Finding Everett Ruess

by David Roberts

  Two other echoes may help explain Everett’s choice of a last pseudonym. In June 1934 he had traversed No Mans Mesa, one of the most remote places on the Navajo Reservation, almost losing his burro Leopard in the process. From a camp just west of the mesa, he had written his declaration to Bill Jacobs, “The perfection of this place is one reason why I distrust ever returning to the cities. Here I wander in beauty and perfection. There one walks in the midst of ugliness and mistakes.” And at the end of his letter to Waldo from Escalante, Everett had signed off, “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.” (“Nemo” is usually translated as “no one” or “nobody,” not the more specific “no man.”)

  By now, both NEMO inscriptions in Davis Gulch lie under water, drowned after 1957 by the rising waters of Lake Powell following the construction of the Glen Canyon Dam. But nobody seriously doubts that the two signatures were Everett’s work. The single Latin name and the date stand, forever enigmatic and portentous, as Everett’s last words to the world.

  * * *

  Agonizing in Los Angeles over their missing son, Christopher and Stella Ruess felt the need to act. On June 21, 1935, they set out on a trip by automobile to northern Arizona and southern Utah. They brought with them a number of Everett’s paintings. Their aim was not to try to find the lost youth on their own so much as to visit the places that he had cared about so passionately, and to meet some of the people who had crossed Everett’s path.

  Navigating the Southwest from the Grand Canyon to Bryce Canyon, from Kayenta, Arizona, to Panguitch, Utah, Christopher and Stella conferred with all kinds of men and women with whom Everett had shared his thoughts and plans during the seven months before he disappeared. Stella kept a diary separate from her five-year journal during this trip, and years later wrote a short essay summarizing the pilgrimage. The diary is oddly travelogue-ish, dutifully recording scenery, miles traversed, places camped, meals eaten. But here and there a mother’s grief breaks through, as in an entry about a natural formation in Zion National Park that her son had passed by: “We climbed up a steep trail to Weeping Rock & it made me weep thinking of Everett.”

  The parents’ first stop was not Escalante, but Kayenta, where Everett had begun his 1934 expedition. There they met John and Louisa Wetherill and their son, Ben, who had been with Everett on the Rainbow Bridge-Monument Valley excavation of Woodchuck Cave. On June 24, Stella wrote, “Visited Wetherills, who discredited N. Johnson, explained Indian situation & said Everett was very happy last Sept.” (This entry casts further doubt on Clay Lockett’s testimony that John Wetherill “had little respect for Everett.”)

  The veteran trader and guide recounted how he and Everett had pored over maps the previous summer, plotting a course for his upcoming months of travel. It was Wetherill’s firm belief that after visiting the Escalante region, Everett hoped to cross the Colorado and explore Wilson Mesa. Had he done so, he might well have followed the faint trail blazed by the Mormon pioneers in 1880. And so far, none of the searchers had looked for the missing young man on Wilson Mesa—then as now, one of the more inaccessible regions in all the Southwest.

  The next day Stella and Christopher drove to the Navajo Mountain trading post. Along the way they met Edward Nequatewa, a Hopi man who had become an ethnologist. “Long talk,” Stella noted dryly. The gist of what Nequatewa had to say is preserved in a letter he later wrote to the parents:

  What Navajos that I had talked with, from the Navajo Mountain, said that they had never seen Everett or any white man around there at that time nor there was never any searching party came around there, otherwise the Navajos would be talking about it. They also said that if Everett has met his foul play in that region it won’t be by an Indian. If this Johnson really had sent these Indians out on searching party, he certainly would have some reports from them.

  From Navajo Mountain, Stella and Christopher drove west through the Kaibab Forest to Zion National Park, then northeast toward Escalante. Along the way, a number of people who had met Everett the previous autumn offered suggestions as to where he might be found. One of them was George Shakespeare, who lived in Tropic, the little town where Everett had lingered for several days before pushing on to Escalante. About Shakespeare, Stella recorded, “Spent considerable time with E., & would like to go searching. Thinks E. may be with Navajos.” Joe Lee, the proprietor of The Gap, a trading post south of Lee’s Ferry, had another hunch: “Thought E. would go across Hall’s Crossing [on the Colorado River, almost a hundred miles to the north] on a raft, maybe drowned.” Bryce Canyon chief ranger Maurice Cope was even more definite: “Set up tent & called on Mr. Cope. E. told him he would stay with the Navajos until July. Navajos do not use burros very often.”

