Ted Hatch

My dad was a little guy at Jensen, Utah. They had Bridge Day at Jensen when they built the first bridge across the Green River. They had an old ferry there before, that was run by a fellow named Jensen. But they had Bridge Day to celebrate the building of this bridge, and so my dad went down there. He saw this old boat come in with furs in it. It was one of the Galloway boats; and he admired that boat, and looked at it then and thought, “This would be so much fun.”
The account that was written about them is true— Parley Galloway was thrown in jail, and... Frank Swain at that time was a sheriff for the Vernal Police Department, and they captured Parley for [not paying child-support], and put him in Vernal Jail. Parley didn’t have enough money to post bail, but Frank called my dad. He said, “Bus, we got a river man up here, and he tells the neatest stories about all these canyons that he’s gone through, and by boat.” Frank and my dad thought it was fascinating that they could go down the river in a boat. Dad said “Whoa, I want to find out what kind of boat he had, and build one, so that we can go.” And Frank said, “Well, look, Parley will help us if we’ll post the bail, so he can get out of jail.” Dad went up, and I don’t know how much it was—it seemed like it was $75 as I…I can’t be sure of that figure, but they put up the bail for Parley. Before they did, they interviewed him a few times to make sure of the description and size of the boat and how it was built. All the time, my dad was taking notes, and drawing, because he was a contractor by trade, and he was a very good carpenter and builder. So he got the idea to build this boat pretty much from what Parley said. And so, they put the bail up. Well, the next day (laughs) they went to see Parley again, and he had skipped out on the bail. And here’s an interesting sidelight that I don’t think Roy [Webb] discovered in his research [for River Man, a biography of Ted’s father Bus Hatch]: Wally Perry is a direct descendant of the Galloways.
Lew Steiger: Parley was Wally’s granddad?
Ted Hatch: Yeah. And it’s interesting because Nathaniel Galloway and Parley were great river runners, and admired, because they remembered the rapids so well. But my dad had gleaned enough information from the discussion that he went home that winter and built a boat in the garage—a beautiful wooden boat. He thought this was the cat’s meow, we’re ready to go now.
Steiger: I think I saw in Roy’s book that they named their first three boats What Next, Don’t Know, and Who Cares?
Hatch: Yes. Those are the correct names. He later built one, a fourth one named Teddy, after me; I’d been born in ’33. It was painted light blue, and they took it on the Middle Fork, and ran it up there. And when I got older, I just remember seeing the boat, but he loaned it to Doc Frazier and Hack Miller when they did their trip up there, and they lost it.
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If it can be said that there are a handful of 800 pound gorillas in the Grand Canyon river business, you could argue that Ted Hatch by himself equals two or three. Ted’s dad, Bus, was the grandfather of commercial river-running. The companies that Bus and his sons built over time have touched the lives of just about half the boatmen that ever were, not to mention untold thousands of guests on a host of different rivers. Along the way Ted himself has pretty much always been a fountain of good cheer and generosity, giving everybody and their brother a job when they needed one or a ride down the river, throwing the best parties of all, and happily donating the use of his warehouse for countless gcrg functions whether he agreed with the politics therein or not, to name just a few examples. This interview took place in February, 1999 at the Hatch Warehouse at Cliff Dwellers and, as per usual, the beer was on Ted…an old story that all too often goes unacknowledged.
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Hatch: I can’t remember when my dad did his first trip. It’s up for conjecture. The first good boat he built was Parley’s design. He tried one earlier, I think when he was sixteen or eighteen, and just used nails—and this is kind of like Norm Nevills did with the horse trough—he ran Split Mountain Gorge and he said by the time he got to the bottom, it had come apart. So he was reluctant to talk about it, or even show that he had a boat, but I think that was prior to the Parley Galloway boat.
…It was kind of a family outing. They’d take a rifle and they’d hunt, and they’d take fishing poles, they’d fish, they’d take liquor, they’d take everything they thought they would need, and go as a vacation, a fun thing to do…
Then they got movies, old-time movies of ’em, and he’d show ’em to his friends, and the Chamber of Commerce. They gave talks, and…especially after he ran Grand Canyon—then he became quite well-known—but other people would call and say, “Bus, take me down the river! I’ve got to go down the river with you!” And he’d say, “Well, I can’t get off work,” you know. His first love was the river, and second was the contracting and building trade. He’d say, “I can’t take you, I can’t afford it.” “We’ll pay you.” So they’d pay my dad to go run the Yampa River. Well, what could be a better job? No one would argue that. So he’d take a river trip, and he’d take several doctors or lawyer friends of his, and they paid him for the trip. And eventually, that became our way to earn a living. Even though it was seasonal and it was difficult…for many, many years it wasn’t profitable. But we had so much fun that we couldn’t give up, and any time a guy wanted to go on a trip, and would just cover bare bones expenses, we’d jump in our boat and go.
Steiger: And this was the whole family?
Hatch: Yeah, my oldest brother, Gus, ran a few trips, and then my brother Frank did too, and Don, and then I did. Gus got tired. He didn’t like river-running. He liked the trip, but he didn’t like that kind of work. As my dad got older, then Don and I became the guys to run, and we loved it. We stayed with it. I even quit my other jobs just to be able to run.
Steiger: There was one other story that I heard about your dad, that story about—I guess it was Doc Frazier was the first one that ever bankrolled him, and how he gave somebody—was it Frank Swain?— some money to go get groceries…(laughs)
Hatch: That’s a true story. Frazier wanted to be one of the guys. He was a physician in Copperton, Utah, which is right by Bingham Canyon, and Bingham Mines. And I think maybe Buzz Holmstrom even worked up there sometimes. But anyway, Frank Swain worked up there, with security, and he’d worked for Kennicott Corporation for a long time, and the doctor told him that he’d love to go on one of these trips. Well, Frank says, “We just can’t afford to go on a trip every time somebody wants to go.” And Frazier said, “Look, I’ll pay you guys to build the boats, pack the trip, if you’ll take me through the canyon.” So Frank called my dad, he said, “Bus, will you build three or four boats, would you get a trip ready? Frazier’ll bankroll us, he’ll finance the trip. If you guys can get off from work and build the boats, we’ll all go down and run the river.” Well, they did. They did the Middle Fork of the Salmon, they did Grand Canyon. I believe they did Lodore, and maybe from Hideout down through Flaming Gorge. I think so. But Frazier financed the trip…
And so, Dad worked all winter building the boats, and then they bought the food and packed the expedition, and that’s how they got goin’.
Steiger: Now, when you say “worked all winter,” do you mean that that’s all he did, or he was buildin’ houses, and then he’d come home and work on the boats a little bit?
Hatch: A little of both, but in the winter, the construction business was slow. So he had time to work in the winter, off-season, kind of. In summer, he was supposed to be building homes, and he’d be running rivers.
Steiger: Would he have to spend a lot of time building the boat, do you remember?
Hatch: Yes. It seemed awfully, painfully slow to me. I’d go out and watch him. He had a draw knife and he’d carve his own oars because the ones they bought he didn’t like. He made his own oars and he could take wood and steam it, and bend it and have it molded the way he wanted. He’d get the best wood. He’d work for days, you know, making a good set of oars…I mean, to have ’em where they’re really even and balanced. His oars were really good. When we bought commercial oars, we didn’t like ’em because they weren’t balanced the way he used to do it, and they were harder to use.
Steiger: Would he kinda make ’em a little counterweighted or somethin’?
Hatch: Yeah.
Steiger: So he’d have ’em pretty stout.
Hatch: And tapered. And then on the ends of some of ’em, he’d take copper, wrap ’em with copper and put little rivets or small nails in it to protect the tips. ’Cause in those days, we didn’t have a tip protector…. Yeah. And to build a good boat, it took several months…. But he built the boats, and then we’d run with Frazier. And the story about the food was…they went to the store, they bought a .22 and some bullets, and they forgot, or didn’t care—they weren’t all that excited about Frazier; they were working for him, yes, but…. they bought liquor and beer with the money. Now in those days…I think it was $21, or something like that, and it doesn’t sound like a lot of money, but a dollar a day is what they paid a lot of men that worked. And so, they thought they’d made an incredibly good deal with the shopkeeper. But on their way back, Frank reminded my dad that Frazier didn’t drink. (laughter) And they said, “He’ll be furious! So what’ll we do?”
A farmer came along with a load of watermelons. Frank Swain was quite a talker and he could tell the most amusing stories. He managed to talk to this farmer for a while and convince him that they were starving and they needed some watermelons. The guy gave him all they could carry. So they had something like six watermelons and a case of beer and liquor and the rifle and the bullets, and they got down to the river and Frazier was mad. He raised hell.
