Finding Everett Ruess

by David Roberts

  “No.” Daisey’s answer was emphatic.

  “Because it would be harmful for you?”

  Daisey sighed. “The medicine man warned me just last week not to hang around the dead, not even to go to any funerals.”

  “Denny told me,” I said, “that he thinks having found the grave site is dangerous for him.”

  “It is. I don’t know why he’s doing it. I hope he puts ash on himself every time he goes out there.”

  There was another long silence. Daisey had ordered dessert, but the pie and ice cream sat untouched on her plate. “How do you feel about the possibility this could be Everett Ruess?” I asked.

  “I hope it is,” she answered. “I hope they solve it. He was such a young guy. What was he doing out here all alone? I hope they take him back to wherever he came from. He’s got family there.”

  * * *

  Before I had gone out to Utah in July 2008, I had telephoned Brian Ruess, who lives in Portland, Oregon. One of four children of Waldo Ruess and his wife, Conchita, Brian and his three siblings were Everett’s closest living relatives, though all four had been born too late to have met their vagabond uncle. Waldo had died in 2007, the day after his ninety-eighth birthday. During his last years, the lifelong quest Waldo had pursued to solve the great mystery of his brother’s fate had been redoubled by his four children. But after decades of fielding leads and hints and theories that had never panned out, the family had become skeptical that any new evidence would ever surface.

  After my long phone conversation with Brian, however, he instantly e-mailed his siblings. “How is this for weird?” his missive began. He deftly summarized the story of Denny, Daisey, and Aneth Nez. Brian closed, “Pretty fascinating!”

  By now I had another assignment from National Geographic Adventure. For its tenth anniversary issue, in April–May 2009, the magazine would run a second story about Everett Ruess, a decade after my report on the mystery in the premiere issue.

  Was there any way, I wondered, to prove or disprove whether the bones Denny had discovered in the Comb Ridge crevice could possibly be Everett’s? What about DNA?

  The same day that I called Brian, I got in touch with Bennett Greenspan, president of Family Tree DNA, a Texas-based firm that has done consulting work for the National Geographic Society for many years. Once more I related the haunting story Daisey had told me over the phone. After a pause, Greenspan gave me an answer. It was a long shot—a very long shot. But with the right pair of samples and the most sophisticated sort of lab work, Family Tree might just be able to demonstrate a match. Or prove a mismatch.

  But if we were ever to probe the mystery deeper, by retrieving a DNA sample from the Comb Ridge skeleton, that was a business that had to be done with the utmost delicacy and through proper channels. On our various visits to the site, Vaughn, Greg Child, Denny, and I had not so much as touched a single bone. If “messing with death” was a dire Navajo taboo, it would be flagrant desecration for white folks to disturb what might well be a Native American burial.

  Before heading out to Utah, I had also gotten in touch with Ron Maldonado, the supervisory archaeologist in the Navajo Nation Historic Preservation Department, based in Window Rock, Arizona. Maldonado was instantly intrigued by the unfolding saga—and instantly cautious. He agreed, however, to go out to the site with us and have a look around. Though a Hispanic, Maldonado, I soon learned, was married to a Navajo woman. He also had vast experience with crevice burials on the reservation.

  Several days after my first visit to the grave, Vaughn, Denny, and I met Maldonado at the café-cum-convenience store that amounts to the town of Mexican Water. The archaeologist was a hefty fellow in his early fifties, with hippie-length salt-and-pepper hair and a Burl Ives beard and mustache. He spoke in a soft, thoughtful voice, often after long pauses.

  With Denny leading the way, we drove three vehicles through the maze of dirt roads west of Highway 191 out onto the slickrock plateau, then hiked to the rim of Comb Ridge. The day was as hot as on our previous foray, and my tongue was parched long before we arrived.

  Rachel Boisselle had called Maldonado before the FBI had headed out to the Comb, and I had forwarded to him Greg’s photos of the grave as it looked when Denny had found it. Now, as soon as Maldonado peered into the crevice, he sucked in his breath. “Rachel promised me they wouldn’t move anything,” he complained. “I’m just really ticked off at what they did.” Gently he removed the saddle and the other “artifacts” from the crevice. “In a crime scene,” he said, “you don’t just shove the goods into the grave.”