  Though Stella’s diary only laconically records the speculations about Everett’s itinerary, one can imagine the mixture of anguish and hope each glimmering insight must have sent coursing through the parents’ veins. In and around Escalante, they met most of the members of the first two search parties. Jennings Allen, head of the March 1935 team, drove Christopher and Stella forty-two miles down the Hole-in-the-Rock road, which was as far as he could coax his car—“so that,” Stella later wrote, “we realized how difficult was Everett’s burro-riding toward Davis Canyon, southeast. We wished that we had wings to fly.”

  Except for the two-day stopover at the Grand Canyon by Stella in 1923, the journey was the parents’ first encounter with the desert Southwest. They were awed by the landscape, but its beauty brought pain:

  From the [Navajo] bridge, we thrilled at the deep gorge of the Colorado. We thought we recognized the very view Everett painted, and which we called “On and On and On” as printed on a folder with his “Wilderness Song”.…

  We saw many sheltered spots where Everett probably slept, and the impressive Amphitheatre of great rocks with a drapery of green foliage and a natural pulpit in a pool of water. We felt sure that Everett had declaimed some well-loved lines to the surrounding vermilion cliffs.

  In Escalante the parents got an earful of appraisals of Captain Neal Johnson. The brunt of the testimony was that the gold miner was a thoroughgoing fraud and scoundrel. As Christopher later wrote Waldo, “I can’t make him out. He may never have sent any Indians at all—a peculiar character. We are financing him no further.”

  Johnson got wind of the Escalante scuttlebutt. On June 1, from Hanksville, Utah, he wrote Everett’s father, summoning up all the indignation he could muster:

  I cannot hardly believe you said it. The report was that you said you considered what money you had sent me was a loss that you considered I had used It for my own use.… I do not need that kind of money. Blood money. If Everet was Dead whitch I believe he is not he would haunt me. If he was alive he would haunt me.

  Although by temperament inclined to think the best of everyone, Christopher responded bluntly: “Can you blame us for being entirely on the fence as to whether you were half right and half wrong or all wrong? Some suggested that you had not hired or sent out any Indians at all.” And yet, despite his resolve to cut off financing Johnson altogether, in the same letter Christopher offered to pay him twenty-five dollars if he would go to Navajo Mountain and come back with a short note from Everett. The captain seized on that shred of encouragement and continued to pursue his bizarre “search” through the summer of 1935.

  On July 3, Christopher and Stella arrived back in Los Angeles. About a week later, officers found a badly burned corpse in the desert near Gallup, New Mexico. Speculation on whether this might be Everett flared high enough to reach the newspapers. The Gallup chief of police corresponded with Christopher and Stella, asking if any dental records of their son existed. The parents appealed to the College of Dentistry at the University of Southern California, where in December 1932 and January 1933 Everett had had work done on his teeth. On July 16, 1935, the college mailed to Christopher three pages of skimpy and somewhat ambiguous records. They indicated two i
nlays and one gold foil. Christopher also knew that Everett was missing a tooth from his upper right jaw.

  On August 1, the Gallup chief of police wrote back, saying that his men had found “no missing teeth roots” and no metal whatsoever among the ashes of the dead man’s skull. On this basis, it was concluded that the corpse in the desert could not be Everett’s.

  Unwilling to let Christopher’s frank accusations sabotage his campaign of feinting and dodging, Captain Neal Johnson wrote from Salt Lake City on August 12:

  I am leaving here in the morning for Navajo Mountain. Where I will stay until Everett is found.… Mr. Ruess I hate to say this but there is a boy living with a bunch of Navajos in the vicinity of Navajo Mountain. He has had a tribal wedding. I am most sure this is Everett.

