Strange it may have been, but characteristic of Stella, to describe her fear on the hand-and-toe trail, but not a word about her feelings on seeing her son’s cryptic inscription in such an inaccessible eyrie.
She managed to descend the “Moqui steps,” coached and spotted by Aleson and Larson. “The path back to our lunch spot,” Stella wrote, “seemed a long long way so we decided to sleep there instead of trying to get back to the cowboy cabin [on the Hole-in-the-Rock Trail].” To the Deseret News reporter, Aleson later hailed Stella as the “bravest of courageous women.”
In camp, Stella wrote, “Harry and Sterling kept the fire going all night, & Harry talked about Everett until 11:30. He discounts every theory except that Everett fell from a cliff.”
During the following years, Aleson latched on to some startling clues about Everett’s fate. The scenario they outlined was so incendiary that Aleson never shared it with Stella and Christopher. He may have first committed it to print in November 1951, in a letter to Olive Burt, a friend and former client who worked for the Deseret News. In a postscript headed “NOT FOR PUBLICATION,” Aleson wrote,
During the past four to five years I have been hearing rumors on the disappearance of young Ruess. I have heard some very bold statements. Names have been named. Certain persons living in the area today are not only suspected, but practically accused of the murder of Ruess. With no substantial proof, of course nothing can be done. I have all the names.… For the present, I am waiting, hoping for a death-bed confession. For some years I have known the men most concerned or suspicioned. Have talked to them often … I have good reason to continue the suspicion.
It was not until 1953 that anyone in the family was made privy to the Escalante gossip about Everett’s possibly having been murdered by locals. On September 12 of that year, Randall Henderson, the editor and publisher of On Desert Trails, wrote not to Stella or Christopher, but to Waldo, who had returned to California from postings in El Salvador and Indonesia.
Two years ago, camping on the Kaiparowitz mesa overlooking the Escalante river basin I listened to the story of a couple of Mormon cowboys—a story that while not conclusive, was an acceptable solution of the mystery. They believe Everett was killed by a couple of cattle rustlers whose names they know. Their story was entirely plausible—and as far as I am concerned it is the solution to the mystery.
It is not clear whether Waldo shared Henderson’s revelation with his parents. By 1953, Everett had been missing for nineteen years. Not a month had gone by, however, without his parents brooding upon their younger son’s fate. And they still held on to a glimmer of hope that Everett might somehow be alive. In March 1948, having had to decline Aleson’s invitation to the trip into Davis Gulch, Christopher wrote to the river guide, summing up the possible scenarios. A number of backcountry veterans who had met Everett, including John Wetherill, thought that the most likely cause of death was a fall from a cliff in some obscure canyon. Wrote Christopher,
It may be that Everett met his end in such a fall, it may be he drowned crossing the Colorado (as Mr. Henderson of the Desert Magazine came to believe), it may be that he was killed by the Indians for his gear (unlikely), he may have fallen and suffered amnesia, forgetting his identity, or it may be he planned to disappear without a trace and lose himself among the natives and he may be in Central or South America or Mexico now. For all these theories there have been believers.
In March 1953, the Salt Lake City newspapers ran several articles about the recent finding of an old camp with a “year’s supply” of canned food lying about. The spot was about fifty miles south of the town of Tropic. The headlines toyed with the idea that this could have been Everett’s last camp: “Clue to Murder?” and “20-Year-Old Mystery Revived. Discovery of Old Hideout Gives Clue to Lost Artist.”
Aleson forwarded the clippings to Stella and Christopher, even while he doubted that the camp could have been Everett’s—“[H]e would not have stocked up on a ‘year’s supply of food.’ ” The authorities soon agreed. But in the exchange with Stella and Christopher, Aleson hinted obliquely at the secret he was keeping close to his vest: “Assuming that someday we do learn the facts of Everett’s disappearance, possibly through a death-bed confession,—to what extent would you, Christopher and Stella, want to know the details? For some years now, I’ve had the thought that we are going to learn.”
