Finding Everett Ruess

by David Roberts

  I started my research in Escalante. I had hiked, backpacked, and llama-packed among the magnificent canyons of the Escalante River and its serpentine tributaries—Harris Wash, Little Death Hollow, Wolverine Creek, Dry Fork Coyote Gulch, and the like—both before and after the region’s inclusion in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in 1996. But I had always treated the town of Escalante as a mere motel stop. Now it seemed logical to look up Escalante’s old-timers and see if they would talk to me about the stranger who had passed through in November 1934.

  This was not an easy task. The town had been founded in 1875 by Mormons from Panguitch, seventy miles to the west. In search of a milder climate, those pioneers had decided to investigate what was then called Potato Valley. Once there, they had laid out a grid of streets just south of an upper stretch of the Escalante River. The town occupies a blissful setting, surrounded by hills, open basins, and the stern escarpment of Kaiparowits Plateau. But life has always been hard in Escalante. By 1998 the settlement was still almost one hundred percent Mormon. Among the residents, the decades of wringing a living from its fields and pastures had bred a fierce distrust of outsiders.

  The insularity of the town emerged in a historical irony I had come across in my reading. In 1875, Almon H. Thompson was in charge of a small team of government surveyors exploring this little-known part of Utah, at the behest of Thompson’s brother-in-law, John Wesley Powell, who six years earlier had led the first descent of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. Thompson’s diary for August 5, 1875, notes,

  Came from camp on Last Chance to camp on Pine Creek about a mile above its junction with the Escalante. Saw four Mormons from Panguitch who are talking about making a settlement here. Advised them to call the place Escalante.

  Presumably, Thompson told the Mormons all about the great Spanish friar, Silvestre Vélez de Escalante, who, with his fellow cleric Francisco Atanasio Domínguez, had accomplished an extraordinary six-month exploratory loop through the Southwest in 1776, starting and finishing in Santa Fe. Escalante’s journal from that trip remains one of the classic expedition narratives in western North America.

  By the first decade of the twentieth century, the locals were pronouncing the town “ESK-a-LANT,” with the accent on the first and third syllables, the latter rhyming with “slant.” (So the townsfolk pronounce it today.) One day during that decade another government explorer came through Escalante. He asked the residents about the source of the town’s name, only to be told that it was an old Indian word whose meaning had been lost to memory.

  In 1998, as I phoned up old-timers or knocked on their doors and told them I was interested in Everett Ruess, I got brushed off regularly. One man, greeting me on his front porch but declining to invite me inside his house, said, “I don’t know what you want, but you’re wastin’ your time and mine.”

  I realized, of course, that the inhabitants of Escalante had been peppered with questions about Everett ever since 1935. And the persistent rumor that it might have been local men who murdered the young artist stuck in the collective Escalante craw. Rusho’s dogged interviews in 1982 and the more recent probes of filmmakers Diane Orr and Dianna Taylor had simply stirred up the old resentment of nosy outsiders.

  Gradually, however, I gained entrée to the homes and thoughts of several locals who had spent time with Everett in November 1934. They included ninety-year-old Melvin Alvey and seventy-four-year-old Norm Christensen. Yet when these informants talked about the search launched by Jennings Allen’s party in March 1935, the story they told me could not be reconciled with Rusho’s account. According to them, it was not the searchers who found Everett’s burros in Davis Gulch, but Gail Bailey, weeks or even months before the search commenced.

  Said Melvin Alvey, “Gail Bailey usually put his bucks down in Davis Gulch in the spring. He went in there to look, and saw the two burros. Brought ’em back to town. There was lots of excitement. Everybody wanted to go in there and look for [Everett].”

  But Norm Christensen commented, “It was Gail Bailey that found his pack outfit. I believe Everett’s camping gear was there, too. I believe Gail Bailey took the stuff.”

  Seventy-five-year-old DeLane Griffin was even more censorious: “I think Gail found Everett’s camp. He’d say he didn’t, ’cause whatever was there, he took. Didn’t want anybody to know he had the stuff. I’m sure whoever found the camp, found the journal.”

