Finding Everett Ruess

by David Roberts

  The media response was electric. “A Mystery of the West Is Solved,” read the New York Times headline. “Enigma Unraveled,” announced the online InsideOutsideMag.com. “The Mystery of Everett Ruess’ Disappearance Is Solved,” declared the Los Angeles Times. Other publications hailed Everett more poetically, as “Kerouac of the Canyonlands” (Tucson Weekly) and “Man-Child in the Promised Land” (American Spectator). The furor reached an international audience, as publications in the United Kingdom, Germany, and even Russia picked up the story. The Russian clipping, titled “In the United States found the remains of the missing 75 years ago poet,” contained some pithy poeticizing of its own, as rendered by Google’s automated translation service:

  Discovers bone Denny Bellson, a resident at the Utah Navajo Indian reservations. According to Bellsona, his late grandfather in 1934 saw Ruessa beaten to death and robbed, and hid the body in the cleft of the coyote and the vultures.

  The news brought the bloggers out of the woodwork. Many of the comments were simply appreciative: “Kind of sounds like a Tony Hillerman novel,” wrote one commentator, and another, “Very fascinating story, it makes me want to go wander around the Chinle area too and see the same sites that Ruess did.” Others were downright weird, like the post of a blogger calling himself “Toy”: “I guess there’s only one thing left to do … is have an uprising against the UTE. Its the only way we can remain safe in the West.… Take away their casinos!!!”

  Around Escalante, the locals reaped a grim satisfaction from the discovery. A woman identifying herself as the daughter of Joe Pollock and niece of Keith Riddle e-mailed the Ogden Standard-Examiner: “TO THOSE PEOPLE WHO MADE A VIDEO [presumably Diane Orr’s Lost Forever] AND WROTE THE STORY OF EVERTT [my 1999 article in Adventure], I THINK YOU DID A VERY BIASED VERSION OF WHAT YOU HEARD FROM OTHERS.… WE AS A FAMILY HAS BEEN HURT BY WHAT WAS WRITTEN ABOUT JOE AND KEITH AND NO ONE WHO KNEW MY DAD AND UNCLE BELIEVED ANY THING THAT WAS WRITTEN.” Another relative gloated (also in capital letters), “UNCLE JOE AND UNCLE KEITH ARE GRINNING AT THE FICTION WRITERS AND STORY TELLERS ABOUT NOW.”

  A number of commentators wondered out loud whether Aneth Nez himself had committed the murder, conveniently blaming it on Utes. That thought had in fact occurred to Vaughn Hadenfeldt and me early on, but it was not the sort of speculation we were eager to share with Denny Bellson or Daisey Johnson.

  On June 22, I moderated a panel discussion sponsored by the Glen Canyon Institute in the packed Orson Spencer Hall auditorium at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Brian and Michèle Ruess had come from the West Coast to share their insights into the uncle they revered but had never met. Others speaking from the lectern included Denny, Vaughn, Greg Child, and Bud Rusho, who had reluctantly been won over to the Comb Ridge discovery. The audience was fervent and enthusiastic, and hung on every word that Denny, Brian, and Michèle spoke. The cult of Everett Ruess seemed to me to pulsate through the auditorium. But in the Q&A period after the discussion, two or three skeptics rose to voice their doubts about our solution to the mystery. One of them was Kevin Jones, the Utah state archaeologist. It puzzled me that Jones seemed not only to resist our findings, but to be angry that we had dared to announce them. In the coming months he would play the critical role in a slowly rising tide of doubt about the Comb Ridge find.

  Although we had exchanged months’ worth of e-mails, I had never met Brian and Michèle before we came together in Salt Lake City. A few days before the June 22 panel, Michèle, her husband, Mark Travers, and I drove from Salt Lake City three hundred miles south to Bluff. Michèle wanted to visit the grave.

  For weeks, Michèle and Daisey Johnson had been e-mailing each other, and they had had a sympathetic telephone conversation. Now Daisey, who was visiting her sisters in White Rock Point, a small trailer park on the reservation south of Bluff, agreed to go out to the site with us, though she had decided not to come within three hundred yards of the grave itself. As soon as the two women met for the first time, they threw open their arms and hugged. Michèle murmured, “Daisey! Thank you for coming.”

