Finding Everett Ruess

by David Roberts

  He had sold a couple of pictures to an eccentric hermit, Everett reported. With the letter, he also sent home a painting he had made of several houses in the Hopi village of Oraibi.

  After Everett’s disappearance, some of the searchers held out hope that if they failed to find the young man, they might at least discover the camera he had carried with him throughout his 1934 journey. Developing the last pictures Everett had taken might furnish clues to his fate. But in the November 4 letter, he had dashed such hopes: “I sent back the kodak because it has not been working well and is an extra expense and weight.” (The letter was published in On Desert Trails in 1940, but with this key sentence omitted. The full text was not published until 1983, in Rusho’s A Vagabond for Beauty.)

  Much as he enjoyed the Copes’ hospitality and the social life of Tropic, Everett was eager to push on. With the ranger he discussed in detail his plan to pass through the town of Escalante, thirty-eight miles east of Tropic, then push on down the lonely Hole-in-the-Rock Trail toward the Colorado River. To his parents, he explained, “The weather has been delightful, although I was in one snow flurry on the Paunsagunt Plateau [west of Bryce]. Now I am heading across the pink cliffs toward Escalante and the lower country toward the river.”

  The logical route would have taken Everett from Tropic along the valley bottom of the Paria River, through the tiny Mormon towns of Cannonville and Henrieville, then northeast over a low divide to the headwaters of the Escalante. Today’s State Highway 12 follows this path. Yet it seems unlikely that Everett took that route, for in a letter to his parents mailed from Escalante, Everett described “a truly delightful trip over the mountains, finding my way without any trails.”

  In Escalante, Everett camped beside the river, rode horseback with the local boys, hunted for arrowheads with them, and treated the boys to his campfire dinner of venison and potatoes. With the ranchers he discussed his plans for the coming weeks, maintaining his insouciant poise in the face of their skepticism. On his last night in town, he took several of the boys to the movie theater. The next day, as he rode away down the Hole-in-the-Rock Trail, he left everyone who had met him in Escalante with indelible memories of his brief visit.

  Before he left, Everett mailed his last two letters, one to his parents, one to Waldo. In Vagabond, Rusho heads them both “November 11,” and calls the letter to Waldo “the last—so far as is known—to be received by anyone.” This is the sequence that ought to have been, for the letter to Waldo is one of the deepest Everett ever wrote, and in light of his disappearance, it has a prophetic power.

  But Everett actually wrote to his brother a few days before he wrote to his parents. The letter Christopher and Stella received is dated

  November 11

  Escalante, Utah.

  The one to Waldo:

  November the? 1934

  Escalante Rim, Utah.

  Internal evidence gives us a more precise date. To Waldo, Everett wrote, “Tonight the pale crescent of the new moon appeared for a little while, low on the skyline, at sunset.” A new moon in 1934 occurred on November 6. The pale crescent Everett observed would have been visible only from November 8 to 10. His camp on the “Escalante Rim” was probably pitched near the divide separating the Paria and Escalante drainages, at least a dozen miles west of the town.

  With the letter to his parents, Everett sent home yet more paintings. His subjects ranged from the volcanic pinnacle of Agathla to the Anasazi ruin of Betatakin. The best of the lot, he wrote, “I … mean to frame for my room.” In this phrase there is a hint of an anticipated return to Los Angeles. But at the same time, Everett wanted no more handouts from his parents. To the contrary,

  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 duty. Let this be the first installment on that nickel I promised you when I made my first million.

  As he wrote the letter, Everett was sitting by his campfire beside the Escalante River, cooking dinner with two of his youthful new friends. Turning his thoughts to his burros, he recounted a problem that would have a crucial bearing on the search for Everett after he disappeared:

  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.

  In mid-November, with the leaves mostly dead on the trees, winter was not far away. But Everett had no plans to curtail his journey. In the letter to his parents he outlined various plans for the coming months, in a passage that would be pored over by Ruess partisans for decades:

  I am going south towards the [Colorado] 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.

  The letter to Waldo, to whom Everett had not written since August 29, tries to summarize the doings of his last two months, while at the same time insisting on the impossibility of sharing them with others.

  Since I left Desert View, a riot of adventures and curious experiences have befallen me. To remember back, I have to think of hundreds of miles of trails, thru deserts and canyons, under vermilion cliffs and thru dense, nearly impenetrable forests. As my mind traverses that distance, it goes thru 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 everyones life that no one else can ever understand or appreciate.