They said, “Look, we’re gonna get the meat, we’re gonna live off the land. We have this .22 and we’ll shoot a goose or some ducks, or something along the way—maybe a deer.” (laughs) I think Frazier saw the folly of that, but they went on down, and later, Frank Swain said yeah, they did shoot a goose. He said they picked it and cleaned it and cooked it. And he said it tasted like glue. (laughs) He said, “We couldn’t eat it.”
Steiger: So they didn’t do much eatin’ on that trip?
Hatch: It was pretty bad. He said, “Fortunately, your dad was a good fisherman, and he caught catfish in the river. We ate a lot of catfish.”
Steiger: That Bus was catchin’.
Hatch: Yeah. The Colorado River squawfish is what I call it. I’m trying to think of the scientific name of it. But they’d catch those once in a while, and they were very good. Some of them really got big. They’re endangered now… He would catch a frog, put it on a hook and throw it out on a set line overnight. He’d usually get one of those great big Colorado squawfish.
Steiger: I remember Emery Kolb talked about catching salmon down on the river. Is he referring to a squawfish? [Ted nods] Yeah, it’s not really a salmon, though.
Hatch: It’s a member of the salmon family. I think it’s a close cousin. Some people called it the Colorado River salmon…When they ran Grand Canyon in 1934, they hiked up to see Kolb, and they went in and had a great visit with him, and he was really friendly and helpful in a lot of ways, and then they hiked back down.
Steiger: Do you have any recollection of them going off and doing that? I guess you were just one year old, so I guess not.
Hatch: I don’t remember that part. In the later trips, I do. I was older. When I got to be about twelve and thirteen, I was mad because I couldn’t go. I was really upset when my older brother Don got to go, and I couldn’t. I told Dad, “I’m every bit as good as Don, I work harder, I’ll do a better job, and I should go.” Well, his excuse was that I was in school. And I couldn’t leave school. But I still got my first trip down the Yampa when I was thirteen—at least the first trip that I ran the boat. I went down the Yampa when I was nine, and then later, I got to run a boat when I was thirteen, and I was more scared than the passengers. (laughs) They were in the other boat! They were with my dad.
Steiger: Was that your very first river trip, on the Yampa when you were nine years old?
Hatch: Yeah, I got a trip or two down Split Mountain Gorge, which is on the Green, a few years before, but my first real trip of note was on the Yampa when I was nine…It was great. It was super. And we met Harry Aleson, I don’t know if you’ve heard of him…at Jones Hole. And of course, I didn’t know him and Dad was really pleased to see him, and they sat up all night, drinking and telling river stories. But I went over to talk to him briefly—he had some boats there—and came back. In later years, I got to meet Norm Nevills, and Jim and Bob Rigg. I met Georgie at Lava Falls in, I think, ’54, when I was down in Grand on my first trip. It kind of galled me, because people on Georgie’s trip told me that I’d better wait, and she’d show me how to run Lava Falls. We were all lookin’ at it, trying to decide where to go, and I had a little 22-foot boat—little by her comparison, you know.
Steiger: She had her big triple-rig.
Hatch: Yeah. I went back to camp and we hadn’t even cleaned up the dishes for breakfast. I said, “Throw everything on the boat, we’re leaving.” Everybody wanted to go, they wanted to run it, they didn’t want to linger around camp. And I’d spent a half hour looking at the rapid. So, I said, “We’re gonna run that before Georgie so they can’t say we waited to have help.” (laughs) And our guys all rallied to the cause, got in, and I ran down and I thought, “I can’t really see my marker point,” you know, trying to watch one rock that would help line it up—I couldn’t find it. And just by luck, I made a better run than I’ve made a lot of times since, but I made a good run, and pulled in at the bottom on the left by the cliff there. Then we turned around and laughed and said, “Okay, Georgie…Come on down.” And no offense to Georgie, she was a wonderful person, and everyone grew to love her in her way. She was pretty abrasive at times, but that was part of being a river runner. But they ran the big barge down through and hit every big hole in there.
Steiger: Do you remember, did you go left or right?
Hatch: Left of center. There’s a slot there, a “V” slot that a small boat can fit. And for divine power reasons I was able to just luck out, ’cause I’ve made worse runs with a bigger audience.
Steiger: Yeah, it seems like you always do. And also, your best runs, nobody’s ever there. (laughs)
Hatch: Exactly.
Steiger: The bad ones, they’ve got the cameras out and all that.
Hatch: That’s when you get in trouble.
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Steiger: I guess we should say a little bit about how the business evolved for your dad. From what I’ve read, it started out as just a hobby, and his main trade was as a contractor, who built a whole bunch of buildings that are still standing in Vernal today.
Hatch: Yeah. One example is the Vernal Elementary School…that’s still in use today. He built the swimming pool complex in the park that was later taken out. He built that large Safeway Store and bowling alley that are still in Vernal.
Steiger: And a lot of residences?
Hatch: Oh, a lot, 35 or 40 homes. But as the opportunity to run the river and show people the canyon came about, he enjoyed it more, and he stopped contracting and we started the river business. And it was just a family-run job. The phone would ring, and my dad would say, “Yeah, we’ll do this trip. Don, are you gonna take this one? Or Ted, will you take this trip?” and we’d go. We’d pack. And sometimes they put me on the back burner, and I’d say, “Hey, remember, it’s my turn.”
Steiger: So the business kind of got started in that immediate area? (Hatch: Yeah.) Sort of with the Yampa, and Lodore, and what else was there?
Hatch: Grey-Desolation. And we did later, Cataract, and we came into Grand. We didn’t do much on the Glen Canyon. We ran some of those, but there were no rapids. It wasn’t exciting. Once you saw all the scenery, and it’s very pretty…I liked the aggressive, the action part of the river running, rather than the hikes to the scenic points. So, as a result, we didn’t run a lot of Glen Canyon trips. But we did the Yampa, you know, like many times. The Middle Fork of the Salmon was also fun, because it was excellent fishing, we’d see bear, and wild sheep; and it had, and still does have, some great rapids.
Steiger: So while you guys were out there doing it as a business—we’re talking about from the late thirties right through the ’40s and into the early ’50s that you guys were operating? (Hatch: Yes.) You must have about been the only ones out there, huh?
Hatch: We got the first-ever-issued, river-running concession by the government. It came through Dinosaur National Monument at the time. The first one that was ever issued, as far as we know, to anyone for commercial operation.
Steiger: Anyone, anywhere.
Hatch: Yeah. We knew the park people and worked with them on fire-fighting duties and helped them a lot when they needed to move people downriver. One time we hauled a bunch of toilets down Lodore Canyon to be put in the campgrounds, because that year, the superintendent thought they all needed to have a toilet. And so, we hauled ’em in for ’em. Shorty Burton and I and my brother Frank went on the “toilet brigade.”
Steiger: How was that? They can’t be like the toilets they have today?
Hatch: No, these would fold. They were partitioned, kind of a prefab type, they’d collapse and fold down. And you could take the partitions out and assemble them together when you got there. They dug the pit, you know, they had a crew. We’d take the crew in, and they’d dig the pit, and the holding tank and everything. I remember, we went down in there, and we liked the toilet job as far as— without passengers, it was a lot more fun, you didn’t have to cook for ’em, and you didn’t have to make ’em wear a life jacket. Once you got your boat loaded, even though it was terribly overloaded, you were ready to go and happy as a clam, because all you had to do was shoot the rapids. We got down to Pot Creek—I’ll never forget. Shorty Burton, who was an excellent boatman, he was always a good ol’ guy. Well, he took an overload on his boat. We all were overloaded, but Short, I remember, had a lot more than he should have for his share. We got to Pot Creek and he went to pull in, and he couldn’t make it. (laughs) He went around the bend, and stopped. Well, there was a cliff, and there was no way to get the toilets back over to Pot Creek. So, Frank and I unloaded our boats and left the equipment we had and went on down and told Short, well, he’d just have to run another trip. So three days later, we come back around and got the rest of the stuff, and tried it again. And it was hard to get in there, because the water was fast, and it was high water. We wanted high water for hauling the cargo. …The boats then were twenty-eights. We called ’em twenty-eights. They’re about twenty-seven-and-a-half, war surplus pontoons. They were lighter than the thirty-threes, by far. They were not as tough as the thirty-three that we got in the later years. But they were a lot better to handle with the oars.
