nce the Bureau of Reclamation had sufficiently filled that fake lake behind the Glen Canyon Dam to let some water through the power plant, Shorty Burton worked as one of the first Hatch River Expeditions head boatmen in Grand Canyon. Shorty's maturity and incomparable proficiency handling boats, dudes1, boatmen, and the kitchen made him an obvious choice. Then within too few years Shorty drowned in Upset Rapid. To remember him as a river fatality makes him into some sort of passive object in the grammar of life. Short did, made, and taught; always remaining polite to the point of reticence.
Shorty's passing hit hard. It hit hard for several reasons. Accidents happen on the river; but usually to the foolhardy, the careless, the inexperienced, or the irresponsible. Shorty was none of those things. His quiet competence taught both bosses and boatmen the meaning of professionalism. We had come to love him, which made his loss the heavier.
Shorty was born in Vernal, Utah, on June 13, 1923. For birth certificate purposes his parents named him Jesse Edwin Burton; but all three of the Burton boys sported nicknames. He hardly answered to Jesse except to endorse his paychecks. His brothers were Stub and Fat. Their father Orson Burton “worked his boys hard into their thirties” on the family cattle and sheep ranches on the north flank of the Uinta Mountains along the Green River. Shorty grew up in the middle of that ranching world, specializing in herding sheep and tending camps. Spending most of his time outdoors he knew the countryside intimately and mastered the tricks for living in it. He was reputed to be the best field dresser of game in northeastern Utah, acknowledged to have the best arrowhead collection of anyone, including his personal favorite, an oölite point, and was circumspect and discreet about the several old lookouts and hideouts he had found from the days when Browns Park and vicinity had been used by infamous bandits and rustlers. Sheep herding fares poorly in the contest with that formidable American icon, the cowboy. None the less, I am convinced that the responsible attitudes Short learned protecting his sheep from both themselves and from external dangers transferred handily to herding dudes down the river.
In his prime Shorty Burton was almost six feet tall, weighed about 165 pounds, had short-cut brownish blonde hair, and quietly kept watch on the world through clear, bright blue eyes with a decided twinkle. He always wore Levis and a collared shirt on the river. He wore his belt buckle to the side, leather boots on the water and a gray Resistol hat. He'd switch to a billed cap when running in the Grand. In those days of cactus rope and wood fires boatmen wore a holster with pliers and a knife. Shorty had a unique holster. He flanked his pliers with a three-bladed Böker Tree Brand knife to the front and a whetstone to the back. He wore his holster on his right and a Sierra Club cup on the left. He smoked Raleigh cigarettes, saving the coupons to trade in for housewares. He seldom drank alcohol, then in utmost moderation. He had the biggest triceps I have ever seen.
Right after their marriage in 1950, Shorty and Ruth Burton lived and worked the ranch in Little Hole up in Red Canyon of the Green River, just below the Wyoming line. Shorty and Ruth had five children, Linda, Raelene, Jim, Judy, and Marian. Judy reports that, no matter her dad's reputation as a cook on the river, Ruth did the cooking at home when she was growing up. Short would cook a Sunday breakfast of pancakes when the kids insisted. In about 1953 Shorty and his father had a falling out and Shorty's family left Little Hole. Jim says that Shorty and Ruth wanted to buy the Little Hole ranch but that Orson refused to sell it to them.
After leaving Little Hole Shorty ran a service station in Meeker, Colorado, coincidentally the first year he needed to send children to school. Subsequently he worked on some and managed other ranches in the region, for the Ashley National Forest out of Manila, Utah, as a camp tender, and as a carpenter before his first full summer of what Judy with a smile calls “permanent seasonal employment” with Hatch River Expeditions in 1955. Both Don and Ted remember Shorty from their dad Bus Hatch's building crews before he started running boats. Bus said he always had Shorty nail the ridge cap along a roof's peak because he could swing his hammer equally well with either hand. Once he started with Hatches full time each summer, Short picked up jobs building, lumbering, delivering around Vernal, and working for Dinosaur National Monument in the “off-season.” All the while he kept up a small place out at the end of the irrigation ditch south of Vernal. For a guy who was on the river steadily during irrigation season he raised damned fine hay. He would run a trip, then take about the same number of days to tend his place, then return for another trip.