  For the next hour, lying awkwardly on his side, sweating profusely, Maldonado reached into the crevice and deftly wielded a trowel to pick the dirt away from the bones. He, too, avoided touching any part of the skeleton. Instead, he studied its layout. As he had two days before, Denny sat about ten yards away, watching and saying little.

  After a while, Maldonado commented, “It’s definitely a full-sized skull. But it’s still growing. It looks like a guy in his twenties.” Many minutes later: “He’s not facing east. As far as I can tell, he’s facing to the southwest. If it was a Navajo burial, he’d be facing east.”

  Later still: “It just doesn’t look like a Navajo burial. They would have put the saddle in the crevice with him.”

  Denny spoke up: “They would have killed the horse, too. Hit it with an ax, and left the ax handle in the grave.”

  Still later, Denny asked, “Smell the bones?”

  Maldonado sat up, trowel in hand. “Yeah. You can smell them even when they’re a thousand years old. It gets into the dirt. It’s a smell I can never forget. This guy I used to work with calls it ‘people grease.’ ”

  We took a break to sit in the shade and eat lunch. Maldonado mused out loud, “Look at that crevice. It’s not a likely place to bury somebody. You could make a much better burial right over there, or there.” He pointed to a pair of ample slots in the rimrock cliff just behind us. “He may have been trying to hide the body in a hurry,” Maldonado went on, referring to Aneth Nez. “Just stuff him in there, then maneuver him around. He had to get him in the ground before sunset.

  “It all makes sense. The 1930s were a really volatile time on the reservation. The government had started wholesale livestock reduction, killing thousands of Navajo sheep and cattle. They were hauling the kids off to boarding schools. Here’s a Navajo guy who witnesses a murder. Your grandpa”—Maldonado nodded at Denny—“doesn’t want the remains just lying out on the ground. In the thirties, if a white guy gets killed on the rez, they call out the cavalry. Round up a bunch of Navajos, pick a suspect, and lock him in jail. I can see why your grandpa would have tried to hide the guy. And then I can see why he wouldn’t tell anybody about it for thirty-some years.”

  After lunch, Maldonado went back to work. Finally, toward late afternoon, we sat in the shade again. The archaeologist lowered his head and wiped his brow as he pondered, silent for so long that he seemed to be meditating. Finally he spoke: “It just doesn’t look like a Navajo burial. Who else lives in this area?”

  “Nobody,” said Denny.

  “Who else could be buried out here?”

  Denny shook his head. He had asked his neighbors. There were no old stories of grave sites on this part of the Comb. “Mom and Dad,” Denny added, “always told us to stay away from here. They never told us why.”

  “According to Navajo Nation policy,” Maldonado said, “we’re supposed to protect graves, whether Native American or not. But we’re also supposed to try to find the lineal descendants, if there’s an unidentified body.” He turned to me. “Who’s the relative you talked to?”

  “Brian Ruess. He’s Everett’s nephew.”

  “Ask him to request a DNA sample.” It was obvious that Maldonado’s decision had not come easily to him. He stood up and hoisted his fanny pack. “Out here,” he said, “Navajo oral tradition is pretty accurate. Based on that tradition, I think there’s a good chance this is Everett Ruess.”r />
  * * *

  For the grave that Denny had discovered on the crest of the Comb Ridge to be Everett’s, a couple of logical puzzles would have to be solved. The most troublesome was what I had started calling “the burro problem.” According to Aneth’s story, the young Anglo who was chased and killed by the Utes in the 1930s had been riding one animal and leading another. Yet in 1982 Bud Rusho had been told by the surviving search party members that they had found Everett’s burros ranging inside the open corral in Davis Gulch.

  But if, as the old-timers told me in 1998, Gail Bailey had indeed found the animals on his own, before the March 1935 search had been launched, and had taken the animals up on “the mountain,” where they were never seen again, how could we credit the truth of any Escalante testimony about the burros? Rusho’s Vagabond for Beauty reprinted a photo of the searchers on horseback leading what looks like a pair of burros up a livestock trail. Could they be different beasts from Everett’s Cockleburrs and Chocolatero?