Steiger: But they had floors in ’em…you’d have to bail?
Hatch: Yeah. We had floors in ’em, they’d pivot. They did a good pivot, but they were so heavy. And the guys that ran those, we used as big an oar as he could handle, and we had a double set of oars, so that if we got down there and Hell’s Half-mile or one of them was pretty rocky or dangerous—in Lower Disaster Falls, you didn’t want to get swept up on the rocks—we’d double up and take two men with oars, the captain being on the main set, and he’d call instructions to the front guy. He’d say “right oar, left oar.” That picture’s an example: There’s a guy on the front set of oars in that shot.
Steiger: That’s a beautiful shot, too.
Hatch: That’s Lava Falls, and one of the early rowing rigs going through. On the back we had a motor on that when we ran Grand. But hauling the equipment and that, we had these big boats with double sets. And we’d double up when we needed to, and we’d carry the oars around with us to take that front set—or if the motor failed. If you’re running a motorized trip, if the motor failed, you didn’t stop and try to change spark plugs. It was too late. You had to grab the oars.
Steiger: So you didn’t have a spare motor, you had the oars right there.
Hatch: Yeah, you had your oars, and you take the motor off, and take the plugs out, shoot alcohol in it, pull it through a few times, put the plugs in. Usually, they’d start.
Steiger: What kind of motors were you using back then?
Hatch: When we started out, the first motors I remember were the old Johnsons, 5-horse and Sea King. Later, we tried several brands, Evinrude. Eventually, we had better luck with the Merc’s that came out in ’58. The Hurricane Merc engine was a champion engine. It was 20-horse, but it would beat the 25s of the other brands, so we stayed with Mercury then—for those years. Later years, we became disenchanted with Mercury, and changed engines again.
Steiger: From what I’ve read, just of the history of that time, I had the impression that the fight over Dinosaur National Monument, with the dams down there and stuff, probably figured in for growing you guys’ business. Do you remember that happening?
Hatch: Yeah, once they proposed the Echo Park Dam. The original proposal, as I remember, was to be put in an area near Steamboat Rock, which is down in the middle of Dinosaur National Monument. We blew our stack on that plan, it was a bad plan to flood the national monument for a power-type dam, for an irrigation and power reason. We put up such a battle with ’em, and it got a lot of newsprint. A lot of people had wanted to come and see that area to decide, pro or con, whether to build the Echo Park Dam. Well, we fought that as best we could, with the Sierra Club, and with the Audubon Society, and outdoor people that wanted to preserve the national monument. Dave Brower came on that trip, Martin Litton came down in there, and we put up such a battle that a lot of people in the community wouldn’t speak to us. (Steiger: In Vernal.) They treated us very poorly. The Chamber of Commerce didn’t like us, and we’d been good members for years. But that got a lot of interest in the park, and we started running more people. Lucky for us, with all our figures and arguments, there was a trade off, they got them to move the dam up into Red Canyon, which was not national monument. And even though we didn’t want a dam up there, that’s where they built the Flaming Gorge Dam. And we fought the Echo Park Dam for years. I think through the efforts of the Sierra Club and our guys and the Audubon Society and other people, we finally got them to trade it off and get it out of the park area. At least not build it in a national monument. And we weren’t all that well-treated in Vernal for ten years, but we brought in quite a few tourists as a result, and more people after they’d run the trip, decided, “Yeah, that’s a fun trip, we’ll go again.” And then we had a lot more folks.
And pretty much the same in Grand Canyon, our business grew as we took more people. We didn’t have a quota then, and we tried to improve our business and make it grow, get it larger. As I remember, sometimes we’d only run three or maybe five trips through Grand Canyon in all of summer. We were just a small company, and we worked long, hard, lean years to build our company to where it is. And I’m proud of it. There’s nothing to hide from that. We’d take the same stand if we had it to do over. Same…we fought the dam when they wanted to build [Glen Canyon] dam. We couldn’t block it, but we did argue against it. Now that it’s here, I think it’s improved our trip…we’ve got water in July and August, when it was too rocky to run. Maybe you could take kayaks through, and little tiny boats, but the dam at this time is giving the river runner an opportunity to extend his season. Even though you can see all kinds of damage, you can see the sandbars are being eroded. I talked to a guy—and I won’t tell you his name because they still might go find him—he landed a plane on one of the sandbars down by Tanner Mine. That’s how big those sandbars used to be.
Steiger: Wow.
Hatch: You go down there now, and there’s no way. And they were beautiful. They were redone each year, polished with a new layer of sediment and sand, and they were so pretty and gorgeous and large. You never had a problem with camps like you do now in the lower section. You had a lot of sandbars. And they’ve eroded away.
Steiger: Boy, landing a plane down there. It must have been a pretty good airplane.
Hatch: He was a good pilot, and it was a Cessna 140…and that was way before it was illegal, see. When I got my first airplane, I flew down the river through a good part of Grand Canyon, like I was driving a car. I looked at Indian caves, Indian ruins. I flew Havasupai and Deer Creek Falls, and everything, every place imaginable to see it from the air, because I couldn’t see all of that from the boat and I didn’t hike up to all of it. I’d fly the canyon all the time. Then when it became unpleasant for the people on the bottom of the canyon, I had to get out of there.
In the early days, we didn’t have that many people in the canyon. It wasn’t offensive.
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Steiger: How did the transition from wood boats to rubber occur?
Hatch: In the ’30s, my dad ran—well, even earlier, I’m not sure of the exact year he ran the Middle Fork. I can find out from Roy. But, he ran the Middle Fork, and on his first or second expedition, they had a rubber boat with them. It wasn’t my dad’s doing, but this fellow showed up with one. I wouldn’t be surprised... I think it was Amos Burg. But he ran the rubber boat with my dad’s wooden boats downriver. They had a movie of it, and later, Doc Frazier went back to Washington and showed movies of the trip to the President of the United States, and narrated it. And it was their first or second expedition. There was a newsman along that took movies, and the rubber boat ran so very well; I saw a picture of it go over Velvet Falls, and my dad was amazed. He said, “That guy can hit big holes, and it rides more easily, won’t tip over as easy, and it packs way more weight.” It was more efficient. He liked it. Right after that, then he made every effort to start finding rubber boats. But it wasn’t ‘til after the war that we were able to get ’em. And toward the end of World War II, then the rubber boats became available. I used to buy pontoons for $50 apiece. I remember one time, he sent me to Salt Lake to buy two or three, and I bought seven, ’cause it was such a deal.
Steiger: And, when you say pontoon, you don’t mean the side tube, you mean just the boat part, the whole raft.
Hatch: The raft, with a floor. And with a motor on it, the floor would come up and plane a little bit. Those with a floor would outrun these types we’re running now. They were a lot faster. And used less fuel. The trade off was that you had to bail.
Steiger: Somebody had to bail.
Hatch: The bilge water was always down there, and we used to run the floor-type boat down about Bass Trail…about 110 Mile…and we’d have eighty to a hundred buckets of water in that floor. We’d leave it in there, and toward the lower rapids we’d try to hit one of those big holes head-on to throw the water out. (laughs)
Steiger: You’d think that it would come to the back, wouldn’t it?
Hatch: Yeah, it goes just the opposite way to help stabilize your boat. It made it more stable. I’d seen Georgie take a bucket and fill her boats with water to run some tough rapids because she didn’t want ’em to capsize.
Steiger: Her triple-rig?
Hatch: Yeah, the little ones that tried to kill her.
Steiger: Oh, the thrill boats, yeah.
Hatch: And, I thought, “You know, that’s a neat idea.” So we just left the water in, sometimes it got too deep, and it would squirt the passengers, then we’d bail it. They were faster. But, see, as you went down into the hole, the water all ran to the front—that’s where you want it. You hit the hole, take on more water, you’re going over the back, then it runs to the back. And you go back down. The water seemed to be a kind of a gyro, to stabilize it…and we thought it was fun if we could—that was before Crystal was formed. If we’d hit some of those rapids, Horn Creek or Granite, and knocked the water back out, it’d save us a lot of work. But by a hundred buckets, I mean those big, big ones—the big buckets.
Steiger: Like a five-gallon bucket.
Hatch: Yeah, that kind you can wash dishes in.
Steiger: Uh-huh, yeah…When did it hit you that river running was something you could maybe do full-time? When you were growin’ up as a kid, did you think the river business was gonna be it?