Because he'd grown up in the area, Hatches used him extensively on the Flaming Gorge and Red Canyon stretches of the Green. Those trips soon extended into Lodore Canyon and the Yampa through Dinosaur. Then when Flaming Gorge Dam stoppered the Green in 1962, he, like all the rest of us, concentrated on the Yampa.
The summer of '63 Shorty and his son Jim headed to the Warm Spring Reservation on the Deschutes River in Oregon with one of Hatches' Shorty Boats.2 The Ute Indians that were concentrated there hoped to establish a Native business similar to Hatches' on the two-day run through their lands. When off the river that summer Short worked in a lumber mill at Warm Springs. When the feeding frenzy on the Grand commenced after the Bureau of Reclamation opened the Glen Canyon Dam's turbines, Hatches made Shorty one of their lead boatmen in their rapidly growing operations there. He hated going to Grand Canyon; but the big money running big water was the best available to support his family. The trips were too long. He was away from home for too long. He had to train too many new boatmen. And he didn't like Upset. He came to love it as he got to know it
Shorty was a master at managing customers, keeping them in fine spirits. He was professional, in it for both the money and the pride of craftsmanship. As a teacher of boatmanship, Shorty was as good as they come. As a boatman, he ran the very best oared pontoon on the water. Let me elaborate on those one at a time.

Care and Feeding of Dudes and other Temperamental Beasts

Shorty specialized in the long trip in Dinosaur National Monument, five or even six days to do an easy four-day run. That schedule gave him extra time to practice and ply his legendary kitchen prowess. Glowing praises for his cooking fill the files. I trace his skills to three straightforward sources: 1) his experience with the farm and ranch tradition of feeding the crew, 2) the proverbial advice which he knew to be universal rather than gender specific: “The way to a man's heart is through his stomach,”3 and 3) the self-sufficiency he had acquired tending sheep and working cattle in his youth.
Somewhere along the line, no one remembers when, Bus suggested to Shorty that he assemble a personal utensil box. Shorty picked everything needed to outfit a camp kitchen from stuff in the boathouse and the shelves at Ashton's, Vernal's general store. Figuring he ought to do that just once, Shorty took his box home with him at the end of each trip. At the first night's camp on a two-boat trip Shorty would open the kit and show it to the green boatman he was training that week. It contained sharp knives of various sizes and shapes, a sharpening stone, and a tempered masonite cutting board; sets of spoons, spatulas, and mixing bowls; a “spice cabinet” including baking powder at a time none of the rest of us could get beyond Bisquick, sufficient cans of evaporated milk for each breakfast and supper coffee; nearly worn-through tin plates, silverware, and Sierra Club cups for sixteen or so; dish towels and washrags; his own griddle and coffee pot; a light weight single-bitted axe and a Burton stick.4 All neatly packed, it was the antithesis of the junk piled in a box at the last minute that was typical of our camp kitchen kits in those days. That made the green boatman's assignment to repack the box the next morning all the more formidable a task. When the frustrated trainee finally asked smiling Shorty for help getting all that stuff back in the box, the greenie would meet most intimately Shorty's bottomless reserves of patience.
Shorty mastered the dutch oven. His memory thrives in three classic recollections from boatmen who ran with him. The Grand Canyon crews recall his pies and cobblers. The pie pan memorial at Upset speaks eloquently to those desserts. The folks who ran smaller trips remember his biscuits. A few of the boatmen from the early sixties remember how he roasted beef or stewed chicken with dumplings. Glade “Hardtack” Ross and I share an envying recollection. We could never get the dumplings to work right despite Shorty's teaching.