  Daisey’s cancer had gotten worse. It took a painful effort for her to make her way a hundred yards from our vehicles to a rock bench from which she had a commanding view of Chinle Wash meandering off to the north. She was content to sit there and wait while the rest of us—Vaughn, Ron Maldonado, his colleague John Stein, Denny, Michèle, Mark, and I—ambled down the now-familiar route through the ledges to the crevice from which the bones had been excavated.

  A few weeks before, Maldonado and Van Gerven had shipped all the bones and “artifacts” (beads, buttons, buckled belt, and the like) to Christella Campbell, Michèle and Brian’s sister, who lived in Santa Barbara, California. It was the plan of Waldo’s four adult children to have the remains cremated, then scatter the ashes over the Pacific Ocean, in a family tradition more than a century old. (In 1909, Christopher and Stella had strewn the ashes of Christella, their firstborn, who had died of spina bifida at the age of six weeks, across the waters of San Francisco Bay near the Golden Gate.)

  At the grave site, Michèle sat on a boulder, pulled out a piece of paper, and recited “My Soul Set Free,” a poem Everett had written in 1930, at the age of sixteen, in which he imagines his soul floating over cliffs and forests and out to the Pacific. Its last stanza:

  Where seagull shadows fall across the waves,

  And high above, the sky is blue and wide,

  Content, my soul drifts out alone to sea,

  Upon the surging, restless, rhythmic tide.

  When she was finished, Michèle addressed the rest of us with tears in her eyes: “That’s where we’re bringing him. That’s where his parents, his brother, his sister, his uncle, and his maternal grandparents are—with the sea and the waves.”

  Back at the bench where Daisey waited, we took photos of each other in various groupings. The mood was almost that of a family reunion. Abruptly, Michèle unpinned a piece of antique jewelry from her blouse and gave it to Daisey. It was a tiny pin made of silver, with a small turquoise sphere in the center, shaped like a bird or perhaps an angel. It had belonged to Stella, Michèle’s grandmother, Everett’s mother. Deeply moved, Daisey attached it to her own blouse.

  An hour later we assembled in the trailer home of one of Daisey’s sisters in White Rock Point, as she and another sister fixed us all a lunch of Navajo tacos. Sitting at the kitchen table, I asked Daisey why she had been unwilling to approach the crevice grave.

  “It was an enemy thing,” she answered. “It’s twice as dangerous.”

  Denny elaborated, “It’s like a lightning strike.”

  “Grandpa should have buried him there, down in the canyon,” Daisey added. “Not carried him up to the ridge.”

  A few minutes later, Daisey turned to her sisters, working over the stove only a few feet away. She was fingering the pin Michèle had given her. “I want this buried with me when I go,” she said. “Not this.” Her hand moved to the brooch with the ring of turquoise stones, the same ornament she had worn during our first meeting in Farmington eleven months earlier.

  Shocked and upset, Daisey’s sisters turned away, refusing to answer or even meet her gaze. “I know I don’t got long,” Daisey said to me, but loud enough so her sisters could hear. “I spent so much time on the other side, it’s not so bad. I’m not afraid of it.” She nodded her head toward her sisters, who had edged even farther toward the other end of the kitchen. “They don’t want to hear me talk about it. They don’t want to hear about death.”

  * * *

  Through the summer of 2009, an undercurrent of backlash against our Comb Ridge discovery simmered across the Southwest. Some of it was merely romantic, the knee-jerk reaction of Ruess partisans who, after seventy-five years, simply didn’t want the mystery to be solved. And some of it was downright nasty, attacking me and the National Geographic Society for making such a public splash of our find.

  But some of it was thoughtful, and came from sources I respected,
veteran explorers of the canyon country who had themselves pondered long and hard about Everett’s fate. A fellow named Chuck LaRue, based in Flagstaff, Arizona, sent me a long e-mail laying out his arguments against what he was calling “Comb Ridge Man” being Everett, despite the apparently conclusive DNA result obtained by Ken Krauter and Helen Marshall. Among LaRue’s arguments:

  ER would never in a million years [have] left his burros in Davis Gulch. These were his lifeline and he would have been very strongly bonded with them. He would not have abandoned them.…

  ER’s pattern wherever he went was to go into towns and hang out awhile. For him to get to Chinle Wash/Comb Ridge he would have either gone through Kayenta or into Bluff where the people would have noted him and remembered him. To go straight to Chinle Wash would have been an aberration of his previous patterns.

