The Mystery of Everett Ruess

by W. L. Rusho

  In Escalante he camped out under the cottonwoods along the Escalante River, while he spent his days visiting local young people. He also poked into some of the nearby side canyons of the Escalante.

  November 11

  Escalante, Utah

  Dear Father and Mother,

  After a truly delightful trip over the mountains, finding my way without any trails, I have reached the Mormon town of Escalante. No mail awaited, and I think my ranger friend forgot to tell the postmaster to forward it. I am going south towards the river now, through some rather wild country. I am not sure yet whether I will go across Smokey Mountain to Lee’s Ferry and south, or whether I will try and cross the river above the San Juan. The water is very low this year. I might even come back through Boulder, so I may not have a post office for a couple of months. I am taking an ample supply of food with me.

  I have had plenty of fun with the boys of this town, riding horses, hunting for arrowheads, and the like. I took a couple of boys to the show last night, Death Takes a Holiday. I liked it as well as the play, enjoying the music especially. This year the pinyon nut crop is unusual, and everyone occupies his leisure time in eating them. This year, the severe drought and the grasshoppers have made a critical situation for the farmers.

  I promised you some pictures and I am sending a few of them now, as it will lighten the load, and they are getting travel stained. They all have faults, but those I like best, and mean to frame for my room later, are Betatakin, Short Cedars, The Pinnacle, Desert Light, Agathla, and Desert Noon.

  I have sold away a few more lately, but I hope you will like those I am sending. As I have more money than I need now, I am sending you ten dollars, and I want both of you to spend five for something you have been wishing to have—books, or a trip, but not anything connected with any kind of a duty. Let this be the first installment on that nickel I promised you when I made my first million.

  I’m also enclosing a couple of clippings which I thought would amuse you. The one about Dwight Morrow made me think of Father, but I think he has outstripped him.

  Tonight I have been sitting by the fire with two of my friends, eating roast venison and baked potatoes. The burro bell is tinkling merrily nearby as Chocolatero crops the alfalfa. I took their shoes off yesterday. Chocolatero is a good burro by now. It was hard to get him across the Colorado River suspension bridge, as he was very frightened by it. A packer dragged him across behind his mule, and he left a bloody track all the way across. Later it was hard to teach him to make the fordings where the water was deep and swift, but now he does not mind.

  So, tomorrow I take the trail again, to the canyons south.

  Love from Everett

  Theater in Escalante.

  In the next letter, he states, “If I had stayed any longer I would have fallen in love with a Mormon girl, but I think it’s a good thing I didn’t. I’ve become a little too different from most of the rest of the world.” No doubt he was attractive to the many young Mormon girls who must have seen in him a youthful, adventurous stranger from outside the remote village. But Everett felt compelled by his nature to frustrate all these women.

  The following letter is also the last—so far as is known—to be received by anyone. We know from later evidence that Everett found his way into Davis Gulch, one of the deep, spectacular side canyons tributary to the Escalante River. Not only was the canyon scenic, it had grass and water for the burros, high sandstone arches, pictographs, and petroglyphs, and it had Indian ruins in large number. It would have been a fascinating place to spend the winter.

  November 11

  Escalante Rim, Utah

  Dear Waldo,

  Your letter of October twelfth reached me a week ago at Bryce Canyon. Since I left Desert View, a riot of adventure and curious experiences have befallen me. To remember back, I have to think of hundreds of miles of trails, through deserts and canyons under vermilion cliffs and through dense, nearly impenetrable forests. As my mind traverses that distance, it goes through a long list of personalities, too.

  But I think I have not written you since I was in the Navajo country, and the strange times I had there and in the sunswept mesas of the Hopis, would stagger me if I tried to convey them. I think there is much in everyone’s life that no one else can ever understand or appreciate, without living through the same experiences, and most could not do that.

  I have had a few narrow escapes from rattlers and crumbling cliffs. The last misadventure occurred when Chocolatero 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.

  I stopped a few days in a little Mormon town and indulged myself in family life, churchgoing, and dances. If I had stayed any longer I would have fallen in love with a Mormon girl, but I think it’s a good thing I didn’t. I’ve become a little too different from most of the rest of the world.

  Tell your friend K.O. Duncan that the burro has been a saddle and pack animal for centuries in almost every country of the world. I have ridden more than a thousand miles on burros myself. Both of my burros were saddle animals of the Navajos when I bought them. In the winter, they ride burros almost exclusively, as the horses are then too weak from lack of feed.

  Do you remember that Sancho Panza rode an ass? If you poke back into the recesses of your mind, you may remember that Christ once rode a donkey. So I’m not the only one.

  As to when I shall visit civilization, it will not be soon, I think. I have not tired of the wilderness; rather I enjoy its beauty and the vagrant life I lead, more keenly all the time. I prefer the saddle to the streetcar and starsprinkled 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. Do you blame me then for staying here, where I feel that I belong and am one with the world around me? It is true that I miss intelligent companionship, but there are so few with whom I can share the things that mean so much to me that I have learned to contain myself. It is enough that I am surrounded with beauty and carry it with me in things that are a constant delight, like my gorgeous Navajo saddle blankets, and the silver bracelet on my wrist, whose three turquoises gleam in the firelight.