Training new kitchen help was a formidable task. Shorty quickly sized up the new guys by how they followed his instructions for gathering, preparing, and using firewood. The test was cooking eggs to order and pancakes on the same griddle. Those who could not manage a fire he exiled from the kitchen to boat tending. Don Hatch failed the test, probably by design. Don built his griddle technique around using the cardboard egg carton as supplementary fuel when the fire burned down. The ensuing blaze burned the eggs' edges and left their whites transparent then faded by the time the eggs could be flipped for over easy. Competent fire managers became full-fledged assistants potentially responsible for any task. When I ran with Shorty I always had to help with breakfast and found my boat tight and tidy when I came down to load. Shorty taught by doing, without ceremony or fanfare, but showing every trick, answering every question, and considering every idea. You knew you were doing well when he'd ask, “Why don't you make us some biscuits this morning?”
Shorty's cooking made national television. Once a film crew hired Hatch River Expeditions for a Lees to Phantom run to make an Aunt Jemima pancake mix commercial. Their script called for key shots of the product cooked to perfection and eaten with gusto deep within the glories of Marble Canyon. The production crew included gaffers, producers, actors, film and audio experts, and a home economist to do the pancake cooking. The weather and scenery cooperated with the script's designs but the professional Aunt Jemima couldn't get her pancakes to cook to the intended golden brown on the thin fry pan and Coleman stove she was using as props. Recalling his good breakfast of that morning, the producer revised his script on the spot and hired Shorty as actor and Aunt Jemima. Shorty and George Wilkins put away the Coleman, got out their Bisquick, Carnation powdered milk, Wesson oil, sugar, griddle, and fire irons, and cooked up some beauties. The Burton kids today revere Shorty's “on-screen talent contract” as a treasured relic.
Now that the statute of limitations has run its course, one of the great Shorty stories may finally be told. Early on in the river running business the Park Service decided that the streamside campsites in Dinosaur National Monument needed wells for drinking water. Hatch River Expeditions won the contract to freight down the equipment and supplies and to feed the drilling crews through the course of the project. With one boat and boatman already in the canyon full time Bus, Don, and Ted were reluctant to send down another boat to re-provision the crews. Instead they drove to the top of the cliff above Anderson Hole, site of the first well, and lowered the second week's food down to Shorty by rope. When Bus hauled the rope back up after the first load he found a note tied to the line that read, “No more meat. Have plenty. Send more flour, fruit, potatoes, and vegetables.” Shorty was skilled from considerable practice at living off the land.
Shorty ran everything in his life the way he packed his kitchen box: everything in its place where he could find it when he needed it. I think the trait has roots in the habits he developed successfully managing his sugar diabetes. He kept his kit, a bottle of insulin, hypodermic, and syringe in a small two-piece soap box made of aluminum. Hoping to avoid the prying inquisitions of passengers, he was uncommonly discreet and took his shots in his triceps each dawn down in his boat. Late-rising boatmen never knew. On the other hand, he took others of us aside once we'd run together for a while and instructed that if he ever started acting like he was drunk, to fetch the lemon drops in his ammo box or drain a Sierra Club cup full of juice from a can of fruit and get that sugar into him immediately. Once in a while a passenger discovered that Shorty used a hypodermic and jumped to the conclusion that he was shooting heroin. (Ain't propaganda remarkable? This was the era when a few could roll their own weed, only jazz musicians and junkies knew about smack and coke, and Timothy Leary was experimenting with an obscure metabolic waste product of a parasite of rye.) The amateur detective would gather up his courage, approach another boatman, and furtively report his discovery. Sometimes they accepted our explanations but other times insisted on their discovery's truth until shown the insulin bottle. Shorty took care of the routine so as to be ready to devote full attention to the surprises. Occasionally Shorty would surprise everyone and pull out his harmonica while folks sat around the fire after supper. He played a repertoire of songs everyone knew. His touch with a Sierra Club cup for a wah-wah vibrato was quite slick.

Professionalism

A responsible husband and father, Shorty ran rivers for the money to support his family; not for the thrills, the companionship with the other boatmen, to escape his responsibilities, to chase women, to drink whiskey in the wilds, nor to “commune with nature.” He exuded quiet competence, protecting his dudes from their surroundings and themselves the way a shepherd takes care of his flock. I guess that would make the other boatmen on his trips his sheep dogs so I will not push this overtaxed metaphor any farther. Instead let me offer a trio of examples.
