Evertte Ruess, Mystery of the American West

(Posted as it first appeared in The Prairie Times, Elbert County, Colorado, January 2010).............................................................In the autumn of 1934, a pair of sheepherders in the middle of the Utah wilderness were rather taken aback when a boy, no more than twenty years old, alone and riding a burro, happened into their camp out of nowhere. As twilight gave in to night, the threesome sat around an arid desert campfire. Their topic of conversation can only be speculated at, however, Everett Ruess, the burro riding boy, almost certainly did the majority of the talking. The sheep wranglers probably sat and listened, somewhat suspiciously, as Evertt told them of how he had been born in California and that at age 16 saddled a burro and traveled east and into the desert wilderness with little more than provisions of raisins and rice. And perhaps the pair grew even doubtful of this young man’s sanity as he explained how he had traded works with the famous American West artist, Maynard Dixon or how he had been the photography subject of the prized photojournalist Dorothea Lange. Regardless of what the shepherds thought of this boy’s stories, they decided they liked him, and as morning dawned out across the painted desert, Everett Ruess would break from camp, his new friends giving a gentle wave as he rode off. He would never be seen again, vanishing forever into the serene Utah wilderness. Sometime later a search party of Escalante cowboys would come across a makeshift camp, and two burros, but Everett Ruess now belonged to the ages. And so began the legend. Almost six decades before Chris McCandless would venture into the north expanses of Alaska on his own attempt “to kill the false spiritual being with-in”, Everett Ruess trekked into the vast American West, exploring the Canyon de Chelle, Grand Canyon, and what is now Yosemite and Sequioa National Parks. And he did it alone. His travels are well documented by photographs, journal entries and letters home to his parents, but rich with legend and myth. His motives were largely unknown, and his eerie disappearance only fuels the cult like following in certain American history circles. So when in March of 2009 a small group of individuals from the University of Colorado had announced they had found the remains of the most famous missing person in the history of the American West, some had feelings of melancholy ripple through their hearts. The discovery actually began in November 1934, when Aneth Nez, a Navajo indian had noticed a young white man roaming the area around Comb Ridge in the Utah wilderness. A week later Nez witnessed the same boy rundown, murdered and robbed by three Ute natives. Because of rising tensions between the Navajo and Ute at the time and for fear of government retribution because a white boy had been murdered at the hands of Native Americans, Nez said nothing. He instead waited until almost sundown, gathered the boy’s remains and buried them in a small crevasse on a near by ridge. That story would remain his secret until 1971, when he confessed the tale only to his daughter and a Navajo medicine man. His daughter, Daisy Johnson, facing her own mortality some 40 years later, confided in her brother Denny Bellson of their grandfather’s amazing confession. Bellson, who lived just minutes from the area where Aneth Nez had seen the boy murdered, was gripped with a passion to find the site where his father had said he buried the boy in the fall of 1934. Over the next several weeks, Bellson searched the Comb Ridge area looking for the grave. One day he came across an almost indiscernible crack in the sandstone. He peered through the narrow fracture and there at the bootom of the shallow crevasse, he found the scattered bones of a human skeleton. In the year that was to follow, the FBI would investigate the scene and conclude it was that of a traditional Navajo burial. DNA would be taken and compared to relatives of Everett Ruess’s, and found to be inconclusive. It seemed the Everett Rues mystery was to remain just that, a mystery. Then in January 2009, a team of experts in Navajo archeology and a forensic anthropologist from the University of Colorado in Boulder returned to the site to give the remains the proper forensic examination they had deserved. By early 2009, they had reconstructed the skull and examined enough of the bones, comparing them to physical descriptions and excellent photographs of the living Ruess to come to the, in their opinion, positive conclusion that the remains found on the Comb Ridge were in fact those of Everett Ruess. “I’d take this to court. This IS Everett Ruess.”, said Dennis Van Gerven, the anthropologist in charge. However, just when relatives were ready to take custody of the bones found in the desert crevasse, they decided on a second opinion, urged on by Utah state archeologist, Kevin Jones. The Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory conducted the new DNA tests and concluded that the DNA samples irrefutably proved the body in the Utah desert, found by Denny Bellson, were not that of long famed Evertt Ruess. Ruess’s family has accepted these results as final. Van Gerven, from the Boulder, Colorado study, still argues his bone comparisons are evidence enough that the remains cannot be anyone else’s but Ruess. So once again, it seems for now at least, the American West is united with one of its greatest unsolved mystery. Or maybe perhaps we like to still believe that in this world of satellites and thermal imagining, micro-processors and DNA spiral helixes, that there are some mysteries, some unsolved stories and romances of the wilds we’d rather just not have the answer to. Whatever the case, whenever we venture out, into a wild world we’ve never been, we still evoke the feeling in ourselves that people like Ervertt Ruess, Thoreau, and Muir understood. We stand beside them, and we hear the whispers as the wind ripples across the ridges and through the ancient pine laced canyons. Go out, explore, live, and never cease to wonder. Ben Fulton, “Utah Scientists question Everett Ruess DNA Findings”, Salt Lake Tribune, 02 July 2009 David Roberts, “Finding Everett Ruess”, National Geographic Adventurer, 01 May 2009 Paul Foy, “Remains Found in Utah not poet Everett Ruess”, Associated Press, 21 October 2009