Christopher may have thought Aleson was hinting at Jack Crank, the possibly insane Navajo who had bragged about killing Everett, and who had been released from prison in 1952 after serving a ten-year sentence for his actual murder of an elderly Anglo near Oljato. Or he may have harked back to John Upton Terrell’s formula of a “renegade bad man or Indian.” He answered Aleson, “We would want to know everything, but we hate the idea of general publicity, though it might be desirable to influence others not to venture on the Indian lands without realizing what risks they take. An Indian drunk or sober … might well get the idea of vengeance on any white man.… Everett probably realized that he was taking his life in his hands.”
On April 14, 1954, after suffering complications from a pair of abdominal operations, Christopher died at the age of seventy-five. Five hundred “loving friends” (in Stella’s phrase) attended his memorial service. Despite the vicissitudes that had forced him to take one job after another just to keep his family afloat, the common thread of Christopher’s life’s work had been service to others in need. His forty-nine years of marriage to Stella had amounted to a seamless continuum of love and loyalty. And by 1954 he was extremely proud of Waldo, who had launched a successful career as an international diplomat and businessman.
The great hole in Christopher’s life, however, the dark sorrow that he took with him to his grave, was the loss of Everett, compounded by the impossibility of ever learning what had happened to his son after he had carved his NEMOs on the canyon walls of Davis Gulch.
* * *
Meanwhile, Harry Aleson was closing in on what he was sure was the answer. Yet he was loath to commit his knowledge to print. His closest confidant was another river guide and Southwest historian, Otis R. “Dock” Marston. (The Utah State Historical Society holds reams of fascinating correspondence between these two would-be writers and wilderness sleuths.) On December 14, 1952, Aleson wrote Marston “in strictest confidence,”
I heard firsthand on Pearl Harbor Day this year, some startling statements—from a man of that area, pretty much “in his cups.”
The boy was shot. Killer was named to me. Killer died seven years later. Two others threw the body in the Colorado R. Both are living. One served time in Utah Pen for rustling. I’ve been seeing and talking to him off and on for several years. For some weeks now, he has kept a room here [in Richfield, Utah]. Not more than 20 feet between our beds. Nothing re the murder could be proved in court.
While the parents, whom I know, are living, I’m inclined to say nothing—let the secret of the disappearance die with them.
What would you do with this knowledge.
On Marston’s advice, Aleson shared his revelations with Randall Henderson the next March, in yet another letter headed CONFIDENTIAL. As was his wont when dealing with top-secret material, Aleson reverted to a telegraphic prose, almost like a spy sending a coded message. The key sentences are doubly indented, each line a new paragraph:
This past winter I learned RE disappearance of ER.
Much of the details of the final hours.
The names of the men involved.
The way the murder was committed.
The disposal of the body in the river.
But, there is no evidence or proof to bring into court.
One of the men is dead.
One of the other two would have to testify against the other.
Perhaps a death-bed confession will come.
It may be that when Henderson wrote to Waldo six months later, sharing the cowboy gossip about rustlers he said he had heard on top of Kaiparowits Plateau, he was camouflaging the informat
ion Aleson had passed to him in March. Or it may be that in 1951, Henderson had indeed listened in on the cowboys telling a macabre story that dovetailed closely with what Aleson had wrung from his inebriated Richfield neighbor.
Aleson had vowed to Marston that he would indeed make a written record of everything he knew about Everett’s murder, but would somehow keep it “in confidence.” The piece of paper on which he did so may be the most bizarre document in all the annals of Everett Ruess’s life and death.
Aleson recorded his solution to the mystery in the form of a Western Union telegram from an anonymous soothsayer to Aleson himself. His almost boyish effort at codifying the message took the form of reversing people’s names and stringing words together without spaces. The homemade cryptogram is, however, easily deciphered. The first line dates it: “RECDNIGHTOF DECSIX 1952.” The second line records its arrival: “ATUTAHRICHFIELD BY ALESONHARRY.” The text spells out everything Aleson had learned from his informant:
TOWARD SOLVING OF MYSTERY
LAYADALIN ONEOFLAST TOSEEERALIVE
TOLDTOHLABY BAILEYHUGH
KILLEDBYSHOT ALVEYEMERON MANONCE KICKEDBY
HORSEAND DEVELOPEDSPOT ONLUNG ANDMAY HAVEDIED
ASARESULT TBDEVELOPED DECEASEDWTR 194243
RIDDLEKEITH ANDPOLLOCKJOE THRWEBODY INTHERIVER
PROBABLYOFF JACKASSBENCH NEARHOLEINTHEROCK.
