by W. L. Rusho
Allen later wrote to the Ruesses that Everett was probably not in the Navajo country, that he had trouble believing Johnson’s Navajo stories, and that “if I had of had any such leads as he claims he has I could have found Everett in a week.” He further complained that Johnson’s optimistic stories had served to delay the search on the northern side of the river.
In July 1935, the Ruesses received a letter from Neal Johnson saying that he had encountered three Navajos whose statement “more than ever convinces me that Everett is still alive.” He would not reveal what was said, declaring that he wanted to check it out first. Then, on 12 August he wrote that “...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.” His biggest news, however, was that he had talked the editor of the Salt Lake Tribune into conducting and financing a new search in the Navajo Mountain area. Ace reporter John Upton Terrell was assigned to write daily stories from the search area. The only discouraging note in Johnson’s letter is that, as usual, he needed money for expenses. Obligingly, Christopher sent him twentyfive dollars.
With Johnson as instigator and guide, the TerrellJohnson trip naturally concentrated on the Navajo country, to which Johnson seemed virtually certain Everett had gone. Starting at Blanding, Utah, the party crossed the San Juan River at Mexican Hat, drove through Monument Valley to Kayenta, where they interviewed John Wetherill, then to Betatakin Ruin, to Shonto, and on to Navajo Mountain Trading Post, on the southeast side of the mountain.
At the trading post they met Dougeye, “a famous Navajo trailer,” who stated that he was one of the three Navajos who had been seen talking to Everett in Escalante. Dougeye and his associates, Hosteen Nath Godi and Azoli Begay, had left Escalante, he reported, but on their return, while they were crossing one of the rivers, they met and passed three other Navajos heading toward Escalante to trade. Terrell implied in his Tribune article that one of these unnamed Indians might have murdered Everett and stolen his outfit.
Dougeye’s statement was significant, for it tended to confirm that Everett did not join the Navajos, who had been trading in Escalante, on their return to the reservation. Dougeye further stated that no white man had crossed the river in that area during the past year and the only known people to cross were the two parties of three Navajos each, who passed each other in November 1934. In other words, according to Dougeye, Everett did not enter the Navajo Reservation from the north. Had he done so, stated the Indian tracker, his footprints would still have been visible in a few sheltered parts of the trail.
Furthermore, Everett’s need for food would have forced him to contact a trader, or at least an Indian or two, thus making his presence known. Terrell concluded his first Tribune article by stating that, unless everyone on the reservation was an accomplice and they were all lying in unison, Everett was not in Navajoland.
Terrell and Johnson then followed Dougeye by horseback around Navajo Mountain, down Trail Canyon to the San Juan River, where they crossed, rode up Wilson Creek Canyon over Wilson Mesa, then down Cottonwood Gulch to the Colorado River, which they crossed near Hole-in-the-Rock. North of the Colorado they examined Davis Gulch, which yielded no evidence beyond what Allen and the searchers from Escalante had already discovered.
Terrell and Dougeye returned to Navajo Mountain Trading Post, but Johnson left to search “other areas” on his own. They agreed to meet several days later at Marble Canyon Lodge. At the isolated village of Kaibeto, Terrell talked with a wellknown Navajo named Geishi Betah, who assured him that “news travels swiftly over the barren wastes and high ranges of the Navajo country” and that no stranger could have entered the reservation without almost all Navajos in the vicinity knowing about it.
Terrell ended his fourday series of articles on 28 August 1935, with the conclusion: “Everett Ruess was murdered in the vicinity of Davis Canyon. His valuable outfit was stolen. He never reached the Colorado River.”
What then was the outcome of all of Neal Johnson’s glowing optimism? Did a white man recently marry a Navajo girl near Navajo Mountain? Did a white man accompany two Navajos and state that he did not wish to be disturbed? Johnson wrote to Christopher Ruess that, “I have found several things they [the Indians] told me were lies. . . .”
Were they lies, or were they Johnson’s fantasies?
