Welcome to the John Wesley Powell River History Museum’s new monthly feature, History Makers of the Colorado River!  Each month we will highlight an individual, group, or event that had a significant impact on the history of the Colorado and Green Rivers, and their tributaries. 

This month’s feature is Frank Swain. If you look at any photo, or watch any movie, from the adventures of Bus Hatch on the river in the early days, in the background will be a big tall lanky guy, often wearing a cowboy hat. That would be Frank Swain.

Frank and Bus were double cousins; a sister and a brother married a brother and a sister. Both were the eldest of big families that ran to boys.  Enough, in fact, to have their own general contracting business and a baseball team and to run a still in Split Mountain Canyon.

When it came to the exploring the Green River, near their home in Vernal, Utah, Bus, and Frank, also took the lead. In the lean years of the 1930s in Vernal, Frank took a job as deputy sheriff of Uintah County.  One of his jobs was guarding prisoners at the jail.  Parley Galloway was one such unfortunate, imprisoned for non-support of his wife.  Parley was the son of the Ur-boatman, Nathaniel Galloway—a member of the River Runners Hall of Fame, and learned boats and rivers at his daddy’s knee.  Learning of this, Frank invited his cousin Bus to come to the jail and talk to Parley about the nearby canyons of the Green and Yampa Rivers.

Sensing an opportunity, Parley wove tales of wonder to be found in the nearby canyons of the Green River, the canyon of Lodore, the Yampa, Desolation Canyon.  Frank and Bus were rapt listeners. Having set the hook, Parley reeled them in by promising to help them build a boat and guide them down the river.  He only needed a little loan to make his bail…

Frank and Bus paid Parley’s bail, whereupon he promptly disappeared.  Who needs him, they must have said, we’re contractors, we can build a boat. They’d already built a small skiff to go fishing out on Pelican Lake, so they built the same kind of little skiff, reinforced with a hardwood bow piece and more ribs, to withstand the rigors of the canyon rapids So they did, a little plywood skiff about 14 feet long.

The trip through Lodore, with Bus, Frank, Bus’s brother in law “Cap” Mowrey, and Alt Hatch, one of Bus’s brothers, was one disaster after another.  They capsized, lost most of their gear and food, and had to live on what they could scrounge from the river. The best thing to come from it was teaching them how much they didn’t know, that and a desire to do it again.  After that, Bus, along with Frank and a rotating cast of Hatch family and later, others they met along the way, ran one stretch of the Green and Colorado after another: Desolation Canyon, Cataract Canyon, the Grand Canyon (the famous “Dusty Dozen” trip in 1934) and then moved up into Idaho to run the Middle Fork and Main Salmon Rivers the next two years.  In between, they were constantly on the river for one reason or another, hunting fishing, or just having a good time.

After the arduous Dusty Dozen trip, and those difficult Idaho journeys, Bus and Frank didn’t run as many rivers together, but they kept working and playing baseball and hunting and fishing together, as families do. Even if they went their separate ways on the river, and Bus became the founder of Hatch River Expeditions, Bus and Frank stayed close for the rest of their lives.