by Holly Sheidenberger
She tucked old Bessie Hyde’s pistol and marriage license into her lingerie drawer, covered them with her favorite leopard print swimsuit, and cackled. She turned to her cats and said, “Won’t that just give ‘em fits.”
Georgie Clark never did tell how she ended up with the license and gun. They’d belonged to a newlywed who went missing on a Colorado River rafting trip through the Grand Canyon with her husband back in 1928. Rumor was that Bessie killed her husband on their honeymoon and ran off to start a new life.
Georgie didn’t come to the Grand Canyon until 1945. Not yet thirty-five years old, she’d already burned through two marriages, which didn’t seem to bother her at all. She’d shared grand adventures with her daughter Sommona Rose, until she died tragically at the age of fifteen. That bothered her considerably.
Her friend Harry took her mind off her troubles by introducing her to the wilds of the lower Colorado River, through the Grand Canyon. The river was wild, dangerous, and unpredictable. Its rapids had claimed the lives of many adventurers before them, and was known for never giving up its dead.
But Georgie had nothing to lose. She and Harry donned life jackets and launched themselves into the river, trying to prove that it would be easier to float down the river than hike out. Three days and sixty miles later, they arrived at Lake Mead, bedraggled, but triumphant.
Georgie would never be the same. She’d found her true love. The river.
By 1947 she’d learned to row the rapids, and she decided she would take paying customers along for the ride. It didn’t matter one bit that everyone said she couldn’t do it. People were keen to explore the wonders of the Grand Canyon, and she had no shortage of riders.
She called her tourists the “Royal River Rats,” even though there was nothing royal about the accommodations on the adventure. They slept outside and ate mystery food out of tin cans. If anyone complained, she’d say, “Did ya come to eat or did ya come to see the canyon?”
Never short of daring, Georgie defied the odds. Others had died trying, but she didn’t care. She became the first woman to row the full length of Marble and Grand Canyons in 1952, and live to tell the tale.
Proper river guides of the time used wooden rowboats. Georgie did not. She experimented with different types of boats, finally coming up with the perfect rig. She lashed three rubber army surplus rafts together and attached an outboard motor. The result was the nimblest, most stable rig to run the rapids.
Nevertheless, the river was wild and couldn’t be tamed. Accidents did occur. Once a customer was thrown off the boat and drowned. The Park Ranger who came to transport the body out of the river noticed Georgie getting impatient. He said, “Georgie, you just killed this woman, now you want me to hurry up and hide the body?” Georgie looked him dead in the eye and said, “You’re damned right I do. Now get her out of sight before you scare these new people.”
Georgie called her boat the “G-rig,” named after herself, of course. She was mocked at first, but eventually the advantages of the boat won out. The old wooden boats couldn’t make it through all the rapids. They had to be carried down the banks through the roughest water, but the G-rig could plow straight through.
Georgie got the last laugh. The inflatable boats she was the first to run through the canyon outlasted all her detractors. River guides in the Grand Canyon today still use boats descended from Georgie’s original G-rig.
She lived out of her trailer in Las Vegas, running the river until she was eighty years old. When she died at eighty-one, the items tucked in her lingerie drawer were found, and they had just the effect she would have wanted. Rumors spread that Georgie was actually the murderer Bessie Hyde and had lived out her days under a secret identity.
But the people who know, say that Georgie was Georgie.
She would have gotten a kick out of all the speculation, and an even bigger kick out of the Colorado River rapid that was named for her after her death.
“Georgie Rapid” is a tough little rapid that will kick your butt as you go through. Sounds just about right.