  Even from your scant description, I know that I could not bear the routine and humdrum of the life that you are forced to lead. I don’t think I could ever settle down. I have known too much of the depths of life already, and I would prefer anything to an anticlimax. That is one reason why I do not wish to return to the cities. I have been in them before and returned to them before, and I know what they contain. There would have to be some stronger incentive than any I know now to make me want to return to the old ways.

  You said that you could not think what to write of, but I could write pages for every day of my life here.

  A few days ago I rode into the red rocks and sandy desert again, and it was like coming home again. I even met a couple of wandering Navajos, and we stayed up most of the night talking, eating roast mutton with black coffee, and singing songs. The songs of the Navajos express for me something that no other songs do. And now that I know enough of it, it is a real delight to speak in another language.

  I have not seen a human being or any wildlife but squirrels or birds for two or three days. Yesterday was a loss as far as travel was concerned for I got into an impasse in the head of a canyon system, and had to return almost to where I started. Last night I camped under tall pines by a stream that flowed under a towering orange yellow cliff, like a wall against the sky, dwarfing the twisted pines on its summit and the tall straight ones that grew part way up the face of it. It was glorious at sunrise. Today I have ridden over miles of rough country, forcing my way through tall sage and stubborn oak brush, and driving the burros down canyon slopes so steep that they could hardly keep from falling.

  At last I found a trail and have just left it to make dry camp on what seems like the rim of the world. My camp is on the very poin
t of the divide, with the country falling away to the blue horizon on east and west. The last rays of the sun at evening and the first at dawn reach me. Below are steep cliffs where the canyon has cut its way up to the rim of the divide. Northward is the sheer face of Mount Kaiparowits, pale vermilion capped with white, a forested summit. West and south are desert and distant mountains. Tonight the pale crescent of the new moon appeared for a little while, low on the skyline, at sunset. Often as I wander, there are dream-like tinges when life seems impossibly strange and unreal. I think it is, too, only most people have so dulled their senses that they do not realize it.

  It is true that I have been making out pretty well of late. It has been fun to have plenty of spending money, and be able to celebrate and make presents whenever I want to. I have disposed of a good many paintings at odd times. This has been a full, rich year. I have left no strange or delightful thing undone that I wanted to do.

  When my Mormon friends asked me to what church I belonged, I told them that I was a pantheistic hedonist. Certainly you and I have always been hedonists, wishing happiness for each other, as I do now for you.

  It may be a month or two before I have a post office, for I am exploring southward to the Colorado, where no one lives. So, I wish you happiness in California.

  Affectionately,

  Everett

  Wilderness Song

  I have been one who loved the wilderness:

  Swaggered and softly crept between the mountain peaks;

  I listened long to the sea’s brave music;

  I sang my songs above the shriek of desert winds.

  On canyon trails when warm night winds were blowing,

  Blowing, and sighing gently through the startipped pines,

  Musing, I walked behind my placid burro,

  While water rushed and broke on pointed rocks below.

  I have known a green sea’s heaving; I have loved

  Red rocks and twisted trees and cloudless turquoise skies,

  Slow sunny clouds, and red sand blowing.

  I have felt the rain and slept behind the waterfall.

  In cool sweet grasses I have lain and heard

  The ghostly murmur of regretful winds

  In aspen glades, where rustling silver leaves

  Whisper wild sorrows to the green-gold solitudes.

  I have watched the shadowed clouds pile high;

  Singing l rode to meet the splendid, shouting storm

  And fought its fury till the hidden sun

  Foundered in darkness, and the lightning heard my song.

  Say that I starved; that I was lost and weary;

  That I was burned and blinded by the desert sun;

  Footsore, thirsty, sick with strange diseases;

  Lonely and wet and cold, but that I kept my dream!

  Always I shall be one who loves the wilderness:

  Swaggers and softly creeps between the mountain peaks;

  I shall listen long to the sea’s brave music;

  I shall sing my song above the shriek of desert winds.

  —Poem by Everett Ruess

  Escalante Desert, Utah, looking south. Photo by W. L. Rusho.

  * * *

  [18] See letter of 23 March 1933.

  [19] Walter Hampden, whose real name was Walter Hampden Dougherty, was a famous actor who often performed in Shakespearean plays and other well-known productions such as Cyrano de Bergerac, Arsenic and Old Lace, Ethan Frome, and others. He also appeared in various motion pictures. Hampden died in June 1955, at the age of seventy-six.

  [20] Interview with Clayborn Lockett, 29 November 1982.

  [21] Karl W. Luckert, Navajo Mountain and Rainbow Bridge Religion, (Flagstaff, Arizona: Museum of Northern Arizona, 1977), p. 5.

  [22] See Charles L. Bernheimer, Rainbow Bridge (New York: Doubleday, Page, and Co., 1924).

  [23] Two trails reach Rainbow Bridge from the south. From Navajo Mountain Trading Post around the east and north flanks of Navajo Mountain winds the fourteen-mile-long route first used by the Cummings and Douglass discovery expedition of 1909. In 1934, however, Everett hiked from Rainbow Lodge around the west side of Navajo Mountain on the rougher and steeper seven-mile-long trail that had been pioneered by the Bernheimer Expedition of 1922.