Hatch: I was obsessed with it. My dad said, “Of all my sons, I think you’ll be the one that will like the river work the most, but keep in mind it’s a part-time job. It’s not that profitable, and you’re away from home a lot. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” Well, I broke all the rules, I went full-time river-runner, loved it, and built it to where I could support myself and my family. And I’m pleased. If he could come back and see me now, I’m sure he’d be pleased. He wouldn’t have approved my building this big warehouse or buying airplanes or diesel trucks, because that was unnecessary. We did everything with maybe one little one-ton truck and a tandem trailer, in those days.
Steiger: So, you mean his philosophy was “if you don’t need it, don’t have it.”
Hatch: Yeah. And so, I’m pleased the way things [turned out]. I was lucky and worked hard for many years. And I first started really wanting to run the river on my first trip. I never changed.
Steiger: At nine years old.
Hatch: I got discouraged a lot of times, and I’d run on my own without paying passengers sometimes, for the fun. But I would never have stopped running the river, I just would have to regroup. There were times I get discouraged now, because of regulations, and lawsuits, and things like that that have come about that make it more difficult to do the job that you love. But yeah, I decided when I was a kid—and I would do it again.
Steiger: So for you, by the time you were in high school, you knew you were going to be a river runner, and that was it.
Hatch: Eventually.
Steiger: That was what you were gonna do.
Hatch: Yeah.
Steiger: You mentioned earlier that you did have to do other jobs to make ends meet.
Hatch: Oh, yeah! I sure did.
Steiger: When you were gettin’ started.
Hatch: My dad believed in college and education. He was a straight “A” student, which I didn’t believe until my aunt got the old report cards out and showed me. So we all had to go get a college degree.
Steiger: And everybody had to get good grades?
Hatch: Yeah, or pass, because that’s about what I did. (laughter) So I selected a major which would let me run rivers. I got a composite major in biology, so that I could teach school and then run rivers. Well, after I started teaching school, the school system—it was a good job, it was really something to do—high school. I taught biology, and I also taught consumer’s math…but as quick as I could stop teaching and start running rivers, I did, full time, even though winters were pretty slow…I taught one year in Vernal, and then I went to a little town called Manila. I don’t know if you know where that is, up on Flaming Gorge. The reason I went up there, the people were just wonderful, it was great for hunting, fishing, and that’s where you started your trip down Red Canyon and into Flaming Gorge. So each evening after school let out, I’d run down to the lake when they started to fill Flaming Gorge, and catch some trout. And it was beautiful. One day a guy kept lookin’ at me and laughing. I went over to him and I said, “What’s so amusing?” He said, “Well, you’re not the best fisherman up here, but you’re the best dressed”—coat and tie. (laughter) I didn’t even change. I’d leave school and go fishing. And we’d hunt chukars and ducks, sage hens. I loved it.
Steiger: Sounds like a great childhood.
Hatch: Yeah. It was a short-term job, but a long-term river run, and I made it into what I have now. We run from March through September, and that’s pretty nice. Good season.
Steiger: I wanted to ask about characters that stand out from your childhood days. Talking to you, and from what I’ve read about your dad and stuff, there’s a sense that you guys really were River Runner Central, and that everybody who would come through would try to talk to your dad—other guys.
Hatch: Yeah, I think a lot of people came into that area, because the Yampa and the Green River joined right above Vernal there at Split Mountain Gorge. And if you were gonna run either stream, that was kind of a nice place to be. You could quickly get in a car and drive over to Lily Park and be on the Yampa in short time, and up at Flaming Gorge in 45 minutes to an hour. So we were located in an excellent place to run rivers. And if we went on downriver through Ouray, we were in Grey and Desolation and then Cataract. We were right on the hub of river running, in our opinion. Excellent place to locate for river runners. And so a lot of the old-timers that were friends of my dad’s, some of them on their first trip, like the French people that came over, Desynes, and DeColmont, Genevieve [phonetic spellings]. They came over, they had the first kayaks I’d ever seen. As I recall, I was only six or seven years old, maybe five. I can remember they only spoke French, but my dad spoke French.
Steiger: He did?!
Hatch: He wasn’t very good at it, but he could communicate with ’em pretty well. He took it when he went to Willcox Academy when he was young. Anyway, he spoke French, and they stayed in our home for three, four days, and then they went over and ran Yampa with kayaks. And they were the canvas-covered ones, like the Folboat style. They ran that. Then they ran Grey Desolation, I believe, and then down through Cat. Went through Cataract and when they got to Lees Ferry—they were planning to run Grand Canyon— when they got to Lees Ferry, they came back out. But they stayed in our home and got directions, and Dad would draw the map of the river and show ’em where the rapids were, and like “right of center,” he’d tell ’em where to run ’em. Wonderful people. After the war we never found ’em again. They wrote to us before the war, and then after World War II we don’t know what happened to ’em. One was a skier, he was really good. But they came and stayed with us.
Norm Nevills came over to our home. My dad loaned him an engine to take down into this low water in Desolation Grey. I think we’ve got that engine now. We found it in a cellar. This old-timer had bought it from my uncle, and when he moved he called me and said, “This is an old, historic engine—you’ll want it.” We’re trying to determine now if it’s the exact engine that we loaned Norm Nevills, because I think it is. It matches the pictures. It’s got an old iron bottom on it, and big bolts. (laughs) We wind this rope up on top to start it, and if you miss, it beats you to death.
Steiger: And you’ve got to start it again.
Hatch: The wood piece will just…Yeah. So I’ve got that. We’re gonna rebuild it if we can.
Steiger: Does it have a brand name?
Hatch: Yeah, it’s got a brand name. Let me think of the name of it. It’s a Montgomery Ward brand. Sea King. It’s something like that. They don’t make ’em now. But anyway, it’s silver and it’s square on top. And one of Buzz Holmstrom’s old boats in that book that [Conley, Dimock and Welch] wrote, shows a motor just like it. So it’s gonna be fun to find out. This propeller that’s down here, did you know that that’s off the air boat that Bill Greene used to use to run up Glen Canyon? …We think it’s off the first air boat. And before Bill died, I went to Phoenix and asked him about it, and he said, “Yeah, that’s one of the propellers they used.” When we hired a new guy that year, we had him polish the propeller and paint it. You look at it now, and it’s immaculate. We put it up.
Steiger: Yeah, I would like to see that.
Hatch: And Bill—see, we used to come down here, and we’d always go see Bill Greene. He was an old river runner. Norm came and stayed at our home and went out and ran.
A lot of old river runners came to our home. Dock Marston came by.
My dad had an old canteen that I still have. Georgie White came by and signed it. Dock Marston, Rigg brothers, Roy Despain, Smuss Allen, just a good cross-section. Buzz Holmstrom. I got Barry Goldwater’s signature on it before he died. And he said, “I’d be honored to sign this.” He saw—what was that one guy’s name?—Southwick or Sopwith. He had run the river, but I never met him—Grand Canyon runner. Frank Wright…I’ll think of his name. Each time these folks would come by, he’d have ’em sign it. And some of the signatures are real dim now. The museum in Green River wanted me to donate that to the museum, but I didn’t really want to, because I wasn’t sure how they’d take care of it. Some things are just left to sit around.
Steiger: Or if they would know what they had, yeah.
Hatch: It’s priceless. I’ve got it hanging on the wall, and I go hug it. (laughter) My dad tore it on a trip through Grand on a corner, and my mom stitched it up so I got a little bit of her handiwork there, and then his canteen, and all these names on it. He’d see ’em on the river and they wouldn’t have anything, any paper, and they’d sign their name in ink.
Steiger: On his canteen.
Hatch: Yeah. I think Harry Aleson’s on there. I’m not sure about Reynolds and [Halicy?]—they may be. Halicy probably…I’ve got up real close in bright light and wrote all the names down that I could decipher, and showed the list to Barry, and he looked at ’em and he knew a lot of ’em, like Frank Wright.
Steiger: Yeah, he was pretty good on history. Hatch: And Don Harris. I was very lucky, in my opinion, to be…these guys were champions in my book. Everyone else would laugh at me for admiring
river runners, as they were hard drinkers and tough old guys. Every guy was different. We’d go down a river, and one guy would run a rapid one way, and one guy would run it another way, and they both come out the bottom none the worse for wear. You’d argue about who had the best technique, and who had the best run. Of course if the guy tipped over, you could say, “Hey, that wasn’t the way we do it,” and laugh. And that was the fun of it. And I’m lucky too.
