Bessie and Glen Hyde: The Honeymoon That Disappeared

In October of nineteen twenty-eight, newlyweds Glen and Bessie Hyde put a homemade wooden scow into the Colorado River at Green River, Utah. The boat was Glen's design: a flat-bottomed sweep scow, the kind of craft used on Idaho rivers, not a whitewater canyon. Their goal was to run the full Colorado through the Grand Canyon. If they succeeded, Bessie would be the first woman documented to have completed the canyon run. That mattered to her. She had told friends she wanted to be the one to do it.

They passed through the canyon's upper sections and arrived at Bright Angel on the South Rim in November. They visited the rim, met other travelers, posed for photographs. People who saw them that day later described them as in good spirits. Glen bought supplies. Bessie, by some accounts, said she did not want to continue. By other accounts, she said nothing of the kind. The accounts do not agree.

They returned to the river. They did not emerge at the other end. Their empty scow was found floating near Diamond Creek, on Hualapai land, in December. The boat was intact. The oars were shipped. Nothing was missing. Neither body was ever recovered.

The disappearance has produced a century of speculation, and that is precisely what it remains: speculation. One persistent theory holds that Bessie Hyde survived, staged her own disappearance, and walked away into a new life, a theory that traces partly to an elderly woman's nineteen seventy-one claim to be Bessie Hyde. No physical evidence has ever connected that claim to Bessie Hyde. The theory has never been verified.

Another theory holds that Glen killed Bessie, or Bessie killed Glen, or the river killed them both. The official record closes at the empty boat. The mystery has never been settled, and anyone who tells you they know what happened in that canyon in the winter of nineteen twenty-eight is telling you something the evidence cannot support.