Finding Everett Ruess

by David Roberts

  The allusion remains cryptic, for Everett never made clear what the change in his life would have been. But the tone of both the October 9 letters is almost conspiratorial against the parents. In the first (as quoted above), Everett writes, “Of course our letters should be strictly personal. Surely mother did not read that last letter, worded as it was?”

  A few paragraphs later, Everett makes another cryptic remark: “My only choice between getting out on my own and going home is the first alternative. I couldn’t go back—not defeated, at least.” One wonders what sort of defeat Everett contemplated. He had already performed a momentous solo journey full of intense experiences and discoveries. The defeat may have been attached to his financial dependence on his parents, for Everett goes on, “In that last letter I told you to tell father to send no money; I wish you had made that clear to him. It might have saved me more trouble than the money saved.”

  Money in fact preoccupied Everett’s worries, and a defensive mixture of pride and shame pierced his sense of entitlement. To Waldo, he reported that in eight months their parents had sent him “only 52 dollars.” He felt that he had to give his brother a full accounting of his finances on the trail.

  I started with 50 dollars, parents sent 52, 35 came from prizes, I procured 15 from various sources.

  I have spent 136 dollars altogether. Considerably more than a third went for equipment—all the rest for food. Needless to say, I have earned dozens and dozens of meals.

  But this reckoning stirred Everett to a sudden fit of anger. “Not for God’s sake,” he wrote, “or yet for Hell’s sake can I sell any of my paintings. The world does not want Art—only the artists do.”

  Everett was not so self-centered as to be oblivious of the Depression in which the country still floundered; his letters mention the poverty of every town he visited, the scarcity of work. Waldo was living at home at the age of twenty-one, taking what stopgap jobs he could find to support himself, while Everett was cruising across the Southwest, trying to “become” an artist. Yet “It is unfair to you to be chained at home,” he wrote to his brother.

  In the second October 9 letter to Waldo, Everett mentioned that he was mailing home “a small pink arrowhead” and the beautiful Anasazi necklace he had dug out of the cliff dwelling in Canyon de Chelly. He also dropped a comment that for Everett’s devotees today still reverberates as a bombshell:

  Whatever I have suffered in the months past has been nothing compared with the beauty in which I have steeped my soul, so to speak. It has been a priceless experience—and I am glad it is not over. What I would have missed if I had ended everything last summer!

  After Everett’s disappearance in 1934, some observers speculated that he might have committed suicide. Seventy-seven years later, there are still theorists who argue that suicide is the most likely explanation of the wanderer’s fate. The paragraph quoted above forms those theorists’ prime piece of evidence. It remains the only extant statement in Everett’s hand that he ever seriously thought about killing himself.

  Most of the summer of 1930, Everett had spent hiking and hitchhiking in California. There is no hint of the suicidal in any of the surviving letters he wrote from Carmel, Big Sur, or Yosemite. Yet the implication of the October 9 passage is not only that Everett had contemplated suicide, but that Waldo knew about it.

  * * *

  Camped on the South Rim, Everett had reached an impasse. In the first of the October 9 letters to Waldo, he complained, “For the present I am stranded here, with no means of moving my equipment. My clothes are fairly well worn out. As soon as I can procure two good burros, which is my greatest concern at present, I’ll be traveling south.”

  What must have stranded Everett was the condition of Pericles. None of the letters mention the old burro breaking down, but after traveling hundreds of miles, including two traverses of the immense gorge of the Grand Canyon, Pericles may have been too worn out to continue. Evidently, Everett abandoned or sold the faithful burro on the South Rim.

  The answer to his logistical woes was to double the number of his pack animals. (Was this the “important change” in his life that he hinted at to Waldo?) The problem was that he couldn’t afford to buy two burros. Swallowing his pride, Everett sent a telegram home begging for money. Loyal as ever, Christopher and Stella sent cash to their prodigal son, but the transaction sparked some hard feelings. On October 23, Everett wrote defensively to his mother, “I could not buy two burros with my ten dollars, so I wired you to send some money. It came this noon, and I felt much better. This is the first time on this trip that I’ve asked you outright for money, and I needed it.”

