Finding Everett Ruess

by David Roberts

  In July 1934, Lockett’s team had returned to Kayenta from the Tsegi Canyon system to resupply before tackling a remote cliff site they had discovered earlier in the summer. In Dowozhiebito Canyon, six hundred feet above a well-known Anasazi ruin called Twin Caves Pueblo, just beneath the rim of Skeleton Mesa, the team had found a Basketmaker burial cave. (The Basketmakers were the phase of Anasazi before AD 750, who built not masoned roomblocks such as their descendants specialized in, but underground pithouses and slab-lined storage cists.) “Its discovery,” as Lockett later wrote of the new ruin, “was the result of a Sunday climb by some of the more daring members of the Expedition who worked out two routes up the cliff to the cave. The more hazardous parts of both routes were found to have hand- and toeholds pecked into the cliff, evidence that the trails were used in prehistoric times.”

  Hand-and-toe trails carved with pounding stones into the surface of sheer cliffs, or “Moqui steps,” as the cowboys called them, were an Anasazi staple—treacherous shortcuts to high places that the ancients seem to have used blithely for commuter runs. The trails are especially numerous (and terrifying) in the Tsegi system. But this was the kind of sport that Everett reveled in: the “crumbling sandstone and nearly vertical angles” to which he boasted of trusting his life again and again comprised many a scary Anasazi hand-and-toe trail.

  The team eventually named the new site Woodchuck Cave, after they found woodchuck bones in a pair of cists, “probably,” Lockett wrote, “the first record of this mammal in Arizona.” The official report on the excavation was not published until 1953, or nineteen years after the dig. In it, Lockett (and Hargrave, his nominal coauthor) fail to mention Everett’s participation in the expedition, omitting his name from the list of personnel.

  Everett, however, was enthralled by the more than two weeks he spent with the team, as he absorbed a crash course in Anasazi prehistory. “We have been in the cave for four days now,” he wrote to his parents on July 22.

  There is a very precarious way down the face of the cliff with footholds in the stone hundreds of years old. The only other way is the horse ladder, six miles up the canyon. We came that way with pack burros, passing the carcass of a horse that slipped. After two days of wandering on the mesa top, in the trackless forests, we crossed the bare rock ledges in a heavy cloudburst and came here.

  Several photos survive showing a shirtless Clay Lockett and Everett tugging the burros up the horse ladder. They rank among the finest pictures known of Everett in action in the wilderness. The photographer was apparently another member of the team.

  Woodchuck Cave was not, on the face of it, a prepossessing site. The small, low-roofed alcove enclosed not a single habitation structure, but only some fifteen slab-lined cists sunk in the earthen floor. It was the contents of those cists that proved astounding and perplexing. Along with animal bones, pieces of woven baskets, yucca sandals, and a few other artifacts, including wooden dice, the team discovered the whole or partial remains of twenty human beings, seven of them infants. These included not only skeletons but naturally mummified bodies. The burials were identified as belonging to the Basketmaker II period, dating between 1200 BC and AD 500. Everett reported that Lockett dated the cave around AD 500, but the 1953 monograph fixes the date as AD 200, plus or minus one hundred years.

  Nearly all the bodies had been placed in classic Anasazi burial positions, lying on their backs or sides with knees flexed upward in front of the chest. What stunned the researchers, however, was the discovery that all of the adults had been beheaded. All the skulls were missing, and only four partial mandibles could be found.

  In their 1953 report, Lockett and Hargrave did not speculate what the grisly beheading might have signified, except to say that it looked as though later pillagers had ransacked the graves not for jewelry but for the bones themselves. (Along with the skulls, many long leg bones were missing.)

  No further excavation of Woodchuck Cave has ever been undertaken, and during the last seven decades it is unlikely that more than a small handful of hikers, if any, have ever found their way into the inaccessible burial chamber.

  Digging up dead people didn’t bother Everett at all. During his weeks of cooking for the team, as he was paid only in free meals, he got along famously with the crew. “We have great fun up here by ourselves,” he wrote his parents, “discovering something new every day, and looking out over everything from our sheltered cave.” He retained an admiration for Clay Lockett.