  Another Flagstaff native who was skeptical was the writer Scott Thybony. I had never met the man, but had read him for years, admiring such books as his Burntwater, a collection of sly, slender meditations on the Southwest. He was also far more of an expert on Navajo culture than I was. Vaughn knew Thybony well, and put him in touch with me. By e-mail, Thybony argued,

  Aneth’s story doesn’t fit the pattern of what I’d expect from a traditional Navajo in the 1930s. If he witnessed Utes killing a white man, I can’t see any reason why he wouldn’t report it to the trader or Indian agent and a number of reasons why he would. The tribal police and the feds were active on the rez and investigated other murders. And I’ve seen how Navajo react around a body. For him to mess with the remains of an outsider who died violently, a life cut short, is hard to imagine.

  A few weeks later, Thybony added,

  The fact that no one reported seeing ER between Soda Gulch and Chinle Wash is a problem. That was big, remote country and essentially roadless with nobody permanently living there, but lots of people passed through—cowboys, trappers, outlaws, Indians, a few prospectors. The Ruess family did a good job of getting the word out to the traders, ranchers, rangers, and other government types. Nothing, no sightings.

  The most strident objections focused, curiously enough, on a single digital photo I had taken of the mandible we had removed from the crevice in November 2008. National Geographic Adventure had put the photo online. It was clear that the teeth still fixed in the mandible showed no trace of dental fillings. Among the files archived at the University of Utah were two pages of Everett’s dental records. These had been mailed to Stella on July 16, 1935, from the College of Dentistry at the University of Southern California. At the time, Stella and Christopher had been alerted to the discovery of the burned corpse near Gallup, New Mexico, and it was these records that had ruled out the possibility that the victim could have been Everett.

  The records documented two inlays and one gold foil, work performed in December 1932 and January 1933, while Everett was home in Los Angeles between his second Southwest expedition and his upcoming jaunt into the high Sierras. The tooth chart, however, was at best ambiguous—the squiggles on certain molars might indicate where the fillings had been placed, or they might identify problem areas for future work. Further complicating the evidence was the fact that the records had been drawn up not at the time that Everett had visited the USC dentist(s), but only two and a half years later, in response to the parents’ plea. Who knew how reliably the School of Dentistry had kept track of routine office visits that had occurred thirty months earlier?

  Nonetheless, the more vehement of the naysayers seized upon these records to discredit our discovery. Dennis Van Gerven was inclined to dismiss such canards, for, as he pointed out, from the complete assemblage of bones he and Paul Sandberg had removed from the crevice, no fewer than thirteen teeth were missing.

  My photo of the mandible created other problems, however. It was here that Kevin Jones, the Utah state archaeologist, entered the fray. At our Salt Lake City panel discussion, Jones had come up to Greg Child at the end of the evening, fixed him with a glare, and whispered, “It’s not Everett.”

  In June, on the Utah State History website, Jones published an online paper titled “Everett Ruess—A Suggestion to Take Another Look.” Although Jones had never examined the University of Colorado scientists’ work firsthand, nor actually seen the mandible, his broadside poked holes from every direction in the chains of reasoning that had led first Van Gerven and then Krauter to declare that the Comb Ridge skeleton was Everett’s.

  Vexed by the fact that Jones had not sent his critical article to me, Ron Maldonado, or any of the CU scientists, I called him up when I was in Salt Lake City and asked if we could meet. Instead, he insisted on a phone call that lasted, as it turned out, more than an hour. The barely suppressed anger in his voice disconcerted me, as Jones derided the CU experts (none of whom he knew personally) for being completely out of their professional depth.

  Why, I wondered, was Kevin Jones, whom I had liked when I’d interviewed him for other articles, so pissed off? I suspected that he was miffed that because the grave lay on the Navajo Reservation, it was entirely out of his own jurisdiction as state archaeologist. Yet Jones never called Maldonado to ask the Navajo Nation archaeologist about his decision to excavate.

  In his paper, Jones laid out a dozen sources of doubt about the identification of the Comb Ridge skeleton. But over the phone, he focused on the mandible. “I know a Native American jaw when I see it,” he told me. The incisors, he went on, were “shovel-shaped,” possessing marginal ridges on the inner or tongue side that resulted in a scooped-out surface. The trait is very common in Asian and Native American populations, but rare in Caucasians. In addition, Jones went on, all the teeth in the mandible looked heavily worn, most likely as the result of decades of grinding by sand in the typical Native American diet.

