Finding Everett Ruess

by David Roberts

  On November 27, 1939, a man named Burton Bowen, a former Floridian now living in New York State, wrote to Christopher. With the dry dispassion of a self-appointed sleuth, Bowen wrote:

  About May 1935 Everett Ruess registered under an assumed name at Disston Lodge, St. Petersburg, Florida, a federal transient camp, after walking from Lake City, Fla. with the dog Curly. He and the dog had hitch-hiked from Arizona taking several weeks as it was difficult to obtain a ride with the dog.

  The inclusion of Curly in the story was meant by Bowen to be a brilliant piece of insider knowledge. But in its September 1938 issue, Desert had published a photo of Everett at home in the winter of 1931–32, playing in the front yard with the “rez dog” he had adopted. What Bowen had no way of knowing was that Curly had disappeared in May 1932 after Everett, in a fit of anger, beat his dog because Curly had eaten his owner’s supper.

  Bowen offered to send the parents photographs of the boy and his dog, though he never followed through on this promise. In the same letter he recounted his initial conversation with Everett:

  He told me how he had left the burros loose in the canyon.… He thought his parents might be looking for him but didn’t warm up to the suggestion to drop them a postcard. It appears that he wanted to be free to live the life of a hermit philosopher.…

  He wanted no companion other than the dog.

  He disappeared without saying anything.

  One wonders why Christopher tolerated the chicanery of Bowen’s bogus revelations, corresponding with the man for another four years. Perhaps any contact with his lost son, however phantasmal, was better than the eternal silence from the desert.

  Christopher and Stella had dwelt on the implied allusion to Odysseus represented by the NEMO inscriptions. By the late 1930s they had begun to speculate that Everett, still alive, was acting out his “Ulysses years.” Ulysses (or Odysseus), Christopher argued, had wandered for seven years before returning to his home in Ithaca, reclaiming his beloved Penelope, and slaying her suitors. So the parents would wait for seven years, until 1941, before giving up hope of Everett’s return. (Christopher’s calculation of seven years’ wandering is curious, for in Homer’s epic, it is clear that Odysseus is away from home for twenty years—ten of them fighting the Trojan War and ten returning to Ithaca.)

  Indeed, however, in 1941, an apparent solution to the mystery dramatically surfaced, though it was hardly the denouement Christopher and Stella could have wished for. A Navajo “renegade” named Jack Crank was arrested near Monument Valley for murdering an elderly white man who had passed through the Oljato trading post northwest of the valley. According to one source, as reported by Bud Rusho in A Vagabond for Beauty, “Crank’s motives were that he needed the scalp of a ‘blood enemy’ for ceremonial use, and that he simply hated white men.” While in detention in a Phoenix jail, he bragged that he had murdered Everett Ruess.

  Crank may have been mentally ill. Although the authorities cautioned the Ruesses that the Navajo’s testimony was shaky at best, and though the man was never prosecuted for Everett’s murder, Christopher and Stella clung for years to this possible solution of their son’s disappearance. In 1952, Crank was released from prison after serving a ten-year sentence. That August—nearly eighteen years after their last contact with Everett—Christopher wrote to a friend of their son’s who had briefly traveled with him in 1931: “[Crank] was a sort of outlaw among his people even. He was probably drunk when he did the deed.… For us, this seems to solve the riddle.”

  * * *

  With Lacy’s articles, the cult of Everett Ruess was born. As Randall Henderson, editor of the monthly, wrote in 1940, “Readers of the Desert Magazine—literally hundreds of them—wrote letters to the publishing office. They wanted to know more about Everett Ruess. Some of them volunteered to renew the search for him.”

  Under Henderson’s stewardship, the miscellany the parents had envisioned finally saw light in book form, as On Desert Trails with Everett Ruess, published in 1940 by Desert Magazine Press. A slender, large-format volume, the book reproduced some of Everett’s paintings and woodcuts, interspersed with choice passages from his writings. For the first time, readers beyond the circle of friends and family were exposed to Everett’s aphoristic utterances. Proclamations such as “Once more I am roaring drunk with the lust of life and adventure and unbearable beauty” and “I am overwhelmed by the appalling strangeness and intricacy of the curiously tangled knot of life” and “I have left no strange or delightful thing undone that I wanted to do” began to acquire a canonic resonance.