Shorty never seemed to have the “fifth-day crisis” on his trips. My hunch is that people come on river trips already trained to keep themselves on their good behavior for a maximum of four days, the equivalent of a long week-end thrown together with strangers “back in civilization.” On the fifth or sixth day fatigue, exposure, heat, and lack of training could combine to trigger a spat between at least some of the customers, requiring deft and sensitive, practical psychological maneuvering by the boatmen to keep the artificial and temporary society of the trip from fissioning. I could not then figure out how he managed so well. Now I suspect that the age-authority that came with his forty years completed his package of techniques.
Camped with a one-boat party on the bar downstream of Sage Creek (just below Jones Hole in lower Whirlpool Canyon on the Green), a fire got away from a toilet paper-burning customer as the party was taking care of the last minute details before pushing off. Shorty superintended the fire fight, the clean-up with the Boy Scout troop that fortuitously arrived, and then ran his party on down the river. Arriving at the takeout late in the afternoon, he said to his dudes, “Let me do the reporting,” and went off to talk to the ranger. A few weeks later each member of the party received a letter of thanks and commendation from the Superintendent of Dinosaur National Monument praising them for their valiant efforts in fighting the fire they had discovered. This is an example of protecting your customers from themselves that is beyond equal. Needless to say, that group continued to request and get Shorty every time they returned for another trip.
The scariest thing a Hatch boatman ever heard when Bus, Don, or Ted would send us off was an inventory of our gear followed by the admonition to “Fix It on the Way, Boys.” Ted confesses today that Short was so conscientious about keeping equipment in good repair that they'd purposely send him out with an old leaker because it would come back as good as new.
Shorty in a Boat

Shorty saw farther downstream than any other boatman. He was strong as can be, but never depended on his strength, counting instead on positioning. While Shorty taught that the river was always in charge, he never accused the river of changing its mind the way some others had a habit of doing. In the sixties we would occasionally double up on the oars for the roughest stretches. That fuzzy picture Roy Webb published of Shorty and Don Hatch running the left-side sneak at Lava Falls [Call of the Colorado, page 150] is the most widely circulated illustration of this technique. The guy on the back set of oars called the strokes. The guy on the front oars provided obedient, dumb strength and took just enough authority to time his strokes to catch water in the waves rather than air in the troughs.
Shorty and I ran Warm Springs on the Yampa that way twice, once in his boat and once in mine. We liked to enter with our backs downstream and drive (a classic Bus Hatch technique dory boaters call Major Powelling) into the eddy on the right bank, do an eddy turn with the pontoon, then slither over a boulder at the downstream end of the eddy, straddling it with the pontoon's tubes. If you caught the head of the eddy without bumping the point, three easy strokes produced a seemingly effortless and uneventful run that made the dudes mad about being required to walk around. Over the years I quit telling about that run in the face of building hyperbole about that rapid because folks became increasingly incredulous. One of the treasures Judy Burton Kurtz sent me to study is a videotaped copy of some dude-shot home movies taken in 1965 on the Yampa. Those runs we made were on that tape.
Because he was so unflappable, the Hatches gave Shorty the new guys to train in. The list of boatmen who did their first trip with Shorty includes many familiar names: Glade Ross, Tom Hatch, and Kenton Grua will have to suffice here. Glade tells of Bus sending him off with Short on one of those long trips through Flaming Gorge, Red Canyon, Lodore, Whirlpool, Split Mountain and out. At the put-in Glade hopped into the 10-man figuring it would be easier than the pontoon. When they got to Hells Half Mile, Short would have nothing to do with swapping boats in the face of that formidable mix of boulders and water but spent a half hour talking Glade through the tight spots.
Tommy tells of being sent out to run his first boat with a one-day from Rainbow Park down to the take-out at the mouth of Split Mountain Gorge. This is a Hatch telling a story here so you know the butt of the tale is likely to be the teller. Tommy spent the whole day flailing at the water without apparent effect and wondered how Short could always be in the right place without ever rowing very hard. Tommy tells it now that Short spent the whole day grinning about Tom's ineffective efforts.
