Finding Everett Ruess

by David Roberts

  But this new NEMO raised a host of complicated problems. So far as we know, Everett had never been in Grand Gulch, although he may have intended to make such a trip, for John Wetherill would have told him about the rich excavations he and his brothers had carried out there in the 1890s. But by the easiest hiking route, Grand Gulch lies at least forty miles east of Davis Gulch. If Everett indeed had carved the NEMO in the mud of the ancient storage bin, how had he gotten there without his burros? And when had he made the inscription? Since he had never signed himself NEMO before late 1934, the Grand Gulch visit must have come after he had camped in Davis Gulch in November.

  Sleight puzzled over this conundrum for decades, in part because it contradicted his earlier conviction that Everett must have died in or near Davis Gulch. By the early 1980s, Sleight favored the theory that Everett had set out on an arduous hike, intending to visit Monument Valley, where he had spent time both in 1931 and earlier in 1934. He might have left his burros behind because of the difficulty of getting them to cross the Colorado River. In all likelihood, Sleight speculated, after exploring Grand Gulch, Everett had descended the canyon to its mouth, then drowned trying to swim the San Juan River, as he attempted to move from Cedar Mesa onto the Navajo Reservation. The crossing at the mouth of Grand Gulch is a notoriously treacherous one.

  Other students of the Ruess enigma were at least as puzzled as Ken Sleight. Because the river guide was so possessive of his discovery that he did not readily disclose the location of the NEMO granary, others wondered whether Sleight had made up the whole story, or had scratched the copycat inscription himself. But to those who knew him well, such an act was unthinkable. It would be very unlikely that a man who had spent decades searching for any trace of Everett Ruess, and who had guided Waldo into Davis Gulch, would have tarnished the legend by fabricating false evidence.

  * * *

  Over the years, fans of Everett Ruess were moved to poetic evocations that tried to capture the essence of his spirit and his quest. One of the finest appreciations came from Hugh Lacy, whose articles in Desert magazine had first brought the vagabond’s story to a larger audience. In “Say That I Kept My Dream …” Lacy wrote,

  He was one of earth’s oddlings—one of the wandering few who deny restraint and scorn inhibition. His life was a quest for the new and the fresh. Beauty was a dream. He pursued his dream into desert solitudes—there with the singing wind to chant his final song.

  A newspaper journalist and friend of the family, Paul Wilhelm, wrote a ballad about Everett, which cleverly if sentimentally imagined his last days in Davis Gulch from the point of view of Cockleburrs and Chocolatero. It begins,

  At winter dusk they stand and wait—

  Two burros by a broken gate …

  The poem traces Everett’s journeys through late summer and early autumn of 1934, and finally down the Hole-in-the-Rock Trail.

  But that was long before we knew

  That he corralled the burros two,

  Showed them the grass and water near

  Enough to keep them for a year.

  He’d be away, “O not as long

  As you could bray,” he said, “your song …

  Just round the bend, up scarped pine belt,

  A cliff cave hangs, where Indians dwelt,

  Now wait for me, I’ll not be long.”

  He swung away and sang his song:

  “Say that I starved, was lost

  On some cold starlit trail agleam—

  But that I kept my desert dream!”

  And every winter dusk they wait—

  Two burros by a broken gate,

  For one who was their trail friend

  But vanished round the canyon bend

  When autumn snows swirled off plateaus

  Where Escalante River flows.

  The publication of On Desert Trails in 1940, and its reprinting in 1950, served handsomely to fulfill Christopher, Stella, and Waldo’s desire to keep Everett’s memory alive in word and woodcut. But by the 1950s, the family yearned for some additional monument—a fuller anthology of Everett’s work, perhaps, or even a biography. It was thus with high expectations that Waldo and Stella reacted to a letter written to Stella in April 1958 by a man named Larry Kellner.