  In the foreword to On Desert Trails, Henderson articulated for the first time the siren appeal of the vagabond’s vision:

  [This book] is offered, not merely as entertainment, but as an intimate picture of a very intelligent young man who sought in his own way to find the solution to some of the most difficult of the problems which confront all human beings in this highly complex age. We cannot all be wanderers, nor writers nor painters. But from the philosophy of Everett Ruess we may all draw something that will contribute to our understanding of the basic values of the universe in which we live.

  A lofty claim, perhaps, for the productions of an artist and writer who had not yet reached his twenty-first birthday. But the book struck a nerve with readers, quickly becoming a minor classic. Republished in different formats in 1950 and again in 2000, it is still in print.

  Christopher and Stella did everything they could to make the book a success. They bought scores of copies and sent them to friends, as well as to strangers who might be influential advocates for their son’s legacy. They pressed a copy on Orville Prescott, head book reviewer for the New York Times, who sent back a polite thank-you note, but warned that he couldn’t promise to review the book. (The Times never did.)

  For the rest of his life, Christopher kept a kind of log book in which he typed out transcriptions of letters he and Stella had received from readers of On Desert Trails. Some of the encomiums predated the book, for both Stella and Christopher had sent copies of “Youth Is for Adventure” to all kinds of people who had either known Everett or might become interested in him posthumously. In 1938, Edward Weston, whose door Everett had first knocked on in 1930, at the age of sixteen, sent a heartfelt note:

  Your remembrance reached me in Santa Fe. I don’t forget Everett—it was kind of you to include me as one of his friends. The way of his going, I feel, is the way I would like to depart—close to the soil. But he was so young—

  The year before, Hamlin Garland, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of many books of Western history and fiction, wrote to Christopher and Stella: “Your son was a most unusual spirit. I have never known a youth of like endowment and predilection. He is a most interesting character. If he should ever come out of hiding he will bring a noble book in his knapsack!” (Garland may have met Everett, as this note seems to imply, for he had moved to Hollywood in 1929.)

  Others made their first acquaintance with Everett in the pages of On Desert Trails. Some were profoundly moved. In 1940, Edward Howard Griggs, author of such educational and inspirational tomes as Moral Leaders and The Soul of Democracy, praised Everett’s writing to the skies in a note to Stella and Christopher: “It is unique in American, indeed, in all literature, carrying as it does, Henry D. Thoreau and John Muir to the nth power. Walt Whitman would have said Everett’s joyous, free life was his great, rhythmically cadenced poem.”

  It was only a matter of time before the saga of Everett Ruess caught the attention of a major American writer. Such a collision of sensibilities came in 1942, when Wallace Stegner published Mormon Country. In that beguiling meditation on the Southwest, Stegner devoted a whole chapter, titled “Artist in Residence,” to the Ruess saga. Those pages contain the first nuanced, judicious appraisal of Everett, not only as an artist and writer but as a wilderness visionary. Stegner’s chapter remains one of the best things ever written about the lost wanderer.

  EIGHT

  Cult and Conundrumr />
  STEGNER WAS NOT AS IMPRESSED as others were by Everett’s artistic and literary talents. “He was not a good writer and he was only a mediocre painter,” he wrote, “but give him credit, he knew it, and he was learning. It didn’t matter greatly that he was not in command of his tools. He was only eighteen [actually sixteen] when he started traveling by horse and burro and on foot through the canyons and plateaus.”

  Stegner fixed the vagabond in a tradition dating back to the Spanish conquistadors of “spiritual and artistic athletes who die young.” He elaborated, “Everett was one of those, a callow romantic, an adolescent aesthete, an atavistic wanderer of the wastelands, but one of the few who died—if he died—with the dream intact.”