My dad named some of the rapids in Split Mountain Gorge. Doc Inglesby [phonetic] was with him on a trip, and Doc got thrown out of the boat. They named Inglesby. Sob is one that my dad was down there with Holmstrom, and my dad capsized, and Holmstrom said, “I guess you’ll have to name that one Bus.” And Dad said, “No, no, I’m gonna name it sob.” (laughter)
Steiger: So he got to go boatin’ with Buzz Holmstrom?
Hatch: Yes. It’s on the map now as sob.
Steiger: Was that Holmstrom’s second time through there?
Hatch: I don’t know, because I never got to sort that out. Roy Webb would probably know.

Steiger: Do you remember Holmstrom?
Hatch: Oh, yeah. Yeah, he stayed in our home. He was workin’ in Echo Park sometimes, with the Bureau of Reclamation or something. He came into our home and stayed with us and he had a flashlight that was waterproof. I didn’t believe there could ever be anything like that. I’m not sure of the date—I’m guessing 1945 or ’46. He said, “Yeah, this is a waterproof flashlight.” I said, “Can I take it and try it?” He said, “Yeah,” and he laughed. I filled the bathtub, and I got in and put the flashlight underwater, you know. It was rubber-coated and had a glass window, and it worked! I thought, “This is the greatest!” I said, “This is really something to use!” And he said, “Yeah. Don’t swim with it, though. You need to swim with your hands. Don’t take it in swimming after dark.” And I said, “Have you ever drowned?” He said, “Yeah, actually I have. I was underwater so long that I choked and everything went black. They got me out”—in those days they rolled you on a barrel—”and rolled me on a barrel to get the water out, and I came back. But don’t ever be afraid to drown, it’s painless. There’s a minute or two where you struggle real hard, try to get to the surface, and it’s probably the least painful way to die. If you know that, you’ll be a better river runner.” So I never forgot that story, and when his brother—I guess it was a brother or cousin—came to see us a couple of years ago, or a year ago, and I was not there, he wrote to me, and I wrote back and told him what Buzz had told me…but these guys would come into our home, and the minute they showed up, out came the drinks. Dad would sit up all night, talkin’ river runnin’, and my mom would get so tired, and go to bed. They’d be up at three in the morning and didn’t care, and go look at their boats in the dark with a flashlight. It was fun. They’d put me to bed, and I’d come back out and listen to stories. Some of ’em were pretty big yarns, and some were probably accurate—you wouldn’t know. Whatever they said was okay. Frazier, for example, in this article here in The Vernal Express, tells about rivers and rapids running 30 or 50 miles an hour. You know that’s not true. And waves as high as telephone poles. (laughter) The stories got to be whoppers. By the time they came out the other end, the trip had gotten a lot more difficult, and the dangers were everywhere.
***
Steiger: So how old were you when you first came down the Grand Canyon?
Hatch: In ’54 I was about, I’d guess, twenty years old.
Steiger: Was that a scary thing to come down here?
Hatch: Always wanted to. And I thought I was up to the challenge. As a matter of fact, I was mad because they hadn’t let me come earlier to prove myself. But yeah, I’d never run Grand before, and I took a group of people through, and I loved it. I wanted the challenge. One of the things that happened in the early days when Dad was training me in Lodore, was he’d sneak a rapid and make a clean run, and I’d go over and hit the hole, and he’d say, “Son, I know you can run better than that. You’re just bangin’ up the boats and equipment for a thrill. Someday you’ll get yours. You’ll learn that that’s the wrong way to run the river, to hit every hole.” And I loved to do that, to see if the boat would run. In later years, it proved true. I sneak ’em now. (laughs) I’m a lot better than I used to be.
Steiger: It didn’t sound like he was very scared of any…
Hatch: No…he thought if he died running in the Grand Canyon, that was okay. He’d just as soon die here as anywhere else, and he was pretty courageous. He’d come back and run boats when the other guys got scared, or when they tipped over and wouldn’t continue, or when they had a leaky boat, or they had trouble. He’d take the worst boat and run it for ’em, and help ’em. We’ve got an old movie where Frazier tipped over. He climbed on the bottom of the boat (laughs), and he’s waving at the guys while he’s on the way downriver, upside down. My dad would cuss when he’d see that, because he felt Frazier shouldn’t have ever tipped over, it was a bad run. But down here, he loved the challenge and he was feisty and liked to try his best to do it. Tippin’ a boat over wasn’t that bad, unless you lost it, or drifted into the rocks, because they could turn ’em back over, get back in, bail ’em out.
Steiger: Did they turn ’em back over out in midstream?
Hatch: Could do.
Steiger: Themselves?
Hatch: See, this one right here, it’s not an easy job, but they could turn it.
Steiger: Is that the Lota Ve [phonetic]?
Hatch: Yeah. That boat was named after my uncle’s first daughter, who’s close to my age—Uncle Alton. He was on the Dusty Dozen trip.
Steiger: Which was the trip in ’34, those guys’ first time through the canyon?
Hatch: Yeah. All of ’em, first, except for Clyde Eddy— he’d been before.
Steiger: That was the trip where they found the first
Bus Hatch rowing and Blacke Marshal hanging on to the Lota Ve circa 1930 (?).
split-twig figurines that were ever discovered?
Hatch: Yes, they found some then, and later they discovered some more things that they gave to the museum. They brought ’em home to my home and had ’em stored. I got in there to play with ’em in later years, and I wasn’t popular. They made me leave ’em alone. Then he decided that he’d better get ’em to the museum, because he didn’t want ’em damaged. So we don’t have any artifacts from the cave or Indian ruin. I do know where some Indian ruins are that haven’t been discovered, but I’ve left ’em alone, I’ve never gone in there.
***
Steiger: It didn’t sound like [your dad] was on that first [Grand Canyon] trip that you were on.
Hatch: No, my brother Don and I ran that, and Smuss Allen.
Steiger: So about the time you really started runnin’, your dad was kinda phasin’ out of the…
Hatch: I ran that trip in ’54, and we took three boats through. Don was to take the next trip in the little 22footer, all alone. Don didn’t want to go, he was tired, and his wife wanted him, and he had a number of excuses, and I was just rarin’ to go. So with luck I got back and got the second trip with the little seaplane tender. I’d just run it, and I went back and ran it solo, alone, again.
Steiger: So your first trip ever through there, you
were twenty years old, and you were carrying people? Hatch: Yeah. Steiger: And your second trip is a one-boat trip. Hatch: Alone, with people…Yeah, I took the
seaplane tender…22-feet, flat nose, and it took water over the front all the time. We had to bail. But it was all guys.
Steiger: Did that have an inflatable floor? Hatch: I think so. But I had a floor in it, over the
bottom. Steiger: A wood floor? Hatch: Suspended, where I stood, and run a motor
on the outside. Steiger: It was probably pretty quick.
Hatch: It was fast, yeah. It was a lot faster than the boats we’ve got now. It was kinda like skiin’. You’d go down the river like this. And when you picked a slot, it was there, and it rode some big water. It was pretty durable…
Steiger: Now a 22foot boat…how many guys on the trip?
Hatch: I think we had six or seven in that 22-footer. It was way overloaded. I got downriver, and we only had one motor. In those days, if you knocked a motor, you had to row. That was just automatic, we knew that. We were very careful with the motor.
Steiger: So you had one motor and like three oars or some-thin’?
Hatch: Two oars. Steiger: That was it. So if you knocked
the motor, you’d better not lose an oar.
Hatch: And so one rapid, we got down to Bedrock, which is the wrong one to use. That comes from my inexperience, from just being the second trip. I had an old notebook that my dad had written on where to run each rapid, as I went downriver. It was kind of like this river guide you’ve got now. I thought, “Well, this Bedrock, I’ll run it with the oars.” They wanted to see if I could handle a boat with the oars, in case I knocked the motor. So I started on Bedrock, and I could see I wasn’t gonna make it. I fired that baby up! (laughter) and drug the oars, and made the cut. Then I picked the oars up and I said, “We’re not gonna do any more of those!” I about got postage stamped…we thought it was low water if it was below 40,000 [cfs]. “There’s a problem here, boys, it’s gettin’ low.”
Steiger: Below 40,000? (whistles)
Hatch: We always went in the spring when it was high. See, it’s farther from the rocks. But really, now, you don’t get 40,000. That’s before the dam.
Steiger: Forty is huge, isn’t it?
Hatch: Yeah.
Steiger: So those early trips, you were seein’ water like that: it was 40,000-50,000. (whistles)
Hatch: That was my training years.
Steiger: Boy, there’s some big ol’—that’s a pretty big stage.
Hatch: Beautiful.