  A ranger at Wupatki National Monument near Flagstaff, and a friend of Clay Lockett (the leader of the 1934 excavation of Woodchuck Cave who had hired Everett as camp cook), Kellner also had high ambitions as a writer. As Waldo later summarized the letter’s contents, Kellner suggested that he would produce a screenplay about Everett for “a top rate TV program such as ‘Climax’ or ‘Playhouse 90.’ Says can construct a dialogue such as between E and others and between E & Indians by talking to Clay Lockett and to various Indians. Mentions a Navajo about 70 years old who lives on the edge of the Painted Desert and has been there all his life and should know E.” Kellner went on to declare a deep sense of identification with Stella’s lost son: “Everett’s feelings are parallel to mine about this vast country and the Indian people.”

  Thus began a long correspondence among Stella, Waldo, and Kellner. In February 1959, Kellner apologized to Stella for a protracted silence, occasioned, he said, by attending college in Omaha and suffering from a recurring kidney ailment. Back as a ranger at Sunset Crater, just south of Wupatki, he was eager to get started on the screenplay. He asked, “I was wondering if you might have a spare picture of Everett that I might have, showing a close-up of him. Also, if possible, do you have one of him with his burros, or one similar?” Kellner wanted to show the photos to various Navajo and Hopi elders to see if they recognized Everett. The pictures, he promised, “will be returned to you as soon as possible.”

  Kellner added an intriguing datum: “I have one Indian name by which he was known—Yabitoch.” Almost twenty-four years earlier, on March 14, 1935, Captain Neal Johnson had written Stella and Christopher, “Most of the Indians know of the Paint man whitch is Everett they say he is Yabitoch which means fun, good humor.” Although the parents later discounted virtually everything Johnson told them, this striking allusion to “Yabitoch” must have convinced Stella that Kellner was onto a new clue to Everett’s fate. Since Johnson’s letters had never been published, the Navajo appellation for the “Paint man,” it seemed, must have been genuine.

  A trusting woman, Stella promptly mailed Kellner a batch of photos of Everett. Some of them were apparently the only prints from negatives that had long been lost. In May, Kellner wrote Stella again, saying that he needed to hold on to the photos a while longer, and asking if she minded if he made copies of them. Once more he tossed out provocative details from his research in the field.

  I have a trader friend (now 47 years old and a white man) who, as a lad, helped on occasion at Gouldings Trading Post from about 1928 to 1934. I showed him the pictures of Everett, and asked if he knew the lad. The first picture he did not recognize Everett, but when I showed him one with Everett and the burros, he replied “Sure—this is Everett Ruess. We were both about the same age. We packed into Monument Valley once, and had a great time. Everett knew how to camp well, but the one thing I showed him was how to use a Dutch oven. Yes, I knew him well. We used to sit and talk by the hours.”

  Kellner never disclosed the name of this trader friend. He added, “I am still of the opinion, however, that the key to the entire situation lies with the old Navajos whom I will contact, as well as some of the older Hopis.”

  At some point in 1959 or 1960, Kellner briefly visited Stella and Waldo in Los Angeles. Many years later, Waldo would recall the “fine impression” the man had made.

  Meanwhile, however, there was no further talk from Kellner about a screenplay for some television show. Instead, by April 1961 the man had decided to write a book about Everett. As Waldo paraphrased a Kellner letter, “Says wants to do E’s complete life, in one good-sized book. Can do more justice that way. Also, believes he would be able to get better TV and/or movie rights from this book.” Later in 1961, he wrote Stella to as
k what percentage of the royalties she wanted.

  Through 1960 and 1961, sporadic letters from Kellner dropped more tantalizing tidbits from his research. A sample, again in Waldo’s paraphrase: “Says in Oct. he is going to stop at Polacca when he goes to Canyon de Chelly in search of things E left in cliff dwelling. Says 2 Hopis told him they think E wrote Nema, not Nemo, and Nema is a Hopi word meaning ‘I am going home.’ ”

  Three years after first making contact with Stella, Kellner had still not returned the photos of Everett. Nor had the biographer made a second visit to the family. By now, reasonable skepticism ought to have set in. Something was clearly amiss with Larry Kellner, and in some ways he was beginning to resemble the second coming of Captain Neal Johnson. It was not cash that Kellner wanted, but, as it were, pieces of Everett himself.

  Half a century later, it is hard to judge how sincere Kellner was, or just how much research he actually undertook. In July 1960 he wrote to Harry Aleson, describing an encounter with some Hopi firefighters with whom he had worked at Saguaro National Monument near Tucson.

