Finding Everett Ruess

by David Roberts

  I asked Christensen why he hadn’t gone to the authorities with Riddle’s confession. “There was nothing to be gained by telling on Keith,” he answered. “He’d served his country well in World War II. And he’d herded sheep and cattle all his life.”

  In Panguitch, the county seat, I pored over old records. And in Escalante, the simple phrase “Some people think Keith Riddle killed Everett” now opened doors that had previously been shut to me.

  Gradually I pieced together a sketch of Riddle’s life. Born in Escalante in 1915, one of eight siblings, Keith had seen his father desert the family, leaving his mother to care for her numerous offspring. “Lordy,” said Della Christianson, ninety years old in 1998, “I don’t know how that woman raised that bunch.”

  Enter Joe Pollock, twenty years older than Keith. Pollock took the boy under his wing, teaching him to ride and rope and string fence. Pollock’s spread was way out down the Hole-in-the-Rock Trail, on the plateau southeast of Davis Gulch.

  His harsh childhood took its toll on Riddle, and he later developed a drinking problem. “He was pretty handy on a horse and all,” remembered DeLane Griffin. “When he got out of the service, he drank, and he was meaner’n strychnine when he was drunk.”

  Nearly everyone in Escalante agreed that Pollock and Riddle rustled. “Joe made a living stealing cattle,” said Della Christianson, who had also seen Everett come through town. “He’d go down in the Desert, run cows off a ledge or shoot ’em, then take the calves. And Joe taught Keith how to steal.”

  In Panguitch I found documents from 1922 and 1930 bringing Joe Pollock to trial for rustling, but both times he was acquitted. Though I failed to find any record of the case, everybody in Escalante remembered that Pollock had finally been convicted around 1938, and served time in prison. Della Christianson recalled the sting that trapped the cowboy. “The Cattlemen’s Association took a calf, cut a slit in its hide, and sewed a silver dollar into it. They found the calf with Joe Pollock’s brand on it. The sheriff produced the silver dollar.” Gail Bailey, coincidentally, was the president of the Cattlemen’s Association.

  According to Della Christianson, “Keith became a recluse later in life. If you came to his home, he’d go in the bedroom and hide.”

  At the time Everett disappeared, Keith Riddle was nineteen years old, Joe Pollock thirty-nine. Riddle died in 1984, at the age of sixty-eight; Pollock twenty years earlier, at the same age. The recurrent scenario that bits of Escalante gossip outlined was that Everett had stumbled upon some rustlers far out on the Escalante Desert. As I had earlier learned, to put a scare into the likes of Pollock and Riddle, the Cattlemen’s Association had circulated the false rumor that a government agent was coming to Escalante to investigate. Caught red-handed slaughtering a cow, completely unaware of the advent of a twenty-year-old artist in the country, the rustlers assumed Everett was that government agent. One or both of them had killed the young man to cover up their crime.

  I could not dismiss the possibility that Riddle’s “confession” was after all a drunken boast, or even that Norm Christensen had made up the story. In Fredonia, Arizona, I managed to track down Loy Riddle, one of Keith’s sons. Born in 1950, Loy could have known about the Ruess matter only from tales his father had told him more than twenty years after the fact. Loy, of course, had heard the rumors implicating his father. Over the phone, he told me, “On my father’s deathbed, I said, ‘Dad, if you killed the little guy, let me know where he’s at, ’cause there’s still a $10,000 reward out on him. Tell me and I’ll collect.’ Dad said, ‘Hell, I never even met the guy.’ ” Loy believed that it was Gail Bailey who had fingered his father and Joe Pollock.

  Another persistent motif in the gossip of the old-timers nagged at me. From four different sources I had heard the imputation, always repeated in the exact same phrase, that Everett’s killers “had throwed his body in the river.” Clearly the river implied was the Colorado, as its tributary, the Escalante, dwindles to a trickle in November. As Norm Christensen said to me, “There’s so many places out there to dispose of a body—tie a couple of rocks on him, throw him in the river. After three-four months of catfish and carp feedin’ on him, there wouldn’t be much left.”

