According to a May 1 story in the Denver Post, about a
year ago a man in southern Utah at a place called Comb Ridge came
upon a large crevice in a cliff that contained an old saddle and
underneath that a pile of human bones. The man’s name is Denny
Bellson, and he had been searching for those bones. They had been
put there in 1934 by Bellson’s late grandfather, a Navajo named
Aneth Nez. Through a friend Bellson contacted writer David
Roberts (who had published a related article in National
Geographic Traveler in 1999), and Roberts arranged for the
bones to be sent to the University of Colorado-Boulder for DNA
and other testing. The remains proved to be those of one Everett
Ruess (pronounced “Roo-ess”), a young man who had disappeared in
the canyon country at the age of 20, and who was the subject of
Roberts’s 1999 piece.
I’ve come across Ruess’s name occasionally in my reading about
the West. Until now, his 1934 disappearance had made for a
cultish parlor game similar to the one that still speculates as
to whether the outlaw Butch Cassidy survived the famous 1909
shootout in Bolivia and endured into old age. Likewise, Ruess’s
legend was one of the great mysteries of the desert Southwest.
Wallace Stegner wrote about him in his book Mormon
Country: “What Everett Ruess was after was beauty, and he
conceived beauty in pretty romantic terms….If we laugh at Everett
Ruess we shall have to laugh at John Muir, because there was
little difference between them except age.” In Desert
Solitaire (published in 1968), Edward Abbey whimsically
entertains the possibility that Ruess is still alive, a mad
desert hermit subsisting on “prickly pear and wild onions.”
Ruess was not a typical misanthropic desert rat. As Stegner
states, he was a true romantic, and something of a nascent
Renaissance Man, who at his death enjoyed a small reputation as
an artist and writer. He excelled at linoleum and woodblock
printmaking, was a good photographer, and was the precocious
author of two posthumously published books, one entitled On
Desert Trails, Hugh Lacy, Ed.(1940); the other Everett
Ruess: A Vagabond for Beauty, W.L. Rusho, Ed. (1983). These
are a miscellany of Ruess’s journals, letters, and poetry. And
the young man was known to read voraciously in the classics.
Everett Ruess was born in Oakland, California in 1914, the second
son of Christopher and Stella Ruess: his father a Unitarian
minister; his mother a culture enthusiast, who — among other
intellectual pursuits — edited and published a Ruess family
literary magazine. The San Francisco Bay Area at the time was
maturing culturally from its rough-and-tumble gold rush roots.
The writers Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Jack London, Frank Norris and
Ambrose Bierce had already made their marks. There were
photographers such as Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, and Dorothea
Lange, and the painter Maynard Dixon, and the teenage Ruess knew
personally all of this latter group. Weston encouraged his
interest in printmaking; Adams coached him in photography; Lange
took some interesting photo portraits of Ruess; and Dixon gave
him drawing and painting lessons.
Ruess was something of a “red diaper baby.” His parents were —
for the time — typically politically liberal, as were their
friends and artistic acquaintances. Christopher Ruess’s
ecclesiastical duties caused the family to move frequently as he
was transferred to different churches, and Everett and older
brother Waldo attended schools in different parts of California
and in Valparaiso, Indiana, where at age 12 Everett won a school
essay prize. Back in California at 15, and while a student at
Hollywood High School, Everett had a flirtation with the Los
Angeles chapter of “The Young Communists League.” But his
creative impulses wouldn’t be put at the service of radical
politics.
At 16, in the summer of 1930, Ruess wandered the Sierra Nevada
from Sequoia to Yosemite, as the earlier naturalist and writer
John Muir had done. His mode of transportation were the backs of
two burros: one that he rode with saddle and saddlebags; the
other he led, and packed with food, blankets, and personal
belongings such as a camera, art supplies, a few books and a
journal. His resulting woodblock prints of mountain scenes began
to attract attention. Ruess reminds us of the example of the
prolific Western photographer William Henry Jackson, who
photographed the Yellowstone region and the Colorado Rockies in
the 1870s. Ruess — like Jackson — was developing the talent and
know-how to pursue his artistic ambitions in howling wilderness
amidst a myriad of adverse conditions, especially weather.
Ruess first visited the Southwest in 1931, immediately upon high
school graduation, and spent much of the remaining three years of
his life wandering the remote Four Corners (Arizona, Utah, New
Mexico, Colorado) region, with occasional trips home to
California. In the 1930s the Colorado Plateau was one of the
great blank spaces on the map with very few roads. Ruess’s epic
journeys with those burros have their biblical aspects. Weeks and
months of endless trudging through the desert landscapes: Zion
Canyon, Rainbow Bridge, Grand Canyon, Navajo Mountain, the San
Juan River, Mesa Verde, Canyon de Chelly. He read Rabelais,
Thomas Mann, and The Arabian Nights by the campfire. And
he sketched and wrote. Much of his journal is found in the two
books noted above, but his letters show a superior vividness.
