“I like the fact that there’s a beginning and there’s the end. And you meet different people all the time.” Georgie White Clark (1991).
Above this image is a quote from an excerpt of “Young At Heart: Aging Gracefully With Attitude” by Anne Snowden Crosman [Hara Publishing Group, 2003]. I came across it in The Canyon Country Zephyr, a publication chock-full of eccentricities and canyon country histories you won’t see in most National Park visitor center displays. The writer told of a trip with Grand Canyon’s seminal “Royal River Rat,” the somewhat controversial river woman Georgie White, just a year before she died at age 81. Crosman’s account is a good winter-time read, giving a taste of Georgie’s unique personality and enough history to evoke river legends and a range of opinions amongst knowledgeable river rats.
Sorting through fact and legend, here’s a historical sketch, far as I can tell. In 1911 (or 1910), Georgie began life somewhere in Oklahoma as Bessie DeRoss, spent time as a child in Denver, married a man named Clark, had a child named Sommona Rose in 1928, and made her way to Chicago and New York City before a cross-country bicycle trip in 1936 landed her in Los Angeles. Some sources have her briefly married to a James White (a name that lurks about in river rat fables of early Grand Canyon exploits) and a river legend persists that benighted river adventurer Glen Hyde figures in her back-story, but we’ll revisit these later.
In 1945, Georgie White and her friend Harry Aleson arrived at Diamond Creek’s junction with the Colorado River. Her daughter had been killed by a vehicle while she and Georgie were bicycling near the coast in 1943, and Harry had become her hiking companion as she worked through her grief in the desert country of Southern California. When they arrived, the river was running at 48,000 to 55,000 cubic feet per second, depending on the teller of the tale, about normal for early summer before Glen Canyon Dam tamed the flows for awhile. The two adventurers hiked approximately 6 miles upriver in tennis shoes, carrying backpacks filled with water-tight cans full of food and supplies. They strapped on standard life jackets of the time — inflatable, kapok filled Mae Wests, invented in 1928 and battle-tested through the recent war. Harry had convinced Georgie to try out with him a theory that, should one lose a boat to accident on the river, it would be easier to float out than to hike out. Three days later, they took out 60 miles down river in Lake Mead, some what bedraggled but with thirst for adventure apparently unquenched. The next year, they hauled a military surplus raft down Parashant Wash, a side canyon about 20 miles further up-canyon, and here, dear readers, we come again to the namesake of a possible erstwhile husband of the budding royal river rat, Georgie White. This time, the adventurers wanted to test a long-dismissed claim that a man named James White had floated through the Grand Canyon in 1867, on a raft he’d built of logs, or while clinging to a driftwood log (or while, “passing a pint of whiskey around a campfire,” as more than one river rat of my acquaintance has sniffed). Georgie and Harry built a log raft, lashing driftwood together in some approximation of the earlier James White’s claim, but the river was at the same flow as the year before and the raft was promptly defeated by one of the infamous Grand Canyon river eddies, so they aired up their one-man raft and jumped on.
Over the next several years the two friends tried out various types of neoprene rafts, and in time each became an iconic part of the budding commercial river rafting economy, at first charging just about enough fare to cover trip expenses and supplies. By 1953, Georgie White’s Royal River Rats company had pioneered a technique of strapping three rafts side-by-side into the notorious G-Rig pictured above, with an outboard motor on the middle rig powering the trio down the river and theoretically aligning them onto the tongue of the current through rapids. It made for impressive pictures and stories when it worked, and for panicked guests unlucky enough to be the meat of triple-decker raft sandwiches when it didn’t.
Meanwhile, Harry Aleson was continuing his desert and canyon explorations, begun after the poisoned gases of World War I left him seeking solace and adventure in quieter places less scarred by human strife. By 1940 he was living the canyon/river rat dream — with a tent in a side canyon of the Grand, exploring little known ruins and canyons and plotting routes by land and water that defied common logic. In 1953, his Larrabee and Aleson Western River Tours offered a “Grand Canyon Traverse” (Lee’s Ferry, AZ to Boulder City, NV) for $750, and by 1959 the company advertised that “….our small craft have traveled to within 1400 miles of the North Pole.”
Harry Aleson led some of the last trips through Glen Canyon before the rising water of Lake Powell drowned the mossy glens and glowing amphitheaters once extolled by explorers and visitors. Here is a great story by Ken Sleight, who created his own share of canyon river legends, about a 1962 river-side wedding party for then 63 year old Harry Aleson and his bride, Dorothy Keyes, complete with night floats and the fate of Bert Loper’s last bottle of whiskey with hangovers to match. For more on Canyon Country pioneer Bert Loper’s life and legend, here is a link to Otis “Dock” Marston’s “From Powell to Power” [Vishnu Temple Press, 2014]. There is also much more to be said about the life and times of Harry Aleson and Georgie White, some of which can be found in a book by yet another river rat of some renown, Renny Russell. Here’s a review of his “Rebel Of The Colorado: The Saga Of Harry Leroy Aleson” [Animist Press, 2017] that quotes Georgie’s vivid reminiscence of that 1945 backpack float, to get you started.
Now, back to Georgie (nee Bessie DeRoss) White Clark’s final contribution to canyon lore. After her death in 1992, among personal effects tucked away in an underwear drawer were a pistol and a copy of the marriage license for Glen and Bessie Hyde, whose honeymoon trip in 1928 had gone badly awry. In October, 1928, the Hydes launched at Green River, Utah, making their way through Labyrinth, Cataract, Glen and Grand Canyons before disaster struck somewhat downstream of where Georgie White and Harry Aleson launched themselves into Canyon Country lore 17 years later. The Hydes’ boat was found intact in early December, but with no sign of the couple, a perfect recipe for speculation and campfire tales. Over the years many rumors have been attached to the mystery, only to be later discredited — an elderly woman’s mid-river trip confession, a found skeleton with a bullet shattered skull, etc. Without Georgie to clarify or muddy the narrative, amateur river sleuths and bored river guides quickly conflated Georgie’s reputation as a canyon-hardened river rat, her birth name, her somewhat contemporary birth year with Bessie Hyde, the marriage license, and the pistol into a fine campfire tale of survival and possible murder. Alas, more sober heads have discredited this one too, so the mystery still awaits another round of river camp speculation and tale-telling. Feel free to use the Comments section below to share your own version. If it’s a good tale, I just might borrow it to enliven a canyon voyage someday soon.
Up next, a year-end consideration of national parks and public lands —what the late journalist Charles Kuralt called, “Our gifts to ourselves…”. Until, take care of yourself, and help someone else along the way. -B
Historian Brad Dimock’s “Sunk Without a Sound” [Fretwater Press, 2001] is a good, fairly recent take on the Hydes’ ill-fated expedition.
For more versions of Georgie White’s life, look for “Woman of the River” by Dick Westwood [Utah State University Press, 1983] or “Adventures of Georgie White” by Rose Marie DeRoss [Gardner Print & Mailing Co., 1970]. Good luck on finding these two in print, though.
Brad, I once met Georgie at a boatmen's convention near Lee's Ferry. The originator of the 'triple rig' adventure, I was a boatmen at the time (Western River Exp., the former and original Western River), and asked if I could change from the Mormons to her outfit. She laughed and said she prefers LA firemen types, but she would consider it. Not sure if she was certain about that. Anyway, enjoyed reading this latest literary adventure and writeup. Keep 'em coming. RK