  They did not know Everett, although one of them vaguely recalled the young wanderer. I showed him pictures of Everett, but he could not readily recall him to[o] well. He did, however, tell me that there is a white man, about forty-five years old, living among the Hopis. He dresses like a Hopi, complete with long hair.

  In 1960, if he were still living, Everett would have been forty-six years old. Kellner added that the firefighters “are going to try to uncover for me information on Everett from among the older Hopi people.”

  Far from reigning in their collaboration with Kellner in 1961, however, Waldo (who was as trusting as his mother) and Stella kept sending the man original documents, including what Waldo later described as “many letters, papers, etc.” And somehow, in early 1961, they offered to lend Kellner one of Everett’s trail diaries. The part-time ranger wrote back on March 3, “As to Everett’s diary! Nothing would please me more than to read it, document it, and have it published.”

  In the age before copy machines, Stella and Waldo could think of no alternative to sending Kellner the original diary. By August it was in his hands. The thank-you letter Kellner wrote to Stella on August 5 makes the modern partisan of Everett Ruess want to weep with frustration:

  I received the diary you sent me about Everett’s Arizona travels. I have read and reread it many times—I never tire of it.… I will, with your permission, keep the diary for a while longer, until I have an opportunity to either copy it and extract from it what I need for the book. Then, with all my fervent prayers, I hope that I can then return it to you in person.

  The reference to “Everett’s Arizona travels” makes it all but certain that the diary Kellner borrowed was the journal Everett kept during his spectacularly rich ten-month odyssey in the Southwest in 1931. That diary may still exist somewhere, but no disinterested student of the Ruess saga or member of his family has seen it in the last fifty years.

  In 1961, Kellner began excusing his delays in getting on with the book project by complaining to Stella about an endless series of physical ailments and job crises that forestalled writing about Everett. In June, after an illness, Kellner claimed that a dentist in Globe, Arizona, had had to take out all his teeth. Later the same month he had to fight a forest fire “raging out of control” in the Chiricahua National Monument in southeastern Arizona. By the next May, his recurring kidney ailment had forced him to quit his job as a ranger. He had planned, he said, to go into Davis Gulch with Ken Sleight, but had to cancel the trip. In January 1963 he was further distracted by his mother’s undergoing two lung surgeries and his father’s struggling with a “heart condition.”

  In March 1963, Kellner brazenly asked Stella “if there are any more letters, diaries, photos, etc., which can be made available.” It was now five years since Kellner had first contacted her, and neither she nor Waldo had seen a word of the purported book about Everett. Yet Kellner claimed to have had an encouraging response from the venerable Philadelphia publisher J. B. Lippincott & Co. Ever trusting, Stella and Waldo sent Kellner yet more materials, including some letters that Everett had written to his best friend, Bill Jacobs.

  By now, Kellner was writing to Waldo with the air of one accomplice in biography confiding in another. On May 24, 1963, he mused,

  As for not finding a romance in Everett’s life, I think it is only more intriguing and interesting. I wanted to be sure before writing the book, however, so that it can be written as accurately as possible.… [T]he fact that there apparently is no love affair does not make the story more difficult by any means, Waldo. I think this is probably all the more the true Everett.

  It was not until April 1963 that Waldo first voiced impatience about the return of the precious original materials he and Stella had lent the biographer. In Waldo’s résumé of the Kellner connection, he wrote, “I ask if he has extracted data from the diaries & other written material sent to him so that he can return it soon or now.” On May 15, Kellner wrote back, “I have not copied the diaries but only excerpts from them.” He asked if he could hang on to the materials “until such time as a publisher is lined up.”

  Nine days later, Kellner wrote Waldo, “With each passing day, I am more confident in Lippincott.” But, “If that does not work out, I have now established contact with an agent in Beverly Hills and one in New York, and they will help fight the way to the publishing house.”