  Before acquiring his new burros, however, Everett made his way to Mesa, Arizona, probably by hitching a ride with Grand Canyon tourists. Today a suburb of Phoenix, Mesa even in 1931 was far from wilderness. After the solitary remoteness of the Tsegi, Canyon de Chelly, the Grand Canyon, and backcountry Zion, southern Arizona must have seemed bland and civilized to the vagabond.

  From Mesa, Everett made his way east along U.S. Highway 60 to the largely Hispanic mining town of Superior. As Everett wrote his mother, “The Mexicans use burros to haul wood, and there are dozens of them here.” With his new allowance from home, Everett purchased two fresh pack animals, which he named Cynthia and Percival. The bickering with his parents continued. “It hurts me to think you consider me selfish for wanting another burro,” Everett wrote to his mother. And, “Neither Pegasus nor Perry were good burros—they were too old, and suffered under their loads. I had to travel light and carry part of the pack myself.”

  One can hardly blame Christopher and Stella for their resentment. Pinching pennies themselves, they were effectively subsidizing their son to stay away from home as long as he pleased. More than a month after the burro purchase, Everett was still arguing about it with his parents. “[Y]our idea of a burro’s load is hardly correct,” he wrote them on November 28. “The blankets and the canteens alone weigh more than 60 pounds. There is usually a hundred pounds on each burro. When I only had one, he occasionally had a burden of 150 pounds.”

  Through the rest of October and all of November, Everett made minor excursions around the parched hills and scrubby desert east of Phoenix. He visited the Tonto Cliff Dwellings (today, Tonto National Monument) on the Salt River, ruins of villages built not by the Anasazi, but by their contemporary neighbors to the south, the little-known Salado. He fell in with some tourists from New York who were determined to visit an “amethyst mine” in the Four Peaks area just north of the Salt. Everett talked these greenhorns into hiring him to burro-pack their gear for the three-day excursion. Later he used the burros to gather firewood that he sold to other tourists. Money was Everett’s constant concern. On November 13 he wrote Bill Jacobs, “The outlook was quite dismal for a time, but now I am assured of enough to keep me going for a month or so.”

  Those weeks spent in the comparative warmth of the lowland desert lacked the adventurous spark of Everett’s bold wilderness forays during the preceding months. Instead of solitude, he found himself constantly in the company of strangers, some of them interesting. To Jacobs he wrote,

  I have been meeting all types of people—artists, writers, hoboes, cooks, cowmen, miners, bootleggers.… The bootlegger said that as soon as he sold his stock on hand he could offer me a job guarding his still in the mountains and packing barrels to the retreat.

  Nothing came, however, of that odd job offer.

  For a while, Everett pursued an ambitious scheme to make decent money. A shopkeeper named Mr. Dupre encouraged him to transform a drawing Everett had made of the Tonto Cliff Dwellings into mass-produced Christmas cards that the two of them would sell. To do so, however, Everett had to send home the drawing, beseech his mother to make a linoleum block based on it, and then ask her to print a thousand copies. In several letters to Stella, Everett made peremptory demands: “We want this card to be stiff paper, cream color perhaps, and larger than a post card. There must be a thousand envelopes to
o.” Poor Stella dutifully made and sent the blockprint, only to have Everett complain, “The printing is terrible.… There is no use printing the thing unless larger type is used.” In the end, the Christmas cards got made and sent to Arizona, but it seems doubtful that Everett ever sold more than a handful (at the then exorbitant price of forty cents apiece).

  After nearly ten months in the Southwest, Everett still did not want to go home. He had set his heart on wandering indefinitely as he slowly built up a practice as a landscape artist. He shared his dream with Bill Jacobs:

  I am confident that I can make something of my work—the problem is how to keep alive until I have succeeded in a larger measure. My plan is to ramble about the Southwest with donkeys for a couple of years more, gathering plenty of material and mastering water color technique—then to get some windfall so I can work with oils and do things on a larger scale, perfect my field studies, and then do something with what I have.

