The Cult of Everett Ruess: Finding NEMO 1934; The Wildest, Loneliest, Most Desolate Spot

This is Thomas Wayne Riley, and you have found yourself, in the American Southwest.

Bitter pain is in store for me, but I shall bear it. Beauty beyond all power to convey shall be mine; I will search diligently for it. Death may await me; with vitality, impetuosity and confidence I will combat it.

Everett Ruess

This is the fourth and final episode in the four part series over the life, mysterious disappearance, and eternal afterlife of the adventuring wanderer & Vagabond for Beauty that was and is and always will be, Everett Ruess.

If you haven’t listened to the other episodes, I suggest you do so before the intro music starts or else you’ll be as lost as Everett’s final resting place is to us.

Everett Ruess had 5 grand adventures in his young life. Two of them explored the California coast and the Sierra Nevadas. He fished, swam, hiked, painted, explored sea caves and mountain peaks. He got blood poisoning and nearly died of shock from countless bee stings. He lived in San Francisco and met famous painters and photographers like Maynard Dixon and Dorothea Lange. He also fell in love with a woman that Western author Philip Fradkin identified as Frances Schermerhorn. But alas, that love wasn’t meant to last and it had to die with a dying fall, as he put it. A fate our hero may share with his very own love affair.

Everett also embarked on three amazing, long, quite unprecedented wandering adventures throughout the American Southwest. From the Grand Canyon to Mesa Verde in Colorado, from the Hopi mesas to Monument Valley, and from the Phoenix area to Escalante in Utah. He covered more ground on foot, on the back of a donkey or horse, or by sticking out his thumb than we can even fathom. And at such a young age to boot. He saw more beauty than he could bare, as he wrote. And he wrote so well that we get to accompany him on his journeys… at least, until they ended abruptly in November of 1934. 

But before his adventures ended, Everett explored ruins, some seemingly not seen since they were abandoned. He even participated in an archaeological dig! On that dig, his fellow artist dig leader, Clay Lockett, described Everett as being drawn to the precarious edge of cliffs and enchanted by danger. Lockett said of him, quote, Everett was always anxious to get into situations which provided thrills and excitement. When these situations arose he would think about them, write about them or often paint them. End quote. That pretty much sums up Everett, right there.

In a recent book I received in between the third episode of this series and this final one, a book called The Disappearances, a story of Exploration, Murder, and Mystery in the American West, author Scott Thybony writes about Everett Ruess. He also writes about two other prominent disappearances in the year 1935 in Utah, both stories of which I will talk about one day in exclusive Roadrunner episodes.

The final disappearance he writes about in his very well written book is about Everett. He quickly sums up what I’ve already talked about while offering a few more anecdotes and critically… an extremely compelling possible answer… which I will talk about at the very end.

In regards to the archaeologist Lockett and his interactions with the danger seeking Everett Ruess, Thybony paints a great picture of the risks Everett was taking and quotes from Lockett himself. Quote:

Thunder rolled through the canyon below Skeleton Mesa as the sky split open in a violent rain, pounding the slickrock benches. Every crease in the bare sandstone channeled the runoff toward a single nick point on the rim. Within moments a flash flood leaped out into empty space, plunging into an immense amphitheater of overhanging cliffs. In one sheer drop the stream fell more than four hundred feet before hitting the canyon floor.

Everett had to move fast, knowing the storm would end as suddenly as it began. He grabbed his sketchbook and hurried across the wet slickrock along the edge of the precipice. As the rain eased somewhat, the artist found a vantage point on the very brink of the canyon. He worked fast, hunched over his watercolor sketch to give it some protection, trying to capture the wild dynamics of the storm. By now other members of the excavation crew had left the shelter of the cave to watch the event unfold. Clay Lockett was among them, and Everett surprised him by taking such a chance. As crew chief, he was responsible for the safety of his team, and he found the artist's risk taking unnerving. “I personally was scared to death," the archaeologist wrote, "just watching him perched on the edge of the cliff.”

If any single incident can throw light on what was driving Everett, it was the rainstorm on Skeleton Mesa. It shows not only an element of recklessness, but something more fundamental as well. No artist would head into a storm and expect to return with a fine watercolor. Everett took his art seriously and knew he would end up with a rain-smeared sketch at best.

That didn't matter. For him, the act of creating was more important than the final result. By risking everything for a painting, he was living up to the image he had created of himself, the artist-adventurer swept up in the great forces of nature. He was on a journey of self-discovery, throwing himself into experiences meant to shape his own life into a work of art, no matter what the cost. He was painting a self-portrait, and the canvas was himself. End quote.

And now we know… the cost was his own life.

Not long after that rainstorm, as autumn was deepening into winter, Everett was in the land north of the Colorado River, exploring a place the locals called The Desert, a place that would become Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, but what was at that time, an area rarely, if ever, visited by anyone except Mormon ranchers, Navajo traders, and rugged, sometimes dangerous outlaws. It was a place he would truly be able to explore, to recreate in art, and to be alone, as he often wanted to be. After all, the lone trail is best, as he wrote. It was a place where no one lives. Neither would he.

He wrote to his family that after a while, he might go to the town of Boulder so be sure to post some letters to that little town. He’d pick them up in a few months. Amazingly, in 1934, the road, Scenic Byway 12, one of my favorite roads in the world, it wasn’t even finished yet. It was still under construction. The land was truly a wild place.

Two months went by without a single word to Everett’s family or friends. Not a letter, jot, nor tittle.

Back in California, Waldo would board a boat for China for his new job with his mother writing in her diary, quote, Goodbye for how long, question mark. End quote. In the interim, she had hung both of Everett’s paintings up in his room in the hopes he would return to enjoy them. And all the while, she was still mailing him letters, not knowing he’d never receive them.

Scott Thybony writes about his mother Stella, quote:

She had fixed a pair of Christmas Seals to the back of the envelope before mailing it, and each displayed a red cottage in a field of snow with the words Season's Greetings 1934. It was something a mother would do to brighten the holidays for a son who would not be home for Christmas. On the face of the envelope was a canceled three-cent stamp and a postmark bearing the date of December 22. It was addressed to "Mr Everett Ruess, Escalante Rim, Utah. End quote.

By February, those letters, which had been forwarded now to Arizona were then returned to Christopher and Stella, his parents. Their worry, which had been growing, was now justified in its escalation to panic. Until, on February 14th, Valentines Day, of 1935, Everett’s parents reported him missing.

They wrote a reply to the postmistress in Marble, Arizona, near Lees Ferry, who had returned the letters to sender. Her name was Florence Lowry. She responded with, quote, I am sorry, I have not seen or heard of your son. I have made inquiry of everyone near here and haven’t found anyone who has seen him… she would go on to write, The country north of here is very wild and arid and it was ill advised of anyone to start with out a guide but if your son was an experienced camper he will no doubt come through all right. End quote.

The Ruesses would then send a letter to Escalant. The husband of the postmistress, a local rancher and county commissioner named Jennings Allen would write back, quote, we will search for him as though he were our son. End quote. And they really would. Three times. All three times they would donate their time and money and take a break from the hard work of ranching and raising a family to look for the wayward adventurer that they may or may not have even met when he ambled through their quiet town, with his arms around Navajos singing their songs right along with them. Even if they hadn’t met him, the people of Escalante, and other nearby towns certainly remember the burros.

I’ll quote the late author David Roberts from his book, Finding Everett. He gives a great summation of the correspondence which poured out of the parents to every single person who may have ever come into contact with their son in the American Southwest. It’s actually kind of heart breaking stuff to read… quote:

Between February 11th and 25th, Christopher and Stella wrote letters to the postmasters of every town in the Southwest that they knew their son had visited during his three seasons of vagabondage in the region. They also wrote to the sheriffs of every county Everett had passed through, to Anglo traders on the Navajo reservation, to Indian agents, forest rangers, and newspapers and radio stations. These anguished appeals typically began,

Dear Sir:

Can you help us?

Have you seen or heard of our son?

There followed a precise physical description of the missing twenty-year-old.

In these letters, Christopher and Stella tried to balance their fears with faith in their son's wilderness skills:

Quote: Everett is not inexperienced as he has lived this way in the mountains for four seasons, but not during December and January. He may have travelled into great danger, and we hope you can ... tell us how to find trace of him. Do you send out notices, or is there a plane that searches for lost people? End all quotes.

It seems everyone responded with compassion and a promise to search but not a one came back with any helpful news. Everett’s parents hearts were beginning to break. But his brother, Waldo remained, for a time, upbeat. In a letter from China, just days before what would have been Everett’s 21st birthday Waldo wrote, quote:

First of all, I want to wish Everett a happy "Coming of Age." This will probably arrive a few days after his birthday but the sentiments are there. I do hope that I will hear from him some time this year!

I wish I were there; I would certainly go out to try to find him. But since I have had no word from you and your letter is now 3 weeks old I presume everything is all right. End quote.

Everything though, was not alright. By now an LA newspaper had picked up the story which then spread it across the entirety of the United States.

This article and this news, would eventually reach, on February 22nd, a man who called himself Captain Neal Johnson. And this character would send this in a telegram to Christopher and Stella:

WILL CONDUCT SEARCH YOUR REQUEST. KNOW INDIAN SCOUTS. KNOW REGION WELL. NO WATER EXCEPT SNOW. IF LOST CAN BE FOUND. SNOW MELT SOON. NO WATER, WILL PERISH. SEARCH MUST START IMMEDIATELY. ... WILL CONDUCT SEARCH FOR EXPENSES FOR INDIAN SCOUTS ONLY.

Whoever this man was, he seemed to know what he was talking about and he only asked for money for expenses… what was the harm?

In response to this telegram, Christopher Ruess, Everett’s father told Johnson, that quote, we are worried, but not stampeded. End quote. The Captain then seemingly invited himself to LA and to stay the night with the Ruesses. I know, it’s strange… And while there, he claimed to have been a pilot for the Mexicans during the Revolution, hence the captain part of Captain Johnson, and he said he knows the area well on account of his gold searching days. He would find their son, alright. All he needed was $75. For expenses, of course.

Neal Johnson was only 30 when he learned of Everett’s disappearance and he was indeed a prospector in those wild and woolly lands. A failed one, but a man who had been to the region and knew some Indians, nonetheless. What he didn’t tell the Ruesses though, is that he was also a convicted fraud. Thybony writes of Johnson, quote, convicted of forgery, Johnson had spent time in the Utah State Prison and a year after his release got into more trouble with the law. Police in Idaho arrested him for passing a bad check, and when Johnson went on a hunger strike they threw him into solitary confinement. The punishment broke him. Twice he tried killing himself by bashing his head against the cell bars. A couple of months after his release, he began working placer claims along the Colorado River, attempting to wash enough fine gold from the sands to make a living. End quote.

It seems, he was not able to make said living and he went about finding a new means of revenue… feeding hope to a grieving family.

A week later, on the first of March, the rancher and husband of the postmistress of Escalante, Jennings Allen would gather 12 men on horseback and start off down the Hole in the Rock Road. But before they left, they spoke with the sheepherders Addlin Lay and Clayton Porter, the last two people to have ever seen him, probably, and with whom he had stayed just near Soda Gulch. The sheepherders told the search party that he’d taken off down towards Davis Gulch, about 2 miles south of Soda Gulch. And it’s here the posse found some promising signs of the vagabond wanderer.

A little bit about Davis Gulch though, and this mostly comes from the Forward to David Roberts Finding Everett and this forward was written by the author Jon Krakauer who wrote the book over the disappearance of Chris McCandless in the Alasaka wilderness, Into the Wild. He writes of the obscure ravine, quote, For most of its four-mile length, as I later described the defile in Into the Wild, it exists as a deep, twisting gash in the slickrock, narrow enough in places to spit across, lined by overhanging sandstone walls that bar access to the canyon floor. The country surrounding Davis Gulch is a desiccated expanse of bald rock and brick-red sand. Vegetation is lean. Shade from the withering sun is virtually non-existent. To descend into the confines of the canyon, however, is to arrive in another world. Cottonwoods lean gracefully over drifts of flowering prickly pear. Tall grasses sway in the breeze. The ephemeral bloom of a sego lily peeks from the toe of a ninety-foot stone arch, and canyon wrens call back and forth in plaintive tones from a thatch of scrub oak. High above the creek a spring seeps from the cliff face, irrigating a growth of moss and maidenhair fern that hangs from the rock in lush green mats. End quote.

It sounds like a truly beautiful place and a place Everett would have sought out and enjoyed. He would have thought it an oasis, no doubt. It’s not the last we’ll hear of it.

So the searchers, led by Jennings Allen, find some promising signs of Everett in Davis Gulch. But what they found… gets a little mixed up. Roberts says, quote, Exactly what the searchers found in Davis Gulch that day, however, remains a matter of controversy. In the early I980s, several of the searchers still alive reported that as soon as they had reached the floor of the narrow canyon, they came upon Everett's two burros. A brushwork fence had been built to confine them in a huge natural corral consisting of the upper three miles of Davis Gulch. Some of the men said the burros were thin and emaciated, but others, including Jennings Allen, swore they were "fat and healthy.” End quote.

So Chocolatero and Leopard were accounted for. But, near the burros, the search party found even more signs of Everett. Here’s Thybony to describe what else they came upon, quote:

In a natural alcove not far from the foot of the livestock trail, the searchers also found unmistakable signs of what they presumed was Everett's last camp: footprints on the ground, empty cans that had held condensed milk, candy wrappers, Anasazi potsherds (gathered, presumably, by Everett), and the impression in the dirt of a bedroll.

The searchers were puzzled, however, to find no trace of the young man's camping gear, cooking equipment, food, watercolor painting kit, or cash. Nor was there any sign of the journal he had kept throughout the first seven months of his 1934 expedition.

The searchers also claimed to have found Everett's footprints "leading to the edge of a cliff”- though which cliff, they never clarified. End quote.

To recap, this search party found the burros, found what was possibly his last camp, but did not find any of the important gear he would have had with him at said camp, and they found his footprints.

Also important to keep in mind, those two Shepherds, Addlin Lay and Clayton Porter, they would later admit to having gone through his stuff… but, they never said wether they’d done so before, or after his disappearance.

On the sixth day of this search in March of 1935 a blizzard struck the search party which… cast even further doubt that Everett could still be alive. Surely if he was out there, he would not have been able to last through this very rough weather.

When the burros were discovered, though, there was discussion on what to do with them. Do they leave them there so that if Everett returned he’d have them to make his way back to civilization? Or do they bring the burros back to Escalant so they don’t starve or go thirsty? In the end, it was decided that Gail Bailey, a local, would herd the two, Chocolatero and Leopard back to town. But taking them back wasn’t as easy as leading them with a rope. Thybony explains, quote:

When the horsemen attempted to drive them out of the canyon, the animals locked their legs on a smooth pitch and refused to climb. No one was able to persuade them, so two riders roped the burros and dragged them up the sandstone on their sides. This raised the possibility that Everett had faced the same problem, forcing him to delay his travels or to leave them behind with the expectation of returning. End quote.

Had his two trusty companions been complicit in the disappearance of Everett Ruess?!

After 10 days of searching, the party headed home. Not long after, Jennings Allen, in June of 1935, sent a letter to the Ruesses that said, quote:

The consensus of opinion seems to be that Everett did not cross the Colorado River onto the Navajo Mountain. There was a man camped at the Hole in the Rock from about December 6 until sometime in April who seems positive that had anyone come to that place he would have seen them.

In viewing this country you would agree that it is unlikely anyone could cross the river at that point without being seen by a party camped there. End quote.