Although no trace of Everett was found, John Upton Terrell and the Salt Lake Tribune had performed the apparently valuable service of narrowing the probabilities. Terrell and Johnson did not conduct a search, as such, but their talks with local Navajos had almost the same result, since the Indians reported that through their keen powers of observation and their fast communications network, no stranger had come into their midst. Of course, it all rested on Dougeye’s veracity, which could not be known one way or the other. Christopher and Stella Ruess steadfastly refused to accept either Dougeye’s statement or Terrell’s conclusion that Everett had never crossed the rivers, for to have done so would have eliminated the only possibility that their son was still alive.
In September 1941, seven years after Everett disappeared, Christopher Ruess heard that an outlaw Navajo, then being held in the tribal jail, was a suspect in Everett’s death. Upon receiving Christopher’s letter of inquiry, Superintendent E. R. Fryer of the Indian Service replied:
We believe that you have received information prematurely. Jack Crank is being held for an attack on federal officers while in the performance of their duties. We cannot at this time, with any justice, accuse him of any responsibility in connection with the loss of your son. Our present meager evidence leads us only to be suspicious. Therefore, we can go no farther than say at this time that Crank is a suspect.
Six weeks later, Fryer wrote again to state that Navajos John Chief and Jack Crank had admitted complicity in the murder of a white man in Monument Valley. He added, however, that the body had been found and that it was that of an elderly man who had just before his death stopped at Oljato Trading Post. Fryer added the teaser: “There are rumors about the involvement of these two men in the disappearance of Everett. However, these are merely unfounded rumors and must be treated as such.”
Apparently, that was the last letter Fryer wrote to the Ruesses. A few weeks later, however, a Gallup, New Mexico, businessman named Curtis C. Ring learned that two Navajos, who believed that Jack Crank had implicated them in the Monument Valley crime, informed the police that years earlier, Crank had murdered a lone white man in the “country above Rainbow Bridge.” Crank’s motives were that he needed the scalp of a “blood enemy” for ceremonial use, and that he simply hated white men. After the murder, Crank buried the body and the pack outfit, then took the burros to a point “some distance” away, where they were placed in a corral, and where they were later found. Or so Ring wrote to Christopher Ruess.
Superintendent Fryer also reported on the phone to Ring that “Jack Crank, now in Phoenix penitentiary awaiting trial on another count...has himself bragged in detail of murdering Everett Ruess. No confession has yet been signed but the evidence at hand and many peculiarities relative to this case make it look as though the case is genuine.”[40]
Christopher and Stella certainly believed the theory that Jack Crank killed Everett. On 7 August 1952 Christopher wrote to Randolph Jenks (who had known Everett in 1931):
...a trial came up on an entirely different ground and the information (unverified by any evidence good in a court) that this man had probably murdered Everett years prior to this trial in 1942. No doubt the information influenced the court and the jury (tho not proved). The man was given 10 years rather than a very short term. It was expected that he would die before the years were out. But he was released in 1951 or 1952 and is free again. He 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.
Dougeye, the Navajo tracker, never told John Upton Terrell the names of the three Navajos who were headed toward Escalante in Novemb
er 1934, and who passed him on the trail. Could these three have been Jack Crank and his two nefarious companions? And could Everett have innocently invited them into his camp in Davis Gulch, where they killed him, buried his body and took his pack when they left? Admittedly, the theory is a long shot, yet it would account for all of the known facts—or lack of facts—about Everett’s disappearance. Against this theory is the fact that no searcher reported seeing any footprints other than Everett’s in Davis Gulch.