  That feeling, evidently, was not reciprocated. Lockett would drift away from field archaeology, the Woodchuck Cave bulletin his only serious publication. He served briefly as director of the Arizona State Museum, then for a longer time was in charge of the gift shop at the Museum of Northern Arizona. He died in 1984. His obituary identified him as an “Indian trader, lecturer, and authority on Southwestern Indian arts.”

  Two years before Lockett’s death, in 1982, researching A Vagabond for Beauty, Bud Rusho interviewed the man, then seventy-six years old. Lockett’s recollections of Everett were consistently unflattering. In Rusho’s paraphrase,

  Everett did not impress Lockett with his interest in archaeology, for Ruess spent most of his free time, which was considerable, in gazing out over the landscape. Lockett noticed also that Everett seemed careless about his safety when climbing around cliffs, citing as an example the time Everett wanted to make a watercolor sketch of rain-spawned waterfalls shooting off from several points. According to Lockett, Everett nearly got himself killed finding a vantage point on the wet slickrock. Needless to say, the rain-streaked watercolor sketch was not one of his better efforts.

  Lockett is also the sole source for the tradition that John Wetherill was put off by the young vagabond. Again in Rusho’s paraphrase, “[I]t has been reported that Wetherill had little respect for Everett, whom he considered a ‘pest’ who would simply hang around [the trading post] for days seeking information and conversation, but who would buy nothing.”

  Given that in 1935 Wetherill put considerable effort into guiding searchers as to where to look for the lost wanderer, this judgment seems dubious. Lockett was, as Everett had noted, “something of an artist.” He may even have been envious of the twenty-year-old camp cook’s talent as a painter.

  By the end of the RB-MV dig, in early August, Everett had been in the Southwest for four months. But his 1934 journey was just getting started. From the Tsegi he decided to head south across Black Mesa to visit the Hopi villages, where he had stopped briefly on the way to the Grand Canyon in June 1931.

  On that first visit, Everett had not been impressed by the Hopi villages atop the three parallel mesas facing south. All he wrote home about Hotevilla and Oraibi was a complaint about heat and dust, and ancient Walpi, with its incongruous mix of stonemasoned houses and fences made of old bedsteads, had seemed “rather a disillusionment.” But in the succeeding three years, Everett had matured as a connoisseur of Native American cultures. His encounter with the Hopi in 1934 would prove far more consequential, both for himself and for the hosts who welcomed him into their villages.

  In August, Everett had learned, the Hopi performed their rain dances. By the 1930s a small number of Anglo cognoscenti made journeys to attend these sacred rituals, marveling at the gaudy and esoteric panoramas that unfurled in the courtyards of old villages. And during that era, the Hopi themselves were far more welcoming to outsiders than they are today (most of the sacred dances are now closed to Anglo spectators).

  Everett did not write home again until August 25. The day before, he had watched the Snake Dance in Hotevilla, a village on the Third Mesa that had been founded in 1907 by a group of natives who had seceded from Oraibi, resolving a religious schism that had threatened to tear apart what is often called the oldest continuously inhabited settlement in the United States. Hotevilla was thus one of the more “progressive” Hopi towns, in which Everett seemed to have been openly accepted as a guest. “I have been having great fun with the Hopis here,” he wrote his parents
, “and just finished a painting of the village. The children were clustered all around me, some helping and some hindering.”

  A week later, in the Hopi village of Mishongnovi on the Second Mesa, Everett not only watched but participated in the Antelope Dance. This was a singular honor for a white visitor, but Everett seems to have taken the privilege almost for granted. “[M]y Hopi friends painted me up and had me in their Antelope Dance,” he wrote his parents on September 10. “I was the only white person there.” In the next breath, he added, “Killed two rattlers the other day. One struck before I saw him. I caught the other alive. Sold a print yesterday.”

  As these passages indicate, by this point at the end of summer, Everett’s letters home had grown short and laconic. It was as if he was so caught up in the ceaseless novelty of his adventure that he had little energy or time left to craft the fine writing, the evocations of natural beauty, that he had poured into his correspondence earlier during the journey. At the same time, Everett was growing more independent of his family than ever. It would not be until November that he again made the effort to share his deepest thoughts with Waldo, Christopher, and Stella.