  At the outset of his chapter, Stegner delivered a memorable précis of Everett’s quest; it remains today the most oft-quoted summation of his accomplishment:

  What Everett was after was beauty, and he conceived beauty in pretty romantic terms. We might be inclined to laugh at the extravagance of his beauty-worship if there was not something almost magnificent in his single-minded dedication to it. Esthetics as a parlor affectation is ludicrous and sometimes a little obscene; as a way of life it sometimes attains dignity. If we laugh at Everett Ruess we shall have to laugh at John Muir, because there was little difference between them except age.

  The “Artist in Residence” chapter teeters throughout on the divide between mature condescension and sincere praise, but in the end, Stegner “gets” what Everett was about.

  Deliberately he punished his body, strained his endurance, tested his capacity for strenuousness. He took out deliberately over trails that Indians and old timers warned him against. He tackled cliffs that more than once left him dangling halfway between talus and rim. With his burros he disappeared into the wild canyons and emerged weeks later, hundreds of miles away, with a new pack of sketches and paintings and a whole new section in his journal and a new batch of poems.

  Whether or not the writing was very good, Stegner saw Everett’s performance in his letters to friends and family as “chanting his barbaric adolescent yawp into the teeth of the world.” (The allusion to Whitman’s “Song of Myself” was apt.)

  In Stegner’s view, the journeys themselves were Everett’s real work of art: “The peculiar thing about Everett Ruess was that he went out and did the things he dreamed about, not simply for a two weeks’ vacation in the civilized and trimmed wonderlands, but for months and years in the very midst of wonder.”

  As he summarized what was known by 1942 about the Ruess saga, Stegner spun a clever riff on the NEMO inscriptions: “No one in the [search] party knew what Nemo meant. Was it an Indian word? The Navajo didn’t recognize it. Did it have some cryptic significance? Was it a message of some kind?” Then, after summarizing Christopher and Stella’s gloss on the name, Stegner mused,

  The explanation that it meant “no one” was both useless and tantalizing. Trust a boy with his head full of poetry and his eye full of cyclopean scenery to carve that word on the sandstone. But did he carve it just because the cave he was in reminded him of the Cyclops episode in the Odyssey, or had he been reading Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea until he fancied himself the same sort of lone-wolf pioneer as Captain Nemo, or was this scrawl a cryptic notice to the world that he intended to disappear, to cast off his identity?

  Despite his tendency to hold Everett at arm’s length, like some geological specimen, and despite the sophisticated irony that suffuses the chapter, by the end Stegner comes around to admiration, even to empathic identification:

  So there we leave it. Many people in that country believe Everett Ruess to be still alive.… The Mormon boys with whom he hunted horses and went to the Ward House in Tropic and Escalante have a sneaking suspicion that he lives, wandering in a gorgeous errant way around the world, painting and writing poetry. Except for the painting and the poems, they can conceive that life, because it is close to their own adventurous dreams. Because they will never themselves go, they would much rather not have Everett Ruess dead. It is a nice thing to think about, that maybe tonight he is sitting under the shadow of some cliff watching the light race upward on the mountain slope facing him, trying to get it into water colors before the light leaves him entirely.

  Stegner’s ending is as memorable and affirmative as the précis with which he opened:

  It is just possible that the loss of identity is the price of immortality.

  Because Everett Ruess is immortal, as all romantic and adventurous dreams are immortal. He is, and will be for a long time, Artist in Residence in the San Juan country.

  * * *

  Neither On Desert Trails nor Stegner’s encomium brought Everett true fame. The cult that would eventually solidify around his meteoric passage and mysterious vanishing would take decades to grow. Yet over the years, all kinds of bystanders took the Ruess puzzle passionately to heart, refusing to believe that what happened to Everett was a mystery that could never be solved. Some of these devotees were themselves savvy explorers of the Southwest. None of them was more dogged and resourceful than Harry Aleson.