Of course the identity of this mystery camper man has never been discovered but a man who camps throughout the winter alone in this much of a wilderness is sure to not WANT to be discovered. Although, a carving on the wall found years later may indeed reveal this strange wanderer’s identity. Very near the actual Hole in the Rock is carved Quinn R Roundy, Dec 12, 1934, February 35.

Roberts writes of this revelation, quote:

Nudged by a transcription of this graffito, local writer Jerry Roundy (a distant relative of Quinn), the author of an excellent town history called "Advised Them to Call the Place Escalante,” supplied some context:

Now quoting Jerry, quote, Quinn would have been herding sheep. He wasn't the owner-he would have been working for somebody else. Sometimes they had a sheep wagon, and they'd stay out there all winter.

If Quinn saw Everett, I never heard him say so. End all quotes.

Maurice Cope, the Bryce Canyon head ranger who had housed Everett for a few nights along with his nine other children, well he was a little troubled and puzzled by this second party’s findings and he would write to Christopher and Stella quote, the fact that his burros were fenced in and his camp outfit is not to be found is evident [sic] that he has a permanent camp some where. The most reasonable thing for me to believe is, that he in some way crossed the river to the east side or attempted to cross. . .. If he did not cross the river, I cannot understand why he left his burros..

Near where his burros were found are deep canyons and in them are signs of cliff dwellings. There is always danger in attempting to climb up to them. I am very concerned and no doubt there is some need for alarm. If he established a camp some where with the intention of staying until spring every thing will be o. k. ...

If any thing has happened it would no doubt be some kind of accident. End quote.

At this point, to his parents, I doubt it mattered if Everett’s disappearance was the result of some kind of accident or the doings of a malcontent or if he decided to live with the Indians. Either way, their boy was still missing. And probably approaching presumed dead, by this point.

Stella in her diary on March 8th wrote, quote, Radio said Everett may be hopelessly lost. End quote.

Waldo, who was apparently ever the optimist wrote to his parents on March 25th, quote, I hope he is found. He ought to get good publicity out of that and with his writing ability, capitalize on it and write magazine articles. End quote.

If only…

Despite the acting US Secretary of War promising Everett’s parents that the US Military will look for him during their training exercises, no search was ever made in the air by any branch of government for the missing adventurer. With all the canyons though, what good what an aerial search have been? Maurice Cope, the head Ranger at Bryce pretty much told Christopher Ruess that same sentiment. But intriguingly, Maurice Cope also told them, quote, He intended to visit with the Navajo Indians, after reaching the other side of the river. End quote. A thread we should unravel.

But what about this Captain Johnson fellow who’d come over and asked for the 75 up front? Well, despite them writing him a telegram calling his whole search off and begging for their money back, Captain Johnson marched forward throughout all the land and all the while he would send word back from seemingly all four corners of the American Southwest. He’d write from Salt Lake City, Cortez, Colorado, Holbrook, Arizona, Blanding, Utah, and a slew of other locales not really anywhere close to where he disappeared. The closest may have been Hanksville, Utah, which is near Goblin Valley and Factory Butte off of Highway 24. It isn’t too far from Capitol Reef which borders Grand Staircase but is still a world away from the canyons of the Escalante.

From Cortez Colorado, though, Captain Johnson would write in barely legible English, quote,

Reached here this evening. ... I stoped several times to communicate with diferent Indians of diferant trading posts alond up through New Mexico and Arizona also Colorado.

There is several that knew of Everet. One Chief told me today. Picture man heap savy wild mountains O.K. never the less I was unable to get any information from them concerning him nothing more than heap O.K. Picture man. He make picture for Indians.

He would go on to write:  still do not believe that Everet is in danger unless he gets abandoned from more than any one [of the Indians] because they are loyal if they are your friend. Most of the Indians know of the Paint man whitch is Everett they say he is Yabi-toch which means fun, good humor.. end quote.

Then later, from Blanding, the place in eastern Colorado that houses Edge of the Cedars State Park, a fantastic Anasazi/Fremont/Ancestral Puebloan Great House… well, from Balnding, Captain Johnson would name three of his Navajo Scouts and they are as follows: Cidno or Cidney, Bully Chaho, and Buch Nash Chaho. He would write of them that they weren’t charging him anything, just expenses and also that these Indians are friends and trustworthy because they once had pneumonia and he had somehow saved them. So they were loyal… sure, captain…

On April 8th, He’d write from Blanding again and he’d say:

The latest Report is that it is of their opinion that your son is with two Indians Both Navajos. And that they have headed for the camp of Hostene Buchasia a Navajo Indian that lives near Navajo Mountain... The two Indians and the white man seen to be very clever in avoiding seeing, or litting any one see them. Hostene Buchasia is an old Indian and he knows most everything that is known about the Navajo tribe...

I ask one of my scouts what percent of chances did Everett have of being alive. He held up his hands with only one finger turned down. 9 to I. End quote.

If this guy wasn’t taking advantage of the Ruesses during this tragedy he would absolutely be a character worth studying. But make no mistake dear listener… he was a charlatan. This was all a ruse against the Ruesses. But he kept it up well. And he would stick around for a while.

In one letter to Everett’s parents he wrote:

I wish that I could write like Everett it is a Gods Gift what a delightful letter to write to a boy friend the wilderness the out of dorse is Everetts God his sole and heart is raped up in it. . . . I envy him I wish I could take his place and let him come home to you. End quote.

The Captain was barely literate, after all, and obviously, as we’ve heard, Everett is a wonderful writer.

One of the Captain’s plans was to fly over the area from Moab, not a close distance, and while flying, he planned on dropping leaflets that Everett was sure to pick up. But! He mentioned in the letter about this flight, quote, Don’t forget to instruct the pilots to bring an extra parachute, I do not like to fly without one over a rough country. End quote. Of course that flight didn’t work on account of the country being too rough.

But then, despite being sent MORE money by the Ruesses, his next plan didn’t work… and then the next and the next etc… Until, he finally sent word to Christopher and Stella that their son, or at least a white man among the Navajos had been found but he quote, don’t want to be bothered. End quote.

Captain Johnson wouldn’t be the last con-man A-hole to dupe the grieving Ruesses. Roberts wrote of this quote, for years after Everett’s Disappearance, a procession of sociopathic and or delusional informants would surface, offering stunning revelations about Everett’s fate or his secret existence. End quote. Obviously, none of them came to fruition.

At about this same time, a third, and quite robust search was started by Ray Carr, the head of the associated civic clubs of Utah after some money was raised. This party left in late May of 1935 and headed further down Davis Gulch than the previous parties had dared. And on that search, they made two discoveries that kept the story and mystery of Everett Ruess alive.

On June 5th, Carr, the leader of the party, telegraphed the Ruesses to say, quote,

DOES WORD NEMO HAVE ANY SIGNIFICANCE TO YOU FOUND CARVED IN CAVE. End quote.

They found what now?

While exploring a spot in the lower part of Davis Gulch, the team found more footprints which they followed up to some Anasazi Fremont Ruins. Among the ruins were some ceramic shards piled up as visitors are won’t to do. This pile was no doubt made by Everett himself. Then, on the steps leading up to the entrance of the ruin, the team found carved the, NEMO 1934.

They also found another NEMO 1934 written in charcoal at the base of a Fremont pictograph panel not far from the ruins.

They’d found one of his last written words, at least that we’ve found so far. Scrawled into a step leading to the entrance of a cave that held Indian ruins in the Gulch, was, NEMO 1934.

Everett’s mother’s heart must have leapt out of her chest at this revelation, for she knew exactly what that meant. She immediately wired back, quote:

EVERETT READ IN DESERT GREEK POEM ODYSSEY, TRANSLATED BY LAWRENCE OF ARABIAN DESERT. HERE ODYSSEUS GREEK WORD FOR NOBODY, "NEMO" BEING LATIN WORD FOR NOBODY. ODYSSEUS TRAPPED BY MAN-EATING GIANT IN CAVE, SAVES LIFE BY TRICK OF CALLING HIMSELF NEMO. EVERETT DISLIKES WRITING HIS OWN NAME IN PUBLIC PLACES. End quote.

Did Everett take on another pseudonym? He hadn’t in a few years, since he was much younger. But he didn’t ever really scratch his own name into any sandstone that’s been found yet.

To help clear things up about this whole Odyssey and Nemo bit, I’ll quote at length from David Roberts:

In Book Nine of the Odyssey, the hero and his men are trapped in the cave of the Cyclops Polyphemus, a one-eyed giant, who casually dashes out the brains of two of the sailors and eats their bodies raw.

To save himself and his remaining men, Odysseus gets the monster drunk on good wine from his ship; in gratitude the Cyclops promises the hero a "guest-gift," and asks him his name.

In T. E. Lawrence's translation, Odysseus answers, "My name is No-man: so they have always called me, my mother and my father and all my friends." Polyphemus proffers a cruel guest-gift: "I will eat No-man finally, after all his friends. The others first--that shall be your benefit."

While the Cyclops is drunk, Odysseus sharpens a stake of olive wood in the fire and thrusts it into Polyphemus's eye. Blinded, in pain and rage, the monster calls out to his fellow giants to help him finish off the humans. "What so ails you, Polyphemus," they answer, "that you roar across the heavenly night and keep us from sleep?"

"My friends," Polyphemus answers, "No-man is killing me by sleight.” His fellow Cyclopes only laugh: "If you are alone and no one assaults you," they jibe, "but your pain is some unavoidable malady from Zeus, why then, make appeal to your father King Poseidon." Soon after, Odysseus's men escape the cave by hanging on to the underbellies of the giant's sheep and riding the animals past the furious fumblings of the Cyclops's hands.

To be sure, Homer never uses the word "Nemo" (he wrote, of course, in Greek, not Latin). But Everett would have linked the Latin name with the famous passage from the Odyssey, just as his mother did. End quote.

So, Everett could have taken the name of a hero escaping a cave… or, as his father Christopher would surmise, maybe Everett’s name was actually from a DIFFERENT book he had read while on his journeys, and actually, I cling to this interpretation of his father’s more.

Here’s another extended quote from Roberts:

Later, Christopher realized that NEMO also echoes Captain Nemo, the misanthropic antihero of Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, a well-thumbed copy of which Everett had read more than once. In the novel, after hunting what they thought was a giant sea monster all over the oceans of the world, the protagonist, the learned Professor Aronnax, and his two companions are taken captive on the captain's mysterious submarine. There is a vivid moment when the three men first meet their jailer. In all likelihood, Everett felt a deep identification with Captain Nemo's proclamation:

"I'm not what you would call a civilized man! I've broken with all of society for reasons which I alone can appreciate. I therefore don't obey its rules.” End quote.

That line alone, I’m not what you would call a civilized man! I’ve broken with all of society for reasons which I alone can appreciate… that’s Everett!! That is our wandering Vagabond for Beauty who said quote, The perfection of this place is one reason why I distrust ever returning to the cities. Here I wander in beauty and perfection. And, quote, My friends have been few because I'm a freakish person. End quote. There are other quotes I can’t remember right now that echo this exact same sentiment.

There’s another reason I lean towards him taking on the name NEMO from 20,000 leagues under the sea but I will get to that at the end of this episode…

Only a few decades after Everett carved and wrote these two NEMOs, the rising water of the abomination that is Lake Powell would cover, obliterate, and forever disappear these last hints of Everett… although there may be other NEMOs to find…

On June 21st, 1935, after the three unsuccessful searches, Everett’s parents set out on an automobile trip from La to northern Arizona and southern Utah. By now, they had probably given up hope of finding him alive and instead they were looking for his echo. His shadow. The traces of him that still barely lingered. They brought with him paintings he had sent back to follow in his trailless footsteps.

They not only wanted to see the places he knew and loved and had travelled so extensively, they also wanted to meet the people he had met and interacted with and journeyed alongside.

Stella would keep a diary of this trip and actually years later she would write a short story form the passages she kept.

Their first stop was in Kayenta, which was also usually Everett’s first stop. There, they met the legend, John Wetherill and his wife, Louisa, and their son, Ben. All three had known and probably enjoyed the company of Everett. Ben had after all, been on that archaeological dig with him for weeks. And John had shared a lot of wisdom with Everett. Stella wrote that the Wetherills told her that Everett was quote, very happy last September. End quote.

During their visit, John also told Everett’s parents that he thinks as soon as Everett would have been done going down the Hole in the Rock, he would have crossed the Colorado and then explored Wilson’s Mesa. Apparently, Wilson’s Mesa to this day is one of the most inaccessible places in all of the American Southwest. At that time, no one had gone looking for Everett on that desolate place.

The following day, his parents left the Wetherills and headed towards Navajo Mountain Trading Post, but along the way they ran into a Hopi man named Edward Nequatewa. After this incident, Edward would write a letter to his parents which would outline what he told Christopher and Stella. Quote:

What Navajos that I had talked with, from the Navajo Mountain, said that they had never seen Everett or any white man around there at that time nor there was never any searching party came around there, others the Navajos would be talking about it. They also said that if Everett has met his foul play in that region it won’t be by an Indian. If this Johnson really had sent these Indians out on searching party, he certainly would have some reports from them. End quote.

So, we’re back to that conman Captain Johnson. Even John Wetherill was of the opinion that this Johnson fellow was BS. It looks like Christopher and Stella were slowly coming to that realization as well.

From Navajo Mountain, Everett’s parents drove to Zion National Park, and then to Escalante. The entire trip, people who had met or who knew Everett provided their thesis or ideas on where he might have gone adventuring before disappearing. Some said he went to live with the Navajos, another that he probably drowned floating the Colorado River on a makeshift raft.

The leader of that first search party, Jennings Allen would take the parents about 42 miles down the extremely difficult Hole in the Rock Road in his automobile, which is rather impressive. I had to turn around on the road in April of 2023 because of car sized puddles… and an incoming snow storm. I imagine it was infinitely more difficult back then. Stella would write in her journal about the road and how it stopped their continued advance and search, quote, We wished that we had wings to fly. End quote.

This was really, the parents first non drive through of the American Southwest. Stella and Everett and Waldo had stopped at the Grand Canyon all those years back but that didn’t really count. This was their first true visit to see the places that their son had dedicated his life to. The place I am practically dedicating my free time to. The place that enthralls so many from around the world. The place Everett GAVE his life to. Stella would write about it:

From the [Navajo] bridge, we thrilled at the deep gorge of the Colorado. We thought we recognized the very view Everett painted, and which we called "On and On and On" as printed on a folder with his "Wilderness Song"... We saw many sheltered spots where Everett probably slept, and the impressive Amphitheater of great rocks with a drapery of green foliage and a natural pulpit in a pool of water. We felt sure that Everett had declaimed some well-loved lines to the surrounding vermilion cliffs. End quote.

It’s hard for me to imagine their grief and sense of loss… we’ve all lost people but a child… that’s something all entirely different. And to be more unsure than knowing, that must also be frustrating on top of heartbreaking.

Eventually, Christopher and Stella realized the ruse this Captain Johnson was playing on the Ruesses and they refused to send anymore money. They also accused him of being a conman who was taking advantage of them. All of this, no doubt was true.

On June 1st, Johnson sent a letter to the parents filled with righteous but ultimately BS indignation:

I cannot hardly believe you said it. The report was that you said you considered what money you had sent me was a loss that you considered I had used It for my own use. ... I do not need that kind of money. Blood money. If Everet was Dead whitch I believe he is not he would haunt me. If he was alive he would haunt me. End quote.

Either way it seemed, this man was gonna be haunted.

Not to frustrate all my listeners, but… Christopher… eventually wrote back and said, I will pay you $25 to bring back a written note from Navajo Mountain proving that my son is alive… You better believe that charlatan accepted.

By July 3rd, Everett’s parents were back in LA. Their journey east, to the Southwest hadn’t yielded their son but maybe it had brought them some catharsis.

