The Mystery of Everett Ruess

The Mystery of Everett Ruess

By Gregory McNamee on History

“I have seen almost more beauty than I can bear,” Everett Ruess wrote of the canyonlands of the Colorado Plateau, in that stark, rocky country where Utah, Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico meet, immediately after first having wandered through them in the early 1930s.

When he wrote those words, Everett Ruess was not quite 17 years old. He had left his parents’ Hollywood home to wander the world. Along the way he arrived at Big Sur and met the famed photographer Edward Weston, who urged the boy to develop his considerable, though untrained, talents as artist and poet.

Ruess heeded Weston and went to find inspiration in the desert. He journeyed to the Navajo nation and sought out John Wetherill, the trader who had discovered many ancient Ancestral Puebloan sites. Wetherill, suspicious of the strange, footloose youth, pointed him to a remote spot 45 miles from the nearest postbox, and there Everett made his home.

He read the classics. He explored ancient places—Cedar Mesa, Keet Seel, Chaco Canyon—and the rock mazes of the Colorado River and its tributaries. He painted, made block prints, and wrote essays, poems, and affectionate letters to his family and friends.

He left the canyonlands after a year of freedom in the hope of finding professional training in the arts. He lasted out a miserable semester at UCLA and then set out for the Sierra and San Francisco, passed the time with Weston, Ansel Adams, and Dorothy Lange. He returned to the desert in the spring of 1934. Following the Kaiparowits Plateau—about as remote a place as then existed in North America—he explored the Escalante River country of southern Utah. In November, he wrote a letter to his family, saying, “As to when I shall visit civilization, it will not be soon, I think.” Then he disappeared.

No search party would ever catch up to him. One team found an inscription on a canyon wall: “NEMO 1934.” Nemo, no one, what Odysseus (in the Latin translation that Everett knew) said to Polyphemus while fleeing the giant’s cave.

In his 1984 book Everett Ruess: A Vagabond for Beauty, Western historian W. L. Rusho reviewed several theories that had been floated about the young man’s disappearance. One speculation was that the boy fell to his death near Hole-in-the-Rock and was swept away by the waters of the Escalante River. Others suggested foul play. Still others supposed Everett to be alive and well and living secure in some labyrinthine hermitage, rather in the way that Butch Cassidy, the famed outlaw from those parts, was supposedly spotted in various desert venues long after being gunned down in Bolivia.

In the early 1970s, a Navajo Indian man told his granddaughter about an incident many years before. He had witnessed three young Ute Indians chase down a white man, kill him, and steal his mules. The Navajo man had buried the body but then, averse in the Navajo way to mentions of death, kept silent about what he had seen for nearly 40 years before speaking about it.

Thirty-five more years passed. The granddaughter confided the story to her brother. They went to the place their grandfather had spoken of, and there they found a shattered skull.

Reports David Roberts in the current issue of National Geographic Adventure, DNA tests of the remains and of Everett Ruess’s living relatives indicate with certainty that the skull and nearby bones were his. Moreover, a reconstruction of the broken skull reveals the smiling face that Dorothea Lange captured on film three-quarters of a century earlier.

Everett Ruess’s retreat into the back of beyond has long fascinated literary desert rats. Prefiguring another ill-starred escape into nature, a tale told in actor-director Sean Penn’s 2007 film Into the Wild, it remains an inspiration of a kind—if, in the end, a tragedy, and with questions yet unanswered.