man, jump on in.

So he actually rode along for a day, which was the plan. He wasn't like, I'm gonna finish the trip with you. He said, why don't 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 a full day with them and then disembarked, 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, and that's the last known photo of them, and he's the one, he's the eyewitness that Doc Marston interviewed 30 years later, who supposedly said that they were talking about writing a book, 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'll be the first woman who's ever run this river, and there's nothing to say that they set out to do that, but 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 9th. Of course, they did not show, and immediately Glenn's dad, Roland, which was, I guess, Glenn was a junior, because that was his middle name, or maybe not, but that was his middle name. Roland gets worried, and immediately he's like, Glenn gets worried, and immediately goes to Las Vegas

thinking 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 just immediately was like, he didn't sit around a way to see if maybe a couple of days, he immediately left for Las Vegas to basically set up a telegraph campaign to get help to try to find his boy and his daughter-in-law.

Right? 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. 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 at least earned one, because Dwight Davis, the secretary of war, he convinced him to get military planes looking out. From what I understand, he managed to get a message to Calvin Coolidge, the president,

who then directed the- Amazing. The secretary to get planes out. That's pretty cool. And these planes that joined the search, it actually worked, they were the first airplanes to ever fly over the Grand Canyon, and they paid off because they actually found the boat

from the air, that's how they found it. Yeah, December 19th, 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 237, and they reported back and said, hey, this thing is not in pieces. It actually looks pretty undisturbed, and immediately, Rollin Hyde said,

wow, this is great news, you know, they maybe are alive somewhere. So he hits the road, searches out those cold brothers that we already mentioned, he sets it up for Peach Springs, Arizona, with a plan for them to lead him down there and salvage this boat at mile 225 that was, I guess this 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 vertical mile hike down to the river, they just 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 Mr. Hyde, Glenn's dad, was actually on this expedition,

I think he was either at the rim in the village or back in Las Vegas waiting to hear news about it, but they took two days to fix the boat, and I think like a full five days after the boat was first spotted, they set out on December 24th to go get it. Yeah, Christmas Eve, 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 upon their boat, and it sort of had a Mary Celeste vibe going on, and that it was just sitting there in a calm pool, 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 clothes, their money, their gun, Bessie's diary, which would be important later on, 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 them, shouted for them, they were just not with the boat. Very creepy, and I mean, I guess the good news is, even though they didn't find them, is that Rollins still had hope, because they were like, hey, they clearly 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 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 decades later. You never know, this is a Glen Hyde built boat, man,

it's possible it's still out there floating around. That's true. Isn't that creepy? Should we take a break? Yeah, let's. All right, we'll take a break, we'll come back and talk about the further attempts to locate them, and some of the ideas

on what may have happened. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slipdresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy,

blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to, Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself,

what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael.

Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen.

So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right. So the boat has been found. They're not there. No trace of them. Dad goes back home and is very sad and starts to kind of think of what to do next. He starts pouring over Bessie's journal for clues.

And of course, kind of as soon as this thing happens, people start theorizing on what may have happened to them. Yeah, man. This search for these people, especially once airplanes were involved, there was national news. Like the whole country was keeping up with this. So a lot of people formed opinions about this pretty quickly, especially the river people around the Grand Canyon. You know, those river people. A lot of people thought that, especially later on, that Glenn had forced Bessie into this. And so he took on this caricature of a brute, again, wife-beating husband who had either, had probably just hit Bessie one time too many,

and she killed him and then hiked out of the Grand Canyon and took a bus east to start a new life. 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 very experienced in her life after this, you know, this period of time at least, very experienced boatsperson and navigator of wild rivers. I mean, she was on the Johnny Carson show.

She was in Time and Life magazine. She really made a name for herself. And at one point she claimed to be Bessie Hyde and even had the marriage certificate in her belongings, which is totally weird. 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 1992 among her belongings. So it's not like she's 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 later on, Brad Dimmock compared the two and like it was definitely not the same woman. They didn't look alike. Yeah, they looked, I looked at as many pictures as I could side by side. And I thought it doesn't quite look like her, but it wasn't so unlike her that it was impossible to me. One of the things Dimmock put up was that Georgie White was not precisely literate. She wasn't illiterate, she just was not the literate type.

She wasn't a poet. And Bessie Hyde was, yeah, a poet, and she know it, you know? I'm barely literate, too. That historian you were talking about, Otis Marston, he thought that there was this at mile 232, a very violent rapid. He said, that's where I think they crashed. And 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 Dimmock's book and apparently, let me see, how many were there between 1880 and 1935? There, they, some people performed a study, I think of, like, 10. 10? Well, no, this wasn't a study. These were real drownings. Right, they surveyed real drownings for a study, I think is what I mean. Oh, okay.