About a week after they arrived though, a certain preacher Smith from Blanding, Utah, sent a letter to Christopher and Stella saying that Everett was living with them in their town and among his congregation but that he may have quote, lost his sense of identity through some blow or fall and amnesia; or he may be broke and too proud to communicate. End quote. That quote is form Everett’s father’s journal. That story would not pan out in the end. But, around the same time much more plausible, if not horrible answer emerged.

In early July Christopher and Stella were informed that a body, badly burned, beyond recognition, had been found in the desert near Gallup, New Mexico. The police there asked for Everett’s dental records to see if they could match them. After some agonizing waiting, they received the records and sent them on but… unfortunately, this nearly cremated corpse was not Everett. The dead man was missing no teeth, and had no metal fillings. Both characteristics that described our vagabond for beauty.

11 days after the Chief of Police in Gallup informed them that the corpse wasn’t their son, Everett’s parents received a letter from Captain Johnson:

I am leaving here in the morning for Navajo Mountain. Where I will stay until Everett is found. ... Mr. Ruess I hate to say this but there is a boy living with a bunch of Navajos in the vicinity of Navajo Mountain. He has had a tribal wedding. I am most sure this is Everett. End quote.

At this point you have to wonder… was this guy just straight up making this stuff up?! At what point do you bail and count your winnings and move on to the next con? Or is all of this actually real and it just so happens to NOT be Everett?! Or, is it him, after all?

In the summer of 1935, The Salt Lake Tribune would print an article detailing the many disappearances and crimes and murders that seemed to be flooding the Beehive state to many a resident’s shock. Everett wasn’t the only disappearance and in other areas of the state, The Navajo and Ute were quote unquote acting up. It was a dangerous time, seemingly. The Salt Lake Tribune would publish in relation to all of this, quote, It remains a strange world, inhabited by strange characters whose actions are a constant worry and surprise to their fellowmen. End quote.

It is true… it is a strange world, and someone like the strange character that is Everett does give constant worry and surprise to those who knew him…

Shortly after that published, in August of that year, The Salt Lake Tribune would mount their own search party… and Johnson would be on it… probably…

Enter, John Upton Terrell.

John Upton Terrell was a Western historian, and a popular one at that who also worked as a reporter for the Salt Lake Tribune. Later, after his time in our story, he would go on to write over 40 books, many of them biographies and many of them over characters and people I already plan on covering or have covered like Cabeza de Vaca! Whom I have talked about twice now. He also wrote on John Wesley Powell, someone I will talk about, and Zebulon Pike, someone else I plan on talking about much much later since essentially he Powell, and Everett, are just wandering through very similar landscapes. But each have their own unique adventure.

John Wesley Powell has been compared to Zane Grey, by David Roberts and I will indeed cover Zane Grey soon enough. But, all of that writing was yet to come.

For the Salt Lake Tribune, John Upton Terrell agreed to go on assignment and write about this lost artist and free spirit, Everett Ruess.

I’ll quote Roberts in his summation of the headlines and articles that followed:

The results of the inquiry, in dispatches written by Terrell, were published on the pages of four successive issues of the newspaper between August 25 and 28. The first dispatch, printed at the top of the front page of the Sunday morning edition on August 25, under the headline "S.L. Tribune Expedition into Desert Finds Clues to Fate of Young Artist," opened with a bold proclamation of the team's unshakable conclusion. Now quoting the article:

Everett Ruess, 21-year-old missing Los Angeles artist, probably met death at the hands of a renegade bad man or Indian in a lonely canyon near the southern end of the untracked Escalante desert.

This is the united belief of the best Indian and white trackers, traders and wilderness residents of southern Utah and northern Arizona. Their conclusion is based on several "trails" of evidence, which to the men trained in the ways of remote lands, are almost irrefutable. But also these expressions of opinion have come following an extensive and intensive search by an expedition sent out by The Salt Lake Tribune, and which has practically exhausted other possibilities. End quote.

Now back to Roberts: To buttress its claims, the Tribune published a map of the terrain traversed by the searchers. It covers an impressive swath of country stretching from Blanding, Utah, to Tuba City, Arizona. From the Navajo Mountain trading post, Terrell's company (including Indian guides) worked its way northwest by pack train through some of the most rugged and seldom-visited canyonlands anywhere in the Southwest, finally crossing the San Juan and Colorado Rivers to arrive at Davis Gulch. End all quotes.

Wait… didn’t the Hopi man, Edward Nequatewa whom Everett’s parents ran into, didn’t he tell them that there was no way an Indian hurt or killed Everett? And anyways, how dangerous to white men or Anglo Americans were Indians in the 1930s, anyways? I mean a lone crazy Indian or even white man could have gotten hold of him but… what was their evidence?

Well, the team apparently had an expert Navajo trail reader named Dougeye who said not only did the tracks they found, EIGHT months later, mind you… eight months and you’re telling me no monsoon or winds or even scattered rains had dispersed or destroyed or disappeared those tracks?! Sorry, Dougeye told Terrell that with these tracks, there were six of them he saw, but the tracks told him that, quote, white boy come in, not go out. End quote.

Dougeye the Navajo trail reader should know, one of those horse tracks were his! He left them when he went into Escalante to trade.

But how did they know that Everett met a violent end?! Well, duh, Terrell knew the way of the Indians, especially the Navajo and he knew quote, A Navajo Indian cannot keep a secret. He reveals all such things to traders and agents. End quote. You see, Terrell knew the secret to the Navajos… they were constantly drinking truth serum and they just had to spill their guts lest their noses grow.

It’s just ridiculous, really. Looking back, at least.

By the way, Dougeye was Paiute… not Navajo.

So from here, I’m going to just quote a large section from Roberts book because he in turn quotes a lot from Terrell’s article and he does a great job. It’s riveting stuff, truthfully. Quote:

The mystical climax of Terrell's search came in a hogan near Kayenta, Arizona, where the reporter's guides led him to the camp of a Navajo medicine man. "I have forgotten the Indian's name," Terrell wrote. "It was, for me, unpronounceable. He was, however, Natani, which means 'wise man' or sometimes head man.' The old man's wife was a renowned seer.

After the requisite sharing of cigarettes and gossip about the latest Indian policies of "Washingdon" (as Navajos referred to the federal government), "Natani" suddenly asked,

"Why have you waited so long to look for your friend?"

And for the first time, the medicine man's wife spoke, almost inaudibly: "Far north."

As Terrell's party watched spellbound in the rainy night, Natani began to chant, while his wife covered her face, then started to sculpt a mound from the sand on the ground. Twice she destroyed and rebuilt the topographic model, which Terrell's guides recognized as Navajo Mountain. Eventually she used a finger to draw a pair of crooked lines enfolding the peak, signifying the San Juan and Colorado Rivers.

The chant ended abruptly. Natani's wife sat with her head fallen, breathing deeply, as if she were very tired. The rain stopped..

Natani spoke: "Go to the forks of the rivers.'

Guide: "He lives there?”

Natani: "He was there. Close by he made a camp. You will find the fire."

Guide: "Have you seen him?" (He meant in a vision.)

Natani: "He has gone away from there."

Guide: "He's dead."

Natani: "He has gone away and does not mean to come back."

Pressed by Terrell's Navajo guide and translator, Natani made a last effort to "see" Everett. At last he spoke:

There is a shadow. Only some of his outfit was moved away. There is more some place. I see him talking with two friends. They are Navajos. Young men like himself. They sing and eat together. Then there is a shadow. He has gone away. The Navajos have left the place. They are no longer with him.

She says they may have traveled together. He (Ruess) has given himself to our gods. He has taken us in his arms and wished to come among us.

The vision of Natani and his wife directed Terrell to Navajo Mountain, where he recruited Dougeye, then visited the junction of the Colorado and San Juan Rivers. The tracker scrutinized the river-banks, then spoke, "White boy not camp here."

Onward to Davis Gulch, and thence to further consultations with Indians and Anglo cattlemen. The cloak-and-dagger melodrama of Terrell's dispatches obscures the fact that the search, for all its "extensive and intensive" apparatus, was little more than a flamboyant wild goose chase. Terrell's conclusion, moreover, was not so much a QED as a grasping at the kind of straw that might sell newspapers.

The closing passage of the last dispatch, for all its air of certainty, seems to acknowledge silently that Terrell's party could not identify Everett's alleged killer, or even come up with a convincing motive for such a crime.

This is the result: Everett Ruess was murdered in the vicinity of Davis canyon. His valuable outfit was stolen. He never reached the Colorado river.

"But some day," we said, "pieces of his outfit will turn up.” Then we would take the trail again.

The gripping accounts in the Salt Lake Tribune made a big splash.

A Utah Department of Justice agent prepared to make a case before federal authorities to launch a manhunt for Everett's killers. The state governor promised to open an official investigation.

To their credit, however, Christopher, Stella, and Waldo refused to swallow Terrell's detective work whole. As of September 1935, they still held on to the hope that Everett was alive. End all quotes.

By 1935, there were essentially four theories on Everett’s fate that had coalesced around his disappearance. These four theories are still the four most plausible ones today, almost 90 years later.

The first was the one we just covered; murder. Either by a bad man or an Indian. A theory had even been floating that a cattle rancher had killed him… or a cattle rustler! Or a group of rustlers! There were a bunch of em out there. Or… What if a Mormon cattle baron didn’t want his daughter to marry a wandering vagabond gentile…

Bud Rusho, author of A Vagabond for Beauty focuses quite a bit on this murder theory, surprisingly.

The second theory was that he was actually still quite alive but was just hiding. That’s what his mom, dad, and brother believed. And it isn’t all that far fetched, really. Okay, it is, honestly, but, I mean, think of all of the quotes I’ve read so far from his own writings and letters that describe in detail how much he hates cities and how he never ever wanted to return to them. It would make sense if he said to hell with it all, I’m turning Navajo and I’m never going back to the filthy boring civilization again.

Edward Abbey would write in Desert Solitaire in 1968, quote, For all we know he is still down in there somewhere living on prickly pear and wild onion, communing with the gods of river, canyon, and cliff. End quote. He was being somewhat facetious but still, it could have been a reality.

While he was doing his own research, another author, Jon Krakauer, the author of Into the Wild about Chris McCandless’ misadventure in Alaska that ended on that famous bus, well Krakauer was also an Everett cult member and while writing a chapter on Everett, he was told by a man in Kingman, Arizona that he knew Everett was still alive. He was living with a Navajo woman and their child on the Navajo reservation and it wasn’t a secret.

Much later, in the 90s, that same author, Jon Krakauer would track down someone I’ll briefly mention later, and they’d talk about how they thought Everett met his fate and this man would tell Krakauer, quote:

Everett was a loner, but he liked people too damn much to stay down there and live in secret the rest of his life. A lot of us are like that- I’m like that, ed abbey was like that, and it sounds like this McCandless kid was like that: we like companionship, see, but we can’t stand to be around people very long. So, we go get ourselves lost, come back for a while, then get the hell out again. And that’s what Everett was doing. Everett was strange, kind of different. But him and McCandless, at least they tried to follow their dream. That’s what was great about them. They tried. Not many do. End quote.

The author of Vagabond for Beauty, Bud Rusho, seems to agree with that man and Krakauer, quote:

From his letters, it appears that he remained too close to his parents and to his bother, Waldo, to suddenly and deliberately cut all communication, forever. End quote.

Regardless, sightings and rumors of Everett’s living trail would swirl throughout the Southwest for decades to come.

Personally, I don’t buy it for the same reasons I just quoted. He liked people too much and he loved his family and meeting artists and adventurers like himself. Plus he would have had to give up painting and photographing and writing and… it just doesn’t fit.

The third theory is one I’ve struggled with because he just left so many dang hints towards it, and that theory is that he chose to end his own life. Remember him finally sending money TO his parents? Telling them to stop sending it to him… why would he need it if he knew the possible outcome of his upcoming final desert jaunt. Think of all the quotes I’ve already read… well, you don’t have to I’ll repeat some of them now:

I've become a little too different from most of the rest of the world.

I was sorry, though, that our intimacy, like many things that are and will be, had to die with a dying fall. I do not greatly mind endings, for my life is made up of them.

What I would have missed if I had ended everything last summer!

And when the time comes to die, I'll find the wildest, loneliest, most desolate spot there is.

Of course… those may just have been poignant writings from a lost wanderer… and not words of intent. But he was occasionally filled with loneliness, sadness, melancholy, and contempt for mankind as we have read and heard.

In the year 2000, a reprint of On Desert Trails, which was a companion to Bud Rusho’s Vagabond for Beauty that included more letters and more, or a lot of his journals. It too was written by Rusho. It included an afterward by a man named Gary James Bergera and it was titled The Murderous Pain of Living: Thoughts on the Death of Everett Ruess, and in that afterward, Bergera makes a pretty sad but strong case for Everett’s suicide, quote:

For many readers of Everett Ruess’s remarkable letters home, a terrible melancholy permeates almost every line. End quote. He then assembles a lot of the quotes I did as well. But he goes on to write, quote: what emerges from a careful review of Everett’s writings is a portrait of a gifted yet depressive young artist whose tortured engagement with life both powered his creative expression and propelled him toward his own self-destruction. End quote.

At the same time though, as Rusho said of this theory, quote, he was not a recluse, he liked to converse with every one he met. End quote. He also wrote, quote, whatever his feelings upon leaving the cities, his letters indicate a gradual return of confidence and good humor, end quote.

Even Everett’s parents, Christopher and Stella had pretty much also come to this same conclusion. To completely argue against Bergera, Roberts writes, quote, the last letters home had been too full of joy and enthusiasm to spring from a youth contemplating suicide. End quote.

And I agree, despite sometimes doing my research and reading, thinking it may have been how he ended it, in the end, I think, for the same reason that he wouldn’t disappear and live with the Navajos, he wouldn’t choose to end it because he loves life and beauty and his family too much. He may have said he’d seen more beauty than he can bear but he always seemed to be able to bear more.

The Fourth and final theory is that an accident befell him. Or really, in my opinion, if this is what happened, he fell during an accident. That would also make total sense. Think about the many times he himself had bragged about tempting fate or think about when others spoke of him nearly plummeting to his death. If you’ve wandered enough in the wilderness… death does present itself to you in one form or another. And he spent an enormous chunk of his life in the wild… It could have been a severe and debilitating bout of poison ivy. A rattler bite that infected his blood. Heck, Bee stings that infected his blood! He’s almost succumbed to that. He’s almost succumbed to dying from a wound in his hand. He could have drowned, frozen to death, got swept away in a flash flood… although, the whole 80 year drought thing does disprove that a little… Except, a very heavy rainstorm inundated the area shortly after he left the sheepherders.

To me, the accident that makes the most sense if he did go out in an accident… he fell. He was climbing to some Anasazi ruin or to get to some vantage point where he could paint or write or just, explore, and he fell. And he hit the deck and died instantly or was smashed into some crevice where he slowly bled out or starved to death and deteriorated or he fell in some slot canyon and was washed away in summer or, I mean… I don’t want to get too morbid… there are numerous ways to accidentally meet your maker in the wild and woolly American Southwest. To highlight some of his own writings that talk about his own rather proud carelessness, here’s some quotes:

In my wanderings this year I have taken more chances and had more and wilder adventures than ever before.

It may be a month or two before I have a post office, for I am exploring southward to the Colorado, where no one lives.

Yesterday I did some miraculous climbing on a nearly vertical cliff, and escaped unscathed, too. One way and another, I have been flirting pretty heavily with Death, the old clown.

But as I thought and as Rusho and Roberts writes about, he wouldn’t have taken all his stuff up somewheres to look inside a ruin, right? His painting kit, sure, but his mess kit? That seems silly.