  Had Everett run into Keith Riddle and Joe Pollock out on their winter range, he must have left Davis Gulch on a hike to the southeast. Perhaps he had climbed the single line of Moqui steps that attacked that side of the canyon, though I had blanched at the thought as I had stood at the foot of that hand-and-toe trail. But the Pollock range embraced a large quadrangle bordered by the Hole-in-the-Rock, Kaiparowits Plateau, Davis Gulch, and the Escalante River. Where in that featureless badlands might the fateful encounter have taken place?

  Melvin Alvey had given me another fugitive clue. He said that a long-dead rancher who had participated in the 1935 search had told him that somebody had found unexplained footprints in the mud at Jackass Bar, on the Colorado. But where was Jackass Bar, and how did you get there? There was no such name on the 1987 USGS topo map, for the sandbar had long since been flooded under the waters of Lake Powell.

  No one in Escalante seemed to remember where Jackass Bar was. More than forty years before, they had turned their backs on the farthest reaches of the Escalante Desert. Joe Pollock’s range languished unused, its topography forgotten. As DeLane Griffin told me, “All the guys who knew that country’re in the cemetery today.”

  But McKay Bailey, Gail’s son, had a vague memory of Jackass Bar. “Joe Pollock used to put cows down on the bar,” he drawled. “Probably Joe built the stock trail down to it. It’s right there, right below this old spring—Joe Perdence’s seep, named for an old Spanish guy, lived out that way a long time.” Bailey took my map and drew a crooked line on it.

  I had thought I had wrapped up my research at the beginning of June. Like Bud Rusho, I would not solve the mystery of Everett’s demise. But now, in early July, I was seized with a feverish obsession at least to retrace what might have been the vagabond’s last trail.

  The temperature was in the high nineties when I got out of my rental four-by-four, not far from the top of the Hole-in-the-Rock cleft, and started rim-walking northeast. McKay Bailey’s line on the map was evidently off by a mile or two, for when I came to the place where he thought Joe Pollock’s livestock trail headed down to the river, I stood on the edge of a sheer cliff.

  I pushed on through a maze of sandstone billows, ridges, and cirques, backing off dead-end chutes, as I threaded a route that few, I guessed, had ever walked. I never did find Joe Perdence’s seep. But after a couple of hours, growing dizzy in the brutal, windless heat, I found the first cairn, a two-foot pillar of stacked rocks. A hundred yards beyond it I found another, then another. With mounting excitement I traced the old livestock trail, marveling at the route-finding skill of its architect, as it took the only line among the slickrock domes and prows that livestock could negotiate. Just above Lake Powell I found the broad steps, hacked with axes out of the bedrock, coated with the brown patina of the decades, of a classic Western stock trail.

  Standing on the lake shore, I stared into the opaque water, trying to see down to Jackass Bar, drowned under two hundred feet of reservoir and silt. By the time I started back, the temperature was over 100 degrees, and I was down to one quart of water.

  On the rim again, I took a slightly different route back to my vehicle, following cairns I had missed on the way out. As I passed behind a small butte, I saw two logs lying on the ground, bleached white by the sun, but showing plainly the cuts of the ax-blows that had hewn them to size. Beyond the logs, I spotted a rusted can. It had a pair of tiny holes gouged in the lid, beside two PUNCH HERE legends embossed in the metal.

  Clearly the place had been an overnight camp, the can tossed aside by its long-ago visitors, the logs never burned in the fire. (I took the can with me, then returned it to the site months later. To my wonderment, an expert in such matters confidently dated the can to 1935, plus or minus a year or two.)

  All th
e way down the livestock trail, I had pictured the killers hauling Everett’s inert body on horseback before they dumped it in the river. Could this have been the same men’s camp, coming or going? On the verge of heading on toward my car, I noticed a strange pile of rocks not far from the discarded logs. The more I stared at it, the more I was convinced that the mound was man-made. Two feet high, six feet across, the pile was plainly old, for a gnarled sagebrush grew out of it. It looked like the kind of pile of flat rocks you might build to cover something.

  A wild surmise seized my thoughts. I saw Everett, having escaped Davis Gulch to explore the plateau to the southeast, stumbling into his fatal encounter with the rustlers. I pictured them loading his body on horseback to carry it to the Colorado. Then, weary with their bloody toil, or caught short by the early night of late November, they stopped here to camp.