  This time, for once, the con man would make good on a promise, at least in terms of actually setting out into the field on the Navajo reservation. The search that unfolded in August 1935 was not, however, of Johnson’s creation, but rather that of a far more famous sleuth who aimed at a far more high-profile resolution of the mystery. By the end of the month, the most ambitious search yet prosecuted for Everett Ruess would announce to the world what its author regarded as the definitive answer to the puzzle of the young wanderer’s disappearance—an answer that nonetheless left the essential mystery untouched.

  * * *

  John Upton Terrell was a prolific popular Western historian and reporter for the Salt Lake Tribune. Before his death in 1988, he would write some forty books, including Search for the Seven Cities, Apache Chronicle, and biographies of John Wesley Powell, Zebulon Pike, and Cabeza de Vaca, the lost conquistador who accidentally made the European discovery of the Southwest. Terrell was a flamboyant, even sensationalistic writer in the vein of Zane Grey. By 1935 he was widely credited with discovering the horn-rimmed spectacles that helped solve the Leopold-Loeb murder case, but there is no independent evidence that he had anything to do with solving the “Crime of the Century.”

  Terrell agreed to undertake the search on assignment for the Tribune. The results of the inquiry, in dispatches written by Terrell, were published on the pages of four successive issues of the newspaper between August 25 and 28. The first dispatch, printed at the top of the front page of the Sunday morning edition on August 25, under the headline “S.L. Tribune Expedition into Desert Finds Clues to Fate of Young Artist,” opened with a bold proclamation of the team’s unshakable conclusion:

  Everett Ruess, 21-year-old missing Los Angeles artist, probably met death at the hands of a renegade bad man or Indian in a lonely canyon near the southern end of the untracked Escalante desert.

  This is the united belief of the best Indian and white trackers, traders and wilderness residents of southern Utah and northern Arizona. Their conclusion is based on several “trails” of evidence, which to the men trained in the ways of remote lands, are almost irrefutable. But also these expressions of opinion have come following an extensive and intensive search by an expedition sent out by The Salt Lake Tribune, and which has practically exhausted other possibilities.

  To buttress its claims, the Tribune published a map of the terrain traversed by the searchers. It covers an impressive swath of country stretching from Blanding, Utah, to Tuba City, Arizona. From the Navajo Mountain trading post, Terrell’s company (including Indian guides) worked its way northwest by pack train through some of the most rugged and seldom-visited canyonlands anywhere in the Southwest, finally crossing the San Juan and Colorado Rivers to arrive at Davis Gulch.

  Read at a distance of seventy-five years from their publication, Terrell’s dispatches brim with an omniscient arrogance that poorly conceals the scarcity of real evidence the expedition was able to unearth. In 1935, however, the dispatches could well have seemed to give a definitive answer of sorts.

  Terrell’s ace accomplice was not Captain Johnson (who is all but invisible in the published reports), but one Dougeye, a “famed Navajo trailer.” (Dougi, as the name is normally spelled, was actually a Paiute.) Even though more than eight months had passed since the last Escalante men had seen Everett in November 1934, Dougeye claimed (or Terrell claimed for him) that he could tell by tracks still printed in the dried mud on “the only possible trail” that no more than six men on horseback had crossed the San Juan and Colorado into Navajo country during that time. And all six, Dougeye was sure, were Indians. One was Dougeye himself, who the previous autumn had come to trade in Escalante, where he said he had met and spoken to Everett.

  Terrell put Dougeye to work on the old footprints in Davis Gulch. The tracker’s verdict: “White boy come in, not go out.”

  To dismiss the romantic idea that Everett might be living peacefully among the Navajos, having turned his back on white civilization, Terrell trotted out his own ethnographic maxims, such as, “A Navajo Indian cannot keep a secret. He reveals all such things to traders and agents.”

  The mystical climax of Terrell’s search came in a hogan near Kayenta, Arizona, where the reporter’s guides led him to the camp of a Navajo medicine man. “I have forgotten the Indian’s name,” Terrell wrote. “It was, for me, unpronounceable. He was, however, Natani, which means ‘wise man’ or sometimes ‘head man.’ ” The old man’s wife was a renowned seer.