  The Kellner charade lasted through September 1964. More personal crises—job changes, the continued ill health of his parents, and the like—forced Kellner (or so he claimed) to declare bankruptcy. In March 1964 he wrote to Waldo, insisting that he had submitted a finished book, not to Lippincott, but to a New York publisher, which rejected it. Kellner turned to the Sierra Club, whose large-format picture books about the Southwest (most notably, Eliot Porter and David Brower’s The Place No One Knew, about Glen Canyon on the Colorado River) were in the process of galvanizing an environmental movement nationwide. But Sierra Club Books, Kellner claimed, narrowly rejected the work.

  On June 8, 1964, Kellner wrote Waldo again, giving him news of a family tragedy. Waldo recorded, “Sister ran into another car head-on and 4 of 8 occupants of other car were killed; sister critically injured but after 3 surgeries is making a comeback.… This hard on his parents—still alive.”

  On September 6, Waldo received another letter, with the return address general delivery in Santa Fe. Kellner had changed jobs again: he was now working, he said, for the Institute of American Indian Arts. “He mentions ‘deaths in the family,’ ” Waldo noted, “(but parents still alive).”

  Then Larry Kellner simply disappeared.

  * * *

  In the spring of 1964, Stella was eighty-four years old, Waldo fifty-four. During his twenties and thirties, as he crafted his career as an international diplomat, Waldo had spent more time abroad than in the United States, as he took positions in business and government in China, Japan, India, and Russia. He also traveled widely, making extended excursions to Morocco, Algeria, Sudan, Norway, France, Burma, Cambodia, Mexico, Canada, and other countries (“100 foreign lands,” he would reckon in 1974). Waldo was also an accomplished polyglot, who became fluent in Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, Russian, and French, and he could converse in yet other languages.

  Unlike Everett, Waldo was never shy with women. He had had a series of girlfriends both at home and abroad, but did not marry until he was forty-eight years old. Vacationing on the island of Mallorca in February 1957, Waldo came upon a Spanish woman making her way carefully down a sea cliff toward the beach. Waldo gave her a helping hand. Conchita was a surgical nurse at a local hospital. It was classical love at first sight. Waldo and Conchita were married on Columbus Day, 1957. For a short while they lived in the Andalusian town of Jerez de la Frontera, before the couple came to the United States, settling down close to Stella in Los Angeles. By 1964, Waldo and Conchita had three children, two daughters and a son.

  On Mother�
�s Day, May 10, 1964, Stella was resting in a hospital bed installed in her home, as she recuperated from a stroke. Waldo was off in the Escalante country with Ken Sleight, looking for traces of Everett. As he wrote to Harry Aleson a month later:

  Conchita had given Mother a good bkfst, which she enjoyed, and then the children came in and sang, “Happy Mother’s Day to you, dear Grandma,” she the while waving her arms as if conducting a choir. Then she dropped her arms and slowly faded away. Thus her passing was as sweet and poetic as the manner in which she lived.

  Six weeks after Stella died, Waldo, Conchita, and the children moved to Santa Barbara, where Waldo would live for the rest of his life. That summer, his grief about his mother’s death was compounded by the growing suspicion that Larry Kellner would never produce the book about Everett he had promised for half a decade. After September 1964, when Kellner stopped answering Waldo’s letters, the sense of having been robbed of Everett’s irreplaceable manuscripts burgeoned in Waldo (temperamentally the least angry of men) to a quiet but constant outrage.

  Waldo would spend the next eighteen years trying to hunt down the shadowy Kellner. It would not be until November 1973—nine years after the man had dropped out of sight—that Waldo was able to obtain an address for him, a post office box in Tucson that the superintendent of Saguaro National Monument had supplied.

  On February 9, 1974, Waldo wrote a forceful letter to Kellner. It read in part,

  Larry, could you please return to me the correspondence and diaries, etc., re Everett which we had loaned to you? This is part of my remembrance of my brother,—part of my heritage. Our children are growing and they want to read and know more about him. If it is a matter of the cost of sending them, even though we are a family of six [a fourth child had been born in 1965] living on less than $12,000 a year, I will find a way to reimburse you.

  Kellner never replied. The Tucson post office box may have been a defunct or bogus address, or perhaps Kellner was simply ignoring Waldo’s pleas. Waldo redoubled his efforts to track down the fugitive biographer. But it would take another eight years before he again made contact with Kellner.