  It seemed improbable that the mound before me could be Everett’s grave: surely if his killers had decided to hide his body, they would not have interred it smack on the trail. But what if the mound hid some of his belongings, paraphernalia the criminals did not want to trust to the river? What if the 1934 diary lay buried here?

  The skeptic in me demurred. The mound could be merely the grave of some old cowboy’s dead dog; it could be flat rocks piled up to smother an old campfire; it could even be an odd but natural scattering of stones. And yet …

  There was only one way to find out. I knelt beside the pile and seized the topmost stone. But just as I started to dig through the dirt below, an old instinct stopped me. What first gave me pause was the

  ethic I had learned in Anasazi sites: never disturb a ruin. The Antiquities Act, moreover, protected not only seven-hundred-year-old dwellings but a sixty-three-year-old grave, or even a historic cache.

  Yet as I stood over the mound and wiped my hands on my shorts, as if to rub away the itch that had tempted me to dig, I realized it wasn’t the pile of rocks that I most wanted to leave undisturbed—it was the mystery of Everett Ruess. And I felt an odd elation, for no one else had ever had the chance to stand here, stare at the mound, and wonder What if?

  I drank the last of my water, hoisted my pack, and started on. Turning for a last look at the old campsite, I was struck by a tantalizing thought. If that mound was Everett’s grave, then, as he had predicted to Waldo, he had indeed found the wildest, loneliest, most desolate spot in which to die.

  ELEVEN

  Comb Ridge

  WHEN MY ARTICLE ABOUT EVERETT was published in the Spring 1999 issue of National Geographic Adventure, Bud Rusho took it as a personal challenge. Over the phone, I gave him detailed directions to the old campsite on the trail to Jackass Bar. Immediately he set out with three companions to investigate the place.

  Rusho found the site, then, with no compunctions about the Antiquities Act, started digging. As he later wrote,

  Convinced that the mound could not be a grave, we tentatively began discarding rocks and loose sand. But within twenty minutes of digging to a depth of about eighteen inches, we found only sandstone bedrock! Apparently the mound had been formed by a natural disintegration of a small sandstone hoodoo, leaving sand covered by broken slabs of rock. It was not a grave; neither was it a repository for Everett’s journal and camp gear.

  I reacted to Rusho’s debunking mission with relative equanimity. My hunch about the mound, I had always known, was a long shot. And the fact that the protuberance in the earth turned out to be a natural bulge did not disprove the possibility that the trail to Jackass Bar had been the route taken by Everett’s killer or killers on their way to dumping his body in the Colorado River. The campsite itself, dated by the tin can to around 1935, could very well have been the overnight stopping place of the ranchers who might have perpetrated the crime.

  On the other hand, nothing I had discovered in 1998 and early 1999 really proved anything definite about Everett’s fate. All I had to go on was Keith Riddle’s confession to Norm Christensen, and the persistent Escalante rumor about rustlers murdering the vagabond and throwing his body into the Colorado River.

  For the next nine years I kept Everett Ruess on my personal back burner, even as I made many further hiking and backpacking trips into the Escalante canyons. During that time I never returned to Davis Gulch. But in 2002, I spent a blissful week exploring the top of Kaiparowits Plateau. As preparation for that outing, I once more interviewed Escalante old-timers, especially DeLane Griffin, who knew Fifty-Mile Mountain (as the locals call it) better than any other man or woman alive. During my prowls atop Kaiparowits, I kept an eye cocked for any vestige of a sign that Everett might have explored the remote mesa, but, as I expected, I found nothing of that kind.

  Throughout those nine years, I hiked the canyons of Utah and Arizona every chance I could get with Vaughn Hadenfeldt, the wilderness guide who had shared my research forays in 1998 in quest of Everett. In 2004, Vaughn, our mutual friend Greg Child, and I made what was apparently the first complete traverse of Comb Ridge, 125 miles over eighteen days, as we started just east of Kayenta, Arizona, and ended northwest of Blanding, Utah. Following the crest of that dramatic sandstone escarpment day after day, we also looped low on its eastern flanks to explore Anasazi ruins and rock art, as well as Navajo petroglyph panels dating back as far as the end of the nineteenth century, along with the occasional ruined sweat lodge where Diné sheepherders had long ago cleansed their bodies and souls.