  Although he would become one of the leading river-running guides in the West, Aleson came to the country relatively late. Born in Iowa in 1899, he served in World War I, then kicked around the Midwest as he took a series of jobs ranging from fire lookout to oil company surveyor. In 1939, at the age of forty, Aleson rented a motorboat on Lake Mead, the reservoir on the Colorado River above Hoover Dam, and spent five days puttering around its bays and inlets. Smitten by the grandeur of the place, he moved to the Southwest, where his first home was a shack at the western end of the Grand Canyon.

  By 1941, Aleson was leading tame commercial trips on Lake Mead. But the wilder water upstream captivated him, and he began making reconnaissances, often solo, through the rapids of the Colorado River and up the mouths of its many tributaries, including the Escalante. Aleson’s exploratory itch drove him away from his boat into the canyons and up onto the mesas that bordered the riverine systems. Routinely he would cache his craft on shore, set off on a grueling loop hike, and return hours or even days later to resume his river run.

  On one such hike in 1946, Aleson headed up Davis Gulch from the Escalante. He climbed a hand-and-toe trail to a high alcove sheltering an Anasazi structure and discovered, purely by accident, Everett’s “NEMO 1934” inscription carved in the doorsill. The find galvanized his curiosity. By 1948 a reporter from the Deseret News could write of him, “Perhaps no man living has spent as much time in searching for traces of the lost young man as has Harry Aleson of Richfield, Utah.”

  Aleson had ambitions as a writer, but one rejection after another by regional newspapers and magazines soured him on professional journalism. A pack rat by nature, he kept every scrap of paper that had anything to do with his career—the food and equipment lists he sent to his clients, the funky brochures he cranked out by mimeograph, even the rejection slips editors wounded him with. He bequeathed these massive piles of paper to the Utah State Historical Society in Salt Lake City, where they were archived after his death in 1972. Those boxes full of letters, first drafts, and random jottings amount to a treasure trove for scholars of the Southwest, for almost no self-taught sleuth ever probed so deeply into the arcane mysteries and controversies of the region.

  Aleson’s fascination with Everett Ruess drew him into a correspondence with Stella and Christopher. In 1948 he offered to guide them into Davis Gulch. Christopher was too busy at work to go, but Stella gamely signed on for what Aleson made clear would be an arduous journey. By then she was sixty-eight years old.

  Stella later wrote an account of that pilgrimage. Like her narrative of the June 1935 auto trip to the Southwest, it is oddly travelogue-ish, revealing little of the emotions the journey must have brought to the surface. Stella and a friend from Pasadena named Lou Fetzner drove to Richfield, where they met Aleson. After a whirlwind, several-day tour of scenic wonders, on April 15 the river guide, with his assistant, Sterling Larso
n, drove the women in a pickup truck sixty-six miles down the Hole-in-the-Rock Trail. The next day, leaving their vehicle, the foursome hiked for several hours across slickrock domes and sandy washes until they came to the hidden upper end of the old livestock trail into Davis Gulch. As Stella later wrote:

  We got down into Davis Canyon to the willows & box elders before noon & then had sandwiches & juice in beer cans.

  Then we started down grade to the canyon bed, struggling through young willows that were dense & scratchy. Finally we turned & came upon a circle of red mountains with a high window [i.e., arch], & below it were about 30 Indian pictographs—dancing man, lizard, etc. Harry’s name & some of the first searching party were written in the wall with charcoal, so Lou and I added ours.

  From this rock art panel, Aleson then led the party to the hand-and-toe trail he had first climbed in 1946.

  Finally we saw the Moqui house high up the canyon wall with an arched overhang. Lou & Sterling stayed below, because he had leather shoes. Harry climbed up first, then came back & said I could make it. He stayed below me & pointed out each crevice (Moqui toe-holds) where I could put one foot after the other while bracing my hands against the sharp slanting wall. By the time I reached the shelf, 15 feet wide perhaps, I felt pretty shaky, because I thought it would be much harder to get down. Here there were quite dim pictographs, & the one Moqui ruin without a roof.… Two steps lead up to the door sill where Nemo & 1934 are scratch [sic]. Harry & some one else added their dates.… I took 2 small pottery pieces, & Harry cached below several pieces from a good sized cooking bowl.