To me, it’s either theory three or four. Suicide or accident. Or maybe he committed suicide by accident. Maybe all accidents in the wild are a form of suicide. You don’t take risks like he did unless you are willing to die in the first place. Something in you says, bad freakin idea, and you retreat from the ledge… unless you believe living without the adventure isn’t living at all. Truthfully, I don’t believe he committed suicide on purpose. I think he accidentally fell to his death.

On September 24th of 1935, Everett’s father, Christopher wrote to a friend, quote, If Everett is dead, he has truly lived, and more than most people do in a century. End quote.

So apparently… although he was not named by Terrell, the ole coot, Captain Johnson was on the search mission with the journalist and the Paiute Dougeye. Cap’n had actually gone with the crew on their search for Everett. After the unsuccessful mission though, the captain paid yet another visit to the Ruesses at their home in LA. Christopher Ruess would write to Waldo of this and say, quote, he sleeps in Everett’s bed and I in your bed right now. End quote. I don’t like that, I’ll be honest.

In his diary, Christopher would write this of their interaction with the conman:

Johnson says that his brother slept with Everett his last night in Escalate, slept with," meaning camped beside" and that Everett had nearly $1,000 in bills--sounds fishy.

No way of telling what money Everett had; Johnson full of fairy tales; had an idea Everett took a package of photo plates, really drugs, for drug smugglers from New Mexico to Bryce National Park, and was paid $1000 for that; this is absurd, for it took Everett weeks to go that distance and I think Johnson just told it to me to get me to bribe him to keep Everett from being prosecuted. End quote.

As crazy as that sounds… everyone from Waldo to Christopher and even Stella WERE wondering where on earth that money had come from that he had sent them. And what did he mean in one of the final letters he wrote when he said quote I have more money than I need. End quote.

Waldo had already written about this when he said quote have you ever learned the exact source of Everett’s money? It seems to me he never did tell us just how or when he got it. End quote. Christopher would respond to Waldo’s letter with, quote, I believe Everett must have met some well to do people who paid generously for his pictures. End quote.

Well-to-do Mormon rancher art aficionado out in the farming communities along highway 12 in southern Utah with enough money to pay him during the great depression?! Seems unlikely.

In a series of letters between Waldo and his parents around November of 1935, the three discuss some of the possibilities that befell Everett, mentioning all four I just discussed. His father even mentioned quote, he says that if he had shuffled off his mortal coil a year previously as he discussed with you, he would be missing all the great experiences and beauty that at that moment he was recording. End quote. So suicide had crept into his parents imagination…

Waldo dismisses the suicide but does raise two of the other possibilities when he wrote, quote:

From what he had said, I might believe that he would commit suicide in that he would drive himself on in a stoical manner not always being considerate of his bodily needs until he starved to death or from not caring for wounds properly but I doubt if he took life in such a way as to be willing to hang a rock around his neck and jump in the Colorado. I might think that he fell down some chasm but that is not certain because if that was so his belongings should be around somewhere at least. It certainly seems like someone might have "done him in." End quote.

I think right there, Waldo just brushes against the most likely answer. Falling down a chasm. But still…. The other two, suicide or he ran into the wrong person, or persons, in a place where no one lives, are still plausible.

It’s easy for us to armchair detective this story which happened so long ago but to his parents, Christopher and Stella, this was all very real and happening in very real time for them. Christopher’s journal on November 13th, 1935 reads, Quote,  "Dreamed of Everett, saw his skeleton; Mother dreamed of him and saw him stalking into the kitchen the other day, tall, healthy, with sweater with Indian symbols on it, saying, Well, here I am! End quote.

His father would eventually wonder if maybe he made it to south America or even across the pacific to china! But Waldo couldn’t fathom it and wrote to his father what is likely the truth:

As many of his poems and writings lead one to think [that) might happen sometime, he has undoubtedly driven himself beyond his physical endurance and died, beautifully and alone in the desert. Whether he suffered or not at the time is a moot question but it was a beautiful death because he was living a life of beauty, a life of doing what he wanted to do. End quote.

He would also write, quote:

As I think about him I begin to realize what a poor excuse for a person I am. What a shallow empty life I am leading as compared to him. End quote.

While that sounds sad… as you’ll shortly hear, Waldo does NOT lead an empty shallow life but will become in fact an extremely accomplished and cool sounding dude in his own right. And maybe that’s partly due to his brother’s disappearance.

Over the next few years they would get more sightings and more people would come forward to suggest they could prove he was alive, but none would pan out. The Ruesses would search for the truth in fortune tellers and card readers and astrologers. A seer would tell them he drowned for it was written in the stars at the of his birth. They’d consult handwriting specialists to see if he was writing under a pen name somewhere. Another woman suggested he was possessed but it won’t last forever and he’ll be normal and return when the being that had taken him over leaves him again… Anything’s possible in the Devil’s Desert out there… hey, that’s name of my novel…

Strangely, and rather cruelly, in 1938, a friend of the family wrote to Stella and said, quote:

Just before we moved, in I936, Everett came to visit us a couple of times. He acted differently and often spoke of going back to Mexico… and at one thing he said to us I chided him and said . . . "Everett Ruess!" Then I noticed something strange about him ... he asked us ..."Is that who I am?"

I do know that when we asked him of his parents he always said "I HAVE NO FAMILY."

Bless you . . . I do hope this helps ease your dear mind . .. and do give up now . .. Release your sweet loving mind from this double thinking ... for really Stella, darling ... wherever your boy is he is IN GODS LOVING CARE... and that's all we need to know isn't it? End quote.

Why would you write your friend that? It’s absolutely false, and she knew it. I have no family?! Everett deeply loved his family… and to tell Stella, do give up now… cruel.

By that same year, 1938, Christopher and Stella had a small part of them that actually did still believe he was alive and going by an alias in the four corners region. They begged Everett through letter and ads in the area to meet with them, even if it was only just once, for however brief… he would never appear.

Later that same year, a writer out of Palm Desert California who wrote for something called Desert magazine published an article titled: say that I kept my dream, which was a line from Everett’s wilderness song poem. The author, Hugh lacy, began the article with the line:

Wherever poets, adventurers and wanderers of the Southwest gather, the story of Everett Ruess will be told. His name, like woodsmoke, conjures far horizons. End quote.

That is quite the prescient prediction. Although it is a real shame and a mystery that I hadn’t heard of Everett before this series. Maybe it’s for the best… someone like Everett and his story has the power to change peoples lives. I really do think that. I probably wouldn’t be where I’m at now if I’d have known about him earlier in life.

But with this article by Lacy, the beginning of the cult of Everett Ruess was born. After publication, 100s of people would write the magazine asking for more information on who this Everett was!

In that original article Lacy also writes this of our vagabond adventurer, quote:

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. End quote.

I can’t help but sense the similarities between the phrase desert solitudes and desert solitaire, the book by Edward Abbey which was published about 33 years later in 1971…

Lacy though, would follow up that first article with another one in December 1939 titled: what became of Everett ruess? This obviously reignited interest while also causing a flood of new sightings. One of these sightings was by a woman named Cora Keagle who swore that when she was on a vacation in Mexico with her husband, on the drive back, as they passed through Monterey they saw a white man who showed them his quote unquote portfolio of watercolor paintings which he said was his livelihood. He also said he was living amongst the Indians in Arizona. In that first article of Lacy’s, he had printed pictures of Everett and the Keagle’s upon returning to Cali and reading the desert magazine, instantly recognized Everett. He was the one they’d seen in Mexico.

Cora Keagle in turn wrote a piece for desert magazine and she closed it by saying quote:

We are convinced that we saw Everett Ruess, And if it was Everett he was tanned, healthy and happy and several pounds heavier than when he disappeared. End quote.

  Nothing would come of this sighting though.

Another man wrote to the Ruesses saying he saw Everett and his dog Curly… the one that ran away and never came back, but he said he saw Everett and Curly in Florida at a transient camp.

I think that’s pretty messed up. The dude used the long gone dog’s name… he just completely made it up. Some people are cruel.

Despite all that though… Christopher would correspond with this man for four. More. Years… hence why these people do this kind of stuff in the first place.

Eventually, Christopher thought maybe that Everett was on a 7 year odysseys style journey and in 1941, he’d dramatically return… but as Robert’s points out, Odysseus was gone for 20 years and for half of those he was fighting in the Trojan war.

But, as if he’d conjured it, in that very year of 1941, something rather dramatic did indeed happen.

In Thybony’s Disappearances, he writes about another incident from 1941, quote:

An unusual number of Enemyway ceremonies, more than two dozen, were taking place in the western reservation in 1941. Reports had filtered in to traders and Indian agents about medicine men using the scalp of a white man in their ritual. The victim was said to have been killed in the 1930s beyond Navajo mountain, and the circumstances suggested a connection to the missing artist. End quote.

Thybony goes on to describe how the Navajo word for scalp, the item needed in the Enemyway ceremony, may not actually be a scalp but may just be a remnant of the dead person like hair, bones, or even pieces of clothing. But sometimes, a real scalp is actually used and when that happens, a small piece of the scalp in use is cut off to be ritually destroyed at the end of the ceremony. And this ceremony is used to get rid of something called the Ghost Sickness which can be contracted after a Navajo is exposed to the physical remains of a dead person. The Ghost Sickness can kill you quickly, or it can give you cancer, blindness, bad luck, any and all sorts of misfortunes. Thybony writes, quote, soldiers returning from war have had the sing performed to exercise the ghosts of slain enemies, and sometimes children returning from boarding school have undergone the ritual purification. End quote. During the 40s, there were a lot of Enemyway ceremonies taking place on the Navajo res. Eventually, the authorities were called in.

Here’s another extended quote from Thybony’s Disappearances:

An investigation began, and the authorities soon tracked down multiple scalps. One of them had belonged to an Anglo killed while traveling alone on the rim of Tsegi Canyon a quarter century before. A trader linked another scalp to an even older incident, the killing of a white man on a sandbar in the San Juan River around 1882. Then the investigators learned of an active case involving John Chief, a fifty-one-year-old Navajo living south of the San Juan River who was respected by his neighbors and the local trad-ers. Earlier, he joined a delegation that traveled by train to Washington, DC, to protest the stock-reduction program that was hurting their people. The delegates had pawned their jewelry to cover expenses.

The Navajo Police Patrol and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) staked out an Enemyway being held near the Oljeto Trading Post. The scalp of an unidentified white man, said to have been killed by John Chief, was being used. End quote.

The authorities would arrest John Chief but in the end, it was indeed his son in law, already in custody, who had committed the murder. And that man’s name was Jack Crank. Besides needing the scalp, Jack Crank just plain old, quote, hated white men. End quote.

While being held in a Phoenix jail for this murder and taking of the scalp, Jack Crank would tell the authorities the unspeakable… the man he murdered for the Enemyway ceremony had been Everett Ruess.

In the end, Jack Crank was never tried for Everett’s death and the authorities even told the Ruesses not to believe the Navajo man, but Christopher and Stella would end up believing him anyways. Maybe it was the easy thing to do after almost a decade of wondering…

Christopher would write the head of the Navajo Agency saying he opposed the death penalty for his sons murderers but life in jail should be good enough. He also begged him to force the men to show them where they’d buried Everett’s remains. And to please, hand over the diary so they could publish it.

E R Fryer, the head of the Navajo agency would write back and say to Christopher, quote, we are convinced, that these men, murderers by their own admission, had no part in the disappearance of your son. End quote.

The two men would get 10 years behind bars, although the judge hoped they’d soon be released after an appeal. The Navajos had wanted an acquittal.

The Ruesses would go on believing the Navajo renegade though, and in 1952, Christopher would write to one of Everett’s friends saying, quote, Crank was a sort of outlaw among his people even. He was probably drunk when he did the deed. . . . For us, this seems to solve the riddle. End quote.

In reality, the man murdered had been a 50 year old destitute prospector named Shorty who was believed by the Navajo to have broken into a hogan… oops, Everett… but Shorty was believed to have broken into a Hogan and stolen some flour, coffee, and tools. And on top of that, his horses had eaten all the corn and destroyed the field of a Navajo family. This was too much for the struggling people… to answer for his crimes, John Chief and Jack Crank rode out and dispensed some frontier justice on the hapless wandering white man. Hence, why the Navajo had wanted an acquittal and why the judge in Monticello had been so lenient.

Crank wasn’t the only Navajo to claim he had killed or seen Everett killed though. In the 90s, on a hike to Navajo Mountain, Thybony was speaking to his Navajo guide around a campfire when he mentioned Everett Ruess’s disappearance, and to the author’s surprise, his guide told him the riveting story of exactly how he was killed. Thybony writes, quote:

He looked directly at me, surprised by the question. "Yes," he answered.

"My father-in-law told us a story last fall. He said it happened somewhere between where we were camped at Harris Wash and the Colorado River. It's a story only the locals know." Down by the creek, a hobbled horse hopped twice and stopped as if listening.

"Some Navajos met him out there," he told me. "They were on their way to Escalante. One of them decided to take his livestock. He tracked him back to his camp. He killed him with his own ax. He didn't take the animals. He felt guilty and left them there. He buried the body in a crack and covered it with rocks and sand. He hid his tracks and didn't tell anybody about it. He spoke about it for the first time four or five years later at a Squaw Dance.” End quote.

Occasionally, a part of the Enemyway ceremony is called the Squaw Dance.

After the tour around Navajo Mountain, Thybony had permission to come back and interview his guide’s father-in-law but when the time came, the man backed out and on the phone the guide said, quote, it wasn’t my father in law, it must have been one of the other elders. End quote.

Eventually after talking to more Navajo elders, the consensus came back that the story he had been told around the campfire was wrong and it must have happened elsewhere… to someone else…

This story… by the way… is, as you will hear at the end, the most plausible murder story that exists…

After all, Everett knew some Navajo and some Navajo songs. He had been invited to a healing and a song. He had seen the sand paintings, he had chased ghosts. He had been told where Hogans were that he could use. He wore a turquoise bracelet made by a Navajo. The Navajo wife picture… Even Christopher had mentioned that the final time he’d seen his son Everett, he had even walked like a Navajo Indian man.

The case being turned into a murder investigation was serious though… and we will return to it again.

After the two Lacy articles in the late 1930s, the editor of the desert magazine, Randall Henderson, would publish Everett’s writings in 1940! He’d title it on desert trails with Everett Ruess.

In the forward to the book he wrote, quote:

[This book] is offered, not merely as entertainment, but as an intimate picture of a very intelligent young man who sought in his own way to find the solution to some of the most difficult of the problems which confront all human beings in this highly complex age. We cannot all be wanderers, nor writers nor painters. But from the philosophy of Everett Ruess we may all draw something that will contribute to our understanding of the basic values of the universe in which we live. End quote.

The book became a minor classic apparently and it was still in print until very recently. The cult was growing.

One of these cult devotees is a man named Harry Aleson.

At 40 years old, Harry Aleson would quit his job in the Midwest and move to a shack at the western end of the Grand Canyon after falling in love with the American Southwest. The place has the hold on people…

By the early 1940s though, Aleson was leading commercial trips on Lake Mead while also in his free time, exploring the rapids of the Colorado through the Canyon and beyond. But not just the Colorado, he also explored many of the tributaries, including the Escalante. But not just the tributaries! He also would explore up the canyons and even on top of the mesas of the area.

This is how he enters our story now. In 1946, when he was doing just that, exploring the tributaries and canyons, he headed up… you guessed it, Davis, Gulch. During that hike, he climbed a sketchy Anasazi hand and toe hold ladder up to a cliffside set of ruins, rarely seen… but at least one person had seen it since the ruins were abandoned… on the doorway of the ruin was carved, NEMO 1934. This finding was like a lightning bolt and for the next few years, Harry Aleson would search far and wide for Everett. The paper, the Deseret News would say of him in 1948, quote, perhaps no man living has spent as much time in searching for traces of the lost young man as has Harry Aleson of Richfield, Utah. End quote.