Addlin (not Adalin) Lay, Hugh Bailey, Emmorn (not Emeron) Alvey, Keith Riddle, and Joe Pollock were all Escalante ranchers. Lay had been one of the two sheepherders with whom Everett had camped on the nights of November 19 and 20 at the head of Soda Gulch; he was indeed one of the last to see Everett (“ER”) alive. What he had to do with alleged murder, however, is completely unclear. The man “in his cups” was Hugh Bailey, for TOLDTOHLABY means “told to HLA—Harry L. Aleson—by.” And Bailey apparently fingered Emmorn Alvey, who had died in 1944, not in the winter of 1942–43, as Everett’s killer. His accomplices, Keith Riddle and Joe Pollock, Bailey asserted, had disposed of the body by throwing it into the Colorado River.
Aleson’s telegram languished for almost three decades, apparently unnoticed, in the archives of the USHS. No part of it was published anywhere until 1999, twenty-seven years after Aleson’s death. The original copy was still in the USHS files in that year. It has since vanished, apparently stolen by a Ruess aficionado.
As to whether Aleson had indeed unraveled the mystery of Everett’s fate, or at least come close to the solution—that remains in 2011 a vexed and perhaps insoluble question.
Aleson himself had later thoughts that complicated the question. To Dock Marston in 1956, four years after he had typed out his Western Union cryptogram, he wrote, “Yes, I have a few names of persons suspicioned of murdering Everett. I have two stories, from opposite factions, which attempt to cast blame on the other. The ruggedest of the stories was told to me while the narrator was fairly much ‘in his cups.’ I am not yet ready to give these names.”
Seven years later, in 1963, in a letter to another Ruess devotee, Aleson seemed to retreat further from his certainty of 1952:
I have only “hear-say” on cattle rustling in the thirties, when Everett dropped out of sight. There are rumors around Escalante town. No one dares speak up because of lack of proof. I do have the names of three men suspicioned of murdering Everett and accused of throwing his body into the Colorado River a short way upstream from Hole in the Rock. One of the three has been dead several years. Perhaps, one must await a deathbed confession—from one or the other of the two still living.
* * *
After Christopher’s death, Waldo took up the ceaseless quest to figure out what might have happened to Everett. Together with Stella, he chased down every hint of a lead that might trace a path back to 1934 and Davis Gulch. And in the late 1950s, a pair of accidental finds gave Everett’s mother and brother surges of hope. In November or December 1956, some prospectors exploring far out on the Escalante Desert came across a skeleton on the west bank of the Colorado River, not far from the Hole-in-the-Rock. Harry Aleson got wind of the discovery and wrote about it to Stella. Without having seen the skeleton, he speculated, “At this time there is a fifty-fifty possibility that the remains of Everett have been found.” But an investigation led by the Garfield County sheriff ruled out such a match—on what grounds, the surviving record does not disclose.
In the summer of 1957 an archaeologist working as part of a massive survey of Anasazi ruins along the Colorado River, as teams tried to document those sites before Lake Powell would swallow them for good, came across an old camp near the mouth of Cottonwood Canyon. The scholar and his two assistants, both Escalante men, found an assemblage of utensils and cooking gear—spoon, fork, cup, pans, and a canteen—as well as a box of razor blades made by the Owl Drug Company, which was based in Los Angeles. An eastern tributary of the Colorado, Cottonwood flows directly opposite the Hole-in-the-Rock; the 1880 Mormon pioneers rode up its streambed after they had floated their wagons across the great river. Had Everett crossed the Colorado at Hole-in-the-Rock, he would have emerged at the mouth of Cottonwood Canyon.
