Bessie, Woman of the River

Two bqrs ago I asked boatfolk for any stories they might know concerning Glen and Bessie Hydes' mysterious disappearance on their 1928 honeymoon trip through Grand Canyon. I was hoping to sort through the various versions of the myths and put some of them to rest. It didn't work out that way. Instead, I got a phone call from Bill George, one of the owners of Western River Expeditions. Boy, did he have a story:
We bought Georgie Clark's company when she died. And I was conducting the funeral, down in Las Vegas. And her trusted friend and nurse—the person to whom she left her company legally, Lee McCurry, who has since passed away—called that morning, two or three hours before the funeral, and told me, “Bill, we don't know who we're burying today.” Those were her words. I said, “What are you telling me, Lee?”
I went over to Georgie's trailer and sat down with Lee. She said, “You won't believe the stuff I've come up with in the last three or four days Georgie's name was never Georgie. It was Bessie. Here's her birth certificate. She was born Bessie DeRoss. And they lived in Denver.” They never lived in Chicago like she says in her book. She never saw Chicago. I threw my funeral talk out the window. I mean it was not even close!
And then Lee hauls out a marriage certificate. A certified copy, stamped with the original notary stamp in the corner of it, of one Glen R. Hyde and Bessie Haley. And so my mind starts going round and round and round. You know, I mean, “What are you telling me here?” Well, so Lee gives me that copy. It was in Georgie's lingerie drawer. She said in that same lingerie drawer was a pistol.
Then all these things start to come down. One of them I knew—I was aware of it, because Georgie had mentioned it. She hated, with a passion, Emery Kolb. For what reason, she never said. She would go into a meeting, if he were there, and walk away. She would not be around him whatever. And then these other things…

I had already heard rumors, and had noticed several bizarre coincidences. Georgie's first adventures in Grand Canyon in the 1940s were with Harry Aleson, hiking from the Canyon out to Saint George—a route similar to what Glen and Bessie Hyde might have tried had they survived. Georgie later developed the triple rig—an assemblage of three rafts tied to each other and run with one oar downstream and one upstream—similar the to manner in which Glen and Bessie operated their scow. Georgie lived in Las Vegas, but few knew where. No one was invited to her house, ever. What tales she told of her early life turned out to be complete fabrications.
In the 1980s Georgie hired Marty Hunsaker as a truck driver, and later a boatman. She hired Marty's sister Lee McCurry to care for Georgie's ailing sister Marie. Lee later took over Marie's job as office manager. Roz Jirge, a long-time passenger and later crew for Georgie knew Hunsaker and McCurry well. “For a long time there,” Jirge says “Marty Hunsaker and Lee McCurry thought that perhaps Georgie was actually Bessie Hyde.” Perhaps, Jirge speculated, their theory may have had some roots in Georgie's “joking statement to the effect that she wished she could become a black widow spider after her death so that she could come back, mate with a man and then kill him!”
This tied in well with the myths of Glen Hyde being a brute, and Bessie having to kill him to escape with her life. Far fetched, yes, but the coincidences were thick and unsettling. It simply couldn't be, but…
“But this marriage certificate that was in her drawer just blew me away,” says Bill George. “How would she get it? Why would she want it? It's just been an intriguing enough story. There are just so many parallels. I'm not saying they're one and the same, but it has crossed my mind more than once.”
Brad Dimock
Brad Dimock's biography of Glen and Bessie Hyde, Sunk Without a Sound, will be released this winter.