  Other informants placed the timing of Bailey’s discovery not in the spring, but as early as November or December 1934. As I listened to these accounts, I puzzled over Rusho’s certainty that it was the March 1935 search party, of whom Gail Bailey was merely one member, that had discovered the burros. If Bailey had found the animals earlier and on his own, why didn’t that alarming discovery instantly trigger a search for Everett? But Rusho was sure that it took Christopher and Stella’s letter to the Escalante postmistress, Jennings Allen’s wife, to galvanize the ranchers into launching a search.

  It didn’t take long for me to uncover the likely cause of the discrepancy between Rusho’s findings and my own. In 1982, when Rusho did his research, Gail Bailey was still alive. In fact, when Rusho interviewed him, Bailey related the burro discovery as part of the March search party’s team effort, though he admitted that it was he who led the pack animals out of Davis Gulch and back to Escalante. While Bailey was still living, the town’s distrust of outsiders apparently outweighed any regard for the truth. Rusho’s informants chose not to contradict their neighbor’s story, however suspect it was.

  Escalante might present a united front to journalists such as Rusho and myself. But I had already come across hints of long-standing feuds and antagonisms among the residents. One old-timer told me that whether you grew up on the north or south side of Main Street dictated which other kids you played with, which in turn cemented lifelong alliances and grudges. It wasn’t quite the Crips and the Bloods, but the schism was apparently intense. This in a town of a mere eight hundred people!

  Gail Bailey died in 1997. By the next year, when I interviewed the old-timers, they no longer felt the need to cover up the rancher’s prevarications—nor did they stint on judging his character. One local, Dan Pollock, told me, “Gail Bailey was a nasty little son of a bitch.” But DeLane Griffin, who was sure that Bailey had appropriated Everett’s belongings, told me, “Gail Bailey couldn’t have killed Everett. No way.”

  All this left me wondering just what had really happened, in terms of the discovery of the burros, and possibly of Everett’s camping gear, painting kit, and journal. Later I would hear the same persistent rumor that had reached the ears of Mark Taylor two years before me—that Everett’s belongings were still kept inside the house of a longtime Escalantan, and that others had seen the “stuff.” Whether or not the alleged thief was Gail Bailey, I could only guess. It was clear, however, that there was a limit to how deeply any outsider would ever be able to penetrate the workings of Escalante society.

  * * *

  After interviewing the old-timers who agreed to talk to me, I made a three-day backpacking trip into Davis Gulch. There was no hope of visiting the two NEMO inscriptions, which I knew the waters of Lake Powell had long since swallowed. After rim-walking for four miles and descending the livestock trail down which Everett had led his burros sixty-four years earlier, I set up camp beside a stately cottonwood. That night, a full moon rose over the canyon’s southeast rim. Frogs croaked noisily from the pool beneath a fern-hung seep.

  During the next day and a half, I poked as far up- and downstream as I could. The narrow canyon seemed a sandstone paradise. In early May, the prickly pears were in bloom, bursting with waxy magenta flowers. Globe mallow and primrose sprouted from benches of fine sand. I could see at once why Everett had lingered here, the high rims of the gulch sheltering him from late autumn winds.

  As I pushed upstream, every bend in the canyon revealed new wonders. In one alcove I found a masterly pictograph, one of the largest I had ever seen: six and a ha
lf feet tall, painted in red ocher, it limned what archaeologists surmise may be that mythical being, the thunderbird—an eagle-like creature that dispenses lightning and thunder. After widening into a green oasis, the gulch squeezed down to its headwaters slot, barely navigable by chimneying across stagnant pools of water.

  Except for the stock trail and that headwaters slot, in the whole length of Davis Gulch, I could find only three routes out. These were “Moqui steps”—ladders of hand- and toeholds gouged by some Anasazi daredevil with a quartzite pounding stone. I switched to rock-climbing shoes and started up one of these trails. Sixty feet up, I lost my nerve: yet above me, the holds continued on a parabolic wall that grew steeper every step, then made a wild traverse left before topping out on a vertical headwall. I thought of Everett’s boast: “Many times … I trusted my life to crumbling sandstone and angles little short of the perpendicular.”

  Davis Gulch taught me one thing, and only one thing, about Ruess’s fate. He had not fallen to his death in this canyon. The three sets of Moqui steps were, I believed, the only routes that even the boldest scrambler would have been tempted to climb. Had Everett died in a plunge from one of these lines, the searchers, even on horseback, would have found his bones in plain sight on the ground.