The same Garfield County sheriff ultimately shipped some of these belongings to Stella. She and Waldo perused them carefully, deciding in the end that they could not have been part of Everett’s gear. (On previous expeditions, Everett had never made any mention of shaving his beard, while at least twice he sought out barbers who gave him both a haircut and a professional shave.)
In a letter to the Garfield sheriff written in 1960, Waldo ran through the various theories about Everett’s demise. Stella, Waldo claimed, “prefers optimistically to think that he is alive but an amnesia victim.” Waldo himself inclined to the idea, shared by such experts as John Wetherill and Harry Goulding, who had founded Goulding’s Trading Post in Monument Valley in 1921, that Everett had fallen to his death from some cliff. “[E]ven if he only broke an arm or a leg,” Waldo imagined, “in a remote canyon no one would have known of it and he could have starved to death and eventually been covered over by the shifting sands.”
But Waldo could not dismiss the alternate theory that rustlers around Escalante had murdered Everett. “I certainly wish someone could get to the bottom of all this,” he wrote to the sheriff. “If my brother met with foul play, by this time whoever did it must have suffered plenty from remorse, over the years; there would be no need or use of punishing them now, after all these years.”
Another river guide who become fascinated with the Ruess saga was Ken Sleight. A good friend of Harry Aleson, Sleight was also the model for the character Seldom Seen Smith in Edward Abbey’s rollicking novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang. Like Abbey, Sleight deplored the creation of Lake Powell—“Powell’s Puddle,” he nicknamed it. Both men later toyed with the fantasy of blowing up the dam at Page, Arizona, that had created the sprawling reservoir—the guerrilla strike that supplies the plot for Abbey’s novel, which in turn inspired the eco-radical group Earth First!
In 1964, Sleight guided Waldo down the Escalante River and into Davis Gulch, after convincing him that he needed to make the visit before the lower gulch (including the NEMO inscriptions) was drowned by Lake Powell. By the summer of 1963, Sleight wrote to Waldo, the reservoir was rising at the rate of one inch per hour. Another reason for the trip was that Sleight was convinced that Everett’s body might still be found in or near Davis Gulch. On June 6, 1963, he wrote to Waldo, “[L]et me say that I don’t think Everett left the Davis and Escalante drainages. I am sure in my mind that he lost his life in this region.… I do not believe there was foul play.”
Waldo never wrote about the 1964 trip, but it was clearly a powerful experience for him. Many years later he would say to others, “Ken Sleight told me I could count myself among the first 150 white-skins to go down the Escalante.” Somewhere near one of the NEMO inscriptions, Waldo found a prehistoric metate—a stone basin the Anasazi had used for grinding corn. He wanted to take it home as a keepsake of the journey, but the metate was too heavy to pack ou
t. Sleight promised he would pick it up on a return journey, but may never have followed through on this vow.
Sometime in the late 1960s (in later years he could never recall the precise date), Sleight was leading a horse-packing trip down Grand Gulch, a sinuous fifty-five-mile-long northern tributary of the San Juan River that is loaded with Anasazi ruins and rock art. Over campfires in the Gulch, Sleight told his clients all about the mystery of Everett Ruess. One evening, shortly before dark, one of the clients scrambled up to a pair of granaries tucked under an overhang on a ledge some eighty feet above the canyon floor. He returned to report that he had found an inscription carved in the mud wall of one of the granaries, and that it looked like it read “NEMO.” Incredulous, Sleight made the climb himself and verified the find.
In 1998, Sleight recalled, “There was also a bunch of colored zigzags painted on the rock wall just left of the granary. Some kind of design or landscape. Looked like watercolor paints to me. I wanted to take a sample to see if it was watercolor, but I never got around to it.”
The NEMO was plainly legible, though no date was attached to it. It could, Sleight realized, have been a copycat inscription, carved by some later passerby in homage to the lost vagabond. What argued against that explanation, however, was that the shape of the capital letters seemed to match perfectly those of the two inscriptions in Davis Gulch, which Sleight had seen on several occasions. By the late 1960s, however, no photograph of the Davis Gulch NEMOs had ever been published. How could a copycat have gotten the orthography of a faked inscription exactly right?
Finding Everett Ruess Page 24