  After the requisite sharing of cigarettes and gossip about the latest Indian policies of “Washingdon” (as Navajos referred to the federal government), “Natani” suddenly asked, “Why have you waited so long to look for your friend?” And for the first time, the medicine man’s wife spoke, almost inaudibly: “Far north.”

  As Terrell’s party watched spellbound in the rainy night, Natani began to chant, while his wife covered her face, then started to sculpt a mound from the sand on the ground. Twice she destroyed and rebuilt the topographic model, which Terrell’s guides recognized as Navajo Mountain. Eventually she used a finger to draw a pair of crooked lines enfolding the peak, signifying the San Juan and Colorado Rivers.

  The chant ended abruptly. Natani’s wife sat with her head fallen, breathing deeply, as if she were very tired. The rain stopped.…

  Natani spoke: “Go to the forks of the rivers.”

  Guide: “He lives there?”

  Natani: “He was there. Close by he made a camp. You will find the fire.”

  Guide: “Have you seen him?” (He meant in a vision.)

  Natani: “He has gone away from there.”

  Guide: “He’s dead.”

  Natani: “He has gone away and does not mean to come back.”

  Pressed by Terrell’s Navajo guide and translator, Natani made a last effort to “see” Everett. At last he spoke:

  There is a shadow. Only some of his outfit was moved away. There is more some place. I see him talking with two friends. They are Navajos. Young men like himself. They sing and eat together. Then there is a shadow. He has gone away. The Navajos have left the place. They are no longer with him. She says they may have traveled together. He (Ruess) has given himself to our gods. He has taken us in his arms and wished to come among us.

  The vision of Natani and his wife directed Terrell to Navajo Mountain, where he recruited Dougeye, then visited the junction of the Colorado and San Juan Rivers. The tracker scrutinized the river-banks, then spoke, “White boy not camp here.”

  Onward to Davis Gulch, and thence to further consultations with Indians and Anglo cattlemen. The cloak-and-dagger melodrama of Terrell’s dispatches obscures the fact that the search, for all its “extensive and intensive” apparatus, was little more than a flamboyant wild goose chase. Terrell’s conclusion, moreover, was not so much a QED as a grasping at the kind of straw that might sell newspapers. The closing passage of the last dispatch, for all its air of certainty, seems to acknowledge silently that Terrell’s party could not identify Everett’s alleged killer, or even come up with a convincing motive for such a crime.

  This is the result: Everett Ruess was murdered in the vicinity of Davis canyon. His valuable outfit was stolen. He never reached the Colorad
o river.

  “But some day,” we said, “pieces of his outfit will turn up.”

  Then we would take the trail again.

  The gripping accounts in the Salt Lake Tribune made a big splash. A Utah Department of Justice agent prepared to make a case before federal authorities to launch a manhunt for Everett’s killer(s). The state governor promised to open an official investigation.

  To their credit, however, Christopher, Stella, and Waldo refused to swallow Terrell’s detective work whole. As of September 1935, they still held on to the hope that Everett was alive.

  SEVEN

  Desert Trails

  DESPITE THE DELPHIC PROCLAMATION by John Upton Terrell in the Salt Lake Tribune, by the autumn of 1935, four different theories about Everett’s fate were in currency. During the next seven decades, those four theories continued to hold sway, generating many an impassioned debate in bars and around campfires all over the West.

  The possibility that Everett had been murdered could not be ruled out. Terrell’s vague formula fingering the killer as a “renegade bad man or Indian” was complemented by dark rumors circulating around Escalante. And though the residents of that insular town tried to keep the gossip away from the ears of outsiders, the gist of it leaked out. Everett could have been murdered by a local rancher. The motive might have been simple robbery, although even in Depression times the goods Everett carried with him were so meager they would not have been likely to tempt even the most hardened thief. But another scenario sprang from the fact that some of the locals were known to be cattle rustlers. If Everett had stumbled upon rustlers in the process of butchering a stolen cow, they might have killed him to forestall the discovery of their crime.