  Before entering the gulch, I had imagined arcane side canyons where a body could stay lost. There were simply none in Davis, not even in the headwaters slot. As I hiked out on the third day, I was convinced for the first time that if Everett had died in Davis Gulch, it was not in a natural accident.

  * * *

  I shared some of my 1998 outings with Vaughn Hadenfeldt, a wilderness guide based in Bluff, Utah, who had become my regular hiking partner in the Southwest. Together we arranged a meeting with Ken Sleight, who greeted us at his Pack Creek Ranch, a sylvan refuge southeast of Moab. We knew that the old desert rat only grudgingly shared the secrets he had won from a lifetime of river-running and horse-packing. Somehow he warmed to us, and now he told us exactly where to find the granary in Grand Gulch where he had found the NEMO inscription in the late 1960s. (Earlier, Sleight had deflected Vaughn’s inquiry as to its location.) The inscription, Sleight insisted, was fairly legible when he had first seen it. On a subsequent visit he deduced that some overzealous eco-tourist had tried to rub it out, presumably as a graffito that marred the pristine beauty of the Gulch. Sleight also told us about the panel of “colored zigzags” painted on the rock wall just to the left of the granary.

  “Do you think the inscription could have been made by a copycat?” I asked.

  Sleight scratched his grizzled chin. “I think a copycat,” he answered, “would have put it where you could see it better.”

  Now Sleight spun out his rambling meditation on what might have brought Everett to Grand Gulch. “He couldn’t cross the Colorado River with the burros,” he mused. “So he decided to take a side trip. I think he wanted to make a round trip back to Davis, but he underestimated the distances. He wanted to see Grand Gulch. John Wetherill would have told him all about it, the mummies they took out and all.

  “I think Everett made it over to Grand Gulch,” Sleight went on, “but by then he was real tired and hungry, and he didn’t make it back. I’m not so sure about him drowning in the San Juan anymore. There’s lots of ways he could’ve died.

  “I don’t know if he had it in him to really explore. I think he was playing Captain Nemo, going down with his ship.”

  “What do think about Everett as a person?” I asked. “Do you admire him?”

  Sleight paused before he spoke. “I see a young fellow, he says, ‘Dad, I gotta go find myself.’ Had to play out the whole thing. I did that myself with the river”—the Colorado, down which Sleight had made countless rafting trips—“left a wife and kids behind.” The man’s voice trailed off.

  “But Everett did it,” Sleight resumed. “And because he did it, that puts him on the top rung. Like John Wesley Powell—he did it.”

  A few days after meeting with Sleight, Vaughn and I hiked into Grand Gulch to look for the inscription on the granary. It was a beautiful late-spring day, with lazy cumulus clouds sailing across the azure sky. Everywhere white primrose, red penstemon, and scarlet paintbrush were bursting into bloom.

  In less than two hours we reached the site. A tricky approach via benches upstream got us onto the ledge of the twin granaries, eighty feet above the canyon floor. Squashed beneath a massive gray brow of sandstone, the two little storehouses sat.

  At the wall of the left-hand granary, where Sleight had told us to look, we stared and stared. I could not see the inscription at first, but Vaughn—an expert at reading historic signatures—found the four block capitals in the mud. After we swept the surface with raking headlamp light, I too could make out the NEMO. And in that moment, any vestige of the copycat explanation was put to rest. The shapes of the letters perfectly matched those of the NEMO inscriptions in Davis Gulch, of which no photos had been published before 1983—long after Sleight’s discovery.

  Vaughn and I, however, could find no trace whatsoever of the watercolor zigzags on the cliff wall to the left of the granary. Whatever Sleight had seen there in the 1960s had vanished, perhaps washed away by the seepage of the decades.

  From the granary, we headed upstream several miles to take a look at the Music Note panel, which Vaughn and I had each visited several times before. At the far bend of a seldom-hiked oxbow in the Gulch, on the left end of an enigmatic cavalcade of Anasazi pictographs, someone had etched, in what looked like India ink, a perfect treble clef followed by a pair of joined sixteenth-notes and two neat, separated eighth-notes. The most veteran Grand Gulch aficionados swore that the Music Note panel had been there when they first hiked the oxbow decades earlier. It was not a new inscription.

