Finding Everett Ruess

by David Roberts

  * * *

  For at least three and a half decades, Aneth told nobody about what had happened that day in Chinle Wash. Only in 1971 did he feel compelled to share his dark secret with his granddaughter, Daisey Johnson. Thirteen years older than her brother, Denny Bellson, Daisey waited another thirty-seven years to tell Denny the story.

  A few weeks before Vaughn had called me in May 2008, Daisey had come from her home in Farmington, New Mexico, to Bluff, Utah, to visit relatives, including Denny. A dispute over sheep grazing rights was the ostensible reason for the rendezvous. But, as Daisey later recalled, “One of the grandkids asked us how the Utes used to treat us.” So she told the tale that Denny had never heard before—about Aneth Nez, the Comb Ridge, and the young Anglo riding away from his pursuers on the bench beside Chinle Wash.

  Fifty-six years old in May 2008, Daisey was a troubled woman. A year and a half earlier she had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She had undergone a round of chemotherapy that nauseated her and caused her hair to fall out. But the cancer had gone away. Now, just in the last few weeks, it had come back. This time Daisey went to a medicine man.

  “He asked me, ‘Have you been messing with the dead?’ ” Daisey would later explain to me. “So I told him about Grandpa.”

  In Bluff, Denny listened to his sister’s story in electrified silence. In 1971, at the age of seventy-two, Aneth himself had fallen ill with cancer. He had paid a medicine man to diagnose his trouble. Either Aneth had told the medicine man about witnessing the murder on the Comb, or the man had divined it. “He said,” Daisey narrated, “ ‘You had no business messing around with that body.’ ” To her relatives, Daisey added, “When Grandpa carried the boy up to the grave, he must have got a lot of blood on him—that’s what made him get sick later.”

  The medicine man told Aneth that the only way he could cure his cancer would be to retrieve a lock of hair from the head of the young man he had buried decades earlier, then use it in a five-day Enemy Way curing ceremony. “I was nineteen,” Daisey said. “I was home for the summer. I heard Grandpa and Grandma arguing about something. Grandma said, ‘You should have left him alone! Left him be!’

  “So I asked Grandpa, ‘What are you talking about?’ He said, ‘I’m going to tell you this story, and I’m only going to tell you once.’ That was the first time I ever heard anything about the young dude the Utes had killed down there in Chinle Wash.”

  Daisey drove her grandfather, who had never learned to operate a motor vehicle, out toward the Comb in the family pickup. She waited in the cab for two hours. “He came back,” Daisey recalled, “and said, ‘He’s still there.’ ”

  A few days later, Aneth drove out to the Comb again with another medicine man. This time he retrieved a lock of hair from the grave.

  In the curing ceremony, Daisey explained, the medicine man dusted the lock of hair with ash—“so it will never bother the patient again.” On the fifth day, “The medicine man said a prayer, thanking the spirits for making the patient well again. Somebody yelled, ‘It’s ready now!’ The medicine man put ash on the lock of hair, then shot it with a gun, to destroy it completely.

  “And then Grandpa got better.”

  According to the medicine man whom Daisey consulted in 2008, it was not her role in 1971 as driver for Aneth Nez that was the sole cause of her own cancer. A far more grievous event had occurred ten years after the pickup ride. “Grandpa got sick again in 1981,” Daisey reminded her relatives in Bluff. “He was eighty-two years old. I told Grandma to take him to the hospital in Cortez [Colorado]. The night he was admitted, we all went over there, my mom and my aunts and all. We asked the doctor what was wrong with him. The doctor said he had stomach cancer, and that they couldn’t do anything for him.

  “Two weeks later, I went to Cortez to drop in on Grandpa. There was a nurse coming out of his room. She said, ‘I just took his temperature. You can visit him, but he’s not talking much.’

  “I went in, but Grandpa had already passed. His mouth was open. I started shaking him. He was already gone, but I kept shaking him, and saying, ‘Grandpa! Grandpa!’ He didn’t answer.”