Kenton went on a trip as a dudelet when he was ten or eleven. He was so struck with Shorty that he has spent the rest of his life “messing around in boats.”
Short did not like motors. I know that this is a controversial subject in these parts and I open the topic with some trepidation. Shorty had his reasons. The Great President Harding Run has to be one of them.
Shorty and Bus were running a trip in Grand at about 50,000 second-feet with Bus in a ten-man with a ten-horse motor and Shorty in the flat-ended Shorty boat. Bus was always in a hurry; so much of a hurry he hardly ever turned around his boat to face the rapid when he rowed. On this trip he towed Shorty through the slack water so Short wouldn't have to row so hard or get into camp so late. Bus would drag Short right to the head of a rapid, then untie him at the last minute. When they got to President Harding the dude in the front of the boat couldn't get the tow line untied, Short had to clamber to the front of the boat, cut the line and hustle back to the oars. He had only enough time to straighten out to run right over the top of Warren G. Boulder and through its hole. When Ted later asked Short how he felt when he saw he was going to have to run the hole Shorty shrugged and drawled, “Well, there really wasn't much else I could do.”
His objection to motors had nothing to do with noise, appropriate wilderness experiences, or other ideals. Although they had never met, he shared P.T. Reilly's opinion of motors; he simply did not trust them. They were not as reliable as he thought they ought to be. He acquired his distrust from the green-cased Mercury outboards he used early in his career. They sucked water through their cases with such a voracious thirst boatmen duct-taped every crack and kept a can of ether handy for restarting. Unless run at full throttle their plugs quickly fouled with oil. Only in the last couple of years of his life did he get to run relatively splash-proof black models. He was so good with the oars, it's no wonder to me he distrusted motors. This leads inevitably to the hardest part of a biographer's job, describing Shorty's last trip.
Nothing unusual characterized the trip that launched on June 9, 1967: a dozen passengers, two boats tail dragger-rigged with twenty-horse, long shaft Mercs, ten days from Lees Ferry to Temple Bar. Clarke Lium was the other boatman. One of the pioneer college boy boatmen, Clarke had run some of the most historically significant Hatch trips. Clarke had started out in that huge summer of the first Sierra Club trips through Dinosaur in 1954, then went to rotc summer camp in '55 so his brother Bruce got to run the Eggert–Hatch trip from Green River, Wyoming, to Lees. The next summer Clarke partnered with Bruce on the 1956 finish of that expedition from Lees to Mead. Clarke came back to run occasional trips for the Hatches whenever he could get away from his real job as a sales engineer in the aeronautics industry, but kept quiet about his past experience. Shorty, too, avoided the limelight, turning down the trip with the Kennedy entourage earlier in June. Despite the overlap of their careers and these superficial similarities in their personalities, Shorty and Clarke had never run a trip together.
In Page the day before the trip, Shorty was sizing up Clarke and displeased about getting yet another trainee after the six already that season. He instructed Clarke to follow him closely, copying his every move. After a couple of days, Short recognized Clarke's experience and told Clarke he would not worry about him any more; he could read water and handle a boat just fine, so he was glad to have him along.
On the fifth night out, the thirteenth of June, the group celebrated the birthdays of Shorty and a woman on the trip. Folks assembled a bunch of trinkets, fishing gear and the like, as presents and Clarke baked a pineapple upside-down cake for the party. The next day they lunched about three miles above Upset. As they pushed off, Short told Clarke he didn't like that particular rapid, counseled him to drive hard for the slot on the right just above the hole, and preceded him into the rapid. The gauge at Phantom reports 13,000 cfs as the mean daily flow for June fourteenth. Immediately after lunch they would have been running on the lowest water level of the daily cycle, a flow that had started its way down the canyon as a between 6,700 and 7,100 cfs release from the Glen Canyon Dam at between 2:00 and 6:00 a.m. on June thirteenth. Augmented by the several streams and springs along the way, it still was not much water. Maximum release earlier that day measured 18,765 cfs at noon. Clear, dry weather had prevailed for the entire trip.
