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

by David Roberts

I’ve decided that I’m going to live this life for some time to come. The freedom and simple beauty of it is just too good to pass up.

As to when I shall visit civilization, it will not be soon, I think. I have not tired of wilderness; rather I enjoy its beauty and the vagrant life I lead, more keenly all the time.

“Once more I am roaring drunk with the lust of life and adventure and unbearable beauty,” he wrote to one friend his own age. And to another, “I am overwhelmed by the appalling strangeness and intricacy of the curiously tangled knot of life.”

“If we laugh at Everett Ruess we shall have to laugh at John Muir, because there was little difference between them except age.”

Here in the utter stillness, High on a lonely cliff-ledge, Where the air is trembling with lightning, I have given the wind my pledge.

Even in 1930, in August Yosemite was thronged with tourists.

I have had a few disillusionments about Indians, here. For one thing the Navajos are scrupulously dishonest. When I leave my hogan for a while, I have to take all my posessions [sic] down to the store. Once I left a few pots and pans behind. When I came back they were outside in the mud. And to Waldo, he wrote: The Indians around here are very poor, having no income except from their sheep and the blankets they sell. A statistician here figured that the per capita income from sheep, including wool and hides, is $13.40 a year. The Navajos live in filth.

During his first weeks in Arizona, the weather was atrocious. “It has rained, snowed, hailed, or showered every night since I have been here,” he wrote his parents in an undated letter. “Now it is blowing an icy gale. Heavy, lead colored clouds are in the offing. On one side, the hills are still covered with snow.”

In Kayenta, Everett also made the acquaintance of the legendary trader, guide, and self-taught archaeologist John Wetherill, who had found more Anasazi ruins on the Navajo reservation than any other Anglo. “Wetherill is the man who discovered Mesa Verde,” Everett wrote Waldo on February 13, “and was in the party which discovered Rainbow Bridge. He is the best guide in the Southwest.” Sixty-four years old that February, Wetherill was glad to share his knowledge of the backcountry with the sixteen-year-old greenhorn.

It was John Wetherill who turned the young man’s attention to Monument Valley and the Tsegi Canyon system. The trader even drew a sketch map for Everett to follow.

Where is this map

Forty years earlier, John Wetherill and his four brothers had been able to do that to their hearts’ content, but by the 1930s, all but the most minor and remote Anasazi sites had been discovered by government explorers, miners, pot hunters, and archaeologists.

The team spent two seasons digging in the ruins, bringing back an immensely rich trove of artifacts, mummies, and skeletons that ultimately found their way to various museums. Betatakin, tucked away in a short side canyon, was first visited by Anglos only in 1909. The party that discovered it included a prominent archaeologist, Byron Cummings, and was guided by John Wetherill, who learned of the ruin’s existence from a Navajo living near the mouth of the Tsegi.

At Keet Seel, Everett discovered, kept, and mailed home an artifact that he called “a mother of pearl ornament of value”—most likely a pendant made of shell traded to the Anasazi from the Pacific. More ghoulishly, he also scavenged and sent home “a part of a human jawbone with teeth.” Everett’s

Only a month before Everett set out, on April 1, 1931, President Herbert Hoover had declared Canyon de Chelly a national monument—in celebration of the Anasazi ruins, not of the Navajo presence. (The people who lived in the canyon were never consulted about the governmental decree.)

One room, however, was rocked shut, & on opening it, I thot for a moment I saw a cliff dweller in his last resting place. But the blankets, tho mouldering with age, were factory made, & a Navajo baby was buried therein. Odd, because the Navajos are superstitious about the Moquis [Anasazi]. However, in sifting dirt in a corner, I found a cliff dweller’s necklace, a thousand or so yrs. old. About 250 beads, 8 bone pendants, 2 turquoise beads, & one pendant of green turquoise.

“I write by firelight. The crest of the sandstone cliffs is bathed in moonlight. I know it is beautiful, but I can’t feel the beauty.”

In any event, this letter marks the first unambiguous expression of the longing for a soul mate that would plague Everett throughout his short life. He never acknowledged the kind of terrible loneliness that the extraordinary solo journeys he was undertaking would have inflicted on a normal seventeen-year-old. But he would return now and again to the lament that he could not find that “true companion”—whether or not he meant lover, mentor, or partner in the wilderness.

Then too I never could make anyone do anything for me; I’d feel like someone if you actually kept your promise; it was one, you know. How I looked forward to that Christmas trip with you—it fell thru. Always then you told me you’d certainly be with me this summer; you waived my doubts. Yet we both feel the undeniable lure of far places. But I know there are many drawbacks to my way of living & traveling—things you wouldn’t want to do. Don’t come unless you want to. Your letter was good; I couldn’t complain—but letters are poor substitutes for speech and companionship.

Whatever I have suffered in the months past has been nothing compared with the beauty in which I have steeped my soul, so to speak. It has been a priceless experience—and I am glad it is not over. What I would have missed if I had ended everything last summer!

Yet he had behind him an exploratory adventure the likes of which few Americans so young had ever accomplished. In ten months he had traveled perhaps a thousand miles on foot, most of it solo, and seen more obscure and beautiful corners of the wilderness than other devotees of the canyon country do in a lifetime.

IN THE CHRONICLES OF AMERICAN HISTORY, a quest such as the one Everett Ruess had launched in the Southwest in 1931 was virtually unique. Few vagabonds before him had attempted anything comparable.

None of Everett’s predecessors or potential role models, however, launched their wandering careers at anything like the early age of sixteen. And we are left to speculate whether, had he lived as long as Muir, Everett Ruess might be acclaimed today as the artist and writer who, more than any other American, championed the quest for beauty for its own sake as he pursued an insatiable solo vagabondage through the landscapes of his heart’s content.

“I don’t have much trouble getting along with people, but I have the greatest difficulty in finding the sort of companionship I want.”

I have been thinking more and more that I shall always be a lone wanderer of the wildernesses. God, how the trail lures me. You cannot comprehend its resistless fascination for me. After all the lone trail is best. I hope I’ll be able to buy good horses and a better saddle. I’ll never stop wandering. And when the time comes to die, I’ll find the wildest, loneliest, most desolate spot there is.

Navajos will usually abandon a hogan after someone has died in it, and sometimes they will break down a wall “to let the spirit out” or even burn the structure. But for an Anglo to take apart a hogan just to feed his campfire would amount to a serious profanation.)

“I think I have seen too much and known too much—” he wrote, “so much that it has put me in a dream from which I cannot waken and be like other people. I love beauty but have no longer the desire to recreate it.”

“There is nothing permanent in the world except change, which is inevitable and omnipresent,” Everett wrote, veering dangerously astray, before he closed the essay with a lame pronouncement: “If we believe in evolution, then we must believe that the English reformation was fated, and that Henry was only the tool, if a good tool, to bring it about.”

“I was sorry, though, that our intimacy, like many things that are and will be, had to die with a dying fall.”

There was indeed the potential for a John Muir in Everett Ruess, a nature and adventure writer who could at once sing the glory of the natural world and yet keep a sense of proportion about the limits of human endeavor in the wilderness.