  Two thirds of our journey crossed the Navajo reservation. In camp several nights, as Vaughn cooked up tasty dinners, he told Greg and me about his friend Denny Bellson, a Navajo who lived just east of Comb Ridge in a house he had built for himself in 1993. Denny’s favorite pastime was to explore the nooks and crannies of the Comb, as well as the benches of Chinle Wash, which carves a sinuous gorge through the escarpment as it makes its erratic journey north toward its junction with the San Juan River. Never having met Denny, I imagined him, I suppose, as a bit of a kook, for the primary goal of his sleuthing was to find old Spanish treasure—this despite the fact that there is little or no evidence that the conquistadors of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries ever reached the Comb. But Denny was all the same a repository of local lore. He had told Vaughn, for instance, that in more than twenty years of exploring Chinle Wash, he had never found its silt-laden current clean enough to drink, even after filtering a potful and letting it stand for hours to settle.

  One day in May 2008, Vaughn called me up at my home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Out of the blue, he said, “Denny thinks he may have found Everett Ruess.”

  I could not suppress a derisive snort. “Yeah, you bet,” I rejoined. “Tell him to keep looking.”

  “Shut up and listen a minute,” Vaughn countered. Then he told me an extraordinary story.

  * * *

  Denny’s grandfather was a man named Aneth Nez. Born in 1899, Aneth was a tall, well-built, stern-faced man who wore his hair tied back in the traditional Navajo ponytail, kept in place with a tight bandanna. His hogan, the six-sided house in which he had grown up, stood only a few miles east of Comb Ridge.

  One thing that Aneth did for hours at a time was to sit on the crest of the Comb and survey the country beneath him. Sometimes those vigils were practical, for he was a sheepherder tending the flocks that grazed below him on the willows and tamarisks fringing Chinle Wash, or on the grasses stubbling the rocky slopes. But sometimes Aneth’s outings were simply idle and contemplative. Like all traditional Navajos, he had a deep connection with the land. It spoke to him in ways no white man or woman could understand.

  One day in the 1930s, Aneth’s eye had been caught by a novel and unexpected phenomenon. Some three hundred feet below his airy perch, a young man was traveling along the wash. The intruder was an Anglo. He had two pack animals, one that he rode and one that was packed with gear dangling from the saddlebags. Aneth saw a frying pan, a coffeepot, and other items that suggested the youth was on a camping trip. But he moved with an urgent purposefulness, as if searching for something.


  In the 1930s, the presence of white strangers in such a remote corner of the Navajo reservation was an unusual event. It was all the more surprising that this traveler was so young, and that he was there by himself. Aneth stayed out of sight: the youth never realized that he was being watched. Where had he come from, Aneth wondered. Where was he going? What was he looking for?

  During the next several days, Aneth spotted the young traveler again. But on the third or fourth occasion that he caught sight of the wanderer, Aneth realized immediately that something was desperately wrong. The young man was yelling and riding as fast as he could. And the men who were chasing him were Utes.

  Traditional enemies of the Navajo, the Utes are an entirely unrelated people. In the 1930s, the band of Utes nearest the Navajo reservation resided near Blanding, Utah. Aneth had grown up afraid of the Ute ruffians who had routinely robbed and beaten up his older brother, who as a teenager had been hired by white ranchers near Monticello, north of Blanding, to tend their sheep. But south of the San Juan River, on the reservation, Aneth felt safe, for Utes seldom ventured anymore into the homeland of their ancient foes.

  As Aneth watched, the Utes caught up with the young man, hit him in the head, and knocked him off his pack animal. Then they stole all his belongings, took the pack animals, and rode away north.

  After the Utes were gone, Aneth climbed down from the crest of the Comb to the bottom of Chinle Wash. The young man was dead by the time Aneth got to him. Rather than look for a burial site in the sandy stream bank, the Navajo man carried the body up to the rim, probably slung across the saddle of his horse. In the process, he most likely was smeared with the victim’s blood. In a rock crevice on the crest of the Comb, Aneth buried the young stranger.