Ruess was an enthusiastic scribbler of correspondence mailed
during his periodic sojourns from hamlets such as Kayenta,
Arizona and Escalante, Utah:
In my wanderings this year I have taken more chances and had
more wild adventures than ever before. And what a magnificent
country I have seen — wild, tremendous wasteland stretches,
lost mesas, blue mountains rearing upward from the vermillion
sands of the desert, canyons five feet wide at the bottom and
hundreds of feet deep, cloudbursts roaring down unnamed
canyons, and hundreds of houses of the cliff dwellers,
abandoned a thousand years ago.
Ruess could be reckless and accident prone. In his final letter,
written to his brother Waldo Ruess, he states:
I have had a few narrow escapes from rattlers and crumbling
cliffs. The last misadventure occurred when Chocolatero [his
burro] stirred up some wild bees. A few more stings might have
been too much for me. I was three or four days getting my eyes
open and recovering the use of my hands.
At an earlier date and to a friend named Bill Jacobs:
For six days I’ve been suffering from the semi-annual poison
ivy case — my sufferings are far from over. For two days I
couldn’t tell whether I was dead or alive. I writhed and
twisted in the heat, with swarms of ants and flies crawling
over me, while the poison oozed and crusted on my face and arms
and back. I ate nothing — there was nothing to do but suffer
philosophically….I get it every time, but I refuse to be driven
out of the woods.
This last is interesting. Poison ivy is common in the lush river
and creek bottoms of the Southwest, but Ruess would have to have
been extremely careless to get it.
Everett Ruess’s last trip has for 75 years been shrouded in
mystery, but since the discovery of his remains more facts are
coming to light.
In November 1934, Ruess turned up in the Mormon ranch village of
Escalante, Utah, and devoted a few days to preparing (procuring
supplies, etc.) for another long trek into adjoining remote
country. On November 11 he mailed that last letter to Waldo. It
has a chillingly prophetic tinge to it: “I prefer the saddle to
the streetcar and star spangled sky to a roof, the obscure and
difficult trail, leading into the unknown, to any paved highway,
and the deep peace of the wild to the discontent bred by cities.”
Within days Ruess left Escalante with his burros packed with the
usual provender and poetry. He proceeded along the rough
“Hole-in-the-Rock” Trail, which after 60 hard miles leads to the
Colorado River in the vicinity of Glen Canyon (now submerged
under Lake Powell). About 50 miles out he met two friendly
sheepherders and camped with them for a couple of days. It was
long assumed that these two nameless men were the last to see
Ruess alive.
For three quarters of a century the Western parlor game noted
above has it that Ruess died the result of a mishap. He was an
enthusiastic cliff climber, so one theory was that he died in a
fall. Others speculate a drowning in the Colorado River or a
rattlesnake bite. There was also the improbable theory that he
crossed the Colorado and entered the Navajo Reservation, where he
married a native woman and fathered children. A story like this
always spawns rumors and tales of odd sightings.
But the discovery of the impromptu grave and resulting DNA
evidence point to the fact that Ruess was murdered, and three
anonymous Ute Indians were the killers. A large rock striking the
young artist’s head was probably the death blow. Enter our friend
Aneth Nez, who observed the murder from a distance at place
called Chinle Wash. After witnessing the Utes chase Ruess down
the wash and quickly dispatching him, stealing his burros and
belongings, and waiting for them to leave, Aneth Nez approached
the site. Ruess was dead. The young Navajo, probably perplexed as
to what to do, eventually elected to simply bury him. The ground
in the wash was rocky so it would have been difficult to dig a
hole. So Aneth Nez packed the body onto his horse and led it up
to Comb Ridge, where he found the deep crevice. After putting
Ruess in the crude crypt, he added his saddle because it was
covered with blood. When it comes to death, the Navajos are a
superstitious lot.
The Navajos and the Utes are traditional enemies, and to some
extent remain so in modern reservation times. So Aneth Nez kept
quiet for years. Denny Bellson eventually found the remains based
on a second hand story that came down from the old man to other
family members. Aneth Nez died around 1980.
In March 1935, at the instigation of Christopher and Stella
Ruess, an official search was conducted to try to find their
missing son. The search party began in the area where the two
sheepherders had last seen Ruess, and in nearby Davis Gulch they
found the two burros grazing contentedly in a crude corral. There
was no sign of Ruess’s personal belongings. The search party also
found two instances of graffito scratched into sandstone (and
both long submerged by Lake Powell now). Both read “Nemo 1934.”
Captain Nemo is a character from Jules Verne’s Twenty
Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, an adventure novel that was
Everett Ruess’s favorite childhood reading. And the Latin
translation of “Nemo” is “No one.”
“When I go, I leave no trace,” Everett Ruess once wrote.