  Instead, Everett had painted himself into a corner. The only windfall was the dribs and drabs of allowance his indulgent parents kept mailing to him. Everett’s blind idealism kept him from recognizing just how naïve it was for a seventeen-year-old in the middle of the Depression to hope to build a career as an itinerant painter carrying all his belongings on a pair of burros.

  Sending home treasures like the Anasazi arrowhead and necklace was a way of trying to placate his parents. Yet even in this respect, Everett misjudged their tolerance. In October he wrote his mother:

  I now have another trophy to put on the wall of my imaginary studio. It is the skin of a Gila monster which I caught. It took me all morning to separate the skin from the monster, and then it wrinkled when I stretched it. In a few days I will have it dried, and I can send it to you. It should be sewn with fine thread on a piece of felt.

  Throughout his several years of traveling in the Southwest, Everett would gleefully kill every rattlesnake he could find—even though he knew that his mother (an environmentalist before her time) was appalled by that practice. Stella may have been an artist, but it is hard to imagine her making a wall hanging out of a Gila monster skin.

  By the end of November, Everett was reconciled to returning home. “I want to be in the city for a couple of months this winter,” he wrote his parents on November 28, “but I’m not sure just how I’ll get there. I would like to spend hours in a library, and to put some of my sketches in oils.” Not once in his letters home did Everett let down his guard enough to offer his parents or Waldo even a perfunctory gesture of affection, such as “I miss you” or “It’ll be good to see you again.”

  On Thanksgiving Day, feeling a bit sorry for himself, Everett wrote Bill Jacobs, “I suppose you are sitting around a groaning table now while I am all alone in a tent with my feet frozen.” He had a proposition to make. He would give Bill one of his best paintings if he would drive out to Arizona and pick him up. “The proper time for you to arrive here would be December 6th, 8th, 10th, or 12th,” he wrote. “If you drive rapidly, you could be under parental wings again within five or six days.” The edge of annoyance toward the friend who had stood him up in the summer tainted this letter. “Here is how you can earn my everlasting gratitude and respect,” he threatened, “or fail to do so.”

  Jacobs evidently declined. On December 6, Everett wrote a petulant letter to his mother. “I had no intention of paying Bill anything,” he griped. “I told him it was an opportunity for him to earn the picture he has been clamoring for me to give him.” This letter reveals Everett at his most spoiled and selfish. “I wish you would please send me more Christmas cards soon,” he demanded of his mother. “I think I had some unused pieces of linoleum in my droor [sic]. Please send them—large and small, and any others you can spare. If you have an extra carving knife, I’d like to have it.”

  Then, in the next paragraph, “I am not coming home.… I’d never have thought of coming home if you hadn’t spoken of it two or three times.”

  But Everett had nowhere else to go. Toward the end of December, he hitchhiked to Los Angeles. He left his burros, Cynthia and Percival, in Roosevelt, Arizona, entrusting them to a local Apache to keep through the winter. With him on the road, however, Everett brought Curly, the “roly poly puppy with fluffy white fur” he had adopted on the Navajo reservation in April.

  By all indications, Everett returned to Los Angeles in a sullen mood, weighed down by a crushing sense of failure. Yet he had behind him an exploratory adventure the likes of which few Americans so young had ever accomplished. In ten months he had traveled perhaps a thousand miles on foot, most of it solo, and seen more obscure and beautiful corners of the wilderness than other devotees of the canyon country do in a lifetime.

  Of Everett’s next three months at home with his family, we know almost nothing, except that he could not wait to get back to the Southwest. By the end of March 1932, he had arrived in Roosevelt once more, ready to reclaim his burros and hit the trail. Ahead of Everett lay another aimless but purposeful pilgrimage.

  THREE

  “The Crazy Man Is in Solitude Again”

  IN THE CHRONICLES OF AMERICAN HISTORY, a quest such as the one Everett Ruess had launched in the Southwest in 1931 was virtually unique. Few vagabonds before him had attempted anything comparable.