Steiger: There’s some big ol’ whirlpools, big old eddies, big waves.
Hatch: The first trip I was on, Smuss and Don kept runnin’ ahead of me. I didn’t know the river, I’d run the rapids by sight. And after a couple of days, I got mad. I said, “You guys keep runnin’ off and leavin’ me. I’ve never been down here. Gimmee a break. If you’re gonna lead me through, lead me through.”They’d get their motor goin’, they’d run off and leave me. So the next day I got up early and I took the lead. Don said, “What the hell’s goin’ on?! How come you’re runnin’ the boat in lead? You’ve never been down here, you don’t know where you’re goin’!” I said, “Well, I was doin’ that before, only you guys were out of sight.” And he said, “Well, you’ll tip over!” And I said, “If I do, you’ll be behind me. You can pick me up.” And I did, I ran Hance, first time I ever saw it, without any help. I just looked at it and ran it. And Grapevine down to Phantom.
Steiger: Now, was that around 50,000 or something like that?
Hatch: Yeah, 44,000–45,000, ’cause I run it, and then it came right back. In those days, without a dam to make it fluctuate, you probably were within six inches depth the next week, unless it was really dry or really flooding. Then, of course, it could go up six feet. But we’d go up and we’d put a stick in the sand and see where it was, and come back the next week and look and see if it was gone, or how much it had dropped.
Steiger: When it comes to bein’ scared, when Shorty Burton got in his jackpot, did that affect you? [When Shorty Burton got tangled in a flipped boat in Upset Rapid and drowned.]
Hatch: That was terrible. Shorty was one of my best friends, if not my very best friend. Short and I ran a lot together, and his skill as a boatman was very good. He wasn’t afraid. He was probably more stable and cool than any man on the crew. One time he stopped and approached a Big Drop in Cat and lit a cigarette, watchin’ the river. We said, “What the hell were you doin’, lightin’ a cigarette on the approach to Big Drop?!” And he said, “I figured I was right where I was supposed to be. I wanted a cigarette.” So he stopped, lit the smoke, and then kept his engine goin’, and made a beautiful run. So he was a cool hand. When he got killed, we all had bad feelings, because I gave him that brand new jacket that got tangled and we believe it killed him. You know, he couldn’t get loose. Brand new nylon jacket. That same week my dad died. And Shorty died and we were still running busy in Grand—we needed Shorty. My dad died, and he kind of helped in the office—even though he was old, he gave me a lot of good advice. We had two deaths in ten days there, and the funerals were just three, four days apart. But that was a real tragedy for our whole family. We kept on running our trips, even though a lot of folks would have said, “Hey, don’t do that.” But my dad had an old theory that when somebody died, don’t sit around and cry, have a party, have a wake. He didn’t believe in sadness, he said, “You’re gonna die anyway. Might as well enjoy it.” When he was on his deathbed, I went in and I was cryin’. He said, “What’s the matter with you?” I said, “Doesn’t look like you’re gonna make it.” And he said, “Son, I know that. If you do half the things that I did in my life, and have half the fun, it’ll be a success. I’ve been watchin’ ya’, you haven’t done that yet. Get out there and have some fun! Don’t try to change things you can’t change.” I thought that was great, ’cause he died the next day. I thought, “What a deal.” But I was pall bearer at Shorty’s, put my dad in the grave the same day. He said, “Go on with your life.” The same day that my dad died, I packed a trip that afternoon, and I went out on the river and ran it. We’ve always said we’ll just keep on runnin’ if somethin’ happens, so be it. I like that.
Steiger: …With Shorty, did that make it seem more dangerous to you guys? Like that was the first time somebody really got hurt?
Hatch: We were probably more careful, because it was in our minds. Upset wasn’t that hard to run. We’d laugh, we’d drink a beer and run Upset.
Steiger: Did you guys just go left, or down the right side? Hatch: Down the right side, always. Shorty always ran the left. And Dennis and I kept tellin’ him, “Shorty,
run the right side, ‘cause on the left side there’s a shoal that sticks out, and you’d hit your motor sometimes.” And Short said, “Well, it’s a lot easier, but I have to pull my motor.” We said, “Yeah, then you put it down and you’re gonna go into the cliff, and you got other problems. The right side’s a better run.” When he left, I didn’t go with him when he drowned—Clark Lium was with him on another boat. He had an old tattered life jacket that was his personal jacket. It was worn out ten times. I said, “Put this new jacket on, Short,” and he did. Then he tried the right cut on Upset and he didn’t get over there, and he hit the hole sideways. In those days we ran boats with floors in ’em, and no side tubes.
Steiger: The taildraggers, motors hangin’ off the back, floors on the boats.
Hatch: They were a lot faster, but they weren’t safe, they weren’t wide.
Steiger: Didn’t want to be sideways.
Hatch: And he flipped it over sideways. And all the passengers drifted clear, they were fine. Clark picked ’em up. And then they looked around and said, “Where’s Shorty?” Couldn’t find him. So Clark and one of the other guys dove underneath the boat that was upside down, and Short was in there, tangled up. They had to tear his life jacket to get him out. They gave him artificial respiration, but he was gone.
Steiger: I know he was a mainstay of the crew at that time, and I’ve been meanin’ to ask who some of the other guys were then—your starters for that time.
Hatch: Mark Garff was good. And Bruce Lium. Clark Lium. Both were good boatmen. And of course Dennis Massey and Earl Staley. Smuss—his name was Sylvester, which he hated. (laughs) Sylvester Allen—we called him Smuss. When he was doing things wrong, we called him Smudgely. Good guy. Smuss Allen.
Roy DeSpain used to run with my dad, and then he was the same age as Smuss, but he got to where he just didn’t go anymore. He liked the river, but he capsized with a bunch of Boy Scouts up on the Green one time, on his own trip. He just took a bunch of Scouts. We chased duffle and Scouts for two days. No one was lost, no one was hurt, but a lot of duffle was missing. And some of the irate parents tried to make him pay for their lost gear. It discouraged ol’ Roy, I think. But he was a neat guy, I used to date his daughter. Pretty nice gal.
The boatmen in those days, there weren’t very many that could run Grand Canyon safely. The motors we had then weren’t sealed very well, and a little wave would hit you from the back and it would suck water and quit. So you had to really be quick about changing motors or running the oars, and know how to mechanic the motor to get it goin’ again—take the plugs, take it out, take the plugs out, blow it out, get it goin’. So not everybody thought that was a neat way to earn a living. It was kind of precarious. Sometimes you’d get swept into another rapid while your motor was out.
Steiger: Did those guys do other jobs?
Hatch: Yeah, pretty much. Mark Garff got a master’s in economics, and taught at some college for a while. And Bruce Lium graduated in ichthyology from the University of Utah. Shorty Burton was an old cowboy. I don’t think Shorty graduated from school. He took the Utah Boatman’s Test when Ted Tuttle had that test, and Tuttle was really pleased to have this state boating test that…Shorty flunked it. Ted Tuttle said, “Here’s the best guy you’ve got for running the river, and he flunked the test.”
Steiger: Tuttle knew what he was doin.
Hatch: He said, “There’s something wrong with this test if it doesn’t cover the guy that’s able to run the boat.” And Short was a straight “A” guy on a boat. The passengers loved him. So Tuttle kind of went over the questions with Shorty again, and gave him a license. (laughter) Which we thought was funny.
Steiger: That’s pretty good!
Hatch: I got the seventh license ever issued by the State of Utah. My number was B-007 [double-ohseven], which I liked…Yeah. Then Dudley Amos ran boats for us, and Paul Geerlings. Paul was at the University of Utah, and Dudley Amos flew Spitfires in World War II, and then he was an attorney.
Steiger: So these guys, there was a whole different thing. Nobody thought bein’ a boatman, that would be a career. Them guys would just work in the summer.
Hatch: It was a fun job, yeah, part-time.
Steiger: And you guys had the company, and you guys were the only ones around during the winter. Did you have a hard time getting through the winters?
Hatch: Yeah. Oh, some years were pretty lean. I’d write letters all over and try to figure out how to get customers. We had some pretty lean years. I remember we used to load the boats in the summer and go out, and we’d have an old truck just piled high with equipment. And I’d hear people at the gas station say, “There go those crazy Hatches again. I wonder how many will get killed on this trip?” (laughs) Like Don says, “How many went on the trip?”“Five.”“How many drowned?” “Seven.”(laughter)
***
Steiger: When you were doing your early trips, what was the routine with the park? Do you remember what the rules were down here?