He not only cared deeply for the mystery of Everett Ruess, but he also sought the answer to many other mysteries of the region. It turns out, he had wanted to be a writer, but it never panned out. Regardless, he sleuthed and searched and wrote and kept every scrap of paper he ever collected and then when he died, he left it all to the Utah State Historical Society where apparently, his efforts STILL help researchers and writers today.

But while he was still alive, he ended up becoming penpals with the Ruesses and eventually offered to take them on a tour of Davis Gulch. Stella, at 68 years old, took him up on the offer even though it would be a tough and a trying adventure for her.

So Stella and a friend drove from LA to Richfield, Utah, where they given a tour of the area. And then, the two of them, with Aleson and his assistant Sterling Larson, they all drove the entirety of the Hole in the Rock Road, all 60 something bumpy washboard miles of it. They then hiked for hours across the sandstone towards Davis Gulch.

Stella would write this about the journey: But actually, first, before I quote Stella, I must admit I have been saying a word wrong, this whole time. Ive been saying Moqui steps when I should have been saying Moki steps. Thank you dear listener who pointed that out. Okay, Stella wrote, quote:

We got down into Davis Canyon to the willows & box elders before noon & then had sandwiches & juice in beer cans. Then we started down grade to the canyon bed, struggling through young willows that were dense & scratchy. Finally we turned & came upon a circle of red mountains with a high window [i.e., arch], & below it were about 30 Indian pictographs--dancing man, lizard, etc. Harry's name & some of the first searching party were written in the wall with charcoal, so Lou and I added ours.

Finally we saw the Moqui (Moki) house high up the canyon wall with an arched overhang. Lou & Sterling stayed below, because he had leather shoes. Harry climbed up first, then came back & said I could make it. He stayed below me & pointed out each crevice (Moqui toe-holds) where I could put one foot after the other while bracing my hands against the sharp slanting wall. By the time I reached the shelf, 15 feet wide perhaps, I felt pretty shaky, because I thought it would be much harder to get down. Here there were quite dim pictographs, & the one Moqui (Moki) ruin without a roof.. Two steps lead up to the door sill where Nemo

& 1934 are scratch [sic]. Harry & some one else added their dates. ... I took 2 small pottery pieces, & Harry cached below several pieces from a good sized cooking bowl. End quote.

While she did not mention the emotions that she must have felt upon seeing her long gone son who’d mysteriously disappeared’s writing on the wall of the long gone mysteriously disappeared culture… I can almost see the writing of Everett in her recounting of the tale. Maybe she meant that deliberately.

It’s also amazing that the 68 year old woman climbed what is probably a 5.8 or even a 5.9 on the climbing scale in the scary desert sandstone. Truly awesome. And thankfully, she did make it down with some coaching. But they couldn’t make it back to the truck so they just slept under the stars. Aleson would later say of Stella that she was the quote, bravest of courageous women. End quote. I’d say.

Stella would write in her journal while by the fire, quote:

Harry and Sterling kept the fire going all night, and Harry talked about Everett until 11:30. He discounts every theory except that Everett fell from a cliff. End quote.

Most of the time, that’s also my belief. And it’s also the belief of Harry Goulding who had by then found Goulding’s Lodge near Monument Valley! And its also what John Wetherill, the amateur archaeologist and explorer and awesome dude thinks. Christopher Ruess, when not waffling on if he was murdered or not, would occasionally think the same thing. He actually wrote in 1948, the year of this excursion while he was at home and his wife was with Aleson, well he wrote TO Aleson and said, quote:

It may be that Everett met his end in such a fall, it may be he drowned crossing the Colorado (as Mr. Henderson of the Desert Magazine came to believe), it may be that he was killed by the Indians for his gear (unlikely), he may have fallen and suffered amnesia, forgetting his identity, or it may be he planned to disappear without a trace and lose himself among the natives and he may be in Central or South America or Mexico now. For all these theories there have been believers. End quote.

While Aleson may have clung to the theory that he fell and while that may have been what he told Stella, he would have a few differing opinions in the very near future. Time to return to the possibility of murder.

Starting in 1951, 3 years after the excursion with Stella, Harry Aleson began thinking of some other possibilities. He wrote to a friend and former client who worked for Deseret News and said:

During the past four to five years I have been hearing rumors on the disappearance of young Ruess. I have heard some very bold statements. Names have been named. Certain persons living in the area today are not only suspected, but practically accused of the murder of Ruess. With no substantial proof, of course nothing can be done. I have all the names... For the present, I am waiting, hoping for a death-bed confession. For some years I have known the men most concerned or suspicioned. Have talked to them often . . . I have good reason to continue the suspicion. End quote. He told his friend, this statement was in all caps NOT FOR PUBLICATION.

Another desert rat and amateur American Southwest historian… wait… I think… I am a desert rat and amateur American southwest historian… dang… anyways, one of Harry Aleson’s close friends who also loved the desert and its history, a man named Otis R Dock Marston, was on the trail of Everett’s disappearance with Aleson and on December 14th, 1952, Aleson would write to Marston in the strictest of confidences and say, quote:

I heard firsthand on Pearl Harbor Day this year, some startling statements--from a man of that area, pretty much "in his cups.” The boy was shot. Killer was named to me. Killer died seven years later. Two others threw the body in the Colorado R. Both are living. One served time in Utah Pen for rustling.

I've been seeing and talking to him off and on for several years. For some weeks now, he has kept a room here [in Richfield, Utah]. Not more than 20 feet between our beds.

Nothing re the murder could be proved in court. While the parents, whom I know, are living, I'm inclined to say nothing -let the secret of the disappearance die with them.

What would you do with this knowledge. End quote.

In the cups, by the way, means drunk…

Well, to answer Aleson’s question, Marston told him to send this info pronto to Randall Henderson, editor of the Desert Magazine.

Aleson would then do just that and would write a coded top secret message to Randall Henderson describing the murder by the local rustlers. And he again ended it with the hope of a deathbed confession.

After that message to Henderson, Aleson would write down everything he knew about the murder and or disappearance of Everett Ruess but he would do it in a very Aleson TOP SECRET CONFIDENTIAL FOR YOUR EYES ONLY kinda way. He made up some goofy secret language but it’s really just abbreviations all crushed together with no spaces… it’s like, the easiest thing to decipher in the world. It’s all laid out intriguingly and goofily in Robert’s Finding Everett Ruess, if y’all wanna check it out.

But in this message he names names. Names like: Addlin Lay, Hugh Bailey, Emeron Alvey, Keith Riddle, and Joe Pollock. And all of these men were local Escalant ranchers. Heck, you may remember Addlin Lay’s name as he was one of the sheepherders who last saw Everett alive. Hugh Bailey had been the man in his cups, or a little drunk who had told Aleson all of this. And in this coded message, Aleson fingered Emeron Alvey as the killer, but… he had died in 1944. Lastly, Keith Riddle and Joe Pollock, Alvey’s accomplices, had disposed of the body, apparently, in the Colorado River.

So, Aleson had gone from, he fell in an accident to, he was murdered… maybe there was foul play after all.

Surprisingly, this goofy coded note of Aleson’s wasn’t read or published until 1999, a total of 27 years after Aleson’s death. At that time, author David Roberts says, the original telegram piece of paper, the coded message, it was at the Utah State Historical Society but has since been stolen… most likely, by some crazy cult member. At least it’s been recorded though.

How plausible was this theory? For all we know… it could be the truth…

By 1953, a few months after the coded telegram to and from Aleson, Waldo, Everett’s brother, he had left China and had been stationed in Indonesia and El Salvador, but he was now at this time back in California. That year, the editor and publisher of On Desert Trails, Randall Henderson, and on Desert Trails was the first book published about Everett, well Randall Henderson who had just recently heard from Aleson about the possible murder, he would write to Waldo and let slip some of the CONFIDENTIAL, as Aleson put it, rumors that were beginning to swirl out in the desert of Escalan. Quote:

Two years ago, camping on the Kaiparowitz mesa overlooking the Escalante river basin I listened to the story of a couple of Mormon cowboys- story that while not conclusive, was an acceptable solution of the mystery. They believe Everett was killed by a couple of cattle rustlers whose names they know. Their story was entirely plausible and as far as I am concerned it is the solution to the mystery. End quote.

Now, it is not known if Randall Henderson heard the story himself, or if he was just passing on what he’d read from Aleson…

At that same time, still in 1953, Salt Lake City newspapers began running stories about a recently found but quite old camp filled with a year’s supply of canned food. One of the headlines read: 20-year Old Mystery Revived. Discovery of Old Hideout Gives Clue to Lost Artist.

Aleson sent these articles to Christopher and Stella but told them that this was probably not Everett’s since a year’s supply of food was not what he had with him. But at the same time he wrote to them, quote:

Assuming that someday we do learn the facts of Everett's disappearance, possibly through a death-bed confession, -to what extent would you, Christopher and Stella, want to know the details?

For some years now, I've had the thought that we are going to learn. End quote.

Christopher immediately wrote back with, quote:

We would want to know everything, but we hate the idea of general publicity, though it might be desirable to influence others not to venture on the Indian lands without realizing what risks they take. An Indian drunk or sober . . . might well get the idea of vengeance on any white man. Everett probably realized that he was taking his life in his hands. End quote.

He was definitely referencing Jack Crank with this response but it could be that he had heard of other Navajo murders by this time.

Shortly after writing that letter to Aleson though, in 1954, Christopher Ruess, at 75 years old, would pass away after complications with some operations. He would be the first person truly close to Everett who would finally learn the answer to the mystery of the disappearance of his own son.

According to Stella, five hundred loving friends attended the service.

After Christopher’s passing, his other son and Everett’s brother Waldo would take on the mantel of being the finder of the truth to the Everett Ruess mystery.

But things weren’t going to get easier to discover.

In 1956 some prospectors found a skeleton very near the hole in the rock road, on the banks of the Colorado River. Aleson wrote Stella and Waldo and said quote, at this time, there is a fifty fifty possibility that the remains of Everett have been found. End quote.

According to the Garfield County Sheriff though, the remains were not a match, and the body was ruled out as being the remains of our vagabond wanderer.

The very next year, in 1957, as the rising waters of the ill advised Lake Powell began to rise, don’t get me started on lake Powell, but in 1957, as teams of Archaeologists attempted to scour every possible nook and cranny and crevice of that immense and massive canyon system for any and all possible sites, ruins, finds, mummies, artifacts, etchings, petroglyphs, etc etc etc, as archaeologists attempted to save the history that laid in the path of the rising and soon to be radioactive waters, as archaeologists dissected every inch of the area, they came across an old camp near the mouth of Cottonwood Canyon. Cottonwood canyon, is the canyon on the south bank of the Colorado that is DIRECTLY opposite THE hole in the rock! It’s the way the Mormons came in 1880 after they crossed the river. It’s the trail mentioned previously that Everett may have followed. One of the most remote places in the nation. Well in this camp, the archaeologists found a spoon, a fork, a cup, some pans, a canteen, and some razors made by the Owl Drug Company which…. was based out of Los Angeles.

That very same Garfield county sheriff that deduced the remains earlier WEREN’T Everett’s, sent some of these findings to Stella and Waldo. And they realized… no… there was no way these were Everett’s on account of him never having shaved. He would always have barbers shave him instead… Shave and give him a haircut, like I mentioned a couple episodes ago.

Waldo, in 1960, would write to this sheriff of the county I was married in, Garflied County, Utah, and fill him in on his thoughts, which were that he’d fallen to his death on accident. He’d write, quote:

Even if he only broke an arm or a leg, in a remote canyon no one would have known of it and he could have starved to death and eventually been covered over by the shifting sands. End quote. But he’d go on to entertain the other rumors, quote:

I certainly wish someone could get to the bottom of all this. If my brother met with foul play, by this time whoever did it must have suffered plenty from remorse, over the years; there would be no need or use of punishing them now, after all these years. End quote. That’s a rather forgiving outlook, really. Not sure the state would agree though.

At this point, the cult grows, the legend continues, people come and go throughout the Ruess’s lives offering hope and answers and books and screenplays. Some of these people help, some hurt. Some are total creeps with no teeth. Some are friends or acquaintances of people Everett ran into or they knew Aleson or they heard from an Indian fire fighter of a white man among the Hopi who has long hair and dresses like them.

One man, another desert rat like Aleson, a man named Ken Sleight, who influenced the writer and adventurer Edward Abbey, found another NEMO carving in a place 40 miles east of Davis Gulch, at a place called Grand Gulch on Cedar Mesa. Grand Gulch is filled with Anasazi Ruins and is an amazing and remote area still to this day… I don’t really know what to make of that carving, truthfully. Maybe he made it over there and then drowned on his way back in the San Juan? I kinda think this Grand Gulch NEMO is a fake…

One man pops up in the story, the toothless sad man, and he would take the 1931 journal from Waldo and Stella, as well as some letters and photographs, and promise some massive book but would never deliver and would never return the journal or the letters either. He, this man Larry Kellner, is the reason we don’t have that 1931 journal. He creeps me out to read about too.

I had written extensively about all these guys and their ties to the story but eventually decided to gloss over them. If you would like to know more, I suggest you enter the cult, read the books, and enjoy the mystery and the story for yourselves! I’d lose a bunch of you to these names and dates and people that are ultimately unreliable and who muddy the Everett waters, anyways.

I will say, Larry, the toothless man said some Navajo called Everett Yabitoch which, is the same name Captain Johnson used to describe Everett but there’s no way anyone could know that Captain Johnson had told the Ruesses that, so that was interesting. What white man was out there in Navajo country going by the name Yabitoch? But again, ultimately, Larry Kellner, the toothless sad man, he disappears with the writings and the journal and pictures and the letters from Everett. Weirdo.

By 1964, thirty years after the disappearance of his brother, Waldo was 54. And he was EXTREMELY interesting as a person himself! And he too was quite the wanderer. He spent more time outside the US than in it. He’d been to China, Japan, India, The Soviet Union, Morocco, Algeria, Sudan, Iceland, Norway, France, Spain, Burma, Cambodia, Mexico, Canada… over 100 foreign lands as he puts it. His brother would be proud. He spoke Mandarin, Spanish, Russian, French, and a few other languages! He was an international businessman and diplomat. He married a gorgeous Spanish woman in 1957. He, unlike Everett, and again, I think Everett would have grown out of it, but Waldo had no trouble talking to or dating women. By 1964, he had three children of his own. He would have a fourth, later.

Stella, in that same year of 1964, was 84 and she was recovering from a stroke at home when it came time for Mother’s day. Waldo would write this of that fateful day, quote:

Conchita, Waldo’s wife, 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. End quote.

Now Waldo was the only Ruess left who truly knew Everett. At least as much as anyone could have truly known the wanderer.

After Stella’s death, the anger that was building in Waldo about having given the writings and pictures to Larry Kellner, the toothless man I mentioned a minute ago, that anger would grow and for the next 18 years, Waldo would try and track down this weird little sad man who was hoarding the all important Everett writings.

He’d write letters begging him to return the stuff, he’d try and track down an address, he would call and talk to his mother… nothing was working. Even by the 80s, he still had not found out where this creep was. But he was willing to BUY back the stuff he and his mother had LEANT the strange biographer who never biographed. Waldo was now wanting those letters and journals so that he could give them to Bud Rusho, who SUCCESSFULLY wrote another source of mine, A Vagabond for Beauty.

