The Kolb Brothers' Canyon and Their Decades-Long Feud

The Kolb brothers built their photography studio on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon in nineteen oh four, literally into the canyon wall below the rim's edge. The problem was water. There was none at the rim for developing film. Ellsworth and Emery Kolb initially had to carry their exposed plates down four and a half miles of canyon trail to the nearest water source at Indian Garden, develop the prints there, then hike back up to sell them to the tourists who had watched them descend. They charged a dollar a photo. Business was good enough to expand the studio.

In nineteen eleven and nineteen twelve, the brothers descended the Colorado River and filmed it, producing what became one of the first documentary motion pictures of the canyon interior. They screened it daily in the studio for visitors. The film ran for decades. It was still running when Emery died.

Because Ellsworth left in nineteen twenty-four. The brothers had been quarreling for years, the specific causes lost in the privacy of what was, by all accounts, a thorough mutual contempt. Ellsworth moved on. Emery stayed.

For the next fifty-two years, Emery Kolb lived and worked in the studio, screening the same film his brother had helped shoot, fighting repeated NPS attempts to evict him or buy out the operation, refusing to leave the rim where he had spent his entire adult life. He gave tours. He took photographs. He outlasted multiple superintendents who wanted him gone. He died in the studio in December of nineteen seventy-six at the age of ninety-five.

When NPS staff cleaned out the boathouse after his death, they found a human skeleton. The remains were identified as a man named Hualga Williams who had drowned in the Colorado River in nineteen twenty-eight. Why Williams was in the Kolb boathouse, and how long he had been there, was never satisfactorily explained. Emery, who might have known, was dead.