  Daisey paused in her storytelling and took a deep breath. “This year, when I went to the medicine man, I told him about shaking Grandpa in the hospital and calling out to him. He said, ‘That would have done it. You don’t ever touch the dead or talk to the dead. You don’t mess with death.’ ”

  Denny Bellson lives on the Navajo Reservation, just off U.S. Highway 191 south of Bluff, not far from where both he and Daisey had grown up, and where Aneth Nez had lived. As he listened to his sister’s story, Denny realized that the grave must lie somewhere near the house in which he had resided for the last fifteen years. Throughout his adult life, Denny kept a close bond with the land on which he grew up, as he prowled around Comb Ridge and Chinle Wash, looking for hidden treasure. Now Denny was seized with a passion to find the grave where Aneth had buried the young man back in the 1930s.

  For several days, Denny spent the time he had off from his carpentry and craftsman jobs out hiking Comb Ridge, looking into every corner and cranny along the rim. Then he returned to Bluff to visit Daisey again. This time he brought with him a USGS topo map, annotated with penciled-in landmarks—the hogans and grazing pastures of the neighbors and relatives with whom he and his sister had grown up.

  “I tried to get her to show me where she’d parked the pickup with our grandpa,” Denny later told me. “When I showed her the map, she recognized a Y in the road near Colored Rock Woman’s house. She gave me real good directions.”

  It was May 25, 2008. Denny rushed back out to the Comb, while Daisey drove home to Farmington. In less than two hours of searching, in an obscure crevice just under the crest of the Comb, Denny found what he was looking for. And he saw at once that the person whose bones lay in that unlikely tomb had been buried in haste, and perhaps in great fear.

  When Daisey got home, the phone was ringing. It was Denny on the line. He blurted out four words: “I found the grave.”

  Neither Denny nor Daisey, nor anyone in their family, had ever heard of Everett Ruess. Shortly after first listening to his sister’s story about their grandfather, Denny had summarized the tale to a friend in Bluff, Michael Peed, a retired art professor originally from Montana. At once Peed remarked, “Gosh, that sounds a lot like Everett Ruess.” Peed wrote down the vagabond’s name.

  Denny got on a computer, Googled the name, and learned the basic outlines of the story of the artist and poet who had vanished near Davis Gulch in 1934. Later, Peed lent Denny a copy of Rusho’s A Vagabond for Beauty.

  A few days after he found the grave, Denny took Vaughn Hadenfeldt out to the site. Denny showed Vaughn how, rounding a corner on a ledge, he had stumbled across a few stringy pieces of black, desiccated leather, then the wooden framework of an old saddle, and then a single wooden stirrup. All these objects were lying open to the air, in plain sight, yet in a remarkably obscure location. Just beyond the stirrup a narrow crevice gaped in the bedrock, beneath an eight-foot-high cliff. From a distance, Denny thought he could see bones in the dim recesses of the crack. He approached, verified that the bones were human, but touched nothing. As a traditional Navajo, Denny scrupulously observed the taboo about not coming in contact with the dead. Now, on his second visit with Vaughn, the strips of leather, the saddle, and the stirrup lay just as Denny had found them, as did the jumble of bones in the crevice.

  That evening, Vaughn telephoned me. Listening to my friend’s synopsis of the bizarre story about Aneth, Daisey, and Denny, I clung to my skepticism. “It’s a coincidence,” I told Vaughn. “Everett’s burros were found in Davis Gulch. How’d they get over to Chinle Wash?”

  “Yeah, that’s a problem,” Vaughn acknowledged. But he went on, “The grave could be a Navajo crevice burial, but there’s something pretty weird about it. Denny says if it was a Navajo grave, they’d have buried the saddle and the other stuff with the dead man. And it doesn’t look like the guy
was carefully laid out in the crevice. It looks like he was jammed in there in a hurry.”

  Vaughn sent me a few digital photos he had snapped at the site. One was a good shot of the stirrup. I got out Vagabond for Beauty. In a couple of photos of Everett on burro-back, the stirrups looked very much like the artifact Denny had found. But for all I knew, stirrups in the 1930s in the Southwest were all of a single make. To take another photo, Vaughn had leaned into the opening of the crevice and shot straight down. The upper half of a smooth white skull protruded intact from the dirt. Beside it was a leather belt decorated with metal studs, buckled closed in a twisted loop.

  The photos intrigued me, but it took another call from Vaughn to plant the hook. “Hey, David,” he said over the phone, “I think you ought to take this seriously. What if it really could be Everett?”