Surprisingly, Larry actually wrote back.. 18 years later, mind you. He didn’t mention ever receiving a single letter or call or anything and instead said his dad had died and his mom was sick and he was just looking for a job. The dude absolutely sucks. Then to top it all off, in a later letter, he claimed… he never even received a single piece of writing or picture…

In the end, Waldo and Bud offered Larry over $1,000 for the material and for the information he’d gathered over the years but it wasn’t enough and behind Waldo’s back, this guy.. this pest, sold everything on Everett, including his writings, to a Santa Fe book dealer for $3,000. It then got sold to a dealer in Salt Lake City in 1988. Waldo tracked this guy down and asked for the stuff to be returned but he said it was all copies… what on earth was going on?! Larry was never heard from again and in 2009, David Roberts tracked down this Salt Lake Dealer who said… he had sold it all to a cult member in Indiana who will one day donate it to a museum…

How… infuriating, it was to read all of this, by the way… Just, a whole chapter of infuriating backstabbing and selling and lying… Roberts ends that chapter with this, quote:

In 2004, however, at the age of ninety-five, Waldo attended the first Everett Ruess Days festival in Escalante, a celebration that would become an annual event. With him were his wife, Conchita, and three of their adult children. There the family met the Indiana collector--whose name, unfortunately, none of the Ruesses can remember. The man greeted Waldo warmly and posed for some photographs with him. According to Waldo's daughter Michèle Ruess, "He came across to me as awkward and shy. He felt he had obtained the papers in an honest manner. He learned from us that they included stolen property, but he didn't feel any compulsion whatsoever to right the wrong. Apparently he had paid dearly for them. After meeting him I felt that future endeavors to have our property returned to us would be futile."

Waldo's son Brian Ruess adds, "At one point, he indicated a willingness to donate the papers to the University of Utah. But he had some kind of plan to use the materials first--for a book, or a movie, or both. He coyly refused to give our family any access to the materials until after he had finished his project.” End all quotes.

Those papers are still somewhere in Indiana as of 2023 as far as I could glean.

Upon Edward Abbey’s insistence, Gibbs Smith and Bud Rusho made the book A Vagabond for Beauty which is a fantastic book with lots of examples of Everett’s writing. This book, by 2002, had sold over 100,000 copies. At first it barely sold 2 thousand of its 10,000 copies but slowly, as the cult grew, the book sales took off. The co-author Gibbs Smith sums up why he thinks Everett’s writing took off so much when he said, quote, Everett, in my opinion, was the first unscientific appreciator of this land. His letters are still the best expression of why we so appreciate the beauty of this landscape. End quote.

I hope, dear listener, that I am continuing on this practice of unscientific appreciator of the beauty of the American Southwest and I hope I am passing that on to you.

I hinted earlier that in Rusho’s A Vagabond for Beauty, he focuses more attention on the murder angle than any other angle so let’s dive a little into that mystery.

While Rusho was in Escalante doing research for his book, he would learn that during the time of Everett’s disappearance, cattle rustling was such a huge problem, that in that very same year that Everett disappeared, 1934, the Cattlemen’s Association began spreading false rumors that a government spy had been sent to the American Southwest, specifically to that area of southern Utah to investigate and to catch rustlers red handed.

What if, the poor kind looking young man with his two burros who walked like an Indian was mistakenly identified as the spy? Rusho would write, quote, it was into this atmosphere of deceit and suspicion that Everett innocently rode his burros south from Escalante. Of course, Everett must have looked about as dangerous as a puppy dog, but who can account for the possible reaction to him in the mind of a petty thief? End quote.

Rusho would also learn that a local rancher had actually BRAGGED that he was the very same one who KILLED Everett! But when Rusho went to interview him, he wrote that his memory was quote, suffering from old age. He did remember that a young artist had disappeared near Davis Gulch, yet he said that he knew absolutely nothing about the incident. End quote. Rusho left the man unnamed.

In the end, Rusho concludes that, quote, we are left without a final answer, only riddles within riddles. End quote. He would then write that the mystery wasn’t what made the cult so popular, but instead, it was Everett’s life that everyone wishes to emulate and preserve for posterity. Rusho writes, quote:

His love of wilderness, his sense of kinship with the living earth, his acute sensitivity to every facet of nature's displays--all of these, because of their intensity in one young man, gave Everett rare qualities. What made him unique were his reactions to the striking and dramatic landscapes of the American West. End quote.

Those reactions he wrote down and sent and recorded are the same reactions I had and still have when I see the landscape. I sometimes notice that I’ve even written in my old journals nearly the same description, word for word… And that was long before I'd ever heard of Everett Ruess, his life, or his mystery. But I do admit, I am now fully a member of the cult of Everett Ruess.

Despite the whole toothless Larry stealing so much valuable words… Waldo, the ever trusting man, eventually handed over everything to Gibbs Smith and Rusho, and thank goodness he did. The publication of A Vagabond for Beauty in 1983, was the true lasting monument to Everett that the family had always wanted. Christopher and Stella hadn’t lived to see it, but Waldo definitely appreciated it… well, except for the name. He didn’t much care for the Vagabond part. Everett, by now, had been venerated as a saint in his eyes and vagabond had a bad connotation.

For the book, the authors, Smith and Rusho asked a few other authors to write forwards but only one accepted and it was put as an afterward, which is funny because before I even wrote this episode I had decided to end this episode with a few paragraphs from Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire. It just so happens that Smith and Rusho also closed their book with Edward Abbey. Except, he wrote them a poem about Everett and it’s lovely. I’ll repeat it to y'all:

You walked into the radiance of death through passageways of stillness, stone, and light, gold coin of cottonwoods, the spangled shade, cascading song of canyon wrens, the flight of scarlet dragonflies at pools, the stain of water on a curve of sand, the art of roots that crack the monolith of time.

You knew the crazy lust to probe the heart of that which has no heart that we could know, toward the source, deep in the core, the maze, the secret center where there are no bounds.

Hunter, brother, companion of our days: that blessing which you hunted, hunted too, what you were seeking, this is what found you.

Everett lives! This is the theme of a unique festival of Western arts to be held in Kanab, Utah, June 15, and 16.

That was the flyer for the first ever Annual Desert Vagabond Days in that small Mormon community on the border of Arizona that is Kanab in 1984. The cult was rising. During that first ever event, Waldo himself rode on a float in the parade through town during the festival to honor his brother. I’m going to read from Roberts who sums up the awesome sounding festival, quote:

The festivities, mixing rodeo and art festival, included a square dance, a doll show, a horse show, a "Special Everett Ruess Exhibit," a "Kaibab Squirrel Celebration," and a "Highway Sign Shooting Competition." The festival was repeated in June 1985, again centered around Everett, but adding such events as a horseshoe pitching contest, "Jackpot Team Roping," a "Western Cooking Contest," and a "Fun Shoot.” End quote.

This is what they took from us… man I miss the before time.

In 1985, Gibbs Smith commissioned two bronze plaques, one to be placed at Dance Hall Rock right off Hole in the Rock Road where Mormons used to have dances, and the other was to be in Davis Gulch. The BLM okayed the plaque for Dance Hall Rock, the NPS shot down the plaque for Davis Gulch which is Glen Canyon. When it was time to place the plaque, Gibbs Smith, Bud Rusho, Waldo himself, and Pat Jenks, a man I mentioned a long time ago. He would be nearly as old or older than the 75 year old Waldo at this point but Pat Jenks was one of the two young men who picked up the very thirsty Everett near Cameron Trading Post and took him to the ranch near Flagstaff. Well he, Waldo, Rusho, and Smith and 20 other early Everett enthusiasts and believers made it to the spot and placed the plaque. It was a success… at least until some cultist stole the plaque a few years later.

Despite the NPS saying no plaque, some youngins among the crew went down Davis Gulch using a rope ladder to place the plaque, instead of screw it in, but to place the plaque among the sandstone crevices and canyons. As of the publishing of Roberts Finding Everett Ruess, it was still in place. But I believe it has been moved to Boulder, Utah, at the Burr Trail Outpost and Grill.

Waldo would live well beyond those years at the fairs and he would die at 98 years old, in 2007. What a life he lived… his brother would have been proud. But now, they were all united in the next great adventure.

In 1987 though, a wonderful year for earth, Waldo sold the rights to Everett’s woodblocks. In the first eleven years, the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, who had bought them, took in over 88 thousand dollars in sales from the prints. The cult was growing.

One of those prints is the Everett leading the burros silhouette I borrowed as the cover for this series. Although, you’ll notice in this episode, Everett, is missing.

In 1989 a man named Bruce Berger wrote an academic paper about Everett and his travels. The cult was continuing to grow. In that paper he’d write something I believe to be true and something that resonates with so many people today, especially as the place explodes in popularity. It certainly resonates with me, owner of the website and podcast, The American Southwest. Berger wrote, quote:

Ruess was almost the first to travel that country not to prospect, to herd cattle, to scheme a railroad or escape from the law, but simply to relish it, to absorb it, and to shape that love in the arts. End quote.

Shortly after that, a Pulitzer Prize winner by the name of N Scott Momaday wrote:

Of all the myths that pervade the American landscape, none is more pervasive than that of the solitary man whose destiny it is to achieve a communion with nature so nearly absolute as to be irrevocable. It is the act of dying into the wilderness, actually or metaphorically. When Everett Russ disappeared in the Escalate wilderness of Utah in November 1934, he succeeded to that mythic ideal; he became one with the wild earth. End quote.

More serious filmmakers would begin writing scripts with serious people attached but… it would take a long time for something to appear on screen.  But still, the cult was growing.

The first real screen time Everett ever achieved was in the year 2000, by the filmmaker Diane Orr, whom I’ve talked about before, she, for some reason was convinced incorrectly about some of Everett’s feelings. And in the film she straight up portrays him as homosexual… even though Waldo begged her not to and said that years of late night conversations in their bedroom they shared when they were young and letters between the two prove that he was indeed not gay. Regardless, Hollywood is gonna Hollywood and not only did this filmmaker turn him gay, but she made him split with his parents? Which… never happened? So stupid. That’s like Netflix level stupid corruption of the story. Predictably, Waldo hated it. Even after years of correspondence with Orr, she stabbed him in the back. I will never be seeing that film, I can assure you.

A year before that filth was made, a documentary nobody watched called Vanished! Was made for TV. It was directed by the daughter of Dorothea Lange! Who took Everett’s picture waaaaay back when in San Francisco. She also was the one who took that very famous picture of the woman during the Great Depression. We all know the one. Author David Roberts says the final product strayed even further than Orrs from Everett’s life…

On the one hand, you want to make entertainment, but on the other, like, Everett’s life was INCREDIBLY entertaining and amazing and he wrote so well and described so many scenes so well that I have practically been there… I was there when he got stung by the bees and nearly died! I was there when he found the necklace at canyon de chelly! I was there when the Mancos swallowed the horse and the camera and journal and blanket! I was there when he travelled through the Chuska Mountains and saw the storm… why stray from his amazing life? Why make him gay? Why make him break from his parents?! This family, the Ruesses were so incredibly close! It’s so beautiful! They’re a role model to follow for a tight and wonderful family! Why ruin that?! Why ruin him by turning him into a …?! I just do not get it…

In the 2000s, two apparently bad detective novels were printed around the mystery of Everett and a full length play was written and performed in Salt Lake City in 2008.

Songs have been written about him.

A website now sells Everett’s prints in poster, postcard, and magnet form.

And today humble little history podcasters whisper 70,000 spoken words into the void about Everett, his life, his mystery, and the cult…

So what happened to Everett Ruess?

In 1998, the author David Roberts actually set out on assignment for National Geographic to find out just that. Could his remains, Roberts thought, be found after so much time? The desert, after all, is not forgiving… yet, it can sometimes be preserving.

Like everyone, he started in Escalante before hiking, backpacking, and exploring the Hole in the Rock Road, the Escalante River, and its many tributaries.

But his start in Escalante would prove to be rather fortuitous. He actually uncovered that the xenophobic Mormon residents had lied to earlier journalists, writers, and cult members about the true findings all the way back in 1935! And he only found this out because by then, 1998, the people involved, especially the main person involved in hiding the truth, was dead. He’d died the previous year. That man was the man in the first search party who had discovered the burros and the camp, Gail Bailey. It turns out, he’d taken the burros long before the search party and he’d found the camp long before them too. And everyone in town new that if he found the camp, he’d taken the stuff. Including his journal. But, as author Scott Thybony wrote, quote:

By designating the incident a murder case, anyone who might have taken some of Everett's gear or personal items became a suspect. If one of the searchers had appropriated a Dutch oven or saddle blanket as compensation for the time and effort invested, he now had to keep it secret. And anything identifiable as having belonged to Everett would have to be destroyed or risk incriminating the person who possessed it. End quote.

Roberts writes in Finding Everett Ruess, not the Nat Geo article, but he writes of this taking of the stuff, quote:

Gail Bailey died in 1997. By the next year, when I interviewed the old timers, they no longer felt the need to cover up the rancher’s prevarications- nor did they stint on judging his character. One local, Dan Pollock, told me, Gail Bailey was a nasty little son of a bitch. But DeLane Griffin, who was sure that Bailey had appropriated Everett’s belongings told me, Gail Bailey couldn’t have killed Everett. No way.

All this left me wondering just what had really happened, in terms of the discovery of the burros, and possibly of Everett's camping gear, painting kit, and journal. Later I would hear the same persistent rumor that had reached the ears of Mark Taylor two years before me-that Everett's belongings were still kept inside the house of a longtime Escalantan, and that others had seen the "stuff." Whether or not the alleged thief was Gail Bailey, I could only guess. It was clear, however, that there was a limit to how deeply any outsider would ever be able to penetrate the workings of Escalant society. End all quotes.

How much, I’m not sure, but I do imagine the town of Escalante by today, 2023, has changed just a little… probably a lot, since 1998. Although, I hope not too much. My wife and I love that town and the Escalante Outfitter’s pizza and the baguettes from down the street and the incredibly nice people we meet every time we’re there. I kinda want to shut off this recording and head there right now…

But what a bombshell! The stuff, including the journal could STILL be in Escalante! If the owner of the journal is listening… please donate it to the Utah State Historical Society or… you can mail it to me. I am trustworthy. I’ll just look at it for a minute and then give it back… I promise…

But Thybony could also be right, and the evidence is long gone. Nobody wants to go to jail for liberating a missing person’s belongings.

After sleuthing through Escalante, Roberts meets up with a longtime Utah buddy and the two of them track down a man named Ken Sleight who I’ve mentioned before. That desert rat who influenced Edward Abbey and who talked with Jon Krakauer. He was a true desert rat who loved the Colorado river and had been up and down it more times than we can count. He was passionate about the Southwest and about Everett’s story. But in a good way.

After the meeting, Ken Sleight told Roberts and his friend how to find the NEMO scratch at Grand Gulch, east of Davis Gulch, east a good ways through seemingly impossible canyons, mind you. They eventually get there and they see it for themselves and… they can’t tell if it’s a forgery or not but they do have a discussion with Sleight who says about it all, quote:

I think a copycat, would have put it where you could see it better. End quote.

He then goes on to offer this about Everett’s fate, quote:

He couldn't cross the Colorado River with the burros, so he decided to take a side trip. I think he wanted to make a round trip back to Davis, but he underestimated the distances. He wanted to see Grand Gulch. John Wetherill would have told him all about it, the mummies they took out and all.

"I think Everett made it over to Grand Gulch, but by then he was real tired and hungry, and he didn't make it back. I'm not so sure about him drowning in the San Juan anymore. There's lots of ways he could've died. "I don't know if he had it in him to really explore. I think he was playing Captain Nemo, going down with his ship. End quote.