They did, there were 10 life jacketless drownings between 1880 and 1935 and only three of those bodies were recovered. And these things would go a long way. I think it was an average of, like, 19 and a half miles from where they drowned four and a half days later. I think it says 41 and a half days later. Well, Dimmock's book says 19 and a half miles. Right, and 41 and a half days later. 19 and a half miles down below the point. Oh, 41 and a half days later, right?

It's in, like, six points. So I can have a target. Yeah, no, I know it's tiny. But his point is that, statistically speaking, Glenn and Bessie had they drowned at mile marker 232, which we'll talk about in a second why that's probably the case. When they finally did surface again, it would have been below where the search party stopped looking, but above where later search parties started looking. Yeah. 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 people would not have been looking for them right then.

And he also points out that the winter of 1928-29, there was historically low river flow. Yeah. 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 would have been 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. Yeah. Which, I mean, initially when I thought about that, I was like, no way, they'd pop up.

But after hearing that stuff, it's quite likely that it was just a regular disappearance. They drowned and just weren't ever found. Yeah. And Dimmock makes a really great case at the end of his book. And it does a really good, like he's very, the humanity of the case has clearly gotten to him because he and his wife did the same thing in a scow. They rebuilt, they recreated the scow. So he really got into these people's heads or they got into his. And the reason why Mile 232 is what Brad Dimmock and then earlier Doc Marston think is the place where they died is if you look along the Colorado River,

wherever there are rapids, it's because a canyon is emptying like a side river into the Colorado River right there, right? Yeah. 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 canyon has been feeding into the Colorado for so many hundreds of thousands or millions of years that it's worn down right there. So it's relatively deep and boulder free. But there are two spots 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. One of them is bedrock rapids, which is one place where Glenn and Bessie wrecked the one place they did wreck and had to repair their boat for two days. And then the other place is Mile 232 Rapids, which are called Killer Fang's Falls.

And that's Mile 232 and they think that they just simply didn't make it. Whether they got thrown over the boat and drowned or one of them got thrown out and the other one jumped in after them 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 trip already. Hats off to Mr. Brad Demock. And if you were listening, sir, what a great piece of investigative journalism.

And like he said, when he and his wife made this trip in their own scow, 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 and it was still a rough trip. Yeah. 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, though, was Demock interviewed in 1971, these people on a commercial trip. They were sitting around by the campfire as you do after a long day 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, she stabbed him and hiked out to Arizona, then did catch that bus back east, which is a little creepy.

Yeah. And then at one point also, there was a bullet pierced skull found in a garage of a river guy that had passed away. That's Emery 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 2000, so Emery Colb died in 1977. And 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 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 they figured out it wasn't Glenn Hyde pretty quickly. I think he was a different stature or whatever. But they didn't know who it was. And they think now that it was a victim of suicide from 1933, who was found by a botanist back then. And for some reason, Emery Colb got his hands on the guy's skeleton and kept him in a boat in his garage for all those years.

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 Glenn Hyde for sure. Yeah. So that's it.

It's not like the case of subtle. That's the great thing. It's like that's just Brad Demock's opinion. 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. Maybe they might find some bones somewhere one day. Who knows?

I don't know, Chuck. But that would be the only thing. Yeah. So that would be something. Or if they found the scowl floating around in the Pacific. Be cool. You got anything else? Nothing else.

Well, if you want to know more about the disappearance of Glenn and Bessie Hyde, go read Sunk Without a Sound. The Tragic Case of Glenn and Bessie Hyde by Brad Demock, right? That's right. And since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this eulogy for a teacher. This is from Carissa. Hey, guys, today I found out that a teacher who was a big influence on me in my life, long love of learning, has passed away over the weekend. It just breaks my heart.

She's the reason I listen to you guys because without her influence, I highly doubt I would have loved school as much and would not enjoy the process of learning as much, which is why I keep coming back to you guys. Jane Mobley was her name. She was my teacher 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 student's shoe. We are things like that that are why I love writing to this day.

And not only was she an 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 one. Ms. Mobley 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 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 LL bean with my own initials and everything. My mom was very grateful for kindness as was I. Ms. Mobley passed away January 21st will be greatly missed by all her students and family.

She was very much loved. And that is 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 Ms. Mobley touched very, very many students like that. So that's just wonderful. That'd be cool to hear from other people with the Ms. Mobley story too. You know for sure. Well, if you have a Ms. Mobley story, we want to hear it.

Actually, you can tweet to us at Josh O'Clarke or at S Y S K podcast. You can join us on who is that from Chuck? Carissa. Thanks a lot, Carissa. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know or slash Charles W. Chuck Bryant. You can send us an email the stuff podcast at howstuffworks.com. And as always join us at our home on the web stuff you should know.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics visit howstuffworks.com.

On the podcast, Hey Dude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude the 90s called on the I heart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey I'm Lance Bass host of the new I heart podcast frosted tips with Lance Bass.

Do you ever think to yourself what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life tell everybody everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye. Listen to frosted tips with Lance Bass on the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.