John Hance comes to the canyon as a miner and stays as its most entertaining liar. Boone retells the yarns that visitors carried home from his table, then turns to the quieter question of what became of the old guide when the guests went home. Nothing here should be repeated under oath.
Hold on to your good sense. This next fellow will have it off you. They say Theodore Roosevelt called him the greatest liar on earth, and I wouldn't swear to that either. John Hance turned up on this stretch of rim in the eighteen eighties, cut a trail to some asbestos claims, and by eighteen eighty-six was advertising for tourists. When fog filled the canyon he'd allow it was near heavy enough to ski across, and he did it now and then. Last time, it lifted on him halfway over. He dropped through a hole onto Zoroaster Temple and sat four weeks waiting on more fog. "It was a light fog," he said, "but I was lots lighter by that time, too!" He swore a tourist in rubber boots fell in and bounced back past the rim, over and over. They had to shoot the man to keep him from starving. A wrangler named Curly Ennis swore to two schoolteachers that the mule trail was safe. Hance strolled up and told them it had killed four people that week. One teacher turned to the other and said she'd known all along that guide was lying. Every morning at breakfast he told how he'd been snowed in with a bad ankle, half a jar of sorghum and a box of soap, and lived a week on soap flakes, molasses and shavings off a boot. When he finished, the table went silent. Nobody could tell if they ought to laugh. In nineteen oh six he sold his homestead, and friends said most of the money went on one trip to San Francisco. They claimed he blew out his gas light. "I fanned it out with my hat!" he said. After that the Fred Harvey Company gave him room and board at the Bright Angel and asked only that he keep talking to tourists. He'd become part of the view. In December of nineteen fourteen the railway named him in an injunction for doing business on its grounds. William Bass wrote to Ford Harvey that the old man was spending his last dollars on carfare and lawyers, and for God's sake, get his name off it. The case stood nearly four years, and in the last of them the Coconino Sun ran a joke on him, headlined A Mighty Sad Case. Nobody could tell if they ought to laugh. I'd sooner leave him up on the fog, halfway over, with the next patch just out of reach.
Photo: Popular Science Monthly, vol. 69, 1906 (photographer unknown) · Public domain (published 1906)