  If one supposes that Everett had left his burros in Davis Gulch while he explored eastward, another logical snag immediately presents itself. Chinle Wash lies sixty miles as the crow flies east of Davis Gulch, maybe ninety miles as a hiker might wend his way. In his three years of exploring the Southwest, Everett had never been known to stray far from his burros or horses. After his first foray into Yosemite in 1930, when he had struggled with the burden of a fifty-pound pack, Everett had sworn always to use pack animals in the future.

  It seems highly unlikely that in November 1934, Everett might have left Cockleburrs and Chocolatero in Davis Gulch, then covered the ninety rugged miles to Chinle Wash carrying his belongings on his back. It is doubtful that he even had a pack large enough to hold camping gear, food, clothing, and painting kit for an extended journey.

  What eventually seemed the most logical solution to the burro problem came to me after another old Southwestern crony, Fred Blackburn, commented, “The hardest thing to do with a pack animal is to get it to cross a big river.” Fred owns and trains horses, and has led many a wilderness outing with those animals, as well as other treks with mules, burros, and llamas. His remark reminded me of the passage from Everett’s last letter to his parents, in which he described the extreme difficulty he had had coaxing Chocolatero to cross the Colorado on a sturdy suspension bridge, solved only when “a packer dragged him across behind his mule, and he left a bloody track all the way across.”

  In the same letter, Everett had anticipated crossing the Colorado during the days to come, noting, “The water is very low this year.” In fact, Bureau of Reclamation records that go back to the first decade of the twentieth century reveal that the Colorado was flowing at 2,400 cubic feet per second in early November 1934, and that that level was as meager a flow as was ever recorded in the 105 years from 1906 to the present. It is possible, then, that at a place such as Hole-in-the-Rock, Everett could have waded the Colorado rather than having to swim it.

  The parsimonious solution, to my mind, was that after all his troubles with Chocolatero and river fords, Everett had decided temporarily to leave behind or even to abandon his burros in Davis Gulch, cross the river with his camping gear and personal equipment, make contact with Indians on the east side, and buy or trade for new pack animals so that he could explore farther to the east. In previous years he had sometimes bargained with Navajos for burros. And as he had left Escalante, he wrote his parents, he had “more money than I need.”

  With Denny’s discovery of the burial on Comb Ridge, the NEMO carved on the granary in Grand Gulch and the Music Note panel inked on the sandstone wall upstream took on a heightened significance. Grand Gulch lies almost exactly halfway between Davis Gulch and Chinle Wash, smack on the most logical trail between those two canyons. Since Everett had started signing himself NEMO only in late 1934, did the Grand Gulch inscriptions mark his midway passage from one place to the other?

  To solidify the authenticity of the NEMO in Grand Gulch, Vaughn and I took Fred Blackburn in to see it in April 2009. Despite having served for several years in the 1970s as a ranger in Grand Gulch, Fred had never found the inscription. But if Vaughn was an expert at deciphering historic signatures scrawled on rock walls and ruins, Fred was a genius of the craft. Sometime schoolteacher, rancher, writer, and historian living in Cortez, Colorado, Fred had received numerous government grants to record the Kilroy-was-here’s of early Anglo and Hispanic visitors to such places as Cliff Palace on Mesa Verde and Inscription House in Navajo National Monument. There, using one trick of vision after another, he had teased out scores of badly faded signatures that no one had ever been able to read before.

  We reached the granary just before noon. During the eleven years since Vaughn’s and my 1998 visit, the NEMO inscription had faded even more, or perhaps been further obliterated by some do-gooder who disapproved of graffiti, no matter how old. Fred couldn’t find it until Vaughn pointed out where the four letters made a downward tilt in the mud on the left side of the granary. I doubted that Vaughn himself could have seen it had this been his first attempt.

  Suddenly Fred grew animated, narrating his excitement out loud. “N, E, M, O—that’s what it says!” he blurted. “And I really doubt it’s a copycat. It’s a weird place to put it on a wall. If you’d put up a copycat, you’d pick a sucker like Bannister, right on the trail.” Bannister Ruin, one of the most prominent in the Gulch, lies several miles upstream from the obscure granary on the ledge where we peered at the fugitive characters.