  Most of the great explorations of the terrain that would become the fifty United States had been undertaken by well-organized teams. On the traverse of the continent led by Lewis and Clark between 1804 and 1806, thirty-three men served in various capacities, and the team was famously aided by the Shoshone woman Sacajawea. On the five expeditions led by John C. Frémont between 1842 and 1853, the man later known as the Pathfinder and hailed by his foremost biographer as “The West’s Greatest Adventurer” never set out into the field with fewer than fifteen accomplices.

  Among Ruess’s predecessors, it was the mountain men hunting beaver across the West between 1806 and 1840 who were closest in spirit to the wanderer from California. We know very little about those bold explorers because most of them were illiterate, and nearly all of them thought their deeds were not worth recording. It was not unusual, however, for a trapper to set off into the wilds by himself, and some of the mountain men began their careers at relatively tender ages.

  The template for solo discovery among those fearless wanderers was set by John Colter between 1806 and 1808. An ace hunter on the Lewis and Clark expedition, Colter was so little fazed by the hardships of that monumental voyage that on the way home, in what is now North Dakota, he asked to be discharged early so that he could turn around and guide a pair of trappers who had showed up in the government camp back into the regions mapped by Lewis and Clark. During the winter of 1807–8, traveling alone, Colter became the first Anglo-American to discover the thermal wonders of Yellowstone. His reports of geysers, hot springs, and lava pools were almost universally discounted as nonsense, and for a while the unknown region was nicknamed Colter’s Hell.

  Even before Colter, a visionary Dartmouth College student named John Ledyard dropped out of school in 1773, at the age of twenty-one, and rode a canoe he had fashioned out of a fallen log down the Connecticut River to his grandfather’s farm. His appetite whetted by this minor voyage, three years later Ledyard joined Captain James Cook’s third expedition into the Pacific Ocean. During his four years before the mast, Ledyard participated in the European discovery of Hawaii, where his commander was killed by natives.

  In Paris in 1786, encouraged by the American ambassador, Thomas Jefferson, Ledyard concocted a wild plan to travel from London across Europe, traversing Russia, crossing the Bering Strait, traipsing south through Alaska and Canada, and resurfacing in Jefferson’s Virginia. Ledyard made it as far as Siberia before he was arrested and deported by Catherine the Great.

  Two years later, Ledyard proposed a traverse of Africa from the Red Sea to the Atlantic Ocean. He got only as far as Cairo, however, before he came down with a mysterious illness, of which he died at the untimely age of thirty-seven. The unmarked
grave in which he was buried on the banks of the Nile is lost to posterity.

  Explorers, surveyors, mountain men, and miners were the first Anglo-Americans to penetrate most of the remote regions of the American wilderness. But nearly all these men had utilitarian motives—to claim land for the United States, to scout a railroad route, to find gold, or to bring back beaver pelts to be converted into stylish top hats. An explorer venturing out for purely aesthetic reasons was a much rarer creature.

  In this respect, the two renowned American lovers of the outdoors who most closely prefigure Everett Ruess are Henry David Thoreau and John Muir. For Thoreau, walking through the woods or along the seashore (much of his rambling performed alone) was a direct conduit to the metaphysical insights that stitch together his quirky and inimitable books. Like Ruess, Thoreau had a keen eye for nature on its most intimate scale: just as Everett in Yosemite could attentively study the flitting of water bugs on the surface of a stream pool, so Thoreau, strolling the shore of Walden Pond, could observe how “the bullfrogs trump to usher in the night, and the note from the whip-poor-will is borne on the rippling wind from over the water. Sympathy with the fluttering alder and poplar leaves almost takes away my breath.”

  But Thoreau did not really launch his celebrated wanderings until he was in his late twenties. The Walden experiment began in the summer of 1845, when Thoreau was twenty-eight, and his most daring excursion, an early ascent of Mount Katahdin in Maine, came the following year. Nor did any of Thoreau’s expeditions quite compare in ambition or sheer distances covered to the ten-month voyage Everett had made at age seventeen.

  John Muir, whose journeys equaled and even exceeded Everett’s in boldness, did not get started as a wanderer before the age of twenty-six, when he made an extended plant-collecting journey along the shores of Lake Huron. Muir’s personal discovery of Yosemite, the landscape with which he is most often associated in the public mind, came at age thirty.