Personally… I’m not quite convinced. But with Everett, doesn’t all things seem possible?

Cause honestly… Sleight discovered the NEMO in the 60s, some 20 years before any printed version of NEMO existed in the world. And remember, the original NEMOs were underwater by the 60s. How on earth did this NEMO get here… how on earth did the wandering Everett make it to Grand Gulch!? I had to head over to my Four Corners Map and look at the distance and the terrain in between the two, Davis Gulch and Grand Gulches and… I’m in awe. How in the world? It doesn’t seem possible… unless, there’s another NEMO out there in Davis Gulch that ISN’T underwater… and a person who discovered that and studied it and copied it was able to reproduce it… I’m not saying the Grand Gulch NEMO is a forgery but… I AM saying there’s another NEMO in Davis we’ll talk about soon.

There’s more to this Grand Gulch business and if you’re interested, you should read Roberts book.

Back in Salt Lake, author David Roberts, in preparation for his book, pours over documents. He looks for clues as to who could have killed the vagabond, as that was his leading theory at the time. People connected to Ruess and Escalante were still refusing to talk. One local man even said, quote, too many of the folks that might be incriminated, they still got kids and family around. It don't do nobody any good. I just can’t help you. End quote. 

But one man did agree to an interview, a Norm Christensen. I quoted him around the time Everett disappeared. He remembers Everett waving as he rode away the morning he left Escalante. Well, Roberts was interviewing Christensen and he asked him straight up, quote, so what do you think happened to Everett? End quote.

Here’s Norm Christensen’s response, quote:

Christensen’s dark eyes held mine, as his face clouded. I know what happened to him, he said quietly, he was shot. The man who did it told me. End quote.

I’m going to actually continue to quote from Roberts because it’s a bombshell…

I was stunned. In measured tones, Christensen went on to recall an afternoon, sometime around 1949 or 1950. Several young men had gathered in Christensen's barn to drink. One of them was Keith Riddle, nine years Norm's senior.

Riddle and Christensen sat on a plank in one corner of the barn, out of earshot of the others. Drink had loosened the older man's tongue.

“We were talkin' about old cowboy stuff," Christensen recalled.

"I said, Keith, just between you and me, what do you think happened to Everett?'

"He looked at me and said, 1 killed the son of a bitch, and if I had to do it over, I'd do it again.'

"I didn't say another word. I figured I'd pushed it as hard as I could. Keith was a very strong-willed man. He'd fight you at the drop of a hat, and drop the hat himself. If he liked you, he'd do anything for you. If he didn't, he'd have liked to knock you down and kick the guts out of you."

I drew a long breath. "Could it just have been a drunken boast?"

"No," said Christensen. "It wasn't said in a bragging manner. I believe Keith told the truth."

A flashbulb of corroboration was going off in my head. Rusho had claimed the last men to have seen Everett alive were the two sheep herders at Soda Gulch. But Melvin Alvey had insisted that after part ing from Clayton Porter and Addlin Lay, Everet had met and camped overnight with two cattle ranchers, Keith Riddle and Joe Pollock.

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. End all quotes.

Alright… what if he was shot… and that was that… WHY?! Why would anyone shoot Everett and call him an SOB?! Roberts wondered the same thing. So he began digging into the riddle that was Keith Riddle. Allow myself to introduce… myself.

Riddle was born in Escalante in 1915 as one of eight children, he was then raised by his mother on account of his father up and leaving the whole lot of em. Then came a cowboy named Joe Pollock who took Keith under his wing and taught him real cowboy stuff like roping and riding. Pollock had a spread way down the Hole in the Rock Road southeast of Davis Gulch. On top of taking to being a real cowboy in that harsh land, it seems Riddle also took to drinkin. A local Escalante resident in 1998 told Roberts quote, when he got out of the service, he drank, and he was meaner’n strychnine when he was drunk. End quote.

On top of drinkin, dang near everyone in town agreed that he and his mentor Pollock, way out there on their plot of land, also took to rustling’ cattle. Another Escalante resident who had seen Everett way back before he disappeared, a different Christianson, not Christensen, but Della Christianson said, quote, Joe made a living stealing cattle, 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. End quote.

Again, the desert, is just the land around the Hole in the rock road… if you’ve been to the area, it makes a lot of sense. All around you are plateaus or mountains and then to the south is just… the desert.

So Riddle was a tough SOB indeed, and he’d admitted to killing Everett… where does the mystery go from here?!

Obviously Roberts goes further down the rabbit hole.

The man Riddle worked with, Pollock, would go to trial three times for rustling but he’d only go to jail for it, once, apparently in 1938. Riddle would have a son named Loy before dying in 1984 at 68. Roberts tracked down Loy, who lived not far in Fredonia, Arizona, on the border of Utah. This is what Roberts writes:

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'lI 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. End quote.

Remember, Gail Bailey is the one who was accused of taking all of Everett’s things, including his journal. Gail Bailey was also the head of the Cattleman's Association and the one who started the rumor that a Fed was wandering the hills looking for rustlers… which may have been the catalyst for killing Everett in the first place. If Everett was even killed at all.

The mystery ever deepens… but it still remains that… a mystery… one we may never get to the bottom of.

In Roberts book he continues his search although he realizes he may never solve the mystery. But he follows Everett’s final steps around Pollock’s plot of land and down Davis Gulch and to the Colorado River in search of place names forgotten, searching for clues or answers to mysteries like the unknown footprints and other tantalizing stories. He walks from the Hole in the Rock to Lake Powell and imagines what it must have looked like before 200 feet of water covered it… don’t get me started. He finds some artifacts and he finds something he cannot shake. Maybe an answer to the entire mystery… maybe nothing. It turned out to be nothing.

But what turned out to absolutely be SOMETHING, was a phone call Roberts received in 2008 from another Southwestern desert rat who had another friend who knew a Navajo man… and that Dine man believed he had just discovered Everett’s body. This entire saga, in 2009, would find National Geographic publishing the headline EVERETT RUESS MYSTERY SOLVED!

In the 1930s, a Navajo man, Aneth Nez would look out over the land around Comb Ridge, that amazing place I have talked about before and have been to frequently, a place filled with Anasazi ruins and even more ancient mysteries. Comb Ridge is a long line of uplifted sandstone that makes a wall across the land from south of Kayenta to behind the Bears Ears. Well one day, in the 1930s as Aneth was surveying his land, he saw far below him, as a speck on the landscape, a lone white man with two burros. A sight he had never seen in that part of the Navajo Dinetah before. Aneth would see him at least three more times, but on the last time, he would see something he would never forget. The white boy was riding as fast as he could and he was yelling, and he was being chased by Utes. The Utes and the Navajos were not friendly. They hadn’t been historically, and they still weren’t in the 1930s, although, the Utes rarely came down into Navajo land. This was indeed a strange occurrence.

Well, the story wouldn’t end well for this white man, who would eventually be chased down and smacked right up along side the head. The Utes then took the man’s belongings, his burros, and left.

Aneth, unsure of what to make of this, made his way down to the boy, when it was safe. By then, the boy was dead, so, he picked him up, slung him over his horse, and carried him up the ridge where he lodged the body in a rock crevice.

Then, in 1971, suffering from Cancer and being told he got it from having ghost sickness by messing with that dead body, the aging Aneth told his granddaughter, Daisey Johnson, the story of the white man’s death. 37 years later, Daisey, also suffering from cancer and believing it too was ghost sickness, would tell her younger brother Denny Bellson. Denny, who was friends with Roberts friend, told that friend who in turn, told Roberts.

Roberts sums up what happened well when he wrote, quote:

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 some-thing. 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." End all quotes.

By 2008, Denny Bellson had come to believe the Spanish had hidden treasure somewhere on his land so he spent his time much like his grandfather did, intimately surveying and perusing the land. Although Denny did it for quite different reasons. So he believed he could find, because he knew the land and because he had his sister’s help, but he believed he could find where this white boy’s body had been hidden all these years.

It took Denny only two hours to find the hastily hidden body.

At this point in 2008, not a single of the Aneth Nez clan had ever heard of Everett Ruess including the deceased patriarch. After finding the body though, Denny would tell his friend in Utah who would immediately remark that, quote, gosh, that sounds a lot like Everett Ruess. End quote. This friend would then lend Denny a copy of A Vagabond for Beauty and like that, the cult had another member.

Denny would then call up Roberts friend who I just realized I’ve never named, but this man’s name is Vaughn Hadenfeldt. He’d immediately head out to area, Denny would take him to the site, he’d find an old saddle, stirrups, a belt, and a body. He’d take photos and he’d send them to Roberts and then he’d say over the phone, quote, Hey David, I think you ought to take this seriously. What if it really could be Everett. End quote.

Next thing Roberts knew, he was being financed by National Geographic Adventure to find out if it truly was Everett.

When I began reading and thinking about Everett I had no idea the mystery would truly be this exciting and interesting! But I mean… this is amazing unsolved murder mystery stuff… I now understand why people eat this stuff up and why it is so addicting.

So, Denny, somewhat knowledgeable of the history of white men being killed on Navajo land, he also called the FBI in case it was a crime scene… ugh, you never call the FBI… well Roberts talked to the agent who knew Denny on account of him having previously found other bones, bones which turned out to be Anasazi. And those bones were found in a place my wife and I have been to that shall remain unnamed. At the end of the conversation, the FBI promised to visit the site, check it out, and most importantly, handle it all with care.

Thankfully, BEFORE the FBI showed up, one of Roberts friends was paid by Nat Geo to go take pictures which he did. Extensivly. Then, the FBI showed up and utterly destroyed the scene. Completely. Never call the FBI.

Roberts, his friend Vaughn, and Denny would hike out, look around, see the destruction the FEDs wrought and lament their presence. Roberts would ask questions and Denny would answer. Then Roberts asked him quote, Denny, is it dangerous for you to be 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. End quote.

Afterwards, National Geographic gets more involved, an archaeologist is called, and again they go out to the trashed scene. The archaeologist concludes it was in fact NOT a Navajo burial, despite what the FBI thought, since the body wasn’t facing east… kinda, maybe. Then, Denny asks him, as he had asked Vaughn and Roberts, Denny asks the archaeologist, Maldonado if he could smell the bones, quote:

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

I do not personally remember smelling people grease when I was in a small enclosed space in the jungles of Belize working with long dead humans but… maybe I wasn’t aware I should have been looking for the smell.

Maldonado, the archaeologist then sums up the situation that Aneth, the Navajo may have found himself in.

Quote: 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.” End quote.

Now, I do have to say, that SOUNDS like it may be true or may have been the case in the 30s but remember how I just told y'all about how the judge tried to get Jack Crank and John Chief the least amount of time and he hoped they got off on appeals. It’s so easy to project non-existent things on to the past, even for educated people like this archaeologist.

Up next, Roberts and the Nat Geo needed Brian Ruess, one of Waldo’s sons, also one of long gone Everett’s Nephews, the crew needed him to offer up a sample of DNA. They were going to compare it to that of the bones.

DNA would ultimately prove a possible match. The rest of the bones would be carefully dug up. They’d be considered a match. His facial reconstruction. Match. The age, the sex, the time period after finding artifacts… match, match, matched.

Case, freakin, closed. They had found the wandering Vagabond… Everett Ruess could now be put to rest. The cult could now celebrate his life instead of his mystery.

In May of 2009, the New York Times printed the headline, A MYSTERY OF THE WEST IS SOLVED. The Los Angeles Times wrote THE MYSTERY OF EVERET RUESS DISAPPEARANCE IS SOLVED. Tucson Weekly called Everett the Kerouac of the Canyonlands, and they said he was found! Papers in Germany, England, and even Russia printed that the mystery was over. The Ruess Nieces and Nephews were on board. Even Bud Rusho reluctantly agreed the story was over. National Geographic proudly claimed to have funded the finding of the answer to the question we’ve been wondering this whole series! Everett Ruess had somehow been killed by Utes and then hastily shoved into a hole in the rock quite far from the hole in the rock, after leaving his burros there and going from that spot across the river, over to Grand Gulch, getting two more burros, and then down the Comb Ridge… right?

You know what wasn’t found in the teeth of this Comb Ridge Man? Two inlays and one gold foil. 

Why’d Everett leave the Burros?

Why were all of his clothes so obviously Navajo?

The FBI may have trashed the scene but they were dang sure that it was a Navajo burial…

Besides, how come after his parents got the word out to everyone, and I mean everyone, how come no one reported seeing him, not a single cowboy, rancher, trader, Indian, anglo, rustler, prospector, agent… no one saw him. That’s huge country for him to have passed through without going into town at all. He refused the food from the two at Soda Gulch before he disappeared cause he had plenty but… not that much. He’d have gone back into Kayenta and he would have stayed a bit and talked with his old friends and acquaintances. Someone would have had to have sold him two new burros! Unless… the Utes took them right back to Davis Gulch… no…

And why had the Navajo man handled the body in the way that he did, that was quite unNavajo like of him…

Questions began to pile up.

Doubts crept in…

Scott Thybony, who knew and was friends with David Roberts, wrote quote, a large quantity of colored beads and a few turquoise pendants had turned up during the excavation, along with a Navajo-style belt and buttons made from Liberty Dimes. No item found with the burial could be linked to Ruess.

He goes on: Another concern was the location of the burial. The remains were found in an area with other Navajo burials, 125 miles by trail from Everett’s last known camp. End quote.

He also finishes with the fact that in order for Everett to have pulled this off, he would have had to have avoided every single person in that vast territory, something he had never done before and frequently did the opposite of. He liked people, despite writing that the lone trail is best. The trail and every day life are two different things, even for Everett Ruess.

In June of 2009, only months after the article printed, an archaeologist for the state of Utah named Kevin Jones wrote an article on the Utah State History website titled, Everett Ruess- A Suggestion to take another look, and in it, he poked holes in the conclusion from a dozen different directions. He clearly thought this was an older Native American Male. NOT a young white boy and why had they treated the burial in such a way?! And what about the teeth?!

His criticism gave the Ruess nieces and nephews, who were planning to cremate the bones and then spread the ashes in San Francisco Bay, his article gave the Ruesses pause. And then they cut Roberts out of the picture for a bit… until, in September of 2009, Brian Ruess called Roberts and loudly proclaimed on the phone, quote it’s not Everett. In fact, even worse, it’s a Native American. End quote. Uh oh…

Apparently, the Ruesses had taken the DNA sample to the AFDIL in Maryland… that would be the group that specializes in finding family members of deceased soldiers by using the tiny fragments left after battles. The AFDIL is the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory. They had tens of thousands of blood samples. They knew what they were doing. In their tests they found only one of 17 markers matched the Ruesses male lineage. All 17 should have matched. They found no exact match in their entire vast database but they did find 3 males that came very very close… and all, were American Indians.

A month later, Brian Ruess would issue this press release: Ruess Family Accepts Comb Ridge Remains Are Not Those of Everett Ruess.

The bones were reburied elsewhere in a safe spot that wouldn’t pass on Ghost Sickness. The media responded by saying the mystery lives on. The Utah State Archeologist had an article written about him titled; Skeletons in the Closet: Utah State Archaeologist Kevin Jones Knows His Bones. Which, is just a great title, really. And David Roberts would be absolutely devastated. Not that he was wrong, he wrote… but because of what he’d put everyone through and for how they’d treated the burial.

Unfortunately, much like Christopher Ruess, Stella Ruess, and Waldo, Waldo’s children shared their same fate in being dragged along for a wild ride of hope and answers and ultimately a crashing letdown when it came to their beloved Everett Ruess. At least this newest saga was in genuinely good faith, unlike so many other endeavors that their grandparents and father had endured. It seems only Bud Rusho has been successful in the family’s monumental desires to have Everett remembered well. But, the cult is still truly alive. And I think Finding Everett Ruess by David Roberts is a fantastic read and it too helps keep the cult alive. And now, thanks to this podcast and my dear listeners, it will only grow…

But like an Anasazi spiral, the story keeps getting tighter and deeper into itself.