  To his brother, Everett confided an intimacy from his visit to Tropic that he had not told his parents about: “I stopped a few days in a little Mormon town and indulged myself in family life, church going, 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.” After the Ruess cult had gathered momentum, locals in Tropic and Escalante would trade speculations as to who the Mormon girl was, but Everett had been too shy in his attentions for an obvious candidate to emerge.

  With these declarations, it seems, the wilderness loner emerged full-blown. As he had done several times in the past, Everett turned his pride toward a haughty dismissal of Waldo’s way of subsistence: “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.”

  Somewhere between Tropic and Escalante, Everett had shared a camp with a pair of Indians:

  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.

  In the 1930s, Navajos from the reservation crossed the Colorado River every autumn to trade for horses in and around Escalante. Everett’s fraternization with these indigenes would also play a role in the theories about his fate.

  The November letter to Waldo has a valedictory tone throughout, as if he were composing a testament for eternity.

  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.…

  This has been a full, rich year. I have left no strange or delightful thing undone that I wanted to do.

  And it contains the single paragraph that, more than anything else Everett ever
wrote, has come to stand as the eloquent manifesto for his vagabond life:

  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 street car and the star sprinkled 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.

  Everett closed this passionate and oracular letter with a sentence about his future plans that has haunted his devotees ever since: “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.”

  A week later, more than fifty miles down the Hole-in-the-Rock Trail, Everett bumped into the sheepherders, Addlin Lay and Clayton Porter. For two nights he shared their camp near the head of Soda Gulch. On the morning of November 21, as Everett prepared to push on, the men offered him a quarter of mutton, which he declined, telling them he had plenty of food. They watched as he ambled away to the southeast with his burros, Cockleburrs and Chocolatero.

  As far as we know—which is not nearly far enough—that was the last time anyone ever saw Everett Ruess.

  Portrait of Everett Ruess at age nineteen, shot by Dorothea Lange in San Francisco in late autumn, 1933. (Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California)

  Everett’s mother, Stella Ruess, in front of the family house in Los Angeles. (Courtesy of the Ruess family)

  Family gathering in Los Angeles, ca. 1924. Left to right: Stella, Waldo, Christopher, Everett. (Courtesy of the Ruess family)

  Everett (left), Waldo, and Stella pose with the family automobile, a Dodge they named Dorinda, ca. 1929. (Courtesy of the Ruess family)

  A young Everett receives an art lesson from professional sculptor Edith May. (Courtesy of the Ruess family)

  Everett reading at home in Los Angeles, ca. 1929. (Courtesy of the Ruess family)

  Everett with the burro he named after himself and Curly, the rez dog, somewhere in the Southwest, 1931. (Special Collections, the J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah)

  Everett leads Curly and his burro along an exposed trail in Zion National Park, 1931. (Special Collections, the J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah)

  Everett and Waldo with Curly, at home in Los Angeles, late 1931 or early 1932. (Courtesy of the Ruess family)

  Everett with his burros, Nuflo and Jonathan, in Canyon de Chelly, 1932, shortly before Jonathan’s death. (Courtesy of the Ruess family)

  Everett in front of a hogan on the Navajo reservation, date unknown. (Courtesy of the Ruess family)

  Everett exploring a cliff dwelling, probably in Mesa Verde, 1932. (Courtesy of the Ruess family)

  Everett standing on his burro’s back, Sierra Nevada, 1933. (Courtesy of the Ruess family)

  Everett at a lake in the high Sierra Nevada, 1933. (Courtesy of the Ruess family)

  Everett and Clay Lockett (shirtless) pack a burro up the old Navajo trail to Woodchuck Cave, Tsegi Canyon, 1934. (Courtesy of Fort Lewis College, Center of Southwest Studies, Ansel Hall Photograph Collection)

  The search party emerges from Davis Gulch, spring 1935. (Special Collections, the J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah)

  PART TWO

  Say That I Kept My Dream

  SIX

  Nemo

  TWO MONTHS PASSED WITH NO WORD from Everett to his parents or his brother. The family, however, was not troubled, for in his Escalante letters, Everett had warned them, as he had written Waldo, that “It may be a month or two before I have a post office.”

  As soon as she received the paintings Everett had mailed home with his November 11 letter, Stella had them matted and framed. For her, the act may have had a tinge of wishful magic about it—as if preparing the bedroom she and Christopher kept for their younger son (his artwork hanging on its walls, as Everett had hinted he would like) might hasten his return.

  Meanwhile, Waldo had found new employment as a secretary for a religious mission. The posting would take him much farther from Los Angeles than his water company job in San Bernardino had, for the mission was based in China. On December 17 his parents parted with Waldo as he boarded a ship in the Los Angeles harbor. Stella, who kept a five-year diary, with space for only a few sentences each day, wrote, “[W]ent to see W. off, & then went to Krese home [friends of the family] & held candles in the window as the boat went out of the harbor. Good-bye for how long?”