  I pondered the wild improbability. What did I have to lose? “Okay,” I said to Vaughn. “It’s worth a trip out there, I guess. Ask Denny if he’s willing to take me to the site.”

  I called my editors at National Geographic Adventure to see if they were interested in this possibly new wrinkle about Everett Ruess. Guarded but curious, they agreed to finance my junket to Bluff.

  Before I could get to Utah, however, Denny called the FBI in Monticello. If by some remote chance the grave was that of Everett Ruess—or of some other Anglo who had been killed by Utes—it was thus a crime scene. Fearful of violating legal sanctions, Denny felt it his duty to call the authorities.

  I called up Rachel Boisselle, special agent in the Monticello office. Over the phone, she seemed friendly. She, too, had never heard of Everett Ruess, so I filled her in on the seventy-four-year-old saga. Boisselle was planning to head out to the site with Denny in a few days. But she was plainly skeptical. “Denny’s already dragged us out to another place down near Poncho House where he found bones coming out of the ground,” she told me. “When we got there, we could see right away that it was an Anasazi mother and child. We covered the bones back up.”

  The Ruess story plainly intrigued Boisselle, however. “You can be sure we’ll treat this new burial with the utmost respect,” she told me just before we hung up. “We won’t disturb a thing.”

  I had my misgivings. I called Greg Child, who lives in Castle Valley, Utah—only 120 miles north of Bluff—to tell him what was going on. Greg was as intrigued by the developing enigma as Vaughn and I were. Now Adventure commissioned Greg to photograph the strange crevice burial.

  Greg drove down to Bluff and found Denny, who took him out on the Comb. “At the grave, Denny didn’t touch a thing,” Greg told me later. “And on the way back, he made me wash my hands in this spring he knew about. I had to wash them over and over again before Denny would let me get into his truck.”

  At the site, Greg spent an hour photographing the burial—not only the “artifacts” (saddle, strips of leather, stirrup) lying on the ledge, but the top of the skull protruding from the dirt inside the crevice and the buckled belt beside it.

  Greg’s photos, it turned out, would provide the only careful documentation of the burial site before the FBI team came in and trashed it completely.

  * * *

  In Bluff on July 7, I met Denny Bellson. Forty-three years old in the summer of 2008, he had a quiet demeanor but, I sensed at once, an alertness that took in every nuance of his surroundings. Of medium build, with dark hair flecked with gray and a mustache drooping past the corners of his mouth, he squinted through rimless spectacles that a professor might have worn.

  With Vaughn, we drove south on Highway 191, then turned west on a gravel road. At the wheel, Denny took one fork after another, as the branching trails petered out in vestigial slickrock tracks. “When I was a kid,” Denny said, “I asked my dad, ‘Do people live out there?’ ” He pointed through the windshield at the stark plateau ahead of our truck. “Dad said, ‘Nope. You go out there and it just drops off into a big canyon.’ I thought it was like the end of the world.”

  Finally we parked the truck and started hiking. It was 96 degrees and windless, and within minutes my face and chest were covered with sweat.

  I noticed that Denny was toting a .357 Magnum in a holster strapped to his belt. “Why do you carry that gun?” I asked.

  “Might step on another bobcat.” On a search for the grave back in May, Denny explained, he had put his weight on a rock beneath which a bobcat was crouching. “Spooked him bad,” Denny said. “Bobcats can be vicious.”

  We came to the rim. Just below us, I recognized the shelf Vaughn, Greg, and I had hiked in 2004 on our traverse of the Comb. We had passed within a hundred yards of the grave site, I would soon realize, without suspecting there was anything interesting just above us on the right. Now Denny dropped one level, scuttled around a few corners, then stopped before a cranny so nondescript I wouldn’t even have bothered to search it for potsherds.

  “Who piled up those rocks?” Vaughn asked, pointing at an assemblage that covered some six feet of crevice.

  “FBI,” Denny answered.

  As we pulled the camouflaging stones away from the grave, Vaughn groaned, and I cursed out loud, for I had seen Greg’s photos of the site before the feds had gotten here. “What the hell did they do?” I asked.