  Since Jones seemed reluctant to convey his doubts directly to the CU scientists, I passed on his criticisms to Van Gerven, who responded,

  A great fuss is made about the skeleton having shovel-shaped incisors. There was a time when anthropologists viewed such traits as proof of racial identity—racial typology. Sadly, some still do. The fact is that no race possesses any trait exclusive to itself. In the case of shovel-shaping some 8% of Euro-Americans and 12% of Afro-Americans possess the trait while 10% of Native Americans lack the trait entirely.

  Van Gerven and his assistant, Paul Sandberg, also pointed out that shovel-shaped incisors are found almost exclusively on the maxillary teeth—those of the upper jaw—not on those in the mandible. As Sandberg later wrote me, “People don’t talk about shoveled lower incisors. It’s not a trait that is typically scored and recorded. I don’t even think there are any data on the frequency of shoveling in lower incisors in human populations.”

  About the grinding down of the teeth, Van Gerven stated,

  The wear is absolutely consistent with the kind of diet that Ruess is likely to have had out in that sandy environment as well as preparing and cooking food in an environment where sand and grit gets into everything. So nothing there is at all surprising. Indeed given Everett’s many years in the deserts of Utah and Arizona, I would be puzzled if there was no wear! On a personal level, back in my 20’s I spent 6 months in the Sahara Desert [in the Sudan] and lost almost as much enamel as the Ruess skeleton! That didn’t make me a Nubian and it didn’t make me 70 years old.

  Had the naysayers been confined to armchair second-guessers, Michèle and Brian and their two siblings might well have ignored them and gone ahead to cremate the remains. All of us had been alarmed by the looming possibility that the crevice on the Comb might become a pilgrimage site, like the bus on the Stampede Trail in Alaska in which Chris McCandless had died. The last thing the Navajo Nation needed was a stream of Ruess cultists illegally traipsing across the rez to leave their mementos strewn about the grave site, like the graffiti and kitschy treasures that litter Jim Morrison’s grave in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris. Already, in fact, Denny Bellson had fielded and turned down numerous requests from strangers who wanted to
be guided to the crevice. Not only in print but in conversation, Greg Child and Vaughn Hadenfeldt and Ron Maldonado and I had been as vague as possible about the precise location of the site.

  And given the fanaticism of the more ardent fans of Everett Ruess, it was even conceivable that someone might try to steal some of the bones. During the week or two between our NGS teleconference and Van Gerven’s shipping the bones to Christella Campbell, he had fended off several bizarre inquiries from total strangers demanding to see, photograph, handle, and even X-ray the “evidence.”

  But criticisms from someone with Kevin Jones’s undeniable credentials gave the Ruess family pause. Instead of cremating the remains, they decided to heed Jones’s request for another—a third—DNA test. In Boulder, Ken Krauter welcomed the decision, so certain was he that a third test would corroborate his findings.

  And at this point the four siblings took charge of the business, leaving Jones, Maldonado, Van Gerven, Krauter, Denny Bellson, Daisey Johnson, and me out of the loop. Already the Ruesses had been stung by accusations that the NGS, to score a publicity coup, had orchestrated the whole shebang, putting pressure on the family to go along with a sensational detective story that the Adventure writer (me), perhaps in cahoots with Denny and even Daisey, had concocted out of whole cloth.

  At this point, Kevin Ruess, who lives in Virginia, and who so far had been the sibling least caught up in the controversy, appealed to his professional contacts to find the best possible DNA lab to undertake the third test. So as to fend off any hints of complicity, the family did not even tell any of us which lab they had chosen.

  * * *

  More weeks passed, then months. On August 25, 2009, Daisey Johnson died, succumbing at last to the ovarian cancer she had first contracted in 2006. She had turned fifty-seven two weeks earlier. At a burial service on August 29, her relatives gathered at her mother’s house to mourn and remember her. A memorial pamphlet the family printed up captured their grief: “When we think of your beautiful face it all seems so wrong. You had so much to look forward to and so much left to do.” Yet her sisters had honored the wish she had expressed in June in the trailer at White Rock Point. The eulogy continued, “Jewelry you loved and now you have new accessories, a pair of Angel’s wings. The world has lost a wonderful girl, a true and amazing individual.”