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'10 r:Df:adJvtan in Cataract and Otkr J-.Iew E?J-trit1iCf:1; 1 J60-1J61 On May 22, 1960, Albert Q. Quist of Salt Lake City was leading a two-boat, twelve-member party through Cataract Canyon. About noon, after running three rapids, one of the twenty-four-foot rafts slammed into a rock and hung up there, pitching four of the men into the river. Quist and his son, Clair, made it safely to shore about threequarters of a mile below, but the other two men, Leon Peterson and Keith Howard Hoover, both of Provo, Utah, could not be located and were presumed to be drowned.I Two weeks later Georgie embarked at Green River for a trip through Cataract Canyon with a party of thirty-five. She was asked to watch for the missing pair. Among Georgie's passengers was Father John Finbarr Hayes, a twenty-eight-year-old Catholic priest, who had gone through Grand Canyon with her the year before. Georgie was leading the party in her big boat when they came to placid water below Dark Canyon. It was Sunday, about nine o'clock in the morning. The party had been on the alert for the bodies of the two lost men, and as they drifted along Georgie spotted something unusual in a mass offloating driftwood. She knew instinctively what it was even though the man's body was arched over with only the top curve of his back above the water. Both his head and his feet were submerged. In a calm voice she summoned two people back to where she was and told them what she had discovered and what they were to do. Then she said, "I want all the women and children at the back of the boat."2 Georgie told those she had summoned to take oars and snag the body, and she would take it in to shore. When they had done this fff Georgie gently steered the boat over to a sand bank. There was a doctor on the trip, but he knew the man was already dead because of a large gash in the back of his head, making it clear that, if he had drowned, it would have been after he had been rendered unconscious by the severe blow to the head. The man wore cut-off pants, hiking boots, and a life jacket. The kapok life preserver, designed to keep the head and chest up, was under him, completely water-logged. He had thinning hair, and his skin was chalk-white. The body was decomposing and gave off a sickening odor. Georgie quickly decided they would have to bury the man. They had nothing to dig with except oars, so the grave in the sand was only about four feet deep. 'To Georgie all people on her trips were equals. Recalling the incident, Father Hayes said: It was the first, the last, and the only time that Georgie ever called me "Father". We were all always very comfortable and informal on the river. She said to me: "Father, would you say some prayers after we bury the body, before we close the grave?["] Well, all I had was a breviary . And a breviary was a priest's prayer book, in Latin! ... And the breviary doesn't contain a funeral service, but I knew enough about where to look to be able to come up with some suitable prayers for the burial, in the Psalms, particularly. But what was difficult about it was the breviary was all in Latin! There wasn't a single word in English in the breviary. This was 1959 or '60, before the Catholic Church changed in its prayer in this country, from Latin to English. So I sat over, under a little shade tree, going through the breviary, first ofall trying to find what I would say at a ... under these most extraordinary circumstances, and then, when it was time, got up and translated in my head a sentence at a time and said it in English. And kept it ... I felt a need to keep it as-the breviary , after all, was a specifically Roman Catholic and clergy prayer book-and this man was a Mormon! And so I had to, out of respect for that, you know, make the prayer service efficiently generic and not ... I certainly couldn't be saying this specifically Catholic-type thing.3 The burial took place on a high sandbar at the...

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