  On September 9, Everett arrived at Desert View, the tourist center on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. A few days before, descending a steep trail into the canyon of the Little Colorado River, he had suffered a mishap that could have spelled the end of his 1934 expedition. Two years before, when his packhorse Jonathan collapsed and died near the head of Canyon del Muerto, Everett had recorded the tragedy in vivid emotional detail in his diary, and also in a letter to Bill Jacobs. It may be that Everett’s 1934 diary contained an equally vivid account of the disaster in the Little Colorado. But the only record of it that survives is a single, understated line in a letter to his parents: “Lost a burro (Leopard) down Little Colorado Canyon the other day, with some of the pack, but have already replaced him with a bigger burro.”

  The new pack animal, which Everett bought from a Navajo woman for nine dollars, he first named Chocolate (presumably for his coloring), later modified to Chocolatero. “He is young, strong, and good natured,” he wrote to his mother, “inexperienced, but bound to learn from his experienced comrade.”

  Thanks to the scarcity of surviving letters, we have no idea what Everett accomplished in the Grand Canyon between the end of August and the middle of October, when he finally pushed on north toward Utah. The only episode he narrates was a visit to Clay Lockett in Flagstaff. Apparently the twenty-eight-year-old archaeologist and his twenty-year-old camp cook were still on good terms, for Lockett had invited Everett to stay at his house. South of Flagstaff, Everett wandered up and down the sinuous bends of Oak Creek Canyon, which inspired him to pull out his watercolor kit. “In Oak Creek Canyon I painted a couple of striking effects of brilliantly lighted buttes against inky storm skies,” he wrote his mother sometime in September. “Also a massive tower, calmly beautiful under shadowing clouds.”

  In 1982, Lockett recalled Everett’s visit in ambivalent terms. In Bud Rusho’s paraphrase,

  Clay Lockett’s income, in 1934, was only about $30 a month, supplemented by his garden and a few chickens. Everett’s big appetite was not welcomed, especially by Lockett’s wife, Florence, who informed her husband, half in jest, after a week of having Everett as a guest, “Either he leaves or I do!” Lockett then tactfully suggested to Everett that he visit Oak Creek Canyon—immediately.

  Yet the archaeologist and his wife were surprised when, on his return from Oak Creek, Everett gave each of them a book.

  Lockett concluded that Everett was not trying to take advantage of them but was simply a “free spirit,” who did not worry about the complexities of social behavior, and who simply “loved the Navajos and everybody, loved animals, burros, dogs, kids, and everything.” Everett himself, says Lockett, was a “strange kid.”

  Back at Desert View on the South Rim in late September, Everett was surprised to find a letter from Ned Frisius, one of the two Hollywood High School boys with whom he had climbed Mount Whitney the previous summer. The letter Everett wrote in response on September 27 has survived, no doubt a gift from Frisius to the family after Everett disappeared. In it the vagabond recounts a strange episode in his 1934 travels that is preserved in no other document—nor can we guess where or at what point during the previous six months the episode occurred.

  Evidently you overheard something of my adventures with my friends the Indians. I have a great time with them, especially the Navajos. I once spent three days far up in a desert canyon, assisting and watching a Navajo sing for a sick woman. I drove away countless hordes of evil spirits, but after I went away the girl died. The sand paintings, seldom seen by white men, were gorgeous.

  There is no evidence that Everett ever made up imaginary adventures to regale his friends and family with. He may have exaggerated here and there, but he had no trace of the liar about him, or even of the spinner of tall tales. Yet this Navajo scenario is so unusual that it must bespeak a profound trust that Everett had won from natives somewhere in Arizona. For a traditional family—and any Navajos living “far up in a desert canyon” were traditional—to let an Anglo see the sand paintings that a medicine man would have composed on the ground, and then effaced shortly after they were finished, would have been extraordinary. And to let that Anglo not only attend but participate in a sing intended to cure a fatally ill woman would have been even more extraordinary.