In an effort to better understand the people involved, as well as to meet them in person, Stella and Christopher Ruess, in late June 1935, visited many of the localities in northern Arizona and southern Utah about which Everett had written. They also wished to see the country and to talk with the men and women who had helped in the search. On their trip they visited Grand Canyon, Cameron, Tuba City, Marble Canyon, and Kayenta, Arizona; Zion National Park, Bryce Canyon National Park, Panguitch, Tropic, and Escalante, Utah. They met and talked with John and Louisa Wetherill, Ranger Maurice Cope, Frank Martines, Ray Carr, and Jennings Allen, as well as practically all members of the search team. Allen drove them as far toward Hole-in-the-Rock as the primitive road would allow. It was, for Stella and Christopher, a highly emotional experience to gaze at the colorful terrain that Everett had loved and so vividly described, and to meet and talk with many of the people he had known.
Although Christopher and Stella had concluded that Everett was not likely to return soon, they were not yet ready to declare him dead. They guarded the hope of his reappearance the rest of their lives. In fact, some have suggested that Everett could have carefully planned and orchestrated the whole disappearance, and that he might still be alive.
Red rock country. Blockprint by Everett Ruess.
* * *
[37] Interview with Chester Lay, Escalante, Utah, 26 September 1982; and interview with Norman Christensen, Escalante, Utah, 27 December 1982.
[38] Ibid. Chester Lay Interview.
[39] The Army Air Corps was also called upon to help, the appeal based on a hope that someone in an airplane could spot, and even identify, a young white man walking or riding through the rough canyon country. As it was at least a faint hope, Christopher Ruess persuaded his former boss, judge Ben Lindsey of the Superior Court of Los Angeles, to write to the Secretary of War, George H. Dern (a former Utah Governor), who then ordered the Commanding General at March Field, California, to conduct searches for Everett whenever training flights were made over the area. But nothing was ever heard from the Army Air Corps.
[40] Letter of Waldo Ruess to Warden, Penitentiary, Phoenix, 23 January 1960.
Chapter 9: Missing—Wherever He May Be
21 March 1937
Your son was a most unusual spirit. I have never known a youth of like endowment and predilection. He is a most interesting character. If he should ever come out of his hiding he will bring a noble book in his knapsack!
Hamlin Garland
That Everett could have somehow departed from the Escalante River country, without his burros, and without anyone’s knowledge, and have made a new life for himself elsewhere may sound to many like a fairy tale, mere wishful thinking. Yet conceivably, he could be alive in the Southwest, in Mexico, or most anywhere else in the world. Although it would have been difficult for him, he could have severed all contact with the family for which he seemed to care so much and abandon his few friends. He could plainly and simply have disappeared.
Everett’s personality—as we know it from letters, mostly to parents—would suggest that he was not the type to voluntarily withdraw from the world. He was not a recluse; he liked to converse with everyone he met, and seemed to enjoy writing to friends and relatives. His letters were as emotionally intense as he could write them. One can sense in these letters a sincere desire to fulfill his chosen role of artist, poet, and writer. Though he appeared to many to be an aimless vagabond, he was in fact driven, not only to find beauty but to communicate an interpretation of that beauty to the world. In a real sense, he was not a free spirit. Furthermore, at age twenty, his quest had just begun. In spite of the overtones of depression in some of his letters written during and just after his winter in San Francisco, there is little evidence that he was seriously despondent or that he wanted to “escape.”
Tsegi Canyon. Blockprint by Everett Ruess.
Whatever his feelings upon leaving the cities, his letters indicate a gradual return of confidence and good humor as he roamed Monument Valley, Navajo Mountain, Rainbow Bridge, the Hopi Mesas, the Grand Canyon, and southern Utah in 1934. He wrote of his intention to return to Los Angeles. A Hopi at Chimopovi was reported to have said about Everett: “He was a good white boy. We liked him.”[41] People who met him in Escalante also reported that he was cheerful and self-confident.
From his letters, it appears that he remained too close to his parents and to his brother, Waldo, to suddenly and deliberately cut all communication—forever. Even had he done so, his main obsession was to communicate to the world through words and visual art. Had he gone into hiding, in the nearly fifty years since he vanished, surely a few of his sketches, paintings, or writings would have surfaced. But nothing of this type has ever appeared.