Hatch: Oh, the first rules were great! But we thought they were excessive. We had to come over and report the number of people who were going on the trip, the number of boats, and then when we got off at Temple Bar Marina, or back to the office, we had about one week to call in and tell ’em if we had a good trip, or we’re all out or safe, so that they wouldn’t initiate a search.
Steiger: If they didn’t hear from you in about a week?
Hatch: They’d call us. If they had to initiate a search, they didn’t have anyone that could run the river. They’d call us to go help look for people. And in emergencies, we did have some trips where we ran for ’em.
Steiger: Just to go find somebody?
Hatch: To search for lost people. So that was pretty nice. They knew we were gonna run a trip if they saw us down at Lees Ferry, blowin’ up boats. That was the clue. And talk about freedom and fun! Those were the days. Once you’d gotten around the first turn on the river, you were the captain, you ran the boat, you camped where you wished. And we were good with our cleanliness, we didn’t leave trash, because we knew we’d have to use those camps again.
Steiger: What was the typical camping routine?
Hatch: Well, we washed dishes and cared for them pretty much the same. We hadn’t started using the Clorox to sanitize ’em. We’d just put a double rinse. And then for the porto—we didn’t have portable toilets in those days, but we’d dig a big pit in the sandbar, and then we’d put a folding chair over it, with a toilet seat. The effluent went into the sand, and we covered it, and we usually dug the hole two or three feet deep, because we didn’t want it to be near the surface, or to be dug up or washed out. That became a problem because a lot of sewage was left, buried in the beach, even though high water came down and helped clean the beach and put new layers of sand. In those days, it was still a marginal thing to do, and later we changed that.
We used to cook over a wood fire, because everywhere we had piles of wood. We don’t now. Sounds awfully like a big war story, but I remember the wood pile got so high at Unkar, that it was at least two stories high of driftwood, from the surface of the water on that bar there, up into the air. Unkar was just a great collector for firewood. On the right, above it, where that right shoal comes out. It would get loaded with wood. It’s got some there now.
Steiger: Like right in that little eddy where you stop to go see the ruins up there?
Hatch: Yeah, upstream. Don’t stop too far down. But upstream you stop there, and you look out over that gravel bar and the rocks. That used to be just plastered with wood, from centuries, probably. But we used to take that. And Georgie [White] used to build a fire there to signal that everything was okay. I don’t know why. She’d be at Phantom the next day and call on the phone. But Whitey, he could be there and see the fire, and away they went…
We had the most freedom in the world. And we had a safety record that was just as good as it is now. I’m bragging, but we had very few accidents.
Steiger: I sort of have that feeling about most of the outfits. I mean, you’d have people fall down on the trail.
Hatch: Yeah. Hikers. I’m worried about our guys when they get up and climb in the rocks. In the boat, I feel good, they’re safe. And we don’t have untrained men down there. We don’t have a shaky jake running the boat. The old days of jumpin’ in with one guy who’d never been there before are over.
Steiger: Bledsoe told this great story: He said on his first trip that he ever did for you, you pushed ’em all off on the training boat and you said, “So long men! If you live, you’ve got the job!” (laughter)
Hatch: I thought it was funny. They probably didn’t.
Steiger: No, they did, they thought it was great at the time. Just that whole “Wa-hoo!” That really stuck with a bunch of those guys.
Hatch: Bledsoe stayed for a long time. He did a lot of trips. It’s unfortunate, some boatmen, after they’ve run a lot of trips, get tired or change jobs. And probably I’m the kind of guy who’d be a ski bum if I liked skiing as much as I do the river. My preference, right now today, or tomorrow, would be to get in the boat and go with my customers and friends down the river, than to sit here in the office, or to pack trips, or to drive trucks, or to do whatever you have to do to make it work. Most owners feel that way about their company—they’re sincere. And the ones who’ve stayed through all the tough times have proven it.
***
Steiger: Now Don, that’s your brother, and you guys—how’d that work? You guys were kinda partners, and then you split and you took Grand Canyon and he took Idaho and Utah and all that.
Hatch: We were partners for about seventeen years. He wanted to always buy new equipment for Idaho, and I wanted to buy new equipment for Grand Canyon, ’cause I loved it down here, and he loved the Idaho Salmon River country, and he loved Cataract, and he loved Dinosaur—plus it was close to his home. He wanted to stay up there…so we’d argue about equipment. Being brothers, we were rivals. We’d argue about how to run the river, but we were best of friends. And finally one day we just decided, “You know, let’s split the company. It’s big, and we didn’t ever dream it would be this big. Let’s split the company.” Of course the Idaho boats went to Idaho, and the Grand Canyon boats went to Grand Canyon. So we had a pretty good split arranged that worked out to the benefit of both of us. Then he got to be—we didn’t have to go get each other’s permission to buy something or to sell something, or to make big business changes, or little business changes. And we stopped having that animosity. We could call the shots. If you made a bad decision, you had to live with it. I loved the split. I always wanted to be in charge, and I was the youngest of the family, and I always had somebody tell me what to do. They were right (laughter) but I still wanted to be out there. I thought I could do it. (laughs) But in all our efforts, like Don says, “We’ve set river running back twenty years!” (laughter)
***
Steiger: You guys took the Kennedys down?Hatch: Bobby and Ethel and Edward. Edward went a
year or so later. Kennedys did four trips with us. Steiger: Were you on those trips? Hatch: Yeah. Steiger: How’d that go? Hatch: Good. They didn’t ask how I voted, and I
didn’t tell ’em. Steiger: Where was that story, it says in the guide book, in Belknap’s guide book, that Bobby swam? Hatch: Badger. He was in my boat. He jumped out. I
said, “Don’t go, this is a bad rapid.” Steiger: He said, “I want to swim”? Hatch: And he swam. The air mattress went one
way, and Bobby went the other. It really pounded him. I thought, “There goes the business, there goes Bobby.” We chased him, and I caught him downriver, and Ethel’s screaming. We pulled up alongside, and I helped him in the boat, and Bobby sat down and said, “I want to apologize to you. You were right, I shouldn’t have done that.” Which I thought was pretty darned…
Steiger: Yeah. Hatch: So anyway, he was an excellent swimmer, and he handled it, but man, talk about… Steiger: So he just wanted to jump out, and you told him, “Don’t do that,” he did it anyway.
Hatch: I said, “It’s a big rapid.” His terms were “no one tells me what to do.” But overall, they were great folks. I liked Edward the best…
I’ve met some really outstanding, top Americans. Though I’d just as soon go with the regular Americans. The big, deluxe trips take a lot of care and planning, and you don’t want to offend anyone, and they’re more delicate, and I don’t relax ’til it’s over. Maria Shriver got some spray paint—I probably shouldn’t tell this—but she got some spray paint out of the boat. They’d use cans of spray paint to put their names on the boats. And on the front—George Henry ran the boat—and they put “George Raft,” for George Henry. They had stars and all kinds of paintings on the boats. Maria was just a little girl. She was like nine or thirteen, I don’t remember. But we got down to Vasey’s and she put her name on the cliff there in paint. Boy! the Kennedys were upset, and they got her out of bed in the morning. They got some scratchers out of the dishwater to clean it.
Steiger: Made her clean it up.
Hatch: To clean it. And that didn’t work very well, so they built a fire and burnt it off. But there were some big words about that.
Steiger: I hadn’t heard that. I’d heard that story about Bobby jumpin’ in. I didn’t know it was on your boat. I never heard that that was you.
Hatch: I was there.
Steiger: So they were pretty good people?
Hatch: Yeah, I liked ’em.
Steiger: You gotta hand it to him, to jump up there and say, “I owe you an apology.”
Hatch: Yeah, for a guy like Bobby. He was running for president that next year. We did the Green River with ’em, and they had their campaign goin’, and they had all these things worked out. He would have won. I think he had it locked up, when he was assassinated… and that was just before he was killed.
Steiger: That trip? Well, it’s good that they got to do it.
Hatch: They had all the kids with ’em. Michael, the one that got killed last year, skiing, was a little dare devil. He was a lot of fun. He grew up since then, but he was just a little guy when he went with us. We’d be goin’ along, and he’d jump out in his life jacket and swim along a cliff. We’d say, “Don’t do that, it might be undercut.” He didn’t realize the danger. But he’d get up on the ledges, maybe twenty feet above the river, and jump in.
Steiger: The water wasn’t that cold?
Hatch: No, not like it is now. This was on the Salmon, this wasn’t on the Grand. But the Salmon was cool.
And John Glenn, he was nice, I liked him.