  From a few summary judgments in Everett’s letters written between August and November, we can be certain that the adventures he underwent were dramatic and even dangerous. To Waldo on August 19, he wrote, “I have seen more wild country than on any previous trip. I almost lost one burro in the quicksands—he was in up to his neck.…” To Ned Frisius on September 27, “In my wanderings this year I have taken more chances and had more and wilder adventures than ever before. And what magnificent country I have seen.”

  Maddeningly, though, we have almost no idea what the actual content of those “wild adventures” was. No doubt Everett spelled them out in rich detail in the pages of his diary. But the diary is forever lost.

  We cannot even be sure of Everett’s itinerary after he left the Grand Canyon in mid-October. In Vagabond, Rusho guesses at it, surmising that Everett traveled north along the route of today’s U.S. Highway 89, crossed the suspension bridge over the Colorado River at Navajo Bridge, then traversed the Kaibab Plateau into Utah as he made his way to Bryce Canyon National Park. An October 15 letter to his mother lists his next post office as Ruby’s Inn, Utah—the nearest lodging to Bryce, just west of its western gateway.

  During these weeks of travel, Everett had begun to taste a little success as a commercial artist. Able at last to envision real independence from the financial support of his parents, he proudly tried to push aside the stipends Christopher and Stella unfailingly mailed to their wandering son. Sometime in September, from Flagstaff, Everett wrote to his mother, “I’ve sold a number of pictures lately, and you won’t have to worry about me much longer. In fact you can discontinue m.o.’s [money orders] any time you want to. I received the one for 15 early this month, but nothing since.” And then on October 1, to both parents, almost in annoyance, “Evidently you didn’t have my last letter. I don’t want you to send any more money, as I can get along alright and you really need it. I have twelve dollars due me for a picture I made a while ago.”

  It was not only his parents’ money Everett was pushing away—it was his parents themselves. The glum conclusion he had come to in May, that “I am torn by the knowledge that what I have felt cannot be given to another,” that if he had to choose between beauty and friendship he would choose beauty, now had the ring in his ears of triumphant freedom. The solitary wandering artist had at last come into his own. And there is no indication in any of the 1934 letters that Everett envisioned an end to his present expedition.

  We know that Everett reached Bryce Canyon and spent time there, for he befriended the chief ranger, Maurice Cope. But
as early as August 19, in his letter to Waldo from Kayenta, Everett had imagined a journey stretching beyond Bryce into yet another wilderness that was unknown to him: “My plans are not definite, but I think I shall go to the Grand Canyon from the Hopi country, and maybe spend the winter exploring around Thunder River or the Kaiparowitz [sic] Plateau and Straight Cliffs.”

  The Thunder River is a short, steep, spectacular canyon tributary to the Colorado on the north side of the Grand Canyon. It is unlikely that Everett ever made his way into it. But when he was last seen by anyone, in November 1934, he was leading his burros southeast along the Hole-in-the-Rock Trail, with the massive Straight Cliffs looming above him on the right as they soared toward the summit of Kaiparowits Plateau.

  * * *

  The last three letters Everett sent home diverge abruptly from the laconic shorthand of his previous efforts. The first, to his parents, was written on November 4 from the Mormon town of Tropic, the first settlement south of Bryce. Maurice Cope, the head ranger, himself a Mormon, had invited Everett to stay for a few days at his home in Tropic, with his wife and nine children. The mood of the letter is ebullient, as Everett admits to having “great fun” with the locals. “This morning I rode out with one of the boys to look for a cow,” he elaborates. “We rode all over the hills, and stopped at an orchard to load up with apples. Then I went to church, my first time in a Mormon church. It was an interesting experience.”

  In a postscipt, Everett revels in “more fun—apple fights, church, and until about morning we amused ourselves with some Navajos who were camped nearby.” For his parents, Everett conjured up the beauty of the “grotesque and colorful formations” through which he had ridden on his way south from Bryce, in a way that he had not bothered to in months. “Mother would surely enjoy the trees,” he wrote; “they are fascinating, especially the twisted little pines and junipers. I had never seen the foxtail pine before.”