And yet, assuming the cooperation of the Navajos to conduct him onto, or even through their reservation and to keep quiet about it, it is possible that Everett may actually have escaped into a new life with a new identity.
If we concede that such a voluntary disappearing act was possible, the question then is why? A possible reason is that he might have been seeking to join a Navajo sweetheart.
Many in Escalante have suggested that Everett probably had a Navajo sweetheart, but these stories could be pure speculation. One who knew him best at Escalante, Norm Christensen, said that Everett never talked about any girlfriends, whether Navajo or otherwise.[42]
The Navajo sweetheart theory would have Everett falling in love with an Indian girl during the summer of 1934. Later, the theory goes, he traveled south, from Escalante, crossed the Colorado River, married his girl in a tribal ceremony, and is now living happily, protected by the secrecy of his adopted Navajo in-laws and friends.
Everett entitled this photo “My Navajo Wife.” Probably in 1931.
When examined closely, the Navajo sweetheart theory grows weak. Though he could easily have loved such a girl, he would have found it hard to conceal at least a hint of such an emotional event in his letters. Furthermore, during the summer and fall of 1934, he kept traveling—alone—across the reservation and finally into Utah; he would have had little time for courtship. The theory would also require Everett to have disappeared, thus denying to himself both his art and his writing the rest of his life, which would have been unlikely. Finally, it would have required a massive, long-term conspiracy on the part of the Navajos and the white traders to keep his presence among them secret, undoubtedly the most far-fetched possibility.
We have to understand, however, that we have five decades of hindsight. We know that Everett has not been found alive or dead on the reservation, and that the chances that he is living there grow smaller every day. In 1935, however, the theory that he had crossed the river either to visit Navajos or to live with them indefinitely sounded believable. Jennings Allen was only one of many to conclude that because two exhaustive searches on the north side of the Colorado had been fruitless, Everett was almost certainly with the Navajos.
If he did not leave to join a Navajo sweetheart, could there have been another reason for doing so?
A nagging possibility exists that he may have believed that he was failing, as an artist, to live up to his parents’, and his own, expectations. He did sell a few art works during his travels of 1934, but maybe it was not enough to maintain his confidence. Perhaps the parental pressure to excel was more than he could stand. His letters, although sensitive and imaginative, had little colloquial, chatty news. For the most part, they can be read as reports to his parents, his artistic mentors, on his progress in visually interpret
ing the landscape.
The questions are: How much was he pulled to the landscape—and how much was he pushed? Was he really as free as we would all like to think? Could he have been harboring, perhaps for years, a growing determination to strike out on his own, by cutting all ties to his parents? In later years, even Christopher Ruess acknowledged the many unanswered questions when he wrote in his diary: “The older person does not realize the soul-flights of the adolescent. I think we all poorly understood Everett.”
In Davis Gulch, Everett twice inscribed the name NEMO on Indian ruins, possibly to be deliberately enigmatic, but possibly also as a hint that he thought himself to be a real life Captain Nemo. In Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Captain Nemo (whose Latin name meant “no one”), drove the submarine Nautilus on a cruise of the world, hell-bent to escape the disappointments and frustrations of civilization. Nemo’s motto for the Nautilus was Mobilis in Mobile, or “mobile in a mobile element,” freely translated as “free in a free world.” Nemo was solitary, arrogant, sensitive, even a little romantic, but above all free. Perhaps most important to Everett was that Nemo had broken every tie upon earth.
Responding to reader demand to know more about Nemo, Jules Verne included a Chapter in a subsequent book, Mysterious Island, that related how Nemo had once been a wealthy, well-educated, Brahmin from India named Prince Dakkar. Forsaking all worldly pleasures, Dakkar sought only the betterment of his people. He joined, then led, a revolt against the ruling British, only to be utterly devastated by defeat and the senseless killing of his family. Branded a fugitive outlaw, Dakkar swore vengeance, then escaped to study and construct the Nautilus. He then changed his name to Captain Nemo.
