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After 75 years, Everett Ruess' remains found
Everett Ruess, 20, a poet and artist, respected by several artists, including photographers Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams, as well as painter Maynard Dixon, set off into the desert Southwest near Escalante, Utah, in 1934 and was never seen again. Ruess had two burros and several notebooks full of his ideas and dreams. Durango author Will Hobbs set one of his young adult novels, The Big Wander, in the Escalante region as a salute to the Ruess legend.
For the last 75 years, Ruess' story has been fed by public curiosity, as well as the many searchers intent on finding clues to his fate.
Before heading out in November 1934, Ruess wrote, "As to when I will visit civilization, it will not be soon. I prefer the saddle to the streetcar, the star-sprinkled sky to a roof."
Those words are quoted from the 1997 book, Sandstone Sunset: In Search of Everett Ruess, by Mark A. Taylor.
The mystery recently was solved. However, like many mysteries, it is a complicated tale.
Human remains were found last year about 60 miles from Escalante in southern Utah by a Navajo man who knew nothing of the Ruess story. The man had been searching for evidence of a murder that his grandfather had witnessed during the Depression.
Last week, researchers at the University of Colorado said the DNA in the recovered bones matched that of living Ruess relatives. In addition, a forensic reconstruction that was compared with photographs of Ruess indicated the remains were those of the young artist and wanderer.
That the remains were found at all is amazing. In the 1970s, Aneth Nez, a Navajo, broke a 37-year silence to tell his family about being a witness to a horrible event in the 1930s. He said he had been sitting on a ridge and seen three Utes chase down and kill a young white man.
After the killers left, taking the victim's two burros with them, Nez, out of respect, buried the body, but was too afraid to talk about it, he told his granddaughter, Daisy Johnson.
Last year Johnson told her younger brother, Denny Bellson. Together they went to the area their grandfather had mentioned. Bellson said the first thing he saw was a saddle, probably his grandfather's, which in the Navajo tradition he would have disposed of because it had been contaminated by coming in contact with the blood of a dead person. Later, Bellson said he saw the bones jammed into a rock crevice. The skull was in pieces, but was indented as though caved in. This fit with his grandfather's story.
Over the years, Ruess's descendants speculated about what had happened to their legendary family member. Some believed he'd been swept away while trying to cross the Colorado River. Others thought he'd married a Navajo girl and intentionally disappeared.
However, Brian Ruess of Portland said, "I think the message to be found in his life and his writing and his art is there's beauty in the wilderness and beauty in adventure. Go live your wanderlust."
Charlie Langdon is the Herald's senior critic. He can be reached at langdons@gobrainstorm.net.
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