Steiger: John Glenn came down Grand Canyon, or Idaho?
Hatch: Middle Fork. Yeah, John Glenn was great. We got in a water fight, and the Kennedys were just poundin’ us. They had all the buckets, and we were in rowboats, and John said, “Get closer to ’em. I know how to fix this.” I said, “John, they’re whippin’ our ass, we gotta get across the river, get away from ’em.”“No,” he said, “get over there.” So I got closer, and he dove in, swam across, got in the boat with Ethel and the Kennedy kids. He grabbed each one of ’em and threw ’em in the river. Threw ’em all out! And then I went over and picked him up, and we went back and he said, “That’ll slow ’em down.”“What made you think of that?” He said, “It’s an old Marine tradition to charge when you don’t know what to do.” (laughter) “John Glenn! you cut that out! You might hurt my kids!” And we just laughed.
Steiger: That’s pretty good.
Hatch: That was funny. I liked him. Of course I liked about all of ’em. We got tremendous publicity: Right after we took the Kennedys, our phone, our mail, things just went crazy.
Steiger: Yeah, the historians credit the Kennedy thing as really jumpin’ up the business—not just for
you guys, but for everybody.
Hatch: It got national attention.
Steiger: Did you have reporters on the trip and everything?
Hatch: Yeah. We had one boat full of reporters that followed us. They’d come by with a helicopter and pick up the film and go out and show it on the news. I got down to Phantom Ranch and called my wife. She said, “Turn on the TV!” I said, “Hell, I’m at Phantom Ranch, there’s no TV!” She said, “Well, you’re on TV! They’ve got an interview with you about the Kennedy trip.”I said, “Well, I’m at Phantom Ranch.”“Well, you can’t see it.” Al Swartz [phonetic] was the news coordinator for AP, I believe it was, and he came over. The news guy said, “Oh, bill Kennedy for the trip.” So I went to Bobby and I said, “These guys say to bill you for the trip.” He said, “That’s wrong. Tell them if they want to go, they’ll only get interviews when I say. And you have your man run the boat so they can’t come up when we’re going to the bathroom or something. We need privacy too.” So I went back to Al and he said, “If you’ll help me get these extra interviews, I’ll give you publicity that you won’t believe. When we run these shots out, they etch the names of the company off the boats, so that they blur, you can’t see ’em. I’ll leave ’em on. It’s worth $130,000, the length of time these shots are gonna run. I’ll leave ’em on if you’ll help me get the interviews.”
He bought me. Right there I said, “I’ll help you.” (laughter) All I did was go talk to Bobby, and when Bobby’d say okay, our boatman, he’d come down. When Bobby’d say, “That’s it,” I’d go say, “Okay, start the motor.”They didn’t camp with us. They camped on separate beaches.
Steiger: But the Kennedys put up with it because he was gonna run for president, so it was publicity for him too.
Hatch: Every day planes flew by. This one guy, we talked to him on the radio and got him to drop us some ice. Out of the ’copter, he dropped blocks of ice. And we’d pick ’em up and put ’em in the cooler, see, for cocktail hour.
Steiger: Those guys were pretty fun to party with too, I imagine.
Hatch: Yeah. The liquor they brought, Andy Williams brought a lot of wines. He had all these French wines. Ethel liked wine, and they had the wine all over. But the Kennedys had the bourbon, and it was Old Fitzgerald’s, which is their dad’s.
Steiger: That’s his label?
Hatch: That was their bourbon. Of course they gave liquor to the boatmen after dinner, and we had drinks and visits. It was a lot of fun. I was tired, though, when I got out of there.
Steiger: A lot of hoopla too.
Hatch: There’s a lot of concern, because you don’t want anyone to be bumped.
Steiger: That was a big deal for the whole business, right there, it sounds like.
Hatch: Yeah. And Al Swartz was true to his word. He kept the names on the boats.
Steiger: Now, who did he work for? That was network TV?
Hatch: Associated Press, I think.
Steiger: So they would ordinarily air brush out…
Hatch: The name of the company, yeah. But on the TV shots, you’d see “Hatch River Expeditions.” And it was beautiful. I saw some of it later, after I got off the river. But I missed most of it. But he was true, he kept his word. That was risky.
***
Steiger: Now, you went to high school with Jake Luck? You guys were in the same class? What was your class like? How many people were in that thing?
Hatch: We had a good collection of losers. (laughter) They were good ol’ boys. We weren’t all that scholarly.
A good percent of us went to college and got degrees. Sometimes we did things that we weren’t always supposed to do, but Jake was a neat guy, and he used to, like I say, fire a spitwad the full length of the class. He could take your ear off with the impact. So a lot of times, even though I was shooting at his full face, knowing I might hit him in the eye, I had to fire those shots back, just to keep him at bay. But he was fun, and we had a great time in school. I loved our high school class and thought it was great. I was chairman of the reunion two different years—at each five-year reunion—and we had a great time. The nondrinkers would try to have it in some church or some Mormon hall, and I’d try to have it at the country club or the Elks Club, so we had a trade off, but I think I got the best attendance at my [reunions]. We’d hire a band, and we’d have a great time. Jake didn’t ever make it up there, but I sure missed him, and I wished he had. I teased him about it, but it was a long ways from Kanab.
Steiger: I guess like everywhere else, have you seen Vernal change a lot over the years? Has it grown?
Hatch: Vernal has, and I’m not sure I like all the change. I remember when Vernal only had 2,000–3,000 people, and I knew everyone in town. My Great-greatgranddad Hatch settled Vernal, and they were planning to name it Hatchtown, but he didn’t want that, so he asked them not to name it Hatchtown. They named it Vernal, which means “green. “ It was a postmaster who named it Vernal. But Jeremiah Hatch settled there and then I’m a direct descendant of these guys that first came out there. Now in town, I hardly know anyone anymore, and they’ve even got traffic jams. That was unheard of in the days when we were kids.
Steiger: When did he come out there?
Hatch: I can’t remember the exact date, but he was sent out by Brigham Young to colonize Vernal. He had four wives and thirty children.
Steiger: Would that have been like after the Civil War?
Hatch: During, because they were in the Mormon Battalion, and Matthew Caldwell, on my mother’s side, was one of the other settlers. They settled Dry Fork Canyon. He marched in the Mormon Battalion about, I guess, in 1871. They had formed the community then at that time. I’m related to everybody in Vernal, if they’re old descendants…Matthew Caldwell, who was in the Mormon Battalion did believe in polygamy, he had quite a few children.
Steiger: Now, the Mormon Battalion, I’m not sure— now we’re getting pretty far afield—but what was that all about?
Hatch: Well, in the city of Nauvoo, Illinois, the Mormons were holding church meetings, and a lot of people thought they were weirdos and strangers and plotting a revolution, when in fact they were just a religious group. And so they were persecuted. In those days a lot of people thought witchcraft was still in vogue, I guess. But they were jealous, didn’t like the Mormons—especially the part about plural marriage. They chased ’em out of Illinois. And at that time, my ancestors were not Mormons. They were wagon-builders. They built wagons and sold ’em to the guys who were coming out the Oregon Trail and to Salt Lake. Later, they met Mormons and liked ’em and came out and joined ’em.
Steiger: And the Mormon Battalion was just those people who migrated?
Hatch: Well, during the Civil War, the president asked for help from the Mormons, even though they’d been persecuted by the federal government. And if they’d help, he’d let them eventually settle in Salt Lake City with some kind of regulations, and eventually maybe form a state, the state of Utah. So would they send a military detachment to the West Coast? Which they did. They went into Texas and the West Coast and back. It was the longest march in history, as far as we know.
Steiger: And that’s what your great-great-granddad (Hatch: No, on my mother’s side.) participated in? That was Caldwell?
Hatch: Yeah…
Steiger: And so all these people went out to Utah where there wasn’t…
Hatch: Where they could have religious freedom.
Steiger: But it was pretty bare, pretty sparse?
Hatch: It was pretty grim for a long time. Years to come it became what they called the land of Zion. (chuckles)
Steiger: It’s impressive now. So are a lot of your relatives pretty devout?
Hatch: Most of ’em.
Steiger: Are they mad at you for drinkin’ and carryin’ on and stuff?
Hatch: They like me, but they do give me a bad time, and they feel I jumped over the track when I married an Episcopalian. My background heritage, they would forgive me instantly and help me if I wanted to be a religious person, but I’m not, and I tell ’em that. I say, “My religion’s down on the river in the Grand Canyon. If you want to have church, come on down.”