  Over the years, Vaughn and I and our Cedar Mesa friends had speculated wildly about who might have inked those notes on the wall, and when. Now I suddenly wondered whether the artwork had sprung from the same hand as the NEMO downstream. I had also noticed that the notes seemed to replicate the chromatic descending tones of the canyon wren’s call—the most plaintive of all Southwestern birdsongs.

  On the trail, of course, Everett had had music in his head all the time, singing and humming Beethoven and Dvořák and Tchaikovsky to the surrounding walls. He had played the piano and flute as a young man, and in Los Angeles and San Francisco he had been transported at live concerts. After hearing Sergei Rachmaninoff play in L.A. in 1932, he had written his brazen fan letter to the Russian pianist and composer.

  Once more, Vaughn and I stared at the treble clef and the descending tones. Could these indeed be another kind of signature Everett had left behind—a pseudonym in music notes? There was no way of knowing, but as far as we could tell, Vaughn and I were the first ones ever to venture such a surmise.

  * * *

  At the Utah State Historical Society in Salt Lake City, I pored through the Harry Aleson papers. Among reams of letters, unpublished manuscripts, and scraps of guiding miscellany, I finally found the coded telegram Aleson had written to himself in December 1952, recording the claim that “Emeron” Alvey had killed Everett, and that Joe Pollock and Keith Riddle had dumped his body in the Colorado River. I also found the correspondence in which Aleson had confided his discovery to his crony Dock Marston and to Randall Henderson, publisher of On Desert Trails.

  Back in Escalante, without revealing the source of my suspicions, I started asking around. Norm Christensen remembered that Emmorn (not Emeron) Alvey had died in 1944. (Aleson’s coded telegram had him “DECEASEDWTR 194243.”) But to the suggestion that Alvey could have killed Everett, Christensen responded bluntly, “That’s an outright lie.” Another old-timer had the same view: “Somebody’s got their wires crossed. Emmorn didn’t even run cattle with Pollock and Riddle. And Emmorn wouldn’t have killed anybody.”

  Still, the supposition that Everett might have been murdered by Escalante men—perhaps rustlers—could not be discounted. Yet how to plumb it? Sev
eral times, talking to residents, I felt that I had crept to the edge of some great secret that the town fiercely guarded. One man, Doyle Cottam, who had seen Everett come through Escalante in 1934, changed his mind overnight about talking to me. In the morning, in a hoarse, halting voice, he said, “Too many of the folks that might be incriminated, they still got kids and family around. It don’t do nobody any good. I just can’t help you.”

  Thus I had given up hope of pursuing this tack when, as I was wrapping up my second interview with Norm Christensen, he dropped a bombshell at my feet. “So what do you think happened to Everett?” I asked. Oddly, to that point I had failed to put the question so directly.

  Christensen’s dark eyes held mine, as his face clouded. “I know what happened to him,” he said quietly. “He was shot. The man who did it told me.”

  I was stunned. In measured tones, Christensen went on to recall an afternoon, sometime around 1949 or 1950. Several young men had gathered in Christensen’s barn to drink. One of them was Keith Riddle, nine years Norm’s senior.

  Riddle and Christensen sat on a plank in one corner of the barn, out of earshot of the others. Drink had loosened the older man’s tongue.

  “We were talkin’ about old cowboy stuff,” Christensen recalled. “I said, ‘Keith, just between you and me, what do you think happened to Everett?’

  “He looked at me and said, ‘I killed the son of a bitch, and if I had to do it over, I’d do it again.’

  “I didn’t say another word. I figured I’d pushed it as hard as I could. Keith was a very strong-willed man. He’d fight you at the drop of a hat, and drop the hat himself. If he liked you, he’d do anything for you. If he didn’t, he’d have liked to knock you down and kick the guts out of you.”

  I drew a long breath. “Could it just have been a drunken boast?”

  “No,” said Christensen. “It wasn’t said in a bragging manner. I believe Keith told the truth.”

  A flashbulb of corroboration was going off in my head. Rusho had claimed the last men to have seen Everett alive were the two sheepherders at Soda Gulch. But Melvin Alvey had insisted that after parting from Clayton Porter and Addlin Lay, Everett had met and camped overnight with two cattle ranchers, Keith Riddle and Joe Pollock.