  From mid-November through January, Stella and Christopher wrote letters to Everett. They mailed them to Bryce Canyon National Park, probably because Everett had written warmly about his friendship with Maurice Cope, the park’s chief ranger, and they hoped that their son might resurface there.

  By the end of January, however, still having received no answer from Everett, Christopher and Stella were growing worried. To be sure, during his previous journeys their footloose son had sometimes been out of touch for more than a month at a time. But not for two and a half months, and not in the dead of winter.

  Sometime that winter, the letters that had fetched up at Bryce were forwarded to Marble Canyon, Arizona—the nearest post office to Lee’s Ferry, one of the possible destinations of his upcoming rambles that Everett had mentioned in his November 11 letter. The postmistress at Marble, Florence Lowry, waited for what she called “a reasonable time” for the letters to be picked up, then, in early February 1935, returned them to their senders. When Christopher and Stella received their own missives, still sealed in their envelopes, their faint malaise burst into full-blown alarm. They wrote at once to Lowry. She replied, “I am sorry I have not seen or heard of your son. I have made inquiry of everyone near here and havent found anyone who has seen him.” Lowry added, “The country north of here is very wild and arid and it was ill advised of anyone to start with out a guide but if your son was an experienced camper he will no doubt come through all right.”

  At the same time as they wrote to Lowry, Everett’s parents sent off a query to the postmistress in Escalante. She turned this plea over to her husband, Jennings Allen, a local rancher and county commissioner. He wrote back to the Ruesses, offering to instigate a search, as he vowed, “We will search for him as though he were our son.”

  Between February 11 and 25, Christopher and Stella wrote letters to the postmasters of every town in the Southwest that they knew their son had visited during his three seasons of vagabondage in the region. They also wrote to the sheriffs of every county Everett had passed through, to Anglo traders on the Navajo reservation, to Indian agents, forest rangers, and newspapers and radio stations. These anguished appeals typically began,

  Dear Sir:

  Can you help us?

  Have you seen or heard of our son?

  There followed a precise physical description of the missing twenty-year-old.

  In these letters, Christopher and Stella tried to balance their fears with faith in their son’s wilderness skills:

  Everett is not inexperienced as he has lived this way in the mountains for four seasons, but not during December and January. He may have travelled into great danger, and we hope you can … tell us how to find trace of him. Do you send out notices, or is there a plane that searches for lost people?

  The responses from agents, sheriffs, traders, and the like were uniformly diligent and compassionate. But the sum total of their information about the vagabond’s whereabouts was zero. And so, Christopher and Stella’s alarm began to deepen with the edge of grief.

  Maurice Cope sent a long letter from Bryce Canyon in which he summarized his discussions with Everett the previous November as to how he planned to pursue his journey beyond Escalante:

  He had with him a gun, plenty of ammunition, a compass etc. We discussed the condition of Fifty Mile Mountain [Kaiparowits Plateau] during the winter months its height 7000 feet etc.…

  When he left here, he did not intend going over the mountain, but keep un
der the mountain near the river where the elevation is only 3500 feet and there is never enough snow to bother.

  Christopher and Stella wrote to Waldo in China. The letters took weeks to arrive, but Everett’s brother promptly answered each one. At first he strove for an upbeat outlook. On March 12, sixteen days before Everett’s twenty-first birthday, Waldo wrote,

  First of all, I want to wish Everett a happy “Coming of Age.” This will probably arrive a few days after his birthday but the sentiments are there. I do hope that I will hear from him some time this year!

  I wish I were there; I would certainly go out to try to find him. But since I have had no word from you and your letter is now 3 weeks old I presume everything is all right.

  The word of Everett’s having gone missing leaked out to the press. A Los Angeles newspaper picked up the story as early as February 14. Reports of Everett’s disappearance eventually spread across the United States, via Associated Press and United Press dispatches.

  On February 22, out of the blue, Stella received a telegram from someone signing himself Captain Neal Johnson:

  WILL CONDUCT SEARCH YOUR REQUEST. KNOW INDIAN SCOUTS. KNOW REGION WELL. NO WATER EXCEPT SNOW. IF LOST CAN BE FOUND. SNOW MELT SOON. NO WATER, WILL PERISH. SEARCH MUST START IMMEDIATELY.… WILL CONDUCT SEARCH FOR EXPENSES FOR INDIAN SCOUTS ONLY.