  Photography is useless for such faint inscriptions. For the next hour, using a physician’s magnifying glass to amplify his vision, Fred laboriously sketched the signature in pencil in a large notebook he carries with him wherever he documents historic writing in the wilderness.

  “Somebody’s obviously tried to rub it out,” Vaughn said.

  “It just takes one more asshole,” Fred added, “and it’s gone.”

  As Fred sketched the faint letters, I stared over the winding canyon to the south. A cottonwood downstream blazed with young green leaves, and the opposite wall rose in a smooth, ruddy parabola. For all its defensiveness, the granary site had a lordly command of its surroundings. “It’s a real Everett kind of place,” I murmured.

  “Yeah,” said both Vaughn and Fred simultaneously.

  It had been years since Fred had looked at Rusho’s Vagabond for Beauty. Back at the trailhead late that afternoon, I got out a copy and opened it to the photo of the charcoal inscription in Davis Gulch. Fred’s voice rose to a gloating screech. “Damn right!” he declared. “That’s it! It’s the same! The ‘O’ is more oval, the ‘M’ is short-cropped at the top, the ‘E’ is slanted.”

  “It sure does look similar,” said Vaughn.

  “The same damn guy wrote it, that’s why!” Fred crowed.

  * * *

  After I telephoned Brian Ruess, he consulted his three siblings. They agreed to request the DNA sample. On the advice of Bennett Greenspan of Family Tree DNA, I helped Brian and his sister Michèle determine which family specimen the Texas lab might test. Greenspan was bent on looking for mitochondrial DNA, which is carried only in the maternal line, so samples from Waldo’s four children could not be used as a match for the bones in the crevice. But there was no living person related to Everett by a strictly maternal connection. Waldo would have been the ideal source for mitochondrial DNA, but he had died the previous year.

  Michèle Ruess came up with a clever possible solution. After Waldo’s death, his wife, Conchita, had kept her husband’s favorite hairbrush, which still had fragments of his hair tangled in the bristles. Hair itself contains no DNA, except in the follicles attached to the roots. Here was the long shot—but Greenspan was willing to give it a try. Michèle carefully wrapped the hairbrush and sent it to the lab in Texas.

  On July 22, Ron Maldonado went back out to the site with Denny and Greg Child. I would have given much to be along on this outing, but by then I had left Utah and gone home. Greenspan had briefed Maldona
do on how to recover human remains without contaminating them with one’s own DNA. A molar tooth, he counseled, would be the very best thing to find.

  At the site, Maldonado started excavating in as gingerly a fashion as he could. Lying loose in a cranny in front of the crevice was a 1912 Liberty dime that had been converted into a button. Maldonado retrieved it so that Greg could photograph it. The thing struck all three men as a very Navajo kind of relic (antique Navajo belts made of silver dollars fetch high prices in today’s Southwestern gift shops). But we also knew that Everett loved to wear Indian jewelry. In any event, the button gave us a terminus ad quem: the burial could not have taken place before 1912.

  Almost at once, to his relief, just inches below the surface Maldonado came across two loose molar teeth. With great care, he removed and packaged them. There would be no more digging that day.

  As soon as he got back to Window Rock, Maldonado e-mailed me about a bizarre event that had occurred as the men returned to their truck:

  A dust devil (whirlwind) started at or near me violently sending dust into the area. It seemed that it visited each of us individually and slowly meandered down the road, lingering, appearing to die out, then starting again. It is all very strange and definitely associated with the burial. Denny stated that it was Mister Ruess. Such things are associated with the dead and should be avoided at all costs. It has been a strange day.

  We all hoped for a quick answer from Family Tree, but in the end, the testing would take many weeks and involve stranger twists and turns than any of us, including Greenspan, could have anticipated. When the verdict came down, it left all of us baffled, confused, and in a sense, back at square one.

  * * *

  Family Tree eventually admitted that somehow one of their own lab technicians had accidentally contaminated the sample. After sorting out the consequences of this glitch, on September 30, Greenspan finally sent me an official report. Most of it was couched in technical jargon, but the conclusion was unmistakable. Greenspan wrote: “It is clear that the mtDNA from the root of the tooth and the DNA from the hair brush do not contain the same signature, and that both are European in origin and not Native American.”