  In a deadpan voice, Denny narrated his outing a week before with the FBI. The team had consisted of Rachel Boisselle from the Monticello office, two Navajo criminal investigators, and the San Juan county sheriff, who had invited his three sons along. “One of the CIs tried to lift up the skull,” Denny recounted, “and it broke into pieces. The FBI lady decided right off that it was a Navajo crevice burial. They acted like I was wasting their time.”

  I was staring at the desecrated grave. The heavy saddle, the stirrup, and other odds and ends that Denny had originally found on the ledge in front of the crevice had been jammed into the tight space, further damaging the skeleton. When they were done, the whole team had covered up their work by piling stones to hide the grave.

  “Sounds like they thought they were out on a fucking picnic,” I muttered.

  Denny smiled. “It kinda was.”

  “You just sat there and let them do it?”

  “Wasn’t up to me. They’re the FBI.”

  The three of us sat on boulders, surveying the wreckage. I wiped my brow with a bandanna. “I can smell those bones,” Denny said. I couldn’t, but Vaughn nodded. Denny added, “I could smell ’em when I got here the first time.”

  “How did you find the grave?” I asked.

  “Came around that corner there.” Denny pointed north. “I saw part of the saddle. That led me to the crevice.”

  “Was it exciting?”

  “No. Spooky.”

  Daisey’s story about Aneth Nez was dancing in my head. “Why did your grandfather haul the body up here?”

  Denny shrugged. “Dunno. Preserve it, maybe. Use it later.”

  “For medicine?” I was out of my Navajo depth.

  “For his ceremony.”

  From the rim we could see Chinle Wash stretching north into the distance. Denny pointed to a pair of tall cottonwood trees three hundred feet below and a mile away. “They call that place the Standing Tree. I think that’s where the kid was killed by the Utes.”

  At Vaughn’s urging, we scrambled down to the wash. None of us expected to find anything from the 1930s—flash floods over the decades would have scoured clean the creekbed and its banks. Vaughn, Greg, and I had backpacked this very stretch of the Chinle in 2004. But now the hike down from the rim and back up gave us a visceral sense of the effort Aneth Nez must have undertaken to bury the young man in the high crevice.

  Back at the grave site, I asked Denny, “You think the saddle was Aneth’s?”

  He nodded. “It would’ve been contaminated.”

  “Why did Daisey wait thirty-seven years to tell you your grandfather’s story?”

  “Dunno. You’ll have to ask her.”

  I hestitated before posing what felt like an intrusive question. �
�Denny, is it dangerous for you to come here?”

  “It is,” he answered right away. “Doesn’t matter if this guy is white, Mexican, or Navajo. It will probably affect me later.”

  I thought about that. “Why are you willing to take Vaughn and me here?”

  “I want to find out who this guy is.” Denny stared at the crevice. “Well, he sure picked the loneliest place to die.”

  I was impressed. Denny had been doing his homework.

  The next day I drove to Farmington to talk to Daisey Johnson. We met for lunch at the International House of Pancakes, her favorite restaurant. She had dressed up for the occasion, wearing a bright red blouse and a brooch made of concentric rings of turquoise stones. Her wavy auburn hair seemed to belie her age—but after a moment I realized that it was probably a wig, for I knew the chemotherapy had caused her hair to fall out. Now Daisey’s face bore a frown of anguish—the residue of her months of suffering from a cancer that would not go away.

  A week earlier, over the telephone, Daisey had told me a brief version of Aneth Nez’s story. Now she recounted her grandfather’s saga in much greater detail.

  “When Grandpa brought back the lock of hair, it was in a plastic bag,” Daisey explained. “I saw it later for just a second. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to see it. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to know what Grandpa did with that white man.”

  Daisey retold the story of the five-day Enemy Way curing ceremony her grandfather had undergone, culminating with the covering of the lock of hair with ash, then shooting it with a gun. “After that,” Daisey said, “once the ceremony was done, I didn’t hear anything more about the guy down there in Chinle Wash. But I kept thinking about him. He must have family somewhere. I kept thinking if my son was laying out there somewhere, I would want somebody to tell me where he was. Plus, what was even more shocking was that the guy was only twenty years old.”

  There was a long pause. I asked, “Do you have any interest in going out to the grave site?”