Only one eyewitness description written contemporary to the event is known today, a letter to concerned members of one passenger's extended family. A woman now known only as Joan from her signature at the letter's end, refreshing her memory with her daily journal written on the trip, wrote it on July 14, 1967. The following excerpt presents her description of the accident:
At the bottom of this rapid is what they call a big hole—I believe a rock below the surface makes the water rush over it and make what they call a standing wave in back of it. I was watching the other boat—most of the people were in it—just the two parents and Jimmy were in our boat. Evidently Shorty just couldn't get the power to make it around the hole and they were drawn into it and carried right up the wave, and everyone just fell out from about 8¢ up at the top of the wave, and of course the boat came down upside down. I just couldn't believe it—Jim ran up to the front of the boat and just then we hit the hole; however, we were headed into it and so the whole wave just poured into our boat knocking us in all directions (you wouldn't believe the bruises) but thank heavens we didn't turn over as I don't know what would have happened if we had. The people started popping up immediately (was I relieved to see Jan) and we kept telling them to swim for the side as we couldn't get them into our boat and they were all just sitting there and floating downstream with the current. Clarke kept our boat in front of them and the overturned boat as once one of them got in front of us we wouldn't have been able to get it again as you can't come upstream, and at this point you couldn't even walk back upstream as the walls were almost straight up. I said to Clarke, “Where is Shorty?”— and he said he must be under the boat or he would have popped up even if knocked out. We finally cornered the boat into shore, and found Shorty caught by his life jacket on a hook in the boat. The men worked for 3 hours with artificial respiration but he never did show any signs of life. We were on a narrow rock ledge—actually about 6¢ wide section of sand here and there, and about 6¢ of rock in front of it before the water (and by the way the water raised 6¢ every night when they opened the dam at Page). We only had two dry sleeping bags, so that night we just ate some canned meat, put pieces of plastic on the sand and spent a very long night.
After Shorty died on the river everyone who had known and loved him dealt with their shock as well as they could. Ruth Burton insisted that Jim, who incidentally looks very much like his father, stay away from running the rivers. Ted Hatch rues making Shorty use a new lifejacket as the most vocal of his manifestations of survivor's guilt. Stories about the drowning began to proliferate. Several of the boatmen on the next couple of trips down the Grand now believe that they met the trip at Upset, that they helped haul Shorty out of the canyon, or that they helped right the tipped boat. Some have reported that his knife was missing from his holster or that his life jacket was slashed. A local history of the Browns Park and Little Hole region published that Shorty had been tangled in the prop of his outboard.
Clarke reports that Shorty's jacket was intact and that all the buckles were securely fastened. It had caught in an opened eye-bolt from which the floor boards were suspended on chains. Knowing how cool under stress Shorty typically was, Clarke figures Short was knocked out in the tip and drowned while unconscious. He also reports that he and a few of the passengers who happened to be engineers drafted individual reports on the accident while waiting two days at Upset for the Hatch trip he knew was following behind. In addition they righted the boat, repaired a flat chamber, and reinflated it by mouth and lung, having lost their pump in the flip. When the next trip did not appear as expected Clarke made a big sign on the cliff with some fabric, left an ammo box with news of the accident at its base, tied the two pontoons together, piled everyone in, and slowly motored down toward Lava Falls. They spied some hikers at Havasu, told them of the accident, and asked them to hike out to the rim and notify the rangers that Clarke and the party would await a helicopter evacuation of Shorty's body at the head of Lava Falls. The hikers got the word out, the long-awaited other trip caught Clarke at Lava that evening, and the chopper met them in the middle of the next morning.
All of the differing stories of Shorty's death and its immediate aftermath are fully consistent with people laboring mightily with profound grief. To those who might get huffy about the facts and their abuse I would counsel a dose of humane sympathy and understanding. At their core, all the circulating versions are consistent with some of the facts in Joan's letter. While the several witnesses who had drafted reports on the flip awaited the helicopter they compared their versions of the accident. They struggled for a while to get their stories consistent, then said the hell with it and turned over their differing accounts to the rangers who flew out Shorty's body. Because the park spends more effort keeping track of who gets on the river than what happened there, those records are currently lost, misplaced, or destroyed. Ted Hatch remembers reading the official report of the accident. Clarke vaguely recalls that his account may have been returned to him. Like Ted, he cannot find it today. Diligent searching by current park officials turned up nothing. Such are the disappointments of the historian's work.