  [24] The expedition was entitled the Rainbow Bridge–Monument Valley Expedition, under the general direction of Ansel F. Hall.

  Chapter 7: Missing—Utah: Clues and Frustrations

  Dear Mrs. Ruess,

  That is certainly distressing news. But wanderers like Everett have disappearing habits—and he may yet show up. We wish you luck in your search.

  Yours truly,

  Maynard Dixon

  Not yet midwinter, it was nonetheless cool that Sunday morning, 11 November 1934, Armistice Day, in the little town of Escalante, Utah.

  Most everyone had attended the service or Sunday School at the Mormon church to which virtually the entire village population belonged. In the afternoon, following timehonored routine, women cooked several courses of rich food, children played games, and men prepared their large, farmtype yards and homes for the winter.

  Everett Ruess, a visitor in Escalante on that day, prepared to leave the next day on yet another adventure. Tempting though it was to participate in the social life of the closeknit Mormon community, he felt he should move on. “I would have fallen in love with a Mormon girl,” he wrote, feeling he needed to justify his continuing break from organized society. Just the evening before, he had treated Norm Christensen, one of his newfound young friends, to a showing of Death Takes a Holiday at the local movie theater. He then spent his last night in town, camped under the cottonwoods down by the river, where his two burros munched happily on the long grass, as they had for the past ten days.

  Everett was flattered by the attention he received in Escalante—and in nearby Tropic, before that—from the young boys, from the pretty girls, even from the adults, who opened their homes to him. But Everett was not yet ready for a quiet life of comfortable contemplation, if indeed he ever would be. His choice, perhaps even his destiny, was to be moving on.

  “Following his dream,” he called it in a poem, and his dream was to articulate the wilderness, either in visual works or in words, preferably both. Routine life in the town of Escalante, however friendly, must have seemed the very antithesis of his inner need. So he departed on a bright Sunday morning, through the quiet village streets, riding southeast over rolling, sandy bench lands.

  To Everett’s right rose a mesa with many names. Near the town of Escalante it was called the Escalante Rim, while farther south, where the sheer cliffs rose almost 2,000 feet, it was called the Straight Cliffs. The mesa itself was called FiftyMile Mountain by the residents, but mapmakers titled it Kaiparowits Plateau. In this land of jumbled red rocks and deep narrow canyons, Kaiparowits Plateau was one of the dominant features that could be seen scores of miles away. Another prominent point visible from a distance was Navajo Mountain, rising over 10,000 feet out of a slickrock desert less than twentyfive miles southeast of Kaiparowits.

  Generally, Everett’s road followed near the base of Kaiparowits Plateau, where it headed toward the deep side canyons of the Escalante River, which cut through the rocky land six to twelve miles to the east. The side canyons did not necessarily contain much water. Even though the main canyon was that of a small river, the Escalante almost never flowed more than knee deep. In more watered lands such a small flow would be termed a creek or a brook. Tributaries to the Escalante, in side canyons such as Coyote, Willow, Soda, and Davis, were either dry or ran with barely a shoetop trickle. On bench lands between the canyons lay bare sandstone, broken rock, and thin, dry soil supporting sparse desert vegetation.

  That afternoon Everett, camped beside the road near town, penned long letters to his parents and brother. Mentioned in those letters were plans for his future: first, he wished to redecorate his room in Los Angeles, upon his return; second, and somewhat contradictory, he did not desire to �
��visit civilization”; third, he planned to slowly proceed on south, to cross the Colorado River into the Navajo country, or alternately, he might choose to go north first through Boulder, Utah; fourth, he did not expect to be close to a post office “for a couple of months.” Nothing in his letters would have alarmed his family in any way; his words indicated only a continuation of the vagabondwanderer type of life that Everett had followed off and on for five years.

  Norm Christensen and another boy met Everett for a last evening together around the campfire. Then in the morning Christensen watched him ride slowly away, seated on one burro while leading another.

  At the end of the deadend road that Everett traveled, and just beyond the south end of Kaiparowits Plateau, lay historic Holein-theRock, where Mormon pioneers, “called” by their prophet to emigrate to southeast Utah, spent six weeks in 1879 and 1880 making an incredible wagon road down through a narrow cleft in the cliff to reach and cross the Colorado River. Everett cared little for history, but he could see that the country became more wildly dramatic, more teeming with color and contrast, as he approached Hole-in-the-Rock.

  On Monday, 19 November, when he was about fifty miles from town, Everett came upon two sheepherders, Clayton Porter and Addlin Lay, who were camped near the head of Soda Gulch. Accepting their invitation to join them, Everett stayed not one, but two nights, plying Porter and Lay with questions about the nearby topography. Particularly he wanted to know about the canyons, the trails, the Indian ruins, and scenic points of interest. According to Lay, Everett did not seem curious about either how to cross the Colorado River or about the Navajo country on the other side. When Ruess was ready to leave, the two men offered him a quarter of a mutton, but Everett declined. He said he had a full load of groceries and could not add so much weight.[25]