Unfortunately for David Roberts… the ghost sickness that so haunted many a Navajo, may have also visited the author.

In 2009, around the time that the devastating DNA test would overturn his discovery, David Roberts awoke in his office in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the very deep and dark middle of the night, and he had to use the restroom. Being late at night and all and being groggy, Roberts mistook the basement door for the bathroom door and… much like our vagabond for beauty may have done… he fell into the void and down the stairs before laying in a broken pile at the base of them. He suffered a fractured skull, broken ribs, broken vertebrae, and a collapsed lung. And then to make it all worse, he contracted a staph infection… which was followed by life-threatening renal failure. Denny Bellson, the Navajo treasure hunter who discovered the false Everett told Roberts, quote, you’ve been messing with Everett Ruess’s Bones. End quote.

After the 2009 reversal of fate and after healing from his nearly fatal wounds, Roberts continued to get clues to the ultimate fate of Everett.

First of all, even Brian Ruess believed that Aneth’s story is probably true. Its just… Denny found the WRONG burial. He found an actual Navajo burial, not the one where his grandfather returned to for a BLONDE lock of hair he needed for a curing ceremony in the 70s. Aneth may well have witnessed a murder, and hastily buried the body before sundown in an obscure crevice at Comb Ridge… It just may not have been Everett’s murder.

Although, Everett may well have left his burros, taken his stuff, crossed the river, made it to Grand Gulch, carved the NEMO, and then was heading down Comb Ridge, a logical direction, actually, with two new burros when Utes just… killed him.

Also in 2009, Roberts learned from a desert rat friend who had heard from a Navajo man who worked for the BLM that it was known among some Navajo that Everett Ruess had a name, and that name was Hosteen something… and the name is translated as the man who walks with burros. And this man who walks with burros stayed under a tree near Navajo Mountain for years. He regularly met with the Navajos too… allegedly.

Then, a year later, in 2010, Roberts met with a cult member who was a software engineer during the week, desert rat explorer on the weekend. His name was Greg Funseth. And Greg had discovered yet another NEMO 1934 carving. This one, on a sandstone wall on the opposite side of Davis Gulch that everyone and their brothers had been searching since 1935. Greg was probably the first person to see this carving in 2001. Besides his wife, Roberts was the first person he ever told. It turns out, this carving, in an EXTREMELY remote area off hole in the rock road… is genuine.

Enter Scott Thybony… oh wait, he’s already entered the picture cause I’ve quoted him quite a bit in this episode, but Scott is actually a celebrated author, desert rat, and Everett aficionado himself and on this 2010 trip, he accompanies Greg Funseth and David Roberts to the newly found NEMO.

Here’s Scott Thybony’s description of what happened next, it’s exciting:

Relying on friction alone, the three of us angled down a slickrock face toward a sandstone knoll. We entered the main chamber, crowded with breakdown and the matted sticks of a packrat midden, the dust untracked. I scanned the back wall and saw, more than six feet off the ground, an inscription reading "NEMO 1934.” End quote.

Back in 2001, Greg Funseth joined the Cult of Everett Ruess and whenever he could, he’d head to Davis Gulch and look for the intrepid adventurer. And then, one day, the former rock climber, spotted an unusual sandstone knob which he figured was the perfect place for Everett Ruess to want to explore. As if to confirm his suspicions, nearby were a set of Moqui steps that led themselves right up to the little opening. He followed those steps in the sandstone, entered the cave, and found NEMO.

Now, Scott had some reservations… how had it been missed for over 75 years? And why did the inscription look completely unchanged? And, he acknowledged that some NEMOs had been faked… now, when I read that, I immediately thought of the Grand Gulch NEMO, but he doesn’t specify so we’re all still wondering about the veracity of that particular NEMO.

Scott Thybony writes this of what happened next in the cave, quote:

I stooped down to peer through a circular passage in a stone bulkhead leading to the next chamber. Entering the room, I found a domed ceiling and a rounded opening framing Davis Gulch. As much porthole as window, it gave the room a nautical feel, like a ship's cabin. If Everett had made it this far, he would have found himself in a familiar setting, having sailed with Captain Nemo many times while reading his worn copy of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. An old fire ring and a few pieces of firewood indicated someone had camped here long ago. End quote.

After returning to Flagstaff, Scott Thybony began digging in his own files because he remembered hearing in 1991 about bones being found in Davis Gulch in the 1970s. But he couldn’t find any evidence with the National Park Service that they had the bones or had ever heard of them. So, he decided to track down the man who’d been given the bones. This man’s name is Roe Barney and this is what Thybony writes about this most intriguing of all threads, quote:

Roe told me he was motoring across Lake Powell in a Park Service boat when "a gentleman from California" flagged him down and handed him a sack of human bones.' The visitor had just returned from Davis Gulch, where he had been looking for Indian ruins, something he often did. He had left his wife and daughters on the boat and walked up the creek. The Californian spotted a sandstone knoll on top, which appeared to be a good location for a ruin. Finding a way out of the canyon bottom, he headed toward it.

He reached a broad ledge and, looking behind it, saw bones wedged deep within a crack. He "scaled in with a rope" and saw indications of a broken hip and fractured collar bone. Leaving most of the remains in place, he took a few of the bones for identification. He placed them in a sack, along with his name, and turned it over to the ranger. Being curious whether they were prehistoric Indian or more recent, the Californian asked to be notified once they had been studied. "Right away," Roe told me, "I thought about Ruess. I had heard stories about him growing up."

Upon returning to headquarters, then located at Wahweap, he gave the bones to his supervisor, and at that point they disappeared. Rereading the notes, I saw similarities in his description to the knoll with the NEMO inscription. End quote.

So wait, had Roberts and Greg and Scott Thybony actually been mere steps away from Everett Ruess’s final resting place?!

Obviously, Scott had to return. This time, he brought a climbing friend named Tony Williams. The two located the same spot, they located the inscription, and then he entered the second chamber. The one with the nautical themed sandstone window. This is what he writes about the scene, quote:

A stillness permeated the confined space, and a subdued light filled the interior. An ancient juniper had been dragged in for fire-wood, and a small ring of stones had been placed against the far wall, containing a scatter of charcoal mixed with sand. From the absence of smoke stains, it appeared to have been used for only a night or two. A flat stone, set on rocks, sat next to it for keeping things off the sand, an arrangement showing the work of an experienced hand. By the cliffside opening, a row of stones had been laid out for leveling the sandy floor wide enough for a single bedroll. The site contained no evidence of prehistoric use, not even a potsherd or chert flake.

The most intriguing feature was a juniper-root stool with a sandstone slab placed on top for a comfortable seat. It wasn't next to the campfire but positioned to take advantage of the dramatic view of Davis Gulch framed by the rock window. It made an ideal perch for someone to sit and sketch the scene below. Everett had mentioned building a stone seat at one of his camps in Canyon de Chelly, and sitting on the juniper roots I was beginning to think of this as his camp. When Tony joined me, he was having similar thoughts. "I'm assuming," he said, "this was his last stop.” End quote.

There are a couple more long quotes before we wrap up this episode and this series so stay with me…

From the small alcove with the perfect view of Everett’s most desolate spot, the two, Tony and Scott discovered a nearby vertical crack where some of the cliff face had separated from the rim. It looked like a spot where Anasazi could be and Scott realized, from the creek bed below, the Californian would have thought the same thing. And then to add to the scene, Moqui steps were carved into the wall below it.

Scott writes this about the explorers next moves, quote:

As we began to traverse across the slickrock face above it, I noticed hematite concretions covering the micro ledge we followed. Known as Moqui marbles, they made the footing treacherous. A wrong move could result in an accelerating slide of twenty-five feet, ending with a free fall into the sandstone crevasse. Tony and I had enough experience scrambling on slickrock to know when to back off. End quote. 

The following morning, they had a rope, their harnesses, and they were ready to explore the ledge which sat below the angled slick rock that ended in a nearly fatal drop. This time, Tony would rappel down. Upon coming back up, he told Scott, quote, This has to be it, everything fits. End quote.

They discussed what they’d discovered and they came to the conclusion that it’s very possible… that when the Californian had grabbed the bones, he may have loosened what had remained of the skeleton which would have quickly been flushed out of the crack and washed away down into lake Powell with every storm and downpour.

The following year, the two returned returned but it was Scott’s turn to rappel down. This is what he found, quote:

Once off rope I worked into the wider section of the crack along a slanting floor. It had a slot-canyon feel to it-perpetual twilight, cliff walls pressing close, a fissure of sky above. The crevice was two feet wide where I entered and sloped downward to a narrow crack. The far end flared open at the top to form a rock funnel and pinched down to only four inches wide. I shone my headlamp to the bottom fifteen feet below and realized any pieces of bone would have been lost in the interstices of the crack sys-tem. Backtracking, I climbed onto the spall and studied the slickrock slope above. Anyone taking a slide down the face would hit the ledge I was standing on with enough force to cause major injury, if not death, before jamming deep in the crack.

The more I studied it, the more the entire configuration of terrain and circumstance had a compelling fit. I could see the incident playing out clearly. Distracted by the beauty around him, the explorer's attention may have wandered for a second as he stepped on a loose rock or a thin ledge snapped underfoot. Suddenly, he was in a slide, unable to arrest his fall before going over the edge. In an instant, the rock swallowed him, leaving no trace. End quote.

He continues, quote, the slick rock of southern Utah, mostly Navajo Sandstone, provides good friction for scrambling until it gets wet. Then the footing becomes slippery, and the thin bedding planes, normally solid, can crumble under weight.

When Everett headed south on the Hole-in-the-Rock trail, a three-day rainstorm broke a long drought, increasing the hazards. End quote.

The disappearing steps at the edge of the cliff… the possibility of ruins being there… everything seemingly adds up. But there are no more bones in the crevice where the Californian may have found them. There are still no traces of the vagabond for beauty.

And when the time comes to die, I'll find the wildest, loneliest, most desolate spot there is.

Eventually, you have to put down the books, close the magazine, close the browser tabs, and you have to go looking yourself. Even if you don’t find Everett’s remains, you’ll find exactly the feelings he felt as he wandered freely throughout the greatest part of the world, The American Southwest. And I think that he would be truly happy if that were the legacy he left behind. The legacy of exciting people into exploring the wilderness.

In today’s world I feel it is increasingly important that we get out and we enjoy the outdoors. It doesn’t necessarily have to be the American Southwest, although if you do plan on going, let me know and I can help you out. But it doesn’t have to be my favorite places, it can be any place near you. Only a few minutes outside your bubble or city, there is landscape. There is beauty. It’s important that we see the earth, feel the heat from a small fire we made in a pit under a canopy of twinkling stars and planets. It’s important we move and see and feel the dirt and sand and smell the pure air that’s stirred by the wind through the trees. To hear the bugs… to hear the water trickling through a stream… to hear the wind… to hear nothing at all… to sleep outdoors. These are vital to being human. It’s necessary for being a creature on planet earth.

A rather famous American figure recently went to Hungary and gave a speech, just in August of 2023 and in it he talks about what we as humans are missing from the modern world and this person is absolutely right, wether you agree with the rest of him personally or not. I’m paraphrasing what he said but basically he said if you live in a place where you can see the sky and make your own food, if you can go outside and identify trees and hear birds or experience silence, which is the rarest commodity in the modern world, if you can do that, maybe you can hear higher voices. If you’re stuck inside all day glued to a screen like a prisoner or an industrial animal, if you’re trapped inside you’re quote, enslaved and you can’t think clearly and your reference points are gone and you can’t see the stars and you can’t see the trees and you can’t see gods creations. Your ability to make clear judgements and think rationally goes away. End quote.

Tucker’s right. Everett, in all his fantastical poems and letters and journal entries where he said he had seen more beauty than he can bear… I wish we could all feel that, see that. I wish we could all experience nature so gorgeous it makes us weep. It takes our words away, it takes our breath away! We’re missing this in the modern world and it’s changing our DNA, and not for the better. We should all ultimately strive to be a little more like Everett Ruess…

In the Epilogue to Finding Everett, Roberts writes, quote:

Gibbs Smith, the Publisher of so many books about Everett Ruess, may be right: it is not the mystery of Everett's disappearance and final fate that makes him so interesting, but his achievements by the age of twenty. As a precocious artist, a writer of promise, a romantic visionary verging on the mystical, a bold and resourceful solo explorer of the wilderness, and in some sense the first true celebrator of the beauty of the Southwest for its own sake, Everett traces a unique and meteoric path across the American landscape. The cult that has accreted around him since he headed into Davis Gulch serves as the ultimate proof of how Everett's wild quest captivates the minds and hearts of his legions of admirers. End quote.

I hope the cult grows! In a healthy way of course. I hope more people find his words and find the desire to explore safely and smartly, obviously. We don’t want to end up like Everett, just like how Everett could have ended up.

As Stegner in Mormon Country writes about how Everett did the things I just pleaded with you to do and how it leaves us in awe, he writes about that, quote, The peculiar thing about Everett Ruess was that he went out and did the things he dreamed about, not simply for a two-weeks' vacation in the civilized and trimmed wonderlands, but for months and years in the very midst of wonder. End quote. But I do say, if it’s all you can do, you should go out in the trimmed and civilized wonderland. At least it’s still land. It’s still wonderful. You just may find more beauty than you can bear.

I will close the series on Everett Ruess and his mysterious disappearance with a quote from Edward Abbey’s much read and loved Desert Solitaire. I believe Everett would have approved of the words within:

Behind the dust, meanwhile, under the vulture haunted sky, the desert waits mesa, butte, canyon, reef, sink, escarpment, pinnacle, maze, dry lake, sand dune and barren mountain- untouched by the human mind.

Even after years of intimate contact and search this quality of strangeness in the desert remains undiminished. Transparent and intangible as sunlight, yet always and everywhere present, it lures a man on and on, from the red-walled canyons to the smoke-blue ranges beyond, in a futile but fascinating quest for the great, unimaginable treasure which the desert seems to promise. Once caught by this golden lure you become a prospector for life, condemned, doomed, exalted. One begins to understand why Everett Reuss kept going deeper and deeper into the canyon country, until one day he lost the thread of the labyrinth; why the oldtime prospectors, when they did find the common sort of gold, gambled, drank and whored it away as quickly as possible and returned to the burnt hills and the search. The search for what? They could not have said; neither can I; and would have muttered something about silver, gold, copper--anything as a pretext. And how could they hope to find this treasure which has no name and has never been seen? Hard to say--and yet, when they found it, they could not fail to recognize it. Ask Everett Reuss.

Thanks so much for listening and I’ll be seeing y’all again soon, in The American Southwest.

The Sound of Rushing Water

Then there will be no music but the sound of rushing water that breaks on pointed rocks far below, and the sighing of the wind in the pinyons- a warm wind that gently caresses my cheeks, ruffles my hair tenderly, and wanders downwards. Alone I will follow the dark trail, black void on one side and unattainable heights on the other, darkness before and behind me, darkness that pulses and flows and is felt. Then suddenly, an unreal breath of wind coming from infinite depths will bring to my ears again the strange, dimly-remembered sound of the rushing water. When that sound dies, all dies.

Mormon Country by Wallace Stegner

Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey

Everett Ruess: A Vagabond for Beauty by W.L. Rusho

Finding Everett Ruess: The Life and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness Explorer by David Roberts

The Disappearances: A story of Exploration, Murder, And Mystery in the American West by Scott Thybony