The Memorial Escapades and Enterprises

On one of the next Hatch trips down, maybe the trip Clarke had waited for, some of the guys wired a pie pan up on a boulder on the right side of Upset as a memorial to legendary pie baker Shorty Burton.
Sherm Feher mentioned that he thought the plastic flowers in a garland around it were something less than fitting for someone of Shorty's stature. He left them there, none the less. The next folks through, according to tenacious but uncorroboratable Canyon legend, had completely different ideas about appropriateness. The Park Service, according to legend, resented the defacing of the Park's features by the pie pan plaque and confiscated it.5 Because defacing the protected features of a national park, be they scientific or historical, can be construed and prosecuted as a felony, no one knows what rapscallion has or rapscallions have perpetrated the succession of pie pans boatmen have wired to the rock through the years. Everyone involved appears to accept this spontaneously developed ritual. Plates get put up. Plates get taken down. Unknown folks get unique trophies. No one gets busted.
A more substantial plaque project started too. This adventure transpired in the days when the park was first exercising direct control over the operations and practices of the outfitters running in the Grand. Novel ideas about fuel provision, garbage disposal, and waste handling were at the center of a tempestuous and decidedly adversarial relationship. The boatmen were sure the park did not understand anything about the river. The park was equally sure the river runners did not understand the management responsibilities. Calculating that the park service might remove the first plaque installed, the second had a better chance of staying, and the third would be their ace in the hole that even heartless Smokey Bears would respect, an informal committee of boatmen arranged to have three plaques cast from scrap brass salvaged from old boats. In an election they selected some lines about “the one who's gone before” by Vaughn Short, Shorty Burton's close contemporary and boatman for Ken Sleight in the summer of 1967. The plaques were cast but then Walt Gregg, organizer of the scheme, left the Hatch crew and the project lost momentum.
Ted Hatch, who was closer to Shorty than anyone in the business, found himself in a very tricky situation. Shorty had been something of a big brother to Ted exactly the way Shorty subsequently mentored to the generation of younger boatmen who ran in the 1960s. Of all of us, Ted felt the most strongly that an appropriate monument belonged at Upset. Of all of us, he had the most to lose in a spat with the park. Even boatmen could figure that one out, so we had kept Ted out of the planning. One of the plaques ended up on the wood stove at Hatchland at Cliff Dwellers. A second is in Ted's office in Vernal. The third has not been seen in years. It might be bolted to the cliff already, out of view. If not, next time Ted throws a birthday party, someone filch that plaque while he's dancing and put it at Upset. He'll get over it.
Don and Meg Hatch's warehouse in Vernal has held a couple of monuments to Shorty through the years. For the first few years after his drowning Shorty's personal lifejacket, the worn-out one that Ted had insisted he leave ashore, hung in the boathouse, a building which had started life as the first museum at the Dinosaur quarry. Faded red and silt-stained white cotton with “shorty” on the right front, it sobered young boatmen every time they saw it. Then in the middle 1970s Tommy Hatch was finally junking the rotted pontoons out of the swamp and turned up the two old submarine tenders, one of which had “shorty” painted on its bow. He or Don, they both claim this act, cut out those panels, tacked one high on the north wall of the shop and the other disappeared. Tommy thinks George Wilkins has it. George thinks Earl Staley has it. Knowing those three pranksters, the boat probably had four panels and they laugh about it every year during elk season.
Admired, respected, revered, and loved by a generation of boatmen and dudes, Shorty quietly took care of business in the background while younger men and boys posed, pranced and paraded. He was polite, reserved, and a bit bashful. It is Shorty Burton's fault that this article is so sparsely illustrated. Whenever someone would haul out their camera to snap his portrait, Shorty would quietly say, “Oh, you don't want a picture of me” and quietly slip out of view. The